“The story of the brain's separation from the body begin with Rene Descartes. The most influential philosopher of the seventeenth century, Descartes divided being into two distinct substances: a holy soul and a mortal carcass. The soul was the source of reason, science, and everything nice. Our flesh, on the other hand, was "clock-like," just a machine that bleeds. With this schism, Descartes condemned the body to a life of subservience, a power plant for the brain's light bulbs.”

— Jonah Lehrer , book Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Source: Proust Was a Neuroscientist (2007), Chapter 1, page 3.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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American science writer 1981

Étienne Gilson (1884–1978) French historian and philosopher

Methodical Realism

“The idea that consciousness is a mystery is a prejudice inherited from monotheism. The early seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes believed that animals other than humans are insensate machines. Obviously, this was a restatement in rationalist terms of the Christian belief that only humans have souls. Even if mind and matter were categorically distinct, that would not mean humans alone have minds. It was reported that in order to test his theories, Descartes used to throw animals out of the window and observe their reactions. Looking at behaviour of this kind, one might reasonably conclude that humans are the senseless machines.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Freedom for Über-Marionettes: What Science Won't Tell You (p. 151)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

“Isaac Newton deserves to be included in a series of companions to major philosophers even though he was not a philosopher in the sense in which Descartes, Locke, and Kant were philosophers. That is, Newton made no direct contributions to epistemology or metaphysics that would warrant his inclusion in the standard list of major philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant – or even in a list of other significant philosophers of the era – Bacon, Hobbes, Arnauld, Malebranche, Wolff, and Reid. The contributions to knowledge that made Newton a dominant figure of the last millennium were to science, not to philosophy.”

I. Bernard Cohen (1914–2003) American historian of science

Source: The Cambridge Companion to Newton, 2002, p. 1

“God the Father is a person separate from the Holy Ghost. Totally separate. …Do you know that the Holy Spirit has a soul and a body separate from that of Jesus and the Father? …God the Father then is a triune being within Himself. He's a person, He has a soul. …A soul is an intellect. …God thinks …separate from the Son and separate from the Holy Ghost. …God the Father is a separate individual from the Son and the Holy Ghost, who is a triune being who walks in a spirit body and He has hair…has eyes…has a mouth…has hands.”

Benny Hinn (1952) American-Canadian evangelist

Orlando Christian Centre, October 13 1990

“Descartes is rightly regarded as the father of modern philosophy primarily and generally because he helped the faculty of reason to stand on its own feet by teaching men to use their brains in place whereof the Bible, on the one hand, and Aristotle, on the other, had previously served.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 3
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Sketch of a History of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real

“Descartes maintained his confidence in the instantaneity of light. … Yet in his derivation of the law of refraction, Descartes reasoned that light travelled faster in a dense medium than in one less dense. He seems to have had no qualms about comparing infinite magnitudes!”

Carl B. Boyer (1906–1976) American mathematician

Source: The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics (1959), p. 204

“Always remember the words of Descartes: The reading of all good books is like conversion with the finest men of the past centuries.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Ink and Bone

“As the separation of the soul from the body is the death of the body, so the separation of God from the soul is the death of the soul. And this death of the soul is the true death.”

Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) Monk and archbishop

Source: To the Most Reverend Nun Xenia (c. 1344), p. 296

“It is interesting to note that Newton was not impressed by Descartes' great argument for God's existence derived from the idea of a perfect Being, nor by other metaphysical arguments that we have mentioned; yet Newton's own arguments for God's existence from the uniformity and suitability of different parts of the universe would not have seemed like proofs to Descartes.”

Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters

Les Loix du Mouvement et du Repos, déduites d'un Principe Métaphysique (1746)

“That Descartes' Cartesian way of looking at animals, like they're machines… It is outdated, and quite frankly, 100% insane. Because, if we all understand that animals use their eyes to see, ears to hear, noses to smell, mouths to eat, legs to walk, feathers to fly, fins to swim, genitalia to procreate, bowels to defecate.. I'm always perplexed that most people don't believe that they can also use their brains to think, feel, be rational, be aware and be self-aware! Am I supposed to believe, that every body part of an animal functions just like it's supposed to, except the brain?”

Gary Yourofsky (1970) animal rights activist

Part of the speech to the students of the Georgia Institute of Technology, On animal intelligence (Summer 2010)

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