“A place for everything and everything in its place” is a worthy maxim, if we know who and where we are. Often, though, we know neither. Or so it seems. Catholics believe that the human person is an incarnate spirit, a union of body and soul. But what kind of account can we give of our belief? Of late, for instance, enterprising bioengineers have folks wondering just how much of the body we can, part by part, replace before it becomes a (numerically) different body. To be sure, in recent centuries it’s chiefly the soul that’s been a worry, and our worries persist.

Last week, though, a longtime friend was smiling. A keen student of brain mapping, he was regaling me with reports about this part of the brain “lighting up” when we feel one emotion and that part of the brain “lighting up” when we feel another emotion. My friend was mightily impressed by the increasing detail of new findings. Plus, he enthused, it now makes sense to locate the soul somewhere beneath the brain and adjacent to the nasal cavity. And we needn’t bother about its finding a tight fit there (much less about sinusitis), because the soul doesn’t take up space.

But wait, asks the inquiring mind: If it doesn’t take up space, how can it have a location? Not wanting to be rude, I thought my imaginative friend might like to hear a bit about René Descartes (1596-1650), often seen as the founder of modern philosophy. As a dualist, Descartes sharply distinguished between the body and the soul. He further identified the pineal gland, located at the base of the brain, as the organ that enabled their interaction. His proposal proved to be a non-starter, and I hinted to my friend that he was following in footsteps that lead nowhere.

Perhaps discouraged by Descartes, many inquisitive thinkers have been unable to find any place for the soul. As a result, many of them have displaced the soul altogether. In his celebrated Principles of Psychology, William James (1842-1910) puzzles about a unified “spiritual self.” He discovers that in his own case, his “Self of selves” consists “mainly of…peculiar motions in the head or between the head and the throat.” These “cephalic motions” are “the portions of…innermost activity” of which he is “most distinctly aware” (italics in the original). What might James make of today’s brain mapping?

Plato would insist that, map them as we might, we amount to more than our brains. In the Phaedo, his teacher Socrates recounts his early fascination with natural science and speculates specifically about the role of the brain. But on reflection he concludes that only the mind directs us to “seek the best.” Why, Socrates asks himself, is he sitting in jail? Not because of any disposition of his body but “because the Athenians have thought it best to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it best to remain here and undergo my sentence.” The disposition of his body is a condition for Socrates’ staying in jail, but the resolve of his mind, the highest function of the soul, to do just that is its true cause. (Note, in passing, that value blind evolution cannot explain what it is to act for the best.)

For Plato, however, the soul has no integral relation to the body. Indeed, he speaks of the soul as imprisoned in the body. The soul both preexists the body and undergoes reincarnation in another body. Thus, the Platonic view of the soul fundamentally differs from the Catholic understanding. How, then, can we do better? Thomas Aquinas, drawing on Aristotle, offers us a coherent framework. It continues to raise questions, but it enables us to deal with them constructively.

So, let’s once again ask: Where is the soul? Thomas teaches that man is a composite of body and soul, and that the soul is “in the whole body and in each part of the body” (ST I, q. 76, a. 8). Why is this the case? The soul, he explains, is the form of the whole body, not just a part. It animates the body as its essence and animates its parts insofar as they are ordered to the whole. Thomas further adds that “the intellect and the will,” the chief powers of the soul, are in the soul “insofar as it exceeds the whole capacity of the body.” As such, these powers “are not said to be in any part of the body.” Thus, it makes sense to say, for example, that Smith’s pituitary gland secretes vital hormones, but it won’t do to say that his brain thinks wise thoughts. It is, rather, the human being Smith that thinks, wisely or otherwise.

The Thomistic framework, and I’ve only considered one aspect of it, is largely obscured in our secular culture. Yes, we recognize “soul food,” and the soaps feature soulful gazes. But an SOS doesn’t mean “Save Our Souls.” It’s just an easy transmit sequence in Morse Code. Ah, well, gentle reader, in these interesting times the Catholic philosopher can keep more than busy just blowing the whistle on trending nonsense.

Serious science is an ally in this effort. A new major study, highlighted by the National Institute of Health, reports that “Emotions can be understood only in the context of adaptive, synchronized interactions of widely distributed cortical and subcortical neural networks that mediate complex adaptive behaviors, such as perception, cognition, motivation, and actions in which the amygdala plays a central modulatory role.” Brain mapping “for dummies” is a scam. Science itself is modestly multi-dimensional.