The Ghost in the Machine: Emotion and Mind–Body Union in Hamlet and Descartes

For centuries physicians and theorists "continued to work on the assumption that... emotions were corporeal," a position that has become commonplace in histories of the passions.10 On the humoral model, distempers of both mind and body arise as a consequence of dyskrasia, when the qualities of any one humor overpower the temperate warmth and moistness requisite for physical and mental health. [...]for this more limited meaning, Descartes tells us he prefers the (French) word emotion, explaining that it is even better to call them "emotions" of the soul, not only because this term may be applied to all the changes which occur in the soul... but more particularly because, of all the kinds of thought which the soul may have, there are none that agitate and disturb it so strongly as the passions.31 By the middle of the seventeenth century, Descartes's preferred term for the passions has no English equivalent in common use. [...]only recently, the Oxford English Dictionary listed 1660 for the earliest occurrence of emotion as an alternative for passion. [...]emotion is used interchangeably with passion at least as early as 1602, although it seems somewhat rare before the late 1640s and beyond.32 In the anonymous translation of Descartes's Passions printed at London in 1650, a preference for the English term emotion was voiced perhaps for the first time, justified by an appeal to the mechanical physiology. According to Keith Thomas, in fact, the reformist denial of Purgatory did little to quell belief in ghosts.'1 Instead, as skeptic Reginald Scot complained in 1584, "[W]e think souls and spirits may come out of heaven or hell.