ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some of the recurring themes of the tradition, where they seem to touch on the question of possible minds. It is a besetting sin of the academic to dissociate the life of the mind from that of the body which sustains it. It could well be supposed that the technological spree on which humanity has recently embarked is likely to come to grief unless one can learn to respect the bodies as much as the minds of which he/she is so inordinately proud. An altogether more engaging line of speculation about the development of mind begins with the thought that human beings are at their best when communicating with their fellows — that indeed no human being is complete on his own. Human society is compared to a multicellular organism, in which the individual cells are supported and restrained by one another.
