ABSTRACT
The passage from the Discourse provides motivation for Descartes’s dualism by suggesting he had reflected-perhaps more systematically than his contemporaries-on the possibility of a mechanistic account of human behavior. It suggests he had concluded that such an account was impossible, in view of the complexity and ‘diversity’ that would be required in such a machine. If this was his reasoning he must be given credit for, at least, an admirable realism concerning the state of the art and the difficulty of the problem-in contrast, for example, with the unabashed mechanistic optimism of Hobbes (or, as Chomsky might point out, of latter-day behaviorists).7
