MIND AND SOUL Hobbes and many who would later follow him argued that though we are free to what we will, we are not free to will what we will Here again, Spinoza goes further: there is no such thing as the will: When people say that human actions depend on the will, these are mere words to which no idea corresponds What the will is, and how it moves the body, they none of them know; and when they go on to imagine seats and domiciles for the soul, they provoke ridicule or nausea (Eth, 53) Here Spinoza’s target is Descartes, who located the soul in the pineal gland, and who placed great importance on the distinction between the intellect and the will For Spinoza, there is no faculty of the will; there are indeed individual volitions, but these are merely ideas, caused by previous ideas, which have in their turn been determined by other ideas, and so on ad inWnitum Activities which Descartes attributed to the will—such as making or suspending judgements—are part and parcel of the series of ideas, they are perceptions or the lack thereof A particular volition and a particular idea are one and the same thing, therefore will and understanding are one and the same (Eth, 63) Leibniz’s Monadology Spinoza’s amalgamation of intellect and will, and his identiWcation of soul and body as aspects of a single substance, were among the elements of his philosophy that were unpicked by Leibniz But Leibniz did not return to Descartes’ system in which mind and matter were the two contrasting elements of a dualistic universe Instead, he gave mind a status of unprecedented privilege In the Cartesian partnership of mind and matter, of course, mind had always held the senior position; but for Leibniz, matter is no more than a sleeping partner In the Discourse Leibniz takes issue with Descartes’ fundamental claim that matter is extension: The nature of body does not consist merely in extension, that is, in size, shape, and motion, but we must necessarily recognize in body something akin to souls, something we commonly call substantial form, even though it makes no change in the phenomena, any more than the souls of animals, if they have any (D, 12) 231