pawn. Only through the salvation of the church could one hope to attain the freedom of salvation (Ferguson, 1973; Beaumont, 1983).
With the dawning of the Age of Exploration and the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution, however, many of the questions not addressed from the fall of Rome to the mid 1500s were again taken up. For instance, one of the predominant forerunners of the new way of approaching brain science was Francis Bacon. Bacon looked at a critical problem for his time, that of the nature of the nerve impulse. One of Bacon's greatest contributions was in the area of scientific observation. He took the older ideas of Galen, accepted the idea of the soul, but developed a more mechanistic idea that the not only did the body affect the working of the mind, but the mind affected the working of the body (Crowther, 1960).
This mechanistic view spurred in the ideas of Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and Blaise Pascal. Descartes, of course, with his famous maxim "Cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am) placed the mind and brain as the
...