Treatise of Man  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

[1]

Treatise on Man (French original L'homme) is a work by Descartes.

Excerpts

"I should like you to consider that these functions (including passion, memory, and imagination) follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels." (p.108)

"If you have ever had," he writes in L'Homme (p. 166), "the curiosity to examine the organs in our churches, you will know how the bellows push ...

If you have ever had the curiosity to take a close look at a church organ, you will know how the bellows force the air into certain vessels (technically known as ‘wind-trunks’, I believe); and how the air goes from there into the pipes, in combinations depending on the various ways the organist moves their fingers over the keyboard. But here you could imagine that the heart and the arteries pushing the animal spirits into the cavities of the brain of our machine, are like the bellows of an organ forcing the air into the wind-trunks; and that the external objects making the spirits in the cavities enter specific pores, depending on which nerves they stimulate, are like the fingers of the organist making the air enter the wind-trunks of specific pipes, depending on which keys they depress. Again, the harmony of an organ depends neither on the arrangement of the pipes visible from the outside, nor on the shape of its wind-trunks or other parts, but only on three [166] things: namely, the air which comes from the bellows, the pipes which produce the sound, and the distribution of the air in the pipes. Similarly, I want to point out to you that the bodily functions we are dealing with here do not in any way depend on the external shape of all those visible parts which anatomists distinguish in the substance of the brain or its cavities; but only on the spirits which come from the heart, on the pores in the brain through which they pass, and on the way the sprits are distributed in these pores. Hence all that remains is for me to explain one by one what is most noteworthy in these three things. . . . --Descartes, Treatise on Man, Translation © George MacDonald Ross, 1975–1999