The Bedside Book of Psychology: From Ancient Dream Therapy to Ecopsychology: 125 Historic Events and Big Ideas to Push the Limits of Your Knowledge - Wade E. Pickren 2021

1637 Descartes on Mind and Body

René Descartes (1596—1650)

IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, a new understanding of the natural world placed humans and their abilities within a framework of natural law. The writings of the French philosopher René Descartes, especially Discourse on the Method (1637), became a resource for these efforts.

Descartes sought to remain true to the Catholic Church while searching for a natural understanding of the human mind and body. Catholicism held that the mind is under the direct influence of God; thus the soul is distinct from the body and cannot be explained as only part of nature. To avoid conflict with the church, Descartes proposed a mind-body dualism in which some mental functions could be considered properties of the body rather than the soul. Claiming that memory, perception, imagination, dreaming, and feelings were bodily processes meant that they could be investigated and understood by humans as part of the natural order.

Descartes drew on earlier discoveries in medicine, such as William Harvey’s description of the heart as a pump (1628), and from the work of craftsmen who created objects that worked mechanically, such as those in the royal gardens outside Paris. There, hydraulic pressure activated statues when visitors stepped on hidden plates, making it seem as if they moved on their own. Descartes used the principle of mechanical movement as a model for how we can understand memory, dreaming, and other mental acts without relying on divine Providence. He theorized that the mind and body interact via the brain’s pineal gland, which receives bodily impressions and transmits movement to the body. This preserved the soul as the seat of reason and kept it as the special province of divine influence.

Descartes’s approach fit with both the teachings of the Catholic Church and the new mechanical philosophy. In articulating this division between mind and body, he left a legacy that helped later thinkers consider humans part of the natural, rather than supernatural, order.

Grotto d’Orphée, an engraving by Abraham Bosse, c. 1620s, illustrating one of the automatons Descartes likely saw in the French royal gardens at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The automaton statue of Orpheus would play his lyre while the animals and trees in the grotto would lean in to listen.

SEE ALSO Tabula Rasa: The Psychology of Experience (1690)