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On the assumption, that the attributes of the two were wholly different, it appeared to be a necessary consequence that the hypothetical causes of these attributes their respective substances must be totally different. Notably, in the matter of divisibility, since that which has no extension cannot be divisible, it seemed that the chose pensante, the soul, must be an indivisible entity.
But, as no one need be told, our chose pensante has nothing to do with the winding up of our digestive, circulatory, or respiratory apparatus; and so far from internally arranging those other internal organs from the mere arrangement of whose parts, according to Descartes, the reception, conversion, and retention of sensations, and the movements, whether internal or external, thereupon consequent, naturally proceed, or from regulating the molecular mechanism, whence, according to Professor Huxley, results the automatic nervous activity which, in his opinion, governs the movements of the limbs not less absolutely than those of the intestines, it, nine times out of ten, neither knows nor suspects that any such organs or mechanism exist.
When they arrived I gave a bookseller the agency, and in a fortnight I had made a hundred sequins. The first pamphlet was called "Lutero Pensante," the second was in French and bore the title "La Force Vitale," while I called my reply "Lana Caprina." I treated the matter in an easy vein, not without some hints of deep learning, and made fun of the lucubrations of the two physicians.
When they arrived I gave a bookseller the agency, and in a fortnight I had made a hundred sequins. The first pamphlet was called "Lutero Pensante," the second was in French and bore the title "La Force Vitale," while I called my reply "Lana Caprina." I treated the matter in an easy vein, not without some hints of deep learning, and made fun of the lucubrations of the two physicians.
Much, however, might be said in opposition to more than one of that brilliant dramatist's smart philosophical epigrams, just as to the theological ones of Voltaire, or to the biological one of that other Frenchman who for a time discredited a cranial skeletal theory by the phrase "Vertèbre pensante."
True, Descartes lodges within his human mechanism a chose pensante or rational soul, whose principal seat is in the brain, and who is treated as corresponding to a hydraulic engineer stationed in the centre of waterworks for the purpose of increasing, slackening, or otherwise altering their movements.
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