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"The kingdom of the mind, therefore, included not only human understanding and willing, but also human seeing, hearing, feeling, pain, and pleasure."

— Kenny, Anthony (b. 1931)

Author

The Metaphysics of Mind

Place of Publication

Oxford

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Date

1992

Metaphor

"The kingdom of the mind, therefore, included not only human understanding and willing, but also human seeing, hearing, feeling, pain, and pleasure."

Metaphor in Context

For Descartes, and for the generations of philosophers and psychologists that have undergone his influence, the boundary between mind and matter was set elsewhere. It was consciousness, not intelligence or rationality, that was the defining criterion of the mental. The mind, viewed from the Cartesian standpoint, is the realm of whatever is accessible to introspection. The kingdom of the mind, therefore, included not only human understanding and willing, but also human seeing, hearing, feeling, pain, and pleasure. For every form of human sensation, according to Descartes, included an element that was spiritual rather than material, a phenomenal component which was no more than contingently connected with bodily causes, expressions, and mechanisms.
(p. 8)