Descartes was a proponent of the mechanistic model of the universe—a view that the universe is controlled by predictable laws. When it came to human thought, Descartes faced a real challenge—the human mind possessed too many variables to neatly fit into any laws. Since he couldn’t unify his understanding of the physical world with that of the mind, but he had to account for the presence of both, Descartes played a nifty mind game (pun intended). He said that the mind was not subject to laws of the objective, physical world, so it was completely outside the bounds of scientific inquiry.
