RENE DESCARTES

Extracts from Rene Descartes' philosophical analysis of the Mind and the Brain

A chapter of The Brain Project by
Stephen Jones.

The brain, the nerves & the hydraulic analogy

on the hydraulic automaton

It was Descartes who brought about the separation of the mind and body and established dualism as the predominant framework. Descartes developed a view of the animal and human body as an automoton:

"And as a clock composed of wheels and weights observes not less exactly all the laws of nature when it is ill-made and does not tell the hours as well as when it is entirely to the wish of the workman, so in like manner I regard the human body as amachine so built and put together of bone, nerve, muscle, vein, blood and skin, that still, although it had no mind, it would not fail to move in all the same ways as at present, since it does not move by the direction of its will, nor consequently by means of the mind, but only by the arrangement of its organs." [Meditationes, vi].

Descartes saw the brain as an organ of humours, fluids coursing through the nerves which drive the body mechanically. Descartes, having reduced the body to mechanics, has to locate the mind, so for him the soul resides in the pineal gland, a small, single (i.e. untwinned), apparently vestigial body at the base of the brain, behind and between the eyes.