What is Princess Elizabeth saying here in her correspondence with Descartes?

Question by think.thought: What is Princess Elizabeth saying here in her correspondence with Descartes?
“And I admit it would be easier for me to concede matter and extension to the soul, than the capacity of moving a body and of being moved, to an immaterial being. For, if the first occurred through ‘information’, the spirits that perform the movement would have to be intelligent, which you accord to nothing corporeal. And although in your metaphysical meditations you show the possibility of the second, it is, however, very difficult to comprehend that a soul, as you have described it, after having had the faculty and habit of reasoning well, can lose all of it on account of some vapors, and that, although it can subsist without the body and has nothing in common with it, is yet so ruled by it.”

Is she saying that although she agrees with the distinction between the body and soul (Descartes dualism), their union is still a mystery?

Best answer:

Answer by Bob
I think she is arguing against dualism. If the soul is extended, it has mass and exists as matter, not only as spirit. When she says “you accord to nothing corporal”, I hear her disagreeing and believing that the soul is corporal.

Perhaps i should have started with a definition of Descartes’ dualism. I think he made a distinction between physical substances (that are extended, i.e. have mass or dimensions) and spiritual substances that have no mass, like the soul. (it is composed of spirit only)

Elizabeth is saying “No, I believe (or “it would be easier for me to concede”) the soul has mass and that it exists within the body, no different than a kidney

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