For religious reasons, Descartes avoided asserting that his description of the workings of the brain was actually true. Instead, he presented it is a sort of thought experiment, in which he imagined God making creatures with bodies just like ours, and working out what they could do without having a soul added. He would then consider the nature of the soul and how it was related to the body — but unfortunately he completed only the first part of the work. The Treatise is remarkable for the extent to which Descartes sees human action as explicable in purely physiological terms, without any interference from the soul.

The work is quite long (83 pages in Adam and Tannery), and I have extracted just a few pages, starting at the beginning, and ending at the end of what Descartes wrote.

The treatise was written in French, and published by Clerselier from the original manuscript in 1664, together with Clerselier’s own illustrations (some of which I have also included). A Latin translation of a copy of the original had already been published in 1662. I have translated from the French in Adam and Tannery volume XI, and page numbers in square brackets refer to that edition.

Go to Index to the Treatise on the Human Being