Dominique Meeùs
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Notes de lecture : table des matières, index — Retour au dossier marxisme

À Friedrich Engels

Up: Divers, années 60 Previous: À Friedrich Engels, le 28 janvier 1863 Next: Statuts de l’Association internationale des travailleurs (Marx, 1864)
Karl Marx, lettre à Friedrich Engels, le 4 juillet 1864.

My nose, mouth etc., still bunged up with influenza so that I can neither smell nor taste.

During this time, being utterly incapable of work, have read Carpenter, Physiology [1839], Lord, ditto [1855], Kölliker, Gewebelehre [1863], Spurzheim, The Anatomy of the Brain and the Nervous System [1826], and Schwann and Schleiden, on the cells business [1847; 1850]. In Lord’s Popular Physiology, there’s a good critique of phrenology, although the chap’s religious. One passage recalls Hegel’s Phenomenology; it reads:

They attempt to break up the mind into a number of supposed original faculties, such as no metaphysician will, for a moment, admit ; and the brain into an equal number of organs, which the anatomist in vain asks to be shown, and then proceed to attach one of the former unadmitted suppositions as a mode of action to one of the latter undemonstrated existences.

As you know, 1. I’m always late off the mark with everything, and 2. I invariably follow in your footsteps. So it’s probable that I shall now devote much of my spare time to anatomy and physiology and, in addition, attend lectures (where there will be practical demonstrations and dissection).

MECW 41, p. 546-547. Cité dans Baksi 1996, p. 278.
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