Kenny:
"It is not easy to give a non-controversial definition of the mind as a starting point for the evaluation of the metaphor of the inner kingdom. Different philosophers would delineate the boundaries of the kingdom in different ways. Historically, there was one conception of mind which dominated philosophical thinking in the centuries when Aristotle was accepted as the doyen of philos- ophers, and there has been a different one since Descartes inau- gurated a philosophical revolution in the seventeenth century.
The old, or Aristotelian, kingdom of the mind had rather narrower boundaries than the new or Cartesian kingdom. For Aristotelians before Descartes the mind was essentially the faculty, or set of faculties, which set off human beings from other animals. Dumb animals and human beings shared certain abilities and activities: dogs, cows, pigs and men could all see and hear and feel; they all had in common the faculty or faculties of sense- perception. But only human beings could think abstract thoughts and take rational decisions: they were marked off from the other animals by the possession of intellect and will, and it was these two faculties which essentially constituted the mind. Intellectual activity was in a particular sense immaterial, whereas sense- perception was impossible without a material body.
For Descartes, and for many others after him, the boundary between mind and matter was set elsewhere. It was consciousness, not intelligence or rationality, that was the defining criterion of the mental. The mind, viewed from the Cartesian standpoint, is the realm of whatever is accessible to introspection. The kingdom of the mind, therefore, included not only human understanding and willing, but also human seeing, hearing, feeling, pain and pleasure. For every form of human sensation, according to Descartes, included an element that was spiritual rather than material, a phenomenal component which was no more than contingently connected with bodily causes, expressions and mechanisms."
Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, London, 1993, Routledge, pp 16,17.
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