Date: 1664

"Indeed, one may compare the nerves of the machine I am describing with the pipes in the works of these fountains, its muscles and tendons with the various devices and springs which serve to set them in motion, its animal spirits with the water which drives them, the heart with the source of the ...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1664

"And finally, when a rational soul is present in this machine it will have its principal seat in the brain, and reside there like the fountain-keeper who must be stationed at the tanks to which the fountain's pipes return if he wants to produce, or prevent, or change their movements in some way."

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1664

"Now I maintain that when God unites a rational soul to this machine (in a way that I intend to explain later) he will place its principal seat in the brain, and will make its nature such that the soul will have different sensations corresponding to the different ways in which the entrances to th...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1664

"But I shall content myself with telling you more about how the traces are imprinted on the internal part of the brain which is the seat of the memory."

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1664

"Thus they also trace figures in these gaps, which correspond to those of the objects. At first they do this less easily and perfectly than they do on gland H, but gradually they do it better and better, as their action becomes stronger and lasts longer, or is repeated more often. That is why the...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: w. 1628, published in 1684, 1701

"This is similar to the way in which we know that the last link in a long chain is connected to the first: even if we cannot take in at one glance all the intermediate links on which the connection depends, we can have knowledge of the connection provided we survey the links one after the other, ...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: w. 1628, published in 1684, 1701

"But since it is not easy to review all the connections together, and moreover, since our task is not so much to retain them in our memory as to distinguish them with, as it were, the sharp edge of our mind, we must seek a means of developing our intelligence in such a way that we can discern the...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: w. 1628, published in 1684, 1701

"First, in so far as our external senses are all parts of the body, sense-perception, strictly speaking, is merely passive, even though our application of the senses to objects involves action, viz. local motion; sense-perception occurs in the same way in which wax takes on an impression from a s...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: w. 1628, published in 1684, 1701

"Thirdly, the 'common' sense functions like a seal, fashioning in the phantasy or imagination, as if in wax, the same figures or ideas which come, pure and without body, from the external senses."

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: w. 1628, published in 1684, 1701

"In all these functions the cognitive power is sometimes passive, sometimes active; sometimes resembling the seal, sometimes the wax."

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)