Dualism of spiritual or mental functions and the body is the subject of present-day panpsychism’s attempts at establishing monism. This paper discusses some sources of physicalism and materialism in the philosophy of mind and its history: Karel Čapek[aut]Čapek, Karel and his presentation of robots, Franz Joseph Gall[aut]Gall, Franz Joseph, Johann Gaspar Spurzheim[aut]Spurzheim, Johann Gaspar, Gregor Reisch[aut]Reisch, Gregor, Juan Huarte[aut]Huarte, Juan, and Claudius Galen[aut]Galen, Claudius. The purpose is to make plausible that attempts at describing the mental and the psychic in human affairs by focusing on the physical, that is, the anatomical and empirical workings of the mind, inevitably highlight the borderline between the corporeal and the incorporeal (spiritual, metaphysical) realms. The more successful the physical approach, the stronger the inclination to reconstruct the mental, which can have two apparently distinct outcomes: either panpsychism or building robots, which both—on a closer look—embody the mind-body antinomy.