In a meeting of your Academy of Sciences, where I was present during my sojourn in Paris, I heard the report made by members of the Academy who had been present at the transport of the bones of Descartes, I believe from the Church of Ste.-Geneviève to another place. It was announced that there were parts of the skeleton missing, and, if I am not mistaken, that the head was missing. F THE SAGA OF DESCARTES’ BONES CAN SERVE AS a metaphor for modernity then it is doubly symbolic that during their peregrinations the head somehow got separated from the body and was to become, as it wound its way through the centuries, a source of mystery for various thinkers, artists, and scientists. For what does Descartes stand for today if not the cerebral over the material—the head over the body? Who bequeathed to us the mind-body problem? In the seventeenth century it was considered normal for thinkers to cover a fairly astonishing range of subjects in depth—all of reality, more or less. A Descartes or Hobbes or Leibniz might devote one major work to light and optics, another to geology, another to God, another to free will, another to the movement of the tides, another to that of the planets.
