SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 1x5 



result of such reflexes; it is not possible, he thinks, to ascribe to them the 

 possession of a soul. That man has a soul, on the other hand, Descartes con- 

 sidered to be proved by the fact that man has consciousness, and this soul 

 he regards as a substance, the existence of which, however, is entirely inde- 

 pendent of the body. Only at one point, he considers, is there any co-opera- 

 tion between soul and body — namely, in the glandula pinealis; there the 

 currents from the nervous system react upon the soul and impart to it a share 

 in mental impressions; there, on the other hand, the soul substance makes 

 impressions upon the nervous system, which give rise to conscious actions. 

 Thus Descartes has created a purely mechanical cosmic theory in which 

 everything that happens takes place out of mathematical necessity; in which 

 neither the accidental movement of the atoms nor the direct intervention of 

 God is needed to keep the course of events on the move. It is manifest that 

 the great discoveries made during the Renaissance have conditioned his 

 theory. But he himself would not acknowledge any precursors — his ac- 

 knowledgment of Harvey constitutes the one exception — he was, in fact, 

 a very cautious man, and Galileo's fate had made a deep impression on him. 

 He anxiously avoided offending the Church, for which he always showed a 

 deep respect; his manner of escaping from controversy was more adroit than 

 courageous, as when he gives an assurance that his theory of the creation is 

 merely a game of thought; it might be conceivable that the universe arose 

 as his theory declares, but one knows all the same that the Church main- 

 tains the true theory of creation. This, together with his constant assertion 

 of the immortality of the soul of man, was, however, the reason why so 

 many eminent ecclesiastical personages dared to embrace his theory, and thus 

 the mechanical explanation of the cosmos wormed its way, one might say, 

 into the consciousness, thrusting out Aristoteleanism. And naturally the new 

 explanation of the cosmos — Cartesianism, as it was called — had great ad- 

 vantages over the old — above all, in that it rendered possible the appli- 

 cation of the newly-achieved results of research in the fields of physics, 

 astronomy, and biology. But even the new theory had its weak points. In 

 particular, the relation of the consciousness to material phenomena, or, in 

 other words, the soul's relation to the body, was a problem which worried 

 Descartes and which, as we have seen above, he finally solved, though not 

 very successfully. For Aristotle this problem did not exist; he had in fact 

 made the soul equivalent to form and thus evaded the point. For the rest, 

 it seems that the individual life did not concern him very much, any more 

 than it did the other philosophers of early antiquity. Late antiquity, and in 

 a still greater degree Christianity, had, on the other hand, devoted earnest 

 attention to this problem, and now that material phenomena were givr.n a 

 purely mechanical explanation, it became extremely acute and was for a long 

 time to be the main point of discussion in the philosophical agenda. This 



