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Updated: May 9, 2025
He affirms that the soul or mind is united specially to a certain part of the brain called the pineal gland, which the mind by the mere exercise of the will is able to move in different ways, and by whose help the mind perceives all the movements which are excited in the body and external objects.
There is a singular muscle shrinking and deforming disease, known as progressive muscular dystrophy, hitherto a complete and unsolved mystery. Newer studies of the pineal in this disease during life by means of the X-ray have shown it calcified, that is, buried in lime salts, which signifies put out of business. Recently thus another hint as to its function has been ferreted out.
Persistence of the thymus or pineal gland tends to a prolongation of the infantile and child types, that will be taken advantage of. If one permits a drop of ink to fall into a glass of water, amazing figures and shapes, bizarre and chameleon, are born as the blue swirls and whirls through the resisting medium.
I allers pick a few in the fall, but I don't make much use of 'em." "Perhaps you've seen a pineal gland," suggested the disgusted Doctor. "I make 'em," responded Jim. "I whittle 'em out evenin's, ye know." "If you were in one of these cells," said the Doctor, "I should think you were as mad as a March hare."
But he conceived the mind to be so distinct from the body that he was able to assign no single cause of this union, nor of the mind itself, but was obliged to have recourse to the cause of the whole universe, that is to say, to God. Again, I should like to know how many degrees of motion the mind can give to that pineal gland, and with how great a power the mind can hold it suspended.
The older psychologists and philosophers always took such a "seat" for granted Descartes, as we know, imagining that the pineal gland occupied that important function.
When Descartes had learned something of the mechanism of the human body, and had placed the human soul hospes comesque corporis in the little pineal gland in the midst of the brain, the conception in his mind was not unlike that which we have when we picture to ourselves a locomotive engine with an engineer in its cab.
From a purely practical point of view the much derided pineal gland theory would serve. If we could be content to view Descartes as a man who wanted to make the world safe for physical science, then there would be a good deal to be said for his doctrine. In the old philosophy exact science had been frustrated by the hypothesis of loose relations all over the field of nature.
"The Pineal Gland had no known function, so Descartes declared it to be the seat of the soul. 'There is nothing in here. Let us put something in, and he put in the idea of the soul. That was the old method. "Morphology teaches us now that the Pineal Gland is the last vestige of an eye which once belonged to a reptile long extinct.
If the thymus retrogresses after the second year, what takes its place as a brake upon the forward driving impulses of the other endocrines? We have every reason for assigning that rôle to the pineal. It performs its service mainly, in all probability, by inhibiting the sex stimulating effect of light playing upon the skin.
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