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Western Esotericism: History & Scholarship

Treatise of Man

by René Descartes · Thomas Steele Hall (trans.)

An English translation of Descartes' L'Homme, written in the early 1630s and published only after his death. It describes the human body as a machine animated by fluid 'animal spirits' and places the pineal gland at the centre of the system, the basis of his later account of the gland as the seat of the soul.

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