Movements Not Caused by the Soul

THe benefits of knowing oneself extends to morals and medicine.

If we study the nature of our body, we can find very many reliable precepts in medicine for:

• preventing and curing illness
• slowing down ageing

Many of our movements obey the will.

Willpower is one of the powers of the soul.

This has disposed us to believe that the soul is the principle behind all of them.

Our ignorance of anatomy and mechanics has contributed to this.

We usually only look at the exterior of the human body. We never imagined that it had enough organs or springs in it to move itself.

This error is proven in the fact that dead bodies have the same organs as living ones. They only lack the soul.

We see that our soul is a substance distinct from body.

We know our soul solely from the fact that it thinks.

• It understands, wills, imagines, remembers, and senses, because all these functions are kinds of thoughts.

We attribute the following to the body instead of the soul:

• the movement of the heart and the arteries
• the digestion of food in the stomach, and the like

These:

• contain in themselves no thought
• are only corporeal movements

It is more common for one body to be moved by another body rather than by the soul.

When our body parts are harmed, such as when a nerve is pricked, our body:

• stops obeying our will.
• makes convulsive movements which are quite opposed to the will

This shows that the soul can cause no movement in the body unless all the corporeal organs required for that movement are properly disposed.

When the body has all the organs disposed for this movement, it does not need the soul to produce it.

Consequently, all those movements that we do not experience as depending on our thought must not be attributed to the soul but only to the disposition of our organs.

Even those ‘voluntary’ movements proceed principally from this disposition of the organs.

They cannot have been produced without it, no matter how much we will it, and even though it is the soul that determines them.

All these movements cease in the body when it dies and the soul leaves it.

It does not mean that the soul produces these movements. It means that the body’s lack of movement and the soul’s leaving it are due to the same cause.

The disposition of organs alone is sufficient to produce in us all the movements that are not determined by our thought.

This is similar to a soul-less clock being able to tell the time.

The heart is the great spring or the principle of all its movements

The veins are the tubes which conduct the blood from all the parts of the body towards the heart, where it fuels the heat there.

This is similar to how the stomach and the intestines are another much larger tube.

• This tube is perforated with many little holes.
• The juices from the food run through these holes into the veins, which carry them straight to the heart.

The heart then heats up and decompresses this blood which is then sent to the arteries, as yet another set of tubes.

The arteries send this heated blood into all the other parts of the body to bring that heat and matter to sustain them.

The most agitated and active parts of this blood are carried to the brain by arteries which follow the straightest line in their passage from the heart.

This blood is made up of an air or very fine wind called the ‘animal spirits’.*

These dilate the brain, enabling it to receive both the impressions from:

• external objects, and
• the soul

The brain thus acts as the organ or the seat of:

• common sense
• imagination
• memory

These same spirits flow from the brain through the nerves into all the muscles.

This makes these nerves serve as organs of the external senses, and inflate the muscles, imparting movement to all bodily parts.