He asserted that the human casing contains a divine instrument that elevates humankind above the animal kingdom. Inside our mortal hardware, the “prison of the body,” as Descartes called it, resides the software of mind. In his theory, the mind was the place to find both the intellect and the immortal soul, the capacity for reason and man’s most godlike qualities. This was a gorgeous squaring of the circle. Descartes had somehow managed to use skepticism in service of orthodoxy; he preserved crucial shards of church doctrine—the immortal soul, for starters—while buying intellectual space for
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