The Rise of Anatomy

Uptil Descartes' work the rational soul was intimately housed in the brain. The humours which supported the activities of the various souls running the person could be seen and their pathways mapped (to a limited extent, given the difficulties in carrying out anatomical investigation, imposed by the Roman church, particularly in obtaining bodies). The vegetal soul is in the liver, the animal soul is in the heart and the rational soul in the brain.

The role of Authority in teaching could not allow the questioning of handed down wisdom, especially as that wisdom was held by the Roman Church. During the darkness of the middle ages, the Church was the sole repository in Europe of the books and knowledge emmanating from the Greeks and the Romans. The Arab world had kept up a continuing spirit of inquiry through the middle ages but this material did not become available in Europe until it filtered out through the Moorish colonisation of Spain. Any re-appearance of information was controlled by the Church, they had control of the books and the institutions of learning, which, immediately before the Rennaisance where confined to the monastries.

They also carried the ideological power, to maintain the position of authority of the Church, with the Pope as God's representative on earth, essentially bestowing upon him the supreme right of decision making.

As with the clerical hierarchy so was there a hierarchy of social relations and a hierachy within the person and their body. The rational soul was available only to humans. The animal and vegetal souls, available to animals as well, were enough to deal with the bodily needs, both long term and everyday. The head was given a superior value through its position on top of the body and so it must be the seat of the rational soul.

Further, in what anatomical work was done, the main arteries carried the 'sanguine' humour (blood) to the head, and it was there that the vital spirit, the 'pneuma' was distilled out of the blood and distributed through the body by the nerves. So as the Pope was the head of the Church, and the man was the head of the household, the skull housed the brain which must be the head of the body.

Descartes reduced the humoural description of the body/brain with its variety of souls to a mechanical/hydraulic model. He used the most celebrated technological achievements of his time as his analogy. The great watergardens of fountains, water driven clocks and automata, the showpieces of men of power, provided Descartes with models for describing how the brain operated the muscles and the general description of nerve process. But where now is the soul? Descartes demonstrated philosophically that we needed the capacity to keep some sort of 'reason-able' continuity, and the Church ideology demanded some sort of spiritual man which would be able to have continuity after bodily death to keep its carrot-and-stick control over the lives of its subjects and the source of its cash-flow. Thus a purely mechanical model of the human would not do. So Descartes divided the soul or the mind, the thinking thing, from the body and established Dualism as a way of thinking.

Title page from Descartes' Opera Omnia (Collected Works) 1692

Cogito ergo sum By a process of radically doubting everything of which he could not be absolutely certain, all sensation, movement, bodies, physical things were rendered unreliable. Finally only ' I ' could be said to exist, I the thinking thing (the res cogitans). All else is perceived only by a process of understanding, mediated by the mind. So there is that about which Descartes is certain, i.e. the thinking thing, and there is everything else. He has separated the mind from all the world of sensations and physical things. [For more on the Cogito see the extracts from Descartes.]