The legacy of the Cartesian conceptualising of human thought lingers in Western consciousness; it can seem the natural way of thinking of the presence of minds in the world. In the original model, as offered by Descartes, a self-contained individual thinking substance apprehends ideas – mental objects arrayed before it, awaiting judgement. Those mental items are construed as derived from non-mental things in the material world, which act causally on the mind. The mind inspects them to determine whether they carry distinguishing marks of truth; its faculty of will then gives or withholds assent.

Belief in minds as separate entities, utterly different in kind from matter, has receded with the demise of Cartesian dualism as a philosophical theory of mind–body relations. Yet the Cartesian model of human knowing, which Spinoza subjected to scathing criticism, has persisted in collective imagination – despite the gradual disintegration of the philosophical and theological apparatus which supported it. Human minds – whatever their relations with human brains – are still readily construed as holding a privileged position, around which the rest of Nature is configured.

The dualism of mind and matter, which has been repudiated in more recent philosophical critiques of Descartes, has lingered in the imagining of human relations with Nature. Even current calls for a more integrative view of those relations are often couched in terms of improved human adaptation or adjustment to material Nature – as if two separable domains are now to be brought into a new alignment.