‘THAT RENÉ DESCARTES ORIGINATED THE MIND-BODY DISTINCTION’ Peter Harrison University of Oxford Preprint. Final version in Ronald Numbers (ed.), Galileo goes to Jail and other Myths about Science and Religion (Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 107-114. This is Descartes’ error: the abyssal separation between body and mind, between the sizable, dimensioned, mechanically operated, infinitely divisible body stuff, on the one hand, and the unsizable, undimensioned, unpushable, non-divisible mind stuff.’ 1 Rumour mills exist in every age. During the seventeenth century a story circulated amongst gentlemen of letters to the effect that René Descartes, now commonly identified as the father of modern philosophy, was accompanied in his travels by a life-size mechanical doll. Whether the anecdote had a factual basis or was solely the product of the malign imaginations of Descartes’ enemies is not entirely clear, but certainly the story was well known. 2 On the most sympathetic interpretation, the doll was a simulacrum of Descartes’ illegitimate daughter, Francine, who had tragically died when she was five. 1 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York: Quill, 1994), pp. 249f. 2 Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 2.