Free Seeing Further by Bill Bryson Page B

of matter in motion, and the
res cogitans,
the ‘realm’ of thoughts, feelings, morality and spiritual consequence. The new science would tell us about the former, but for Descartes science would have nothing to say about the latter. In effect, Descartes tried to preserve the dualism inherent in medieval thinking while also opening up the possibilities he so boldly saw in the emerging science. As a Catholic, he understood that the Christian soul could not be bound by mathematical laws, and since he believed that mathematics
was
the language of the material world there had to be some ‘realm’ apart from those laws.
    Descartes failed in the same sense that Newton failed; his theological trappings were stripped away by later generations who took what he had done and used it to promulgate a purely secular cosmology. Since the Enlightenment we have come to use the word ‘cosmos’ to mean the purely physical world and ‘cosmology’ to mean our concept of the material domain alone. We have forgotten the wider picture in which ‘the cosmos’ encompassed multiple levels of being; we tell ourselves that older cosmologies are childish tales and that we moderns supposedly have outgrown these stories and faced reality ‘squarely’ to work out where we ‘truly’ are.
S PACE AND S ELF
    In discussions about science and religion it is often noted how corrosive a mechanistic philosophy was to the Christian idea of a soul; what is not widely understood is how important a role our conception of space hasplayed in this story. Eighteenth-century natural philosophy was premised on a neutral, homogeneous, infinite and passive space. The very qualities of Euclid’s ideal that made it such a fruitful foundation for the development of physical science are just the qualities that have become so problematic for those who wish to assert the reality of a ‘spiritual’ plane of being. For medieval Christians, a dualistic conception of the human person went hand in hand with a dualistic spatial scheme; with the advent of a purely physicalist world picture it has become increasingly difficult to argue for the reality of
any
kind of non-physical dimension to human existence.
    Christians are not the only ones who might be troubled by this development. Secularists can be concerned too, for the equation of physical space with the totality of ‘reality’ also problematises the idea of a human
self.
What does it mean to say that the self exists if we cannot locate it on a map? In talks I give about this subject I am sometimes asked during question time to ‘prove that the self exists’. It is always a young man who makes this demand and he is usually a student of physics or philosophy. He is well read and he means his question in earnest. He does not believe that the self exists and he wants me to prove it does. At first I was puzzled by this demand, then I realised how I should answer: If the self does not exist, I say, then
his
self doesn’t, so I shall move right along to a question from someone who does. I assume there are some selves in the room who do exist.
    But are there? In the mathematically defined space of modern cosmology do any of us exist?
A S CIENCE OF M IND
    In the early eighteenth century, the philosopher John Locke claimed that it wasn’t stable for a society to have only a science of body. According to Locke, we would eventually need to develop a complementary science of mind, which is what Freud attempted in the late nineteenth century. The psychoanalytic tradition of the past century may be read, in part, as one reaction to the cosmological shift that took place two hundred years earlier. Freudian psychoanalytics and its many descendants are attempts to make sense of the self in a non-spatial framework and in a very real way to get beyond the metaphysical dualism of our Christian and Greek heritage. Personally I find myself greatly in sympathy with the whole exercise and although I think its therapeutic effects are