visit the 17th century mind
The 17th century view of the Mind
Here follows some notes on the shift from
[The Brain Project] Galen's view of the mind and its body to
the development of the mechanistic view.
Part of The Brain Project by Stephen
Jones.
Galen's Humours
Galen's view of human anatomy became the framework for all further
consideration of the body and its brain for the next 1500 years.
Investigative inquiry into the anatomy didn't begin until Nicholas
Copernicus challenged the prevailing Church backed view of the
world as the centre of the universe by showing that the earth and
the planets moved around the sun; and William Harvey demonstrated
that the blood was pumped in circulation around the body. But the
concept of "pneuma" still held sway in any discussion of the brain.
Rene Descartes wrote, in the mid 17th century, in reference to the
ventricles:
"The cavities of the brain are central
reservoirs...animal spirits enter these cavities. They
pass into the pores of its substance and from these pores
into the nerves. The nerves may be compared to the tubes
of a waterworks; breathing or other actions depend on the
flow of animal spirits into the nerves. The rational soul
(the pineal) takes place of the engineer, living in that
part of the reservoir that connects all of the various
tubes. These spirits are like the wind. When they flow
into a muscle they cause it to become stiff and harden,
just as air in a balloon makes it hard." [Bergland, p61]
[Image] Robert Burton in The Anatomy of
Melancholy (first published in
Title page from Robert London in 1652) represents the
Burton's The Anatomy of "humours" view based on Galen.
Melancholy, 1651. [from the His book is possibly the first
1849 edition in Stephen major treatise on a psychological
Jones' library] problem, namely depression, ever
published.
Burton summarises the state of
anatomy with discussion of the
humours. The four humors were:
blood [sanguine] a hot,
sweet, temperate humour
whose office is to
nourish the whole
body,to give it
strength and colour.
pituita [phlegm] a cold
and moist humour, his
office is to nourish
and moisten the members
of the body.
choler [yellow bile]
hot, dry, bitter, helps
the natural heat and
senses, and serves to
the expelling of
excrements.
melancholy [black bile]
cold, dry, thick,
black, and sour.
He also adopted the Aristotelian
views on the nature of "life"
referring to spirits:
"Of these spirits there
be three kinds,
according to the three
principle parts, brain,
heart, liver; natural,
vital, animal. The
natural are begotten in
the liver and thence
dispersed through the
veins, to perform those
natural actions. The
vital spirits are made
in the heart of the
natural, which by the
arteries are
transported to all the
other parts: if the
spirits cease, then
life ceaseth, as in a
syncope or swooning.
The animal spirits
formed of the vital,
brought up to the
brain, and diffused by
the nerves, to the
subordinate members,
give sense and motion
to them all." [Burton,
p94]
and the soul (or the anima) which was divided
"into three principle faculties - vegetal, sensitive, and
rational, which make three distinctive kinds of living
creatures - vegetal plants, sensible beasts, and rational
men. How these three principle faculties are
distinguished and connected...is beyond human
capacity,... The inferior may be alone, but the superior
cannot subsist without the other; so sensible includes
vegetal, rational both; which are contained in it (saith
Aristotle) as a tringle in a quadrangle." [Burton, p98]
He then goes on to describe the brain as a device for distilling
the animal spirits:
"...the brain...is a soft, marrowish, and white
substance, engendered of the purest part of seeds and
spirits, included by many skins, and seated within the
skull or brain pan; and it is the most noble organ under
heaven, the dwelling-house and seat of the soul, the
habitation of wisdom, memory, judgement, reason and in
which man is most like unto God; and therefore nature
hath covered it with a skull of hard bone, and two skins
or membranes, whereof the one is called dura mater, or
meninx, the other pia mater. The dura mater is next to
the skull, above the other, which includes and protects
the brain. When this is taken away, the pia mater is to
be seen, a thin membrane, the next and immediate cover of
the brain, and not covering only, but entering into it.
The brain itself is divided into two parts, the fore and
hinder part; the fore part is much bigger than the other,
which is called the little brain in respect of it. This
fore part hath many concavities distinguished by certain
ventricles, which are the receptacles of the spirits,
brought hither by the arteries of the heart, and are
there refined to a more heavenly nature, to perform the
actions of the soul. Of these ventricles there are three
- right, left, and middle. The right and left answer to
their site and beget animal spirits; if they be in any
way hurt, sense and motion ceaseth. These ventricles,
moreover, are held to be the seat of the common sense.
The middle ventricle is a common concourse and cavity of
them both, and hath two passages - the one to receive
pituita, and the other extends itself to the fourth
creek; in this they place imagination and cogitation, and
so the three ventricles of the fore part of the brain are
used. The fourth creek behind the head is common to the
cerebral or little brain, and marrow of the back bone,
the last and most solid of all the rest, which receives
the animal spirits from the other ventricles, and conveys
them to the marrow in the back, and is the place where
they say the memory is seated." [Burton, p97]
And so in referring to the cause
of disease and paricularly
mental dis-ease he says:
"...as the body works
upon the mind by his
bad humours, troubling
the spirits, sending
gross fumes into the
brain, and so per
[Image] consequens the
....................forgotten faculties of it, with
quite fear, sorrow, &c.,
All former scenes of which are ordinary
dear delight, Connubial symptoms of this
love .... parental joy disease [melancholy]:
...... so on the other side,
No sympathies like these the mind most
his soul employ; effectualy works upon
But all is dark within the body, producing by
......... his passions and
[Penrose. from the perturbations
frontispiece to Burton's miraculous
The Anatomy of alterations, as
Melencholy, 1849 melancholy, despair,
edition] cruel diseases, and
sometimes death
itself." [Burton,
p164]
To revue Burton: The rational
soul was seated in the brain,
and received sensations and
controlled movement, via the
action of the fluid 'animal
spirit'.
The emergence of the mechanistic view.
It took a very long time and much valiant work (vide: Nicholas
Copernicus and Giordano Bruno) to begin the liberation of science
from the overarching control of the mystico/religious framework and
the political needs of the Roman Church. This change started to
really happen at the end of the 16th century with the appearance of
a new attitude to the observation of what actually happens,
followed up by a desire to experiment on and test what is being
observed. But at this early stage the mystical framework still
greatly influenced theory.
In A Short History of Science, Charles Singer notes Kepler's
mystical adherence to the Pythagorean/Platonic solids and to the
idea "that the arrangement of the world and its parts must
correspond with some abstract conception of the beautiful and the
harmonious" [Singer, 1941, p200].
Referring to Kepler's first approximation of his theory of the
orbits of the planets, Singer says:
"That Kepler sought so persistently for a simple
mathematical scheme of the material world, and that,
having found one, he regarded it as fitting his scheme of
the moral world, suggests certain reflections on the
workings of the mind itself. Whatever reality may be, we
seem to be so made that we aspire towards an
interpretation of the universe that shall hold together
in a complete and reasonable scheme. The fact that we
thus aspire does not in the least prove that such a
scheme corresponds to reality. Nevertheless, all great
religions attempt to provide such an interpretation. All
become skillfully 'rationalised'.[Singer, 1941, p203]
It looks awfully like Singer adopts a vitalistic view of science
here: that the motivation of science is to find a unified view of
the "world" and that this in some way is a "natural" function of
the mind. Yet this has considerable political consequence...
"It is because science disturbs part of this already
carefully rationalised field that religion resents its
intrusion. The mind recoils from a dualistic universe,
and rationalised religion usually seeks to minimise even
such remnants of dualism as the conception of a spirit of
evil. It is easy for us now to regard the opponents of
Galileo and Kepler as purblind fools. Base motive
certainly prompted some of the opposition; but in essence
the opposition expresses the reluctance of the human mind
to adopt any teaching which disturbs it unitary
conceptions. A reasoned view of the universe, physical
and moral, had grown up during the Middle Ages. It would
have been indeed a marvel if this had been relinquished
without a struggle, for faith is not necessarily
accompanied by either wisdom or learning or foresight."
[Singer, 1941, p203]
The 17th century was a most
remarkable period in its
extraordinary fecundity of quite
revolutionary ideas. That the
earth travelled around the sun
was only now being established.
Copernicus had really only found
that the Ptolemaic system of the
Medieval period had too many
anomalies (the epicycles) to
allow it to stand against
observation any longer. It took
Kepler and Tycho Brahe to get the
really useful data that allowed
Galileo to finally publish (much
to his trouble) his great
synthesis Dialogues on the Two
Great Systems of the World
Galileo conceived the world as
reducible to measurement and
mechanical principle. He was
first to exploit the telescope
and also instituted the use of
[Image] telescopes and microscopes of
Title page of the Dialogues high craftmanship as tools of
on The Two Great Systems of investigation. That the heavens
the World by Galileo Galilei were vast and complex with a
(3rd edition, 1641) [from multiplicity of worlds was now
Stephen Jones' library] mirrored in the startling
multiplicity of matter and life
in the microscopic world.
Francis Bacon in The Proficiencie
and Advancement of Learning and
Rene Descartes in his Discours on
Methode laid down the principles
of experimental science which we
still follow. Firstly one should
gather all the facts that are
relevant to the matter being
investigated. This selection of
relevance is based on the work of
one's predecessors with which one
is familiar through study. Having
gathered all the facts one forms
them into an Hypothesis which
links all the facts together.
Then one tests the hypothesis by
experiment, modifying the
hypothesis as required by the
results of its testing. It is
this which finally allows the
development of a Theory.
With Galileo's development of the science of mechanics came the
attempts by the biologists to explain the animal body as a machine.
It becomes apparent to the experimental philosophers of the 17thC.
that one might hunt out principles of a mechanical nature which
applied alike to the motions of the heavens as they did to the
earth and to living things. The world view of science becomes
increasingly mechanistic. For example, in 1615, William Harvey
discovered the process of the circulation of the blood and thus
that the heart is a pump. The mechanical model of the heart as a
pump stands as an early version of the process of using a working
mechanical model to form a clearer picture of some part of the
animal body. The classical microscopists, Malpighi and Leeuwenhoek,
"discovered the corpuscles of the blood, the secretory functons of
'glands', and the fibrillary character of muscles, thus helping to
complete details of the animal machine." (Singer, 1941, p243).
The Rise of Anatomy
Uptil Descartes 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, in obtaining bodies, imposed by the Roman
church). 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' 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
waterworks of fountains and water
driven clocks and automatons, 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
[Image] bodily death to keep its
Title page from Descartes' carrot-and-stick control over the
Opera Omnia (Collected lives of its subjects and the
Works) 1692 [from Stephen source of its cash-flow. Thus a
Jones' library] 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.
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. 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.
It could be argued that all Descartes really did was to separate
the phenomenal from the physical. This had two consequences: for
the physical, biological scientist it allowed ever more detailed
and effective analysis of problem of elucidating what it is that
allow living systems to work, but for the philospher it so utterly
misdirected the agenda for understanding the phenomenal, the mind,
that we still have not completely escaped its effect. Dualism still
rides with us and the religious view still has enormous sway over
the physical/biological sciences.
Descartes ruptured "the traditional stair of life ranging
upward step by step to man. Science since Descartes has
repaired the stair and finds it more significant than
before. It marks the way that man has climbed. And it is
a stair of mind as well as body, and it is without break,
man's mind nothing more than the topmost rung continuous
with related degrees below." [Sherrington, 1940, p186]
In a sense it is the ongoing closure of the gap, opened up by
Descartes, between body and mind which has become the
characteristic of the development of neuroscience ever since. The
increasing localisation of function and the increasing visual and
conceptual magnification of the means of exploring the brain, show
us more and more that the fine structure of the processes of the
brain, the chemistry, interneuronal linking and organisation, can
account more and more for the operations carried on.
On the role of modelling
When we make a tool we project ourselves onto the world. We create
something which fits a mental model of the tool to achieve some
goal, from turning over a large piece of rock with a stick used as
a lever, to creating a mechanism in metaphor with which we can
manipulate and represent our idea (eg. our idea of ourselves).
We seem to want to be able to explain the world in terms simpler
than the operations of the world, i.e. reductionism. The models we
use will in general be the latest or the most acceptable depending
on how conservative we are. We need laws, spiritual or temporal to
fix our relationship with the world and nature and God, if we
consider the latter to be necessary. With the rise of a mechanistic
description of the workings of inanimate nature, new models of how
animate nature might work can be generated and thus the models of
the animal as a machine.
"A machine being a man-made contrivance, to call a living
organ a machine implies that it is mechanism humanly
intelligible. The whole man being organs the implication
is that the whole man is mechanism humanly intelligible."
[Sherrington, 1940, p.186].
Perhaps here lies the key to the mechanistic modelling, it is the
urge to understand and the opportunity offered by modelling which
drives the whole process. The spiritual/religious explanation
denies the option of actually understanding the processes of nature
while the mechanistic starts with the view that nature can be
understood.
----------------------------------------------
References:
Bergland, R. The Fabric of the Mind. 1985
Burton, R. The Anatomy of Melancholy. 1811
Sherrington, Sir C. Man on his Nature. 1940
Singer, C. A Short History of Science. 1941
