At first such a somatic experience of sound was a problem because the body at the beginning of the eighteenth century was not a living organism but a mechanical structure of levers, pumps and sieves (see plate 4). In fact it was no different from an inorganic object. ‘To think’, for Descartes, may have grounded the self in the ‘I am’ of being, but it also severed the body from the soul in the act of reflection, creating an ontological fissure at the very core of self-realisation. The Cartesian, writes Charles Taylor, ‘discovers and affirms his immaterial nature by objectifying the bodily’. Somehow, by a peculiar twist of being, the mind (the rational soul) had to disengage its nature from ordinary experience and divide itself from the flesh as a disembodied entity in order to find its new epistemological footing as an external observer. The body became purely material, something to be reconstructed by the rational soul as mere mechanism and mere extension, emptied of all spiritual essences. Self-realisation became the instrumental control of reason over the body. It was in this way that the Cartesian mind banished the animistic principles that had inhabited the Renaissance body with a functionalism that left its own flesh as good as dead. This is why some historians of science claim that biology was impossible before c.1750; life simply could not be explained by laws different to those of the inanimate world.