ities to good treatment which the European reformers were obliged
to compass. In Paris, for example, Pinel was obliged to ask permission
of the authorities even to make the attempt at liberating the insane
from their chains, and, notwithstanding his recognized position as a
leader of science, he gained but grudging assent, and was regarded as
being himself little better than a lunatic for making so manifestly
unwise and hopeless an attempt. Once the attempt had been made, however,
and carried to a successful issue, the amelioration wrought in the
condition of the insane was so patent that the fame of Pinel's work at
the Bicetre and the Salpetriere went abroad apace. It required, indeed,
many years to complete it in Paris, and a lifetime of effort on the
part of Pinel's pupil Esquirol and others to extend the reform to the
provinces; but the epochal turning-point had been reached with Pinel's
labors of the closing years of the eighteenth century.

The significance of this wise and humane reform, in the present
connection, is the fact that these studies of the insane gave emphasis
to the novel idea, which by-and-by became accepted as beyond question,
that "demoniacal possession" is in reality no more than the outward
expression of a diseased condition of the brain. This realization made
it clear, as never before, how intimately the mind and the body are
linked one to the other. And so it chanced that, in striking the
shackles from the insane, Pinel and his confreres struck a blow also,
unwittingly, at time-honored philosophical traditions. The liberation
of the insane from their dungeons was an augury of the liberation of
psychology from the musty recesses of metaphysics. Hitherto psychology,
in so far as it existed at all, was but the subjective study of
individual minds; in future it must become objective as well, taking
into account also the relations which the mind bears to the body, and in
particular to the brain and nervous system.

The necessity for this collocation was advocated quite as earnestly, and
even more directly, by another worker of this period, whose studies were
allied to those of alienists, and who, even more actively than they,
focalized his attention upon the brain and its functions. This earliest
of specialists in brain studies was a German by birth but Parisian
by adoption, Dr. Franz Joseph Gall, originator of the since-notorious
system of phrenology. The merited disrepute into which this system h