Plato
A contemporary of Socrates (who was Plato's teacher) Democritus, whose theories were opposed by Plato, proposed the idea of the indivisible 'atom'.

He "not only denied the existence of mind as a separate entity but also assumed the universe to be the result of accident." (Singer, 1941, p33).

The 4-faced OCTAHEDRON represented the wet, hot qualities of AIR		 But Plato carried the Pythagorean system on, (the Pythagorean solids become the Platonic ideal bodies) and his belief in the perfect sphere of heaven led him to postulate that the rational soul of man "the divinest part of us" must be in the brain, because the head is spherical in shape. He thought of the brain as a gland, and supposed that it produced semen which flowed down through the spinal chord, out through the phallus and into the female vagina, thus rendering women as "flower pots for male seeds". Surely this was a major factor in the exclusion of women from the governance of academic, religious and governmental institutions for 2,000 years or longer.

In the Timaeus, Plato has Timaeus...


The 20-faced ICOSAHEDRON represented the wet, cold qualities of WATER		 "give an account of how the soul moves the body. [shades of Descartes] The soul is in movement and the body moves because it is interwoven with it. The Creator compounded the soul-substance out of the elements and divided it according to the harmonic numbers that it might have an innate perception of harmony and that its motion might be with movements well attuned. He bent its straight line into a circle. This he divided into seven circles (that is the orbs of the seven planets) in such wise that the motions of the heavens are the motions of the soul." (Singer, 1941, p37. from Aristotle's summary in De Anima).
Here is the doctrine of the macrocosm and the microcosm; as above so below.

Conversly, Hippocrates, teaching in another region of Greece, taught:

"Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. Through it...we...think, see, hear and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, the pleasant from the unpleasant."

Note: The first person to locate, on the basis of neuroanatomy, human intelligence in the head was Herophilus of Chalcedon, who flourished around 300 BC. He was also the first to distinguish the motor from the sensory nerves, and performed the most thourough study of brain anatomy attempted until the Renaissance. (Sagan, p13)

Here is the first manifestation of the controversy between the hard, the behavioural science view, the brain does something, it produces semen; and the soft science, or spiritual, view. It is the appearance of the vitalist view: that there is an essence or soul behind everything (Plato's 'ideals'), which governs the development and manifestation of things; and the mechanistic view which suggests the the motions of things can be understood from within those things themselves. The idea of a vital soul being unnecessary to the existence or vitallity of those things.