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Updated: May 9, 2025
They easily distinguished in the interior of it the septum lucidum, composed of two lamellæ, and the pineal gland, which is like a little red pea. But there were peduncles and ventricles, arches, columns, strata, ganglions, and fibres of all kinds, and the foramen of Pacchioni and the "body" of Paccini; in short, an inextricable mass of details, enough to wear their lives out.
If unused muscles speak of our ancestry, the horse has the strongest claim to be our ancestor. But many organs, such as "the thyroid gland, the thymus gland, and the pineal gland," formerly classified as rudimentary organs, are found to be very useful and necessary. Physicians have found the appendix very useful in preventing constipation, which its removal usually increases.
Moreover, the correlation of the unitary soul with the unitary gland might do justice to a mechanistical philosophy, but it did not do justice to the soul's own consciousness of itself. The soul's consciousness is the 'idea' or 'representation' of the life of the whole body, certainly not of the life of the pineal gland nor, as the unreflective nowadays would say, of the brain.
The mind has no observable natural relation to the pineal gland. It has only two natural relations: to its body as a whole and to its effective environment. What Descartes had really done was to pretend that the soul was related to the pineal gland as it is in fact related to its whole body; and then that it was related to the bodily members as in fact it is related to outer environment.
In the section on the pineal gland there was mentioned the relation between light and the pineal gland in growing animals, and how it serves to keep in check the sex-stimulating action of light. The earlier puberty and menstruation of the warmer climates may be explained as due to an earlier regression of the pineal under the pressure of a great amount of light playing upon the skin.
We refer to that strange organ or gland known to western science as the Pineal Gland. Let us see just what this is. The Pineal Gland The Pineal Gland is a mass of nervous substance which is found located in the human brain in a position near the middle of the skull, almost directly above the extreme top of the spinal column. It is shaped like a small cone, and is of a reddish-gray color.
The thyroid is one of the so-called ductless glands, like the adrenals above the kidneys, the pineal gland and the pituitary body. In normal activity they discharge into the blood substances which are carried to other organs and are now known to be absolutely essential.
Moreover, the anatomical evidence of such changes taking place is at present of the flimsiest character. If these theories be true, what, it may be asked, is the agency that causes the dendrites to contract or the neuroglia cells to expand? Is there really a soul sitting aloof in the pineal gland, as Descartes held?
He knew that an injury to the nerve might prevent the receipt of a message, i.e. he knew that a conscious sensation did not come into being until something happened in the brain. Nor was he content merely to refer the mind to the brain in a general way. He found the "little pineal gland" in the midst of the brain to be in what he regarded as an admirable position to serve as the seat of the soul.
A little blob of matter, a handful of nervous dough, a few ounces of tissue, but there somewhere there lurks that impalpable seed, to which the rest of our frame is but the pod. The old philosophers who put the soul in the pineal gland were not right, but after all they were uncommonly near the mark. You'll find my physiology even worse than my theology, Bertie.
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