While medical historians have noted the continuing importance of the soul in seventeenth-century physiology, it is not generally recognized that there were systematic discussions of the role of the physiological soul even after it was banished from science by Descartes and Malebranche. In this paper I analyze important accounts of it by founding members of the Académie des Sciences who were physicians - Cureau de La Chambre and Claude Perrault. Both these thinkers argued that the soul is spread throughout the body and manifests a form of knowledge in all its actions. Cureau was an Aristotelian who argued that all life processes require some form of active imaging on the part of the vegetative or natural faculty. He argued that life processes themselves must be conceived as passionate responses organized through innate patterns built into the organism itself. While the vegetative soul (like the sensitive soul) reasons through a kind of linking of images, it does so without any knowledge of the goal of its actions. Unlike Cureau, his successor Claude Perrault's account of the embodied soul was developed in response to the new physiology of Descartes. Like the latter, he thought that bodily processes must be described in mechanistic terms. However, he rejected the Cartesian theory that the body is an automaton and insisted that the mechanism must be guided by a soul. Perrault argued that this soul is constantly reasoning in order to achieve certain goals. In response to the Cartesian view that the soul is always conscious and aware of its own actions, he gave a systematic account of how such processes become unconscious and why they appear to be determined. Perrault's theory probably influenced Leibniz and, even more significantly, Georg Stahl. In the conclusion to the paper I discuss the importance of Perrault's conception of the embodied soul for eighteenth-century pathology.
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