Development of the concept of mind

Maxwell R. Bennett

A short account is given of the development of concepts of soul, mind and brain in order
to place in historical context the subject of neuropsychiatry. A selection of primary and
secondary historical sources is used to trace development of these concepts. Beginning
with the spirits of Animism in the 3rd millennium BC, the Greek invention of the soul and
its properties, of thymos (emotion), menos (rage) and nous (intellect) are then traced
from the time of Homer, in which the soul does not last the death of the body, to Plato in
the 4th century BC who argued that the soul, incorporating the nous (now called mind) is
incorporeal and immortal. Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, commented on the impossibility of an
incorporeal soul interacting with a corporeal body. He instituted a revolution in the
concept of mind. This involved pointing out that ‘mind’ is a manner of speaking about our
psychological powers as in thinking and remembering. Given that such powers are not a
thing the problem does not arise as to the relation between mind and a corporeal body.
These ideas of Plato and Aristotle were held by competing scholars and theologians
during the next 2000 years. Plato was favoured by many in the Church who could more
readily grasp the concept of an immortal and incorporeal soul within the context of
Christian thought. Galen established in the 2nd century AD that psychological capacities
are associated with the brain, and argued that the fluid-filled ventricles were the part of
the brain involved. This argument stood for over 1500 years until the 17th century when
Willis, as a consequence of the new blood perfusion techniques developed by Wren
following Harvey, showed that blood did not enter the ventricles but the cortex, thereby
transferring interest from the ventricles to the cortex. The hegemony of Plato’s ideas was
broken about this time by Descartes when he argued that the incorporeal soul does not
consist of three parts (thymos, nous and menos) but is solely identical with the mind,
which is not just concerned with reasoning but with perception and the senses, indeed
identical with consciousness ‘taken as everything we are aware of happening within us’.
The shadow cast by this concept, necessitating as it does relating the Cartesian mind to
the cortex, stretches from the time of Willis, through to the foundation figures of
neurophysiology and psychiatry in the early 20th century, namely Sherrington and
Kraepelin, and beyond. This history is traced in detail because the Cartesian paradigm
provides the main resistance to Kraepelin’s argument that mental illness has biological
concomitants. It is argued that the modern tendency to equate the mind with the brain
does not illuminate the problem that was solved by Aristotle. The mind is not as either
Plato of Descartes would have it, nor is it equivalent to the brain, for talk of the mind is a
manner of talking about human psychological powers and their exercise, as in ‘mind your
step’ (watch where you are going), ‘keep that in mind’ (remember it). It is suggested that
the history of the concept of mind shows that a human being has a corporeal body and a

Maxwell R. Bennett AO, Professor of Neuroscience, University Chair,

Scientific Director
Brain and Mind Research Institute, University of Sydney, 100 Mallett
Street, Camperdown, NSW 2050, Australia. Email: maxb@physiol.usyd.
edu.au

# 2007 The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists

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944 HISTORY OF THE MIND
mind, that is, a range of psychological capacities. It is the role of neuropsychiatry to
identify the changes in the corporeal that need to be put aright when these psychological
capacities go awry.
Key words: brain, history, mind, neuropsychiatry.
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 2007; 41:943 956
This essay is concerned with the history of our
beliefs in the Western world concerning soul, mind
and brain. It is written in order to provide a historical
perspective on the gradual emergence of the idea that
what has gone awry in mental illness is due to
abnormalities in brain function.


Human spirit: Siberia (4000 2400 BC)
Animism arose in Siberia in the Neolithic period
(4000
2400 BC) and is humanity’s first attempt to
make sense of experience. It involves belief in spirits
that do not possess any individuality although their
activities are confined to particular aspects of the
natural environment. Shamanism first formalized the
concept of this spirit world [1].
What was the evidence that such spirits exist? This
seems to have been based primarily on the experience
of dreams, on apparitions of the dead, and on
hallucinations. Also important were experiences of
shadows, reflections and echoes. The recurrence of a
daily period of sleep, accompanied by bizarre dreams
and often containing elements experienced during the
waking hours, seemed to have no other explanation
than that during sleep something left the body and
entered another world quite different to that experi-
enced during the waking hours. That which went
forth came to be called the person’s spirit. This spirit,
although uniquely related to a particular individual,
possessed none of the psychological attributes of the
individual, their particular abilities to think, feel,
remember, perceive, etc. The world this spirit inhab-
ited seemed to possess a high content of shadows and
other elusive and transitory phenomena. The sleeper’s
spirit journeyed into this world, which was also
visited by the spirits of other humans, by animals
and even by objects. The presence of dead friends or
enemies in dreams was considered proof that an
incorporeal part of a person survived degeneration of
the body at death. Hence a human’s spirit was
immortal.
Where did this immortal spirit, lacking an indivi-
dual’s psychological attributes, reside in the body
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when awake? Among the peoples of southwest Asia it
was taken as important to shrink the heads of one’s
enemies as soon as they had been killed. The basis of
this ritual was fear that once the enemy’s spirit had
left the body at death it could act out revenge on the
living. This could only be prevented by restraining the
enemy’s spirit from leaving the body through head
shrinkage. Thus even at these early times it seems that
the immortal spirit, devoid of psychological attri-
butes, was taken as residing in the head.
BC)


Human soul: Archaic Greece (8th 5th century
In the Archaic period at the time of Homer, in the
8th century BC, Greece was in contact with the
shamanistic culture of the Black Sea from which was
inherited the concept of a spirit wandering away from
the body during sleep and during trances [2]. Homer
refers to this spirit as the soul or psyche, peculiar to
the individual and located in the head, but without
the individual’s psychological attributes for remem-
bering, thinking, perceiving, and feeling [2]. If this
had been Homer’s sole contribution to the idea of the
soul or psyche it would have amounted only to the
renaming of the spirit of Animism and Shaminism.
But Homer next made a most profound suggestion,
namely that a soul exists, consisting of three parts,
that is largely unique to the awake and living. One of
these parts, the thymos, is considered to be the source
of the emotions as in anger, courage and zeal; it can
express hope and may even urge one to action; most
importantly these attributes are unique to the person
whose thymos it is and so this soul is often referred to
as the ‘ego soul’; it resides in the chest because it is a
substance that is related to breath. A second part of
the soul of the living and awake is the nous (or noos),
which is related specifically to one’s intellectual
activities; it is said to be an absorber of images but
does not reside in a particular part of the body. A
third part of the living soul is the menos, which is
related to martial rage but not to any particular organ
of the body [2].
 M.R. BENNETT
What happens to the soul of the dead, the psyche,
and of the soul of the living (thymos, nous and
menos) at death? According to Homer the immortal
and impersonal psyche leaves the head to reside in
Hades, of which more will be said in the present
review, a story not much different to that of earlier
times concerning the human spirit [3]. Two compo-
nents of the soul of the living die immediately with
degeneration of the body, namely the nous and
menos, whereas the thymos (ego soul) does not but
is breathed out from the chest at death to escape the
decay of the body. Because the thymos carries some
of the personal psychological powers of the indivi-
dual whose thymos it is, capacities associated with
the emotions and the will to action, it is of
considerable interest that Homer gave these ego-
centred powers to a component of the living soul
that was almost immortal, that escaped the degen-
eration of the body, without specifying further what
happened to the thymos after it was breathed out at
death.
In summary, the thymos was the one component of
the life soul that had the potential to confer unique
psychological attributes on a person. At death the
psyche was thought to go to Hades, where it led a
ghost-like existence as the shade or spectre of the
deceased. However, of the three components of the
life soul only the thymos leaves the body, is actually
breathed out at death, with both the nous and
menos remaining. It is not clear what happens to
the thymos for it is only the psyche, which is not
associated with the life soul and its psychological
capacities, that outlasts the death of the body. The
immortal soul, the psyche, lacked the psychological
attributes of the ego soul of the living. Furthermore,
because the souls of the dead do not possess a
thymos, nous or menos they are incapable of speech.
The immortal souls of the dead are still thought of by
the Archaic Greeks as shadows (described by the term
eidolon), reflecting that there had been no substantial
change in the concept of the immortal soul since early
Animism.
If the soul goes to Hades where is this place?
The earth is encircled by a river that feeds the
oceans in the cosmology of Homer. Earth, river and
oceans are covered by the inverted bowl of the
heavens within which the moon, sun and stars
move. The sun does not sink below the level of the
oceans, a place that therefore remains unlit and is
called Hades.
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945
Attribution to an immortal soul of a wide variety
of psychological (cognitive and emotional)
activities and responses of the individual:
transition from the Archaic to the classical


Greek period (5th 4th century BC)
Towards the end of the archaic age the immortal
psyche took on the personal psychological activities
of the individual that had previously been associated
with the thymos. This most important shift of
activities that were previously associated with the
thymos to the immortal psyche has not been convin-
cingly attributed to any individual or group at the end
of the Archaic period. According to Claus the
emergence of the concept of a personal soul cannot
be taken to result from competition between the
words for thymos, located in the chest and associated
with the life force, with breath, and that for the
psyche, located in the head but not associated with
any psychological activity even though surviving as a
shade after death in Hades [4]. Because if this had
been the case one would have expected thymos to
prevail rather than the activities of thymos to be
attributed to the psyche, which then carries these into
the afterlife. The problem concerns the transition
from the Homeric concept of the psyche as a ‘shade’
in the tradition of Animism to that of the Platonic
tradition in which the psyche becomes a personal
soul, the immortal and divine part of man. Thus the
Greek term for psyche becomes in the Platonic
tradition that part that joins the body to make the
complete human being.
The first writer to feature this new concept of the
soul, that is, of the psyche bearing personal psycho-
logical activities into the afterlife, is Heraclitus (540

475 BC), although it is possible that Anaximines (ca
525 BC) also wrote in this way at about this time. It is
Heraclitus who first calls the soul of living man the
psyche and suggests that man consists of body and
soul and that the psyche is a ‘thinking thing’ [3]. He
says that ‘the human will and the ethical disposition
of man are signs of the state of the soul that animates
him’. Heraclitus claims that ‘you could not find the
ends of the soul that you travelled every way, so deep
is its logos’ [4]. With Heraclitus the psyche takes on a
highly personalized form that, according to Claus,
leads Heraclitus to discuss the psychological value of
the psyche. Intelligence and the emotional life now
depend on the psyche [4].
Snell considers that this reference to the profundity
of the soul, involving a dimension that cannot be
946
applied to a physical organ or its function, indicates a
link to the Archaic lyric poets before Heraclitus [3].
They were the first to suggest that intellectual and
spiritual matters could have depth, for they refer to
‘deep pondering’ and to ‘deep pain’ and to ‘deep
thinking’. The thymos takes on quite personal traits,
for example the lyric poet Archilochus says that his
thymos ‘is stirred after suffering’. It is then to the lyric
poets of the Archaic period that one must turn to find
the transition of the personal psychological properties
of the thymos to the immortal psyche.
Claus considers Plato’s claim that Pythagoras is
responsible for this conceptual shift of the psycholo-
gical identity of a human from the thymos to an
immortal psyche or soul is simply a device that Plato
uses for the purpose of his own dialogues and is not
based on historical fact [4]. Thus Plato’s description
in his Georgias of the Pythagorean psyche as posses-
sing personal psychological attributes is given with-
out any documentary evidence. Rather Pythagoras
seems to have been a shaman who believed in the
form of what is called metapsychosis or reincarnation
in which psyche, devoid of any personal attributes,
wanders aimlessly through the bodies of animals and
humans. Although on some occasions Pythagoras
attributed a somewhat richer existence to the psyche
after death, this was simply to allow that psyche to
punish a living person who had committed a grave
offence.
Onians suggests that the transition of the concept
of the psyche or shade that survives death in Hades to
that of the psyche spoken of as possessing the
psychological capacities previously associated with
the thymos in the chest, might be attributed to
Alcmaeon of Croton (450
500 BC) [5]. Alcmaeon in
his ‘Concerning nature’ identifies the ‘passages’ lead-
ing from the eyes to the brain, that is, the optic nerve.
This is said by Onians to have led Alcmaeon to the
idea that the brain is the organ required for percep-
tion as in sight, sound and smell, and therefore that
the brain is the seat of thought. In this way, it is
surmised, there is a shift away from the conceptual
scheme in which the immortal psyche or soul is
located in the head and does not possess psychologi-
cal powers although it persists after death in Hades as
a visible but impalpable semblance of a once living
being, that is, a shade, like in a dream. In this scheme
the psyche and thymos, with its rich emotional and
other psychological attributes, leave the body at
death with the thymos then being destroyed. The
new post-Archaic scheme is one in which these
attributes reside with the psyche and hence with a
soul that can be identified with the individual and
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HISTORY OF THE MIND
survives death. It is interesting in this regard that the
substantial disagreements between Aristotle and
Plato as to the location of the organ that must
function normally in order for us to express our
psychological powers should revolve around these
being located either in the head or the chest [5].
Attribution to an immortal soul of a wide variety
of psychological (cognitive and emotional)
activities and responses of the individual:
consolidation and elaboration by Plato


(428 348 BC)
Plato is the first to have given a fully realized
psychological description of the soul in his dialogues
named the Charmides and the Gorgias [4]. For Plato
the soul consisted of three parts, in much the same
way as that envisaged during the late Archaic period:
the thymos (the ego soul concerned with the emotions
and the will; associated with the organs of the chest,
including the heart); the nous or logos (concerned
with reason; associated with the head); and the id or
pathos (concerned with the appetites; associated with
the liver). The difference with the late Archaic period
is that all three components of the soul are made of
an immortal incorporeal substance. Plato’s dualistic
philosophy of a corporeal body and an incorporeal
immortal soul had a major effect on the Neoplato-
nists and via St Augustine came to dominate all
Christian thought. Platonic dualism became the most
natural conception for popular Christianity and it
was this dualism that was to become a characteristic
of the Renaissance form of Neoplatonism.
Plato introduced the word mind for the logos soul,
that is, the part of the soul concerned with reason.
Plato in his dialogues puts into the mouth of
Pythagoras his ideas concerning the continued ex-
istence of a person after death [4]. Here the term
‘psyche’ or ‘soul’ is used to denote that person who
continues to exist after death. The psychological,
cognitive and emotional activities that have been
attributed to a particular person had now to be
attributed to their soul. By the end of the 5th century
BC Antiphon has a defendant say that he is sure of
his innocence ‘for though his body may surrender, his
soul saves him by its willingness to struggle, through
knowledge of its innocence’.
Appetites are also activities of the soul, so pleasure
taken in drinking is referred to the soul, which may
also be satisfied with rich food. Souls become the
bearers of moral qualities. Euripides now has Ajax
saying, before he commits suicide, that ‘nothing binds
 M.R. BENNETT
the soul of man more than dishonour’. Plato insti-
tutes a train of thought in which the soul is taken to
be something that can engage in activities such as
thinking and planning. By the beginning of the 4th
century BC Plato has consolidated a view in which
one attributes to the psyche or soul a wide variety of
cognitive and emotional activities and responses as
well, as it being the bearer of such attributes as
courage and justice. The central problem with this
conception, as Aristotle was first to point out, is how
could interaction occur between these two very
different kinds of substances, that of an incorporeal
soul and that of a corporeal body?
The soul is an individual’s psychological
powers: revolutionary concept of Aristotle


(384 322 BC)
Unlike Plato, who considered that the soul was
composed of three parts, Aristotle distinguished three
different kinds of soul (De anima 415a23
6). First, a
rational soul that conferred powers of thought
(reasoning) and is unique to humans, a distinction
like that of nous in the Archaic period and accepted
by Plato as one of his three parts of the soul; now,
however, this component of the soul is a power or
attribute and not a thinking incorporeal substance.
Second, a sensitive soul, which confers powers of
perception, locomotion and desires, possessed by all
animals; like that of the thymos of the Archaic period
and one of the three parts of the Platonic soul but
claimed by Aristotle to be associated with the heart;
again a power or capacity and not an incorporeal
perceiving and desiring substance. Finally, a nutritive
soul conferring powers of growth, nutrition and
reproduction, possessed by all living things, that is,
both flora and fauna; like the ‘id’ component in
Plato’s conception of the soul except that again
Aristotle considers this is a power or capacity and
not an incorporeal substance. The Aristotelian soul
was then an array of psychological powers and
capacities and therefore not a substance at all, be it
a shade or other ghost-like substance (De anima
412b6
7). Hence the problem did not arise as to the
form of interaction between these two very different
kinds of substances, that of the incorporeal soul and
that of the corporeal body [6].
For Aristotle the word ‘mind’ is a manner of
speaking, a façon de parler, about the powers of
intellect, thought, and reasoning (i.e. the Aristotelian
‘rational soul’). So we say ‘keep that in mind’,
remember it; ‘to have something in one’s mind’, is
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947
to be thinking about something. If one has a powerful
mind than the reference is generally to one’s powers
of thinking. To ‘lose one’s mind’ is usually reserved to
those occasions when the rational faculties are not
correctly exercised, as in schizophrenia (this does not
mean of course that one has lost all the psychological
abilities, viz perceiving etc). And so on. Each such use
of the word ‘mind’ is therefore readily paraphrased
into a phrase that does not include the word ‘mind’,
but only a psychological predicate predicable of a
human being. In this sense reference to the mind is
eliminable without any loss in the informational
content of the sentences. Talk of the mind is then a
convenient way of speaking about certain human
faculties and their exercise.
The mind is not then a kind of entity and it makes
no sense to say it is made up of a particular substance,
be it the corporeal brain or an incorporeal soul.
Certainly it makes no sense to ascribe psychological
predicates (thinks, believes, sees, remembers, etc) to
the mind for it is a mere façon de parler. The word
‘mind’ cannot stand in relation to anything. In
phrases such as ‘I will keep that in mind’, ‘mind
what you say’, the word ‘mind’ can be replaced with
phrases such as ‘remember that’, ‘be careful’. It is in
this sense that the ‘mind’ is a manner of speaking and
so cannot stand in relation to something like a
material substance. Mind is then related to the
powers, in the examples given, of perception, memory
and emotion, which may or may not be exercised by
human beings and, depending on the power con-
cerned, by other animals [7].
The word ‘mind’ is etymologically derived from
expressions in Indo-Germanic associated with mem-
ory, thought and attention, namely, ‘to bear some-
thing in mind (to remember), ‘to turn one’s mind to
something’ (to begin thinking about it), ‘to have it in
mind’ (intend to do it). These examples are para-
phrasable into a phrase that does not include the
word ‘mind’. The mind is not a thing nor is it a
nothing. In speaking idiomatically of ‘mind’ we are
speaking of a wide range of human character traits
and powers [8]. Aristotle contends then that he
cannot identify ‘mind’ with the body or any part of
the body because psychological attributes can be
applied to persons, that is, to human beings.
The word ‘body’ is a manner of speaking about
the corporeal attributes of a human person, just as
the word ‘mind’ is a manner of speaking about the
psychological attributes of the human person. So that
to speak of the body is to speak of a certain range of
corporeal characteristics: weight, height etc. Body
and soul make up an animal, not as a chassis and
948 HISTORY OF THE MIND
engine make up a car, but, as Aristotle states, ‘just as
the pupil and sight make up an eye, so in this case the
soul and body make up an animal’. To have a soul is
not to possess something.
Association of the soul with the ventricles


(980 1037)


of the brain: from Galen (129 200) to Avicenna
Nerves were discovered by Heraclitus in the 2nd
century BC but he had no idea as to their function. It
was Galen in the second century AD who discovered
that some nerves derived from the spinal cord were
connected to muscle, and he called these the motor
nerves. As a consequence of his observations on
injured charioteers, he also distinguished sensory
nerves from motor nerves [9]. Using the term ‘soul’
in the Aristotelian sense, Galen considered that there
was a ‘motor soul’ and a ‘sensory soul’, which were
not to be considered as two different entities but as
two different functions or principles of activity [10].
The motor nerves are uniquely associated with their
origins in the spinal cord. It is clear that Galen
associated the brain with the mental capacities of
humans. In his work On the usefulness of the parts of
the body he states: ‘in those commentaries I have
given the demonstration proving that the rational
soul is lodged in the enkephalon; that this is the part
with which we reason’. Galen attributed to the brain
both rational functions and the perceptual functions
that Aristotle had attributed to the heart. Galen, an
Aristotelian, argued that the nous or rational soul,
that is, the powers of reasoning, were dependent on
the brain.
Galen did not ascribe to the cortex any special
function with regard to the higher mental powers
such as reasoning, because he observed that donkeys
have a highly convoluted brain [11,12]. Consequently,
he thought that the cerebral common convolutions
could not be associated with intelligence. Instead, he
identified the ventricles, rather than the cortex, as the
source of such powers as reasoning [13]. He argued,
‘if the entire anterior part of the brain is injured, its
upper ventricle (i.e. the lateral ventricle) is necessarily
also affected by sympathy, and the intellectual
functions are damaged’. Thus according to Galen
the lateral ventricle is required for intellectual activity
and therefore is responsible for our being able to
express our rational powers. Galen also placed the
sensitive soul in the brain, and not in the heart as had
Aristotle. With these exceptions Galen was a thor-
ough-going Aristotelian, regarding the rational, sen-
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sitive and nutritive souls as powers and capacities and
not as substance(s).
In contrast to Galen, Nemesius (ca 390), the bishop
of Emesa, was a Neoplatonist, who argued that the
logos or nous of the Platonic soul, concerned with
reason and intellectual functions, was located in the
ventricles. Nemesius went on to develop the doctrine
of the ventricular localization of all mental functions,
rather than just the intellectual ones [14]. Unlike
Galen he allocated perception and imagination to the
two lateral ventricles (the anterior ventricles), placing
intellectual abilities in the middle ventricle, and
preserving the posterior ventricles for memory. Hence
the doctrine was accepted that imagination/percep-
tion, reasoning and memory are to be found in the
lateral, third and fourth ventricles, respectively. This
became known as the ventricular doctrine.
Galen, as an Aristotelian, regarded the ventricles as
allowing the expression of psychological attributes, of
the rational and sensitive souls. Nemesius, a Neopla-
tonist, considered the ventricles as housing the
rational and sensitive parts of the soul, considered
as a substance, and an immortal substance at that.
These alternative views were to hold sway with
different scholars up to and beyond the time of St
Thomas Aquinas who attempted to reconcile them in
the 13th century. Thus ventricular localization still
held sway at the beginning of the second millennium.
So the great physician Avicenna, working in the years
980
1037 could write that:
the sensus communis is located in the fore part of
the front ventricle of the brain (now the anterior
horn of the lateral ventricle). It receives all forms
which are imprinted on the five senses and trans-
mitted to it from them. Next is the faculty of
representation located in the rear part of the front
ventricle of the brain (now the body of the lateral
ventricle), which preserves what the sensus com-
munis has received from the individual five senses
even in the absence of the sensed object. Next is the
faculty of sensitive imagination, located in the
middle ventricle of the brain (now the third
ventricle). Then there is the estimative (rational)
faculty located in the far end of the middle ventricle
of the brain. Next there is the retentive and
recollective faculty (memory) located in the rear
ventricle of the brain (now the fourth ventricle near
the cerebellum) [15].
Here the word ‘faculty’ can be read in terms of a
power or capacity in the Aristotelian sense although
it is not entirely clear as to whether Avicenna is
alluding to components of the soul as a substance
 M.R. BENNETT
with its different parts (rational and sensitive) located
in different ventricles. However, the word ‘mind’ is a
façon de parler for the rational soul in Aristotle, that
is, the powers of intellect and will, whereas it is the
rational part of the immortal soul in Plato. This gives
rise to potential confusion as to which interpretation
is being followed by a particular scholar, such as in
the case of Avicenna.
St Thomas Aquinas (1225 1274)

For Aristotle possession of the rational soul (i.e. a
soul that includes the powers of intellect and will) is
the distinctive power of man. Aquinas attempted
unsuccessfully to take this Aristotelian concept of the
rational soul of man, and marry it to Christian
doctrine, ultimately derived through Augustine from
Plato, of an immortal soul. In this attempt Aquinas
radically changed the Aristotelian formulation by
separating human capacities and powers from matter,
thus confusing incorporality of these powers, which
are abstractions, with the alleged incorporality of the
soul, conceived of as the non-physical part of the
human body. Aquinas argued for a mixture of
Aristotelian and Neoplatonism in which the sensitive
(thymos) and nutritive souls were taken as powers or
capacities (as Aristotle would have it) and the
rational (nous) soul was taken as a substance, and
an immortal one at that (as Plato would have it) [16].
As we shall see, the mind
brain dualism of Descartes
coupled with the success of Galileo’s science in the
face of Aristotelian teleology insured the dominance
of Platonic dualism over the rational Aristotelian
psychology up to the present day.
Ventricles and the soul in the century before
Descartes: Leonardo da Vinci (1452 1519) and


Vesalius (1514 1564)

tions. Descartes departed from Plato in separating off
Leonardo da Vinci, realizing the great importance
of the ventricle in relation to the soul and mind, went
to great trouble to give the first accurate description
of the ventricles. In order to achieve this (ca 1506) he
injected molten wax into the ventricular cavities in
cattle. His drawings provide detail of a kind un-
matched in accuracy. The drawings still ascribe the
mental faculties to different ventricles. The only
deviation from the doctrine laid down by Galen and
Nemesius more than 1000 years earlier involved
localization of perceptions and sensations to the
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949
middle ventricle (the third ventricle) rather than in
the lateral ventricle.
Vesalius was sceptical about the idea that psycho-
logical functions originated in the ventricles because
he noted that ‘all our contemporaries, so far as I can
understand them, denied to apes, dogs, horses, sheep,
cattle and other animals, the main powers of the
rational soul’
but ‘not only is the number (of
ventricles) the same, but also other things (in the
brain) are similar, except only in size’ [17]. Vesalius
was taught that the anterior horn of the lateral
ventricle contained the sensus communis because
the five senses (vision, taste, smell, hearing, and
touch) are brought into this ventricle by the aid of
the sensory nerves [18,19]. This, as well as the
attributions to the other ventricles were the same as
those of Nemesius 1100 years earlier.


Descartes (1596 1650): the soul now conceived
of as only constituting the mind, no longer
uniquely concerned with reasoning but now
identified with consciousness, taken as
‘everything we are aware of happening within
us’; this soul located in the pineal gland.
Descartes replaced the ventricular doctrine with a
radically different doctrine that has dominated to the
present day. He departed both from Aristotelianism
and Neoplatonism as well as from the attempted
synthesis of these by Aquinas and his scholastic
followers. Descartes held, first of all, that perception
physiologically conceived and locomotion (the ‘sensi-
tive soul’ of Aristotle) as well as nutrition, growth
and reproduction (the ‘nutritive soul’ of Aristotle) are
essentially functions of the body and not of the soul,
that is, essential functions of animal life, of the
material substance of which animals are composed,
and therefore open to purely mechanistic interpreta-
the emotional (thymos) and appetitive (id or pathos)
parts of the immortal soul, leaving the reasoning
(nous or logos) part or mind as immortal and
separable from the body. He then expanded this
notion of the rational soul or mind to include not just
intellect alone but also thought or consciousness,
understood as ‘everything which we are aware of as
happened within us, in so far as we have awareness of
it’. Here thinking is to be identified not merely with
understanding, willing, imagining, but also with
sensory awareness [20]. Thought was thereby defined
in terms of consciousness, that is, as that of which
we are immediately aware of as happening within us.
950 HISTORY OF THE MIND
Consciousness is by this means assimilated to self-
consciousness in as much as it was now held to be
impossible to think and to have experiences (i.e. to
feel, to perceive, to will, to imagine and cogitate)
without knowing or being aware that one does.
Identification of the mental with consciousness re-
mains the dominant view of the present time, with a
person taken as being identical with their mind.
Whereas, as Aristotle pointed out, Plato could not
be right in having an immaterial and immortal soul
(with three parts related to reason, emotion (ego) and
appetites) interacting with a material body, Descartes
shifted the problem to a material body interacting
with an immaterial and immortal mind, identified
with consciousness, in fact with feeling, perceiving,
imagining, cogitating and willing. Descartes thought
he had solved the problem of how non-mechanical
perceptual qualities (such as colours, taste, smells
etc.) arise by having these produced in the mind in the
form of ideas consequent upon interactions between
body and mind. Likewise he thought he had solved
the problem of how voluntary movement comes
about, namely through an act of will by the mind
that then acts on the body. But, of course, all of these
ideas are dependent on a means by which an
immaterial and a material substance can interact,
albeit deposited by Descartes in the pineal gland, but
as much subject to Aristotle’s criticisms as was the
original formulation by Plato of a soul and a body.
In summary we have noted that the question of
how the mind connects with the body is not a
question that can arise for Aristotle. Within the
framework of Aristotelianism, the very question is
as senseless as the question ‘how can the shape of the
table interact with the wood of the table?’ Aristotle
manifestly did not leave this as a problem within his
philosophy. The problem arises within the framework
of Plato’s dualistic philosophy, which was refuted by
Aristotle, but nevertheless informed neo-Platonism
and, via St Augustine, came to dominate Christian
thought. To be sure, Thomas Aquinas adopted
Aristotelian psychology and strove, with questionable
coherence, to adapt it to Christian theology. But
Platonic dualism remained the most natural concep-
tion for popular Christianity, and informed the
Renaissance form of neo-Platonism. The relationship
between mind and body is highly problematic to any
form of dualism, and with the 17th century dom-
inance of Descartes and the corresponding decline in
the influence of Aristotelian philosophy, the problem
of interaction came onto the agenda again, and has
remained there ever since.
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Willis (1621 1675): the idea of a soul, conceived
of in Cartesian terms, located in the cortex.
Thomas Willis was an English anatomist and
physician who displaced interest in the ventricles as
the part of the brain concerned with the expression of
our psychological attributes to that of the cortex.
When Descartes died Willis was 29 and he makes
explicit reference in his work to Descartes, clearly
taking on much of the Cartesian concept of the soul
in terms of consciousness. Thus Willis believed in a
rational soul that is immortal with ‘the prerogatives
of the rational soul and the difference from the other
corporeal may be further noted, by comparing the
acts of judgement and discourse or thought, which
puts forth more perfectly and oftentimes more
demonstrably than this power in the brutes’ [21].
Furthermore, Willis identifies the rational soul in
the brain as doing the sensing. He suggests ‘first, that
the sensible species be expressed, so that it may be
impressed on the sensory; secondly that the idea of
the same impression, be carried thence, by like
affection and motion, by the ‘animal spirits’ flowing
in the intermediate passages, to the sensus communis
for otherwise sensation is not performed’ [22]. Willis
held that an internal representation was formed upon
the corpus callosum, the nerve bundle connecting the
two hemispheres of the brain. This is reminiscent of
Descartes’ idea that an image of what is seen must be
produced on the surface of the pineal gland, where it
is ‘presented to the soul’. Willis was then left with the
problem of explaining interactions between the im-
material rational soul and the material corporeal soul
in the corpus callosum, a problem of the same form
as that of Descartes with the pineal gland, and
harking all the way back to Plato.
Robert Boyle (1627
1691) was responsible for the
transformation of alchemy into chemistry [23]. He
was a close friend of Willis, whom he much influ-
enced during their joint attempts to distil blood in
order to break it down into its chemical components.
Unlike Descartes they did not consider the particles
that made up the blood or indeed make up the body
as mechanical corpuscles [24]. Rather they took these
particles to have special properties like those of salt,
sulphur and spirit. Thus mixing sulphur and spirit
changed the motion of the particles, producing a
continual motion and agitation, so making them the
active principle of life. Both Boyle and Willis called
the transformation that occurred on mixing spirit and
sulphur ‘a ferment’. Fermentation occurred not only
in the blood but could also be seen in the process by
which bread dough was transformed into a loaf of
 M.R. BENNETT
bread by leaven. Just as yeast produced heat in dough
so did blood produce heat. Willis thought that
fermentation in the heart released heat as a conse-
quence of loosening the binding of the particles of
spirit, salt, earth and sulphur together. Willis specu-
lated that the brain looked like ‘a glassy alembic (i.e.
a device that distils or purifies), with a sponge laid
upon it, as we use to do for the highly rectifying of the
spirit of wine’. In this scheme the spirits were
distillations out of the blood once it had reached
the brain. The sponge-like consistency of the brain
then soaked up the spirits. Most importantly, Willis
hypothesized that these spirits did not then pass into
the ventricles but rather into the surrounding cortex.
In the cortex the spirits escaped as vapours that
made their way through the very small interstices of
the cortex to pass from there into the nerves that
leave the brain.
The critical question here is what experimental
evidence did Willis have for these conjectures? His
emphasis on the blood and its passage through the
brain arose as a consequence of the recent discovery
by William Harvey (1578
1657) of the circulation of
the blood that established the subject of experi-
mental physiology [25]. This fascination with the
circulation of blood and its chemistry was accom-
panied by use of the technique established by Willis’
friend, Christopher Wren, of injecting ink and
saffron into the circulating blood in order to trace
the passage of blood vessels. Willis made such
injections into one of the two carotid arteries that
supply the brain with blood. Carrying out such an
experiment on a dog revealed a wonderful pattern
of blood vessels, many of them of very fine
diameter, over the surface of the brain. It was this
complex array of branching blood vessels, together
with the concept that the blood they carried could,
under suitable conditions, undergo fermentation to
release spirits through a chemical reaction [26], that
substantiated for Willis the importance of the
cortex. This was further emphasized by Willis’
discovery that blood did not go into the ventricles.
It followed that the ventricles could not contain
spirits and so were not relevant to the capacity of
the brain to sustain the expression of our psycho-
logical capacities.
Willis traced the blood vessels both over the surface
of the cortex and, as they became finer, penetrating
into the cortex itself. This prompted him to explore
the structure of the cortex in some detail. In this he
was most fortunate that his friend Boyle had dis-
covered that spirit of wine and other substances acted
as preservatives that altered the consistency of the
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951
cortex, indeed of the whole brain, from that of butter
to a boiled egg. This preserved the brain so that it
could then be cut into sections for a detailed
examination using the microscopes recently designed
by Christopher Wren and his friend Hooke [27]. The
development of these techniques allowed for an
unprecedented investigation into the anatomy of the
brain and in particular that of the cortex. The books
of Willis, such as on The anatomy of the brain and
nerves, with magnificent illustrations by Christopher
Wren, swept away all interest in the ventricles and
focused the attention of future generations on the
relationship between the structure of the cortex and
the ability of animals, including humans, to express
their psychological capacities [21,22]. But it should be
noted that Willis provided no direct experimental
evidence to support his hypothesis that it is the cortex
and not the ventricles that support our psychological
abilities. His discovery that the cortex was highly
vascularized but that the ventricles did not receive a
blood supply, and that the cortex had a most complex
structure, does not provide evidence as to which part
of the brain is necessary for the expression of the
psychological powers of animals. Nevertheless this
was taken to be the case by future generations of
researchers.


Robert Whytt (1714 1766); Marshall Hall (1790


1857) and Charles Sherrington (1857 1952): the


idea of a spinal soul and reflex acts
Whytt, in the early 18th century, having shown
that frogs without heads possess bodies and limbs
that move in the absence of the head, was unable
to conceive of such reflexes on the mechanical
principles considered by Descartes and Willis. Whytt
proposed that intervention of the soul was required to
initiate the actions of the decapitated animals. He
comments:
the motion performed by us in consequence of
irritation, are owing to the original constitution of
our frame, whence the soul or sentient principle,
immediately, and without any previous ratiocina-
tion, endeavours by all means, and in the most
effectual manner, to avoid and get rid of every
disagreeable sensation conveyed to it by whatever
hurts or annoys the body. If the soul were confined
to the brain, as many have believed, whence is it
that a pigeon not only lives for several hours after
being deprived of its brain, but also flies from one
place to another?
952 HISTORY OF THE MIND
Marshall Hall in the early 19th century carried out
experiments on salamanders, frogs and turtles in
which parts, like the tail, move when separated from
the body on being excited by the point of a needle

with this ceasing on destroying the spinal marrow
[28]. He arrived at the conclusion that sensory nerves
exist that do not produce sensations and that motor
nerves exist that do not merely mediate volitional
acts. This led Hall to the idea of a reflex act that is
dependent on three components: a nerve leading from
the point or part irritated to and into the spinal cord
marrow; the spinal marrow itself; and a nerve or
nerves passing out from the spinal marrow. All of
these he conceived of as being in essential relation or
connection with each other [29,30]. In this scheme
there is no need of a spinal soul. Nevertheless, even at
the end of the 19th century the idea of a spinal soul
was still being considered. Eduard Pflüger (1829

1910) suggested in 1853 that the spinal cord itself is
sentient and possesses consciousness [31]. Michael
Foster (1836
1907) in his Textbook of physiology still
entertained the problem of whether the frog spinal
cord could be said to be conscious or even intelligent.
It is to the work of Charles Sherrington, at the end of
the 19th century, in laying down the conceptual
scheme for the analysis of the role of the spinal cord
in stepping and standing, that one must turn for
completion of the research programme initiated
80 years earlier by Marshall Hall [32]. As a conse-
quence of this work the notion of ‘a spinal soul’ no
longer figured in neurophysiology.






Sechenov (1829 1905) and Pavlov (1849 1936),
Fritsch (1837 1927) and Hitzig (1838 1907) and
Sherrington (1857 1952): the Cartesian soul of
the cortex revisited
Attempts were made to redeem the soul from the
brain by treating the brain as a reflex centre along the
lines that Bell had followed in refuting the idea of a
spinal soul. Sechenov in 1863 suggested that under
definite conditions the brain may ‘act like a machine,
its functioning being manifested in so-called involun-
tary movements’ [33]. Also ‘by means of absolutely
involuntary learning of consecutive reflexes, in all
spheres of the senses the child acquires a multitude of
more or less complete ideas of objects, i.e. elementary
concrete knowledge. The latter occupies in the
integral reflex exactly the same place as the sensation
of fright in the involuntary movement; hence it
corresponds to the activity of the central element of
the reflex apparatus’. Ivan Pavlov took his work on
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the reflex stimulation of the salivary glands, or the
conditioned reflex as he called it, as supporting
Sechenov [34].
Fritsch and Hitzig published their work Uber die
elektrische Ermgbarkeit des Grosshirns in 1870. They
described the results of their experiments on stimulat-
ing the brains of dogs with galvanic currents that led
them to the idea of a ‘motor cortex’ [35]. Areas were
found on the surface of the cortex that gave muscular
contractions involving the face and neck, on the
opposite side of the dog to the hemisphere being
stimulated, as well as forepaw extension and flexion.
This led them to the idea that discrete areas of the
cortex possess motor functions and they generalized
this idea by suggesting that other specific functions
might be found in other areas of the cortex. In 1902
Grunbaum and Sherrington discovered the motor
area on the free surface of the hemisphere as well as
the relative topography of some of the chief subdivi-
sions of the main regions of the motor cortex [36].
These wonderful physiological discoveries did not,
however, illuminate the question of whether a ‘cor-
tical soul’ existed or, to put it more perspicuously, the
question of the relationship between the mind and the
cortex remained deeply puzzling to Sherrington, his
contemporaries and proteges. Sherrington read ex-
tensively in the works of philosophers from Aristotle
onwards but his grasp of philosophical problems was
infirm. Despite acquaintance with Aristotle’s De
anima he failed to see the depth and fruitfulness of
the Aristotelian conception of the soul and its bearing
on the conceptual questions that plagued him. He
noted Aristotle’s ‘complete assurance that the body
and its thinking are just one existence’, and that the
‘ ‘oneness’ of the living body and its mind together
seem to underlie the whole (Aristotelian) description
as a datum for it all’ [37]. Sherrington did not probe
the Aristotelian philosophical doctrine properly.
Instead, he moved towards a Cartesian dualist con-
ception of the relation between mind and body,
unsurprisingly encountering the same insoluble pro-
blem as beset Plato and Descartes.


Charcot (1825 1893): development of the
clinicopathological approach for correlating
brain diseases with neurological symptoms
(multiple sclerosis)
Cruveilhier in his two-volume work Anatomie
pathologique du corps humain ou descriptions avec
figures lithographies morbides dont le corps humain est
susceptible (1829
1842) pioneered what came to be
 M.R. BENNETT
known as the clinicopathological approach for corre-
lating brain diseases to clinical symptoms, namely the
correlation of changes in behaviour with pathological
changes in the cellular constituents of the brain and
spinal cord [38]. In this work he emphasized both the
living patient and his symptoms along with their
pathological anatomy. He gave the first case of
multiple sclerosis that has been documented using
the clinicopathological approach, depicting the le-
sions of multiple sclerosis in the brain of the patient
Josephine Paget. But it is to Charcot that one must
turn for the first comprehensive description of
disseminated sclerosis.
Charcot, the father of clinical neurology, empha-
sized the importance of collecting detailed clinical
information as well as detailed pathological informa-
tion on the same patient. He gives numerous exam-
ples of this in his Lectures on the diseases of the
nervous system (1868
1877). One of these shows
lesions in the upper lumbar region of the spinal
cord of a patient who had suffered from multiple
sclerosis, indicating clearly the posterior columns of
the spinal cord invaded throughout, with lesions
consisting of axons, some of very small diameter, all
deprived of their medullary sheaths [39]. Although
Paul Broca had before these lectures of Charcot in
1861 shown an association between aphasia and
damage to the frontal cortex in his patient M.
Leborgne, otherwise known as Tan [40], it is Charcot
who established the clinicopathological approach as a
powerful tool for teasing out the biological basis of
neurological symptoms.


Aloysius Alzheimer (1864 1915): discovery of
a correlation between the degeneration of cells
in the cortex and the loss of psychological
capacities that characterize dementia
There were several observations in the second half
of the 19th century that related changes in behaviour
to major endogenous lesions of the brain. In 1863
Virchow discovered amyloid (starchy) degeneration
and devoted a great deal of work to the pathology of
brain tumours, which he erroneously attributed to
conversion of connective tissue. It is, however, to
Alzheimer that one must turn in order to find a
correlation between fine cellular changes in the cortex
of a patient and changes in their behaviour. By the
time of Alzheimer’s work Santiago Ramon y Cajal
(1852
1934) had discovered the individual cellular
constituents of the cortex and identified these as
neurons and glial cells, opening up the study of
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953
pathological changes in these cellular constituents of
the brain and their correlation with changes in
psychological capacities, that is, in behaviour
[12,41]. In 1896 Alzheimer published his thesis on
the histopathology of general paralysis of the insane
[42,43]. This is a complication that arises after syphilis
infection, with approximately 10% of all hospitalized
psychiatric patients suffering from this disease at the
time of Alzheimer. He showed that there were
histological changes in the brain that accompanied
the diseased state. In 1901 Alzheimer identified a
patient in the Frankfurt Asylum with a loss of short-
term memory and other psychological capacities
whom he called Mrs Auguste D. This patient died
in 1906 at the age of 56 and Alzheimer had access to
her brain for histological purposes. Using the newly
invented silver-staining technique, perfected by Nissl,
Alzheimer showed in 1907 that the cortex of the brain
of Mrs Auguste D contained accumulations of
amyloid plaques [44]. Subsequent post-mortem ex-
amination of the brain of a 56-year-old demented
patient (Johann F), after silver staining, showed the
widespread presence of amyloid plaques (without any
indication of neurofibrillary tangles) [45]. This was
the first indication that this psychiatric condition,
namely loss of memory accompanied by the loss of
other psychological powers, was associated with
morphological changes in the cellular constituents
of the cortex.
Curiously the claim of an association between
cortical degeneration and dementia was not resisted,
even though loss of capacities that clearly fall into the
psychological such as memory and rational thought
are involved in addition to changes in motor perfor-
mance, that is, in a neurological condition that, since
Descartes, had been attributed to abnormalities in the
‘machinery’ of the body. Contemporary textbooks of
neurological illness highlight this ‘machinery’, em-
phasizing that neurological patients are those who
present with symptoms of a disease of the nervous
system. A typical list concerns diseases of cranial
nerves (involving tests on smell, face sensations,
reaction to light and auditory phenomena), of motor
function (maintaining limb posture), of reflex func-
tion (reflex activity of the spinal cord viz. biceps,
triceps etc.), of sensory function (skin of face, legs
and neck), of gait (standing and walking) and most
interesting for the present purposes, of higher cortical
function (memory, aphasia). Loss of memory is
certainly loss of a psychological capacity, yet has
been taken as falling in the purview of neurology,
that is, to be considered in terms of something going
awry with the machinery of the body. In contrast,
954 HISTORY OF THE MIND
contemporary manuals of psychiatry, such as Diag-
nostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th
edn), provide a startlingly unhelpful and incoherent
definition for the diagnosis of a mental illness as:
a clinically significant behavioural or psychological
syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual
and that is associated with present distress (e.g. a
painful symptom) or disability (i.e. impairment in
one or more important areas of functioning) or
with a significantly increased risk of suffering
death, pain, disability, or an important loss of
freedom. Whatever its original cause, it must
currently be considered a manifestation of a
behavioural, psychological or biological dysfunc-
tion in the individual [46].
So the psychological powers of memory, thinking,
perceiving, feeling and so on, which if they go awry
inevitably show up in behavioural changes, are
separated out from such changes, and biological
dysfunction is not credited with always being an
accompaniment of a mental illness. A fault in the
biological machinery is not then a necessary con-
comitant of such an illness whereas it is for a
neurological illness (putting memory aside). The
association of the foundations of neurology with the
Cartesian machinery of the corporeal body has often
left psychiatry, still working in the shadow of Des-
cartes, with treating the incorporeal Cartesian soul,
taken as the mind and equivalent to consciousness.


Emil Kraepelin (1856 1926): championing the
concept that the loss of psychological
capacities that characterize psychiatric illness
is due to the loss of normal cellular functions in
the cortex
The discovery of correlations between the loss of
cells in the cortex and both classical neurological
diseases such as multiple sclerosis together with the
neurological and psychiatric changes accompanying
dementia, as well as the discovery of localized brain
areas for different psychological capacities such as
language, unleashed a wide-ranging research pro-
gramme in clinicopathology. Such programmes were
not accompanied by concerns about the soul, identi-
fied now with consciousness as defined by Descartes,
and its relation with the brain. This was because the
clinicopathological approach was taken, as noted
here, to be consistent with the now accepted Carte-
sian view that mechanistic biology was responsible
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for those functions that neurology now covered, so
that questions concerning the relationship between
the brain and mind are not relevant. This was of
course not the case when considering problems
concerned with mental illness. Here the Cartesian
paradigm determined that these involved the mind,
identified with consciousness, which had gone awry,
not the biological mechanisms of the body.
Kraepelin’s suggestion in around 1904 that mental
illness is caused by biological changes conditional on
genetic and environmental factors was revolutionary
[47]. For Kraepelin each psychiatric disorder has some
specific underlying biological cause. This was part of
the reason why he championed Alzheimer’s discovery
of amyloid plaques in dementia. Kraepelin was
responsible for delineating schizophrenia from manic
depression, now recognized as composed of major
depression and bipolar disorder. In so doing he laid
the definitive foundations for psychiatry and neurop-
sychiatry in the 20th century [48].
Kraepelin’s emphasis on searching for what has
gone awry in brain function that leads to a loss of
normal psychological capacities raises insurmounta-
ble difficulties for the concepts of mind adopted by
either Plato or Descartes, because according to them
mind is an incorporeal substance. Such difficulties are
not removed by identifying the mind with the brain
rather than with an incorporeal substance. This has
been termed the ‘mereological fallacy’, namely of
attributing to a part (in this case the brain, which
does not possess psychological capacities) powers
that can be logically attributed only to the whole
(in this case the person whose brain it is, and who
does possess psychological capacities) [7,49]. The
‘insurmountable difficulties’ facing Kraepelin in the
shadow of Plato and Descartes were not present
during the 1500 year period in which Aristotelian
thought was considered highly significant. For Aris-
totle the mind is but a manner of speaking about our
psychological powers in thinking, feeling, perceiving,
remembering etc. Contrary ideas of the concept of
mind that are held by contemporary philosophers and
psychiatrists cannot be maintained in the face of
Aristotle’s criticisms and ideas [8]. The continuing
resistance to Kraepelin’s proselytizing efforts on
behalf of the search for biological changes that
underlie what has gone awry in our psychological
abilities, which have been traditionally treated as
belonging to the domain of psychiatry, cannot be
sustained in the light that Aristotle casts on the
relation between the biological and the psychological.
 M.R. BENNETT
Conclusion
This essay traces, over a period of more than
3000 years, the evolution of the concepts of soul,
mind and brain and how they are conceived as being
related. This places contemporary views on this
subject in a historical context. What we can at least
conclude is that human beings are language-using,
self-conscious animals that have a mind and a body.
The word ‘mind’ is used when one is talking of our
psychological capacities, especially those pertaining
to thinking, the will and affections consequent on
being a language-using animal. The word ‘body’ is
used when talking of corporeal characteristics per-
taining to appearance, physique, health, and sensa-
tion. A fundamental assumption of neuropsychiatry
is that when the mind goes awry there is a con-
comitant pathological change in the function of the
body, in particular of that part of
the body called the brain. A principal emphasis of
this essay was to allay the concerns of many that this
assumption of neuropsychiatry in some way detracts
from their humanity. One of the two greatest
biologists of all time, Aristotle, has shown that this
is not the case.
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