ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a story of how the fin-de-siecle, academic, secular versions of this dualism of mind and body had been given their basic shape by the work of Rene Descartes. It also presents another story of how the Cartesian orthodoxy was called into question in a fundamental way in both philosophy and psychology in the early. Descartes was an extraordinarily gifted seventeenth-century French mathematician, physiologist, physicist and philosopher. Descartes himself thought of the body as little more than a sophisticated machine, a physiological automaton, which was made human by the presence of the soul with its powers of thought and possession of free will. Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries there were other views about the nature of mind and body besides that of Cartesian substance dualism. In philosophy, while behaviourism itself had a comparatively short reign, its critique of Cartesian substance dualism produced a profound and permanent change of climate in the philosophy of mind.
