In Search of the Soul

Abstract

We can date the invention of the soul to that fateful night of November 10, 1619. Snowbound in a room in Ulm, Germany, Rene Descartes squeezed his frigid body into a stove, fell asleep, and dreamed vividly and wildly. He entered the stove a body but exited a soul. The human soul, Descartes learned in his dream, directs the mechanical, material body like a puppetmaster her puppet. The nonphysical soul pulls the strings and the physical body sings and dances in response. The soul is the captain, the body the ship. The soul is a nonphysical or metaphysical ghost, the body is the machine that it haunts. The soul is the essentially human—it’s what makes me me—and the body is only incidentally connected to me and can be shucked off, without loss of self, like a fingernail, flake of skin, or lock of hair. I am, Descartes wrote, “a thinking thing”—a soul, not a body.