Soul Machine: the invention of the modern mind
GEORGE MAKARI

A centuries-old assumption held throughout Christian Europe was that we have, indeed are, souls. But what is a soul, and how can it be fitted into a scientific world view? George Makari, a historian of psychiatry, charts the “hybrid” philosophical and scientific attempts from Descartes onwards to make this accommodation.  

Given the history of the word “soul”, these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers weren’t even clear, as Makari shows, quite what they were talking about in the first place. The “soul” seems to be an immaterial immortal spirit, a “thinking thing”, and, incompatibly, a viscerally-sensing subject, a source of agency and a morally culpable decision-maker.

Descartes is often blamed for making us see ourselves dualistically but in fact he rendered the inherited concept of “soul” into scientific terms as the more secular “mind”. And he argued that as well as being distinct, soul and body are also intermingled: I do not deduce that my body is damaged or needs food; I spontaneously feel pain or hunger. Yet how can body and soul be discrete yet interacting entities? The next step was to downplay or deny the soul’s more aethereal properties and naturalise the others.