C.S. Lewis used the phrase “Men Without Chests” for people whose emotions have been severed from reason in The Abolition of Man. The phrase appears in the book’s second chapter, titled “The Way.”
Lewis argues that education should cultivate both reason and properly trained emotion. He describes the chest as the symbolic meeting place of the head and the belly: reason directs, while sentiment supplies the motivation to act well. Without that middle faculty, people may possess intelligence but lack humane judgment.
The Abolition of Man began as three lectures delivered at the University of Durham in 1943 and was published that year. Lewis’s argument responds to an educational textbook he calls The Green Book, written by fictional authors Gaius and Titius.