"To Descartes, the material universe is a machine and nothing but a machine. There was no purpose, life or spirituality in matter. Nature worked according to mechanical laws, and everything in the material world could be explained in terms of the arrangement and movement of its parts. This mechanical picture became the dominant paradigm of science in the period following Descartes. It guided all scientific observation and the formulation of all theories of natural phenomena until twentieth-century physics brought about a radical change. The whole elaboration of mechanistic science in the seventeenth, eighteenth and ninetieth centuries, including Newton's grand synthesis was but the development of the Cartesian idea,...In his attempt to build a complete natural science, Descartes extended his mechanistic view of matter to living organisms. Plants and animals were considered simply machines; human beings were inhabited by a rational soul that was connected with the body through the pineal gland in the center of the brain. A far as the human body was concerned, it was indistinguishable from an animal-machine. – Dr. Fritjov Capra, "The Turning Point"
		We may not like the idea of being reduced to a mere machine but Descartes ideas certainly weren’t all bad. If not for him, we might still be diagnosing a virus by blaming the accidental ingestion of small elves during the new moon. While Descartes helped Western culture dismantle the absolute rule of Christianity over the scientific thought of the day, he couldn't recognize the limitations he would set into motion for centuries to come. His vision was incomplete precisely because we were growing "into it". I's just that today it seems that we have grown beyond it.