René Descartes (Hals) 

                            (credit: Frans Hals [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

A younger contemporary of Bacon was the man many still see as the leading light of the Renaissance and its new way thinking, a sickly French parochial-school boy who became a sickly man with a mind like a razor: René Descartes. He spent years manoeuvring to get a feel for what the religious leaders of his time would let him say, and only then did he publish his views on how thinking and learning should be done.

Descartes separated Science from Religion and moral theory. Under his model, Science can advance our ways of dealing with the physical world of the body, but Religion and its inherent morality must oversee the activities of our minds and souls. For the people of his time, the affairs of souls were seen as being much more important than those of bodies or anything else made from matter. Under Descartes’s model, Religion retains primary control over our decisions about what we should be doing with our lives, including how we should be using the findings of Science.^3,4

Descartes’s clever manoeuvre then enabled him, in his writing at least, to separate the mind from the body and the realm of faith from the realm of thought. It was a move that somewhat ameliorated the religious authorities’ scrutiny of those who studied the physical world and how the things in it worked, but he only delayed the inevitable. We humans have issues and concerns in both “realms”, the sensory and the abstract so sooner or later we must deal with the logical conclusion that the two realms must interact somehow in order for them both to involve, matter to, and make sense to, us.