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"You may say that you occupy the citadel in your brain and there receive whatever messages are transmitted by the animal spirits which move through the nerves, and sense-perception thus occurs there, where you dwell, despite the fact that it is said to occur throughout the body."

— Gassendi, Pierre (1592-1655)

Author

Objections and Replies

Place of Publication

Paris

Publisher

Michel de Soly

Date

1641

Metaphor

"You may say that you occupy the citadel in your brain and there receive whatever messages are transmitted by the animal spirits which move through the nerves, and sense-perception thus occurs there, where you dwell, despite the fact that it is said to occur throughout the body."

Metaphor in Context

You may say that you occupy the citadel in your brain and there receive whatever messages are transmitted by the animal spirits which move through the nerves, and sense-perception thus occurs there, where you dwell, despite the fact that it is said to occur throughout the body. Let us accept this; but the brutes have nerves, animal spirits and a brain, and in the brain there is a principle of cognition that receives the messages from the spirits in an exactly similar fashion and thus completes the act of sense-perception. You may say that this principle in the brains of animals is simply the corporeal imagination or faculty of forming images. But in that case you must show that you who reside in the brain are something different from the corporeal imagination or the human faculty of forming images. I asked you a little while ago for a criterion which would prove that you are something different, but I do not think you will be able to supply one. You may cite operations which far surpass those performed by animals. But although man is the foremost of the animals, he still belongs to the class of animals; and similarly, though you prove yourself to be the most outstanding of imaginative faculties, you still count as one of these faculties. You may attach the special label 'mind' to yourself, but although the name may be more impressive, this does not mean that your nature is therefore different. To prove that your nature is different (that is, incorporeal, as you maintain), you ought to produce some operation which is of a quite different kind from those which the brutes perform - one which takes place outside the brain, or at least independently of the brain; and this you do not do. On the contrary, when the brain is disturbed, you are disturbed, and when the brain is overwhelmed you are overwhelmed, and if the images of things leave the brain you do not retain any trace of them. You may say that everything which occurs in animals happens by means of a blind impulse of the animal spirits and the other organs, in just the same way as motion is produced in a clock or other machine. This may be true in the case of functions like nutrition or the pulsing of the arteries, which occur in exactly similar fashion in the case of man. But can you cite any sensory acts or so-called 'passions of the soul' which are produced by a blind impulse in the case of the brutes but not in our case? A scrap of food transmits its image into the eye of a dog, and the image is then transferred to the brain and as it were hooks on to the soul, so that the soul and the entire body joined to it is drawn towards the morsel as if by the most tiny and delicate chains. And if someone aims a stone, the stone transmits its image and, like a lever, pushes the soul away and simultaneously drives off the body or forces it to flee. But does not all this occur in the case of man? Perhaps you have in mind some quite different way in which this occurs in man, in which case I should be much obliged if you would explain it.
(Fifth Set of Objections, p. 187-8)