Everything which Thinks is Immaterial

Abstract

I am not so surprised that, among all the questions of philosophy, although there is none which has ever been so much studied nor about which there has been such a variety of views among ancient and modern philosophers as that which concerns the nature of the human mind, there is none nevertheless in which they have succeeded less. This has happened, not only because of the difficulty of the material which is beyond the scope of the senses but also because, having committed themselves primarily to examining the relationship between the mind and the body to which it is joined, they have made knowledge of what the mind is in itself more difficult. For by not distinguishing the power which the body has to move itself from the power by which some movements of the body are subject to the will of the mind, some people have thought that the mind is a body or, at least, that it is the harmony or motion of a body. If some others, reflecting on its most noble and superior actions or being informed by the light of faith, thought that the mind is something immaterial, they nevertheless constructed an idea of the mind which is partly corporeal and partly spiritual, as ridiculous as the idea of chimeras and hippocentaurs, because they thought about it in the same way as other forms of matter and attributed to the mind all the functions which are found in us. They could still have avoided these mistakes quite easily if, by postponing the examination of the body, they had stopped to examine what the mind is in itself before looking at the nature of its union with the body. For, whatever that union may be, it could not prevent the mind from being what it is.