Great IdeasKnowing and thinking
The mind
Thinking, feeling, memory, dreams and consciousness.
The question
What is the mind? How do thinking, feeling and remembering work, and how is the mind related to the body?
How the books answer
Oldest first. Each stop is our own short summary of what the author argued; follow the link to the rung for the whole lesson.
c. 385–370 BC
Plato, Phaedrus
Plato pictures the soul as a chariot with a driver and two winged horses: one noble, one unruly. Reason is the driver, trying to steer both. The image explains why we often feel pulled in two directions.
“And let the figure be composite—a pair of winged horses and a charioteer.”
c. 350–322 BC
Aristotle, On the Soul, and the short works on sense, memory, sleep and dreams
Aristotle says the soul is to the body as the shape is to a wax seal: not a separate thing but what makes the body alive and active. He studies the powers of living things in layers: growing, sensing, moving and thinking.
“It is therefore unnecessary to ask whether body and soul are one, as one should not ask whether the wax and the figure are one…”
c. AD 397–400
Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions
In Book X of the Confessions, Augustine wanders through memory as through great halls full of images, skills and feelings. He is amazed that he can remember forgetting, and that his mind is too vast for him to grasp. Memory leads him to search for God within.
1641
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, with the Objections and Replies
Descartes concludes that he is a thinking thing, and that the mind is a different kind of thing from the body, which takes up space. This split between mind and matter shaped centuries of debate about how the two interact.
“It is a thing that doubts, understands, [conceives], affirms, denies, wills, refuses, that imagines also, and perceives.”
1677 (published after his death)
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order
Spinoza answers Descartes: mind and body are not two things but one thing seen in two ways. Every event in the body has its match in the mind. Understanding our emotions, he argues, is the way to be free of their rule.
1781; second edition 1787
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
Kant argues that the mind is not a blank screen but an active organizer. It arranges what the senses give in space and time and links it by concepts like cause. Without the mind's work, there would be no experience at all.
1890
William James, The Principles of Psychology
William James helped found psychology as a science. He describes consciousness as a stream, always flowing and changing, and studies attention, habit, memory and emotion. He tied the mind closely to the brain while leaving room for free will.
“It is nothing jointed; it flows.”
1899 (dated 1900)
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, with the early papers
Freud argued that much of the mind is unconscious, and that dreams and slips of the tongue reveal hidden wishes. His ideas spread widely and changed how people talk about the mind. Later researchers have rejected many of his specific claims, while some of his broad themes, such as that much mental activity happens outside awareness, are widely accepted.
“At any rate the interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge of the unconscious in the psychic life.”
1913
Marcel Proust, Swann in Love (from Swann's Way)
In Swann in Love, a little phrase of music becomes bound up with Swann's feelings, and hearing it again later brings that whole lost time back to him. Proust's great novel explores how memory, set off by the senses, can bring back the past more vividly than effort can. Time lost can be found again in the mind.
For young readers
Your mind is the part of you that thinks, feels, remembers and dreams. Right now it is reading these words and maybe wondering what's for lunch!
William James said thoughts flow like a stream, one into the next. Try this: close your eyes for one minute and notice your thoughts. Where did they go? The great writers have wondered how the mind works and how it is connected to the brain and body.
Talk about it
- What is your earliest memory? Why do you think you remember it?
- Plato said the soul is like a chariot with two horses. When do you feel pulled two ways?
- Can a song, a smell or a taste bring back a memory for you, as a piece of music did for Swann?
- Is your mind the same thing as your brain? What do you think?
- Where do you think dreams come from?
Where else on the site
- You Can't Remember What You Didn't Notice
- Your Mental Workbench
- Long-Term Memory
- Sleep On It
- Nerves, Senses and the Brain
- Neurons and Signals
Every rung tagged with this idea:
- Aristotle: On the Soul
- Augustine: Confessions
- Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy
- Spinoza: Ethics
- Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
- Kant: The Critique of Pure Reason
- William James: The Principles of Psychology
- Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams
- Freud: The Later Works
- Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations
- Proust: Swann in Love
- Woolf: To the Lighthouse
These pages are our own short synthesis, written for families. They were inspired by Mortimer J. Adler's Syntopicon, the index of great ideas in volumes 1 and 2 of Great Books of the Western World, but the questions, summaries and groupings are ours, not the Syntopicon's. Short excerpts come from public-domain translations, credited where they appear.