“my soul, unlike my mind, seemed a bit too vague and general to be “me.” I wanted to be in heaven with me as me myself. Such were the vicissitudes of boyhood. I was troubled by three-ism. I was not, and am not, alone.”
“The old dichotomies of body and soul now became a three-way contest between body, soul, and mind, with the last term existing somewhere between scientific discourse with its prerequisites of materialism, mechanization, and quantification, and the metaphysical credos of an immaterial human essence.”
“George Santayana observed that anyone who does not learn the lessons of history is destined to repeat its mistakes. But, in this case, the question of our nature — whether persons are only complicated animals, or part animals and part not, or essentially spiritual beings — is still not settled 150 years after Makari’s tale ends, and it isn’t settled for many of the same reasons it wasn’t settled then. Too much, actually everything, is at stake in how we answer these questions.”
“In caveat lector, I must inform the reader that enthusiasts of the scientific image at universities are likely to hold the view that ordinary people still speak, and indeed will continue to speak, in all the cute, adorable, confused, and old-fashioned ways about minds and souls, just as they always have. But surely matters are settled: there are no souls, and the mind is the brain. But this is not right either. The scientists and philosophers, allegedly “in the know,” are very far from having figured out how to respectfully talk about the matters that Mrs. Flanagan tried to talk to her wee boy about over five decades ago.”
“it is still true that nothing less than the meaning of life depends on how we think of minds, souls, persons, and selves”