> Depends on what you mean by "premodern."
Right -- I was thinking way back. But religion, belief in ghosts and spirits, etc., go way back too, of course. My point was that the fact that something was part of the mental furniture of a lot of pre-literate peoples doesn't count toward its being true. Actually, people in various societies had all sorts of conceptions of the earth they walked on -- flat, round, hollow, etc. -- and the universe surrounding it. We now think we have a pretty good grasp of the nature of the earth and the visible part of the universe (though we still don't understand "dark matter" and "dark energy"), thanks to scientific research. But ask a cosmologist if we now know everything there is to know about the whole universe, and she will laugh. And so will a psychologist or neurologist (at least, an honest one), if you ask whether we know everything there is to know about the human brain/mind.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org ______________________________ Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing. -- Oscar Wilde