Cartesian dualism and Descartes’ ontological primacy of the soul upon the body were criticized long before analytical philosophy. In the eighteenth century, the authors of the Encyclopedia and the ideologues of the French Revolution gave the body a central role back for knowledge of the self and of the external world. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, French philosopher Maine de Biran thought anew the relations between consciousness of the self and of the body, a fundamental theme in his whole work, and particularly in his "Essai sur les Fondements de la Psychologie". Maine de Biran thought that Descartes failed to explain consciousness and thought when it is not the thought of a particular object.