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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Knowledge and Immortality in Spinoza and Mulla Sadra III. From what we have seen thus far, there is little basis for contrasting the utilitarianism of 17th century European philosophy with the spirituality of 17th century Islamic philosophy. Both Spinoza’s and Sadra’s doctrines of knowledge and immortality are deeply philosophical and nondogmatic. They would have understood, I daresay, each others’ theories.

But there is already a perceptible division between them, and it is a Cartesian division, though in the opposite way than this is usually conceived. For Sadra asserts that the imaginal power of the mind survives the death of the body.

Death is a natural occurrence, but it does not supervene on the failure or exhaustion of the body as, he points out, the physicians and natural scientists maintain; the withdrawal of the soul is not its exhaustion, but an “increasing intensity of its being.”[^26] Descartes maintained the contrary view.

Death, he thought, supervenes on the decline and failure of the bodily machine.[^27] We are mostly taught that Descartes tried to prove that the mind can think, will, perceive and feel without a body, but many of his contemporaries did not understand Descartes to be saying this but something very different.

Henry Regius, Descartes’s “wayward disciple,” took his master’s doctrine in a direction perhaps closer to Descartes’s original convictions than the doctrines expressed in the Meditations and defended thereafter.

In brief, Regius read Descartes as trying to say that the body could experience, feel, and act, in virtue of the operations of its mechanisms without the need for a soul.[^28] Spinoza is rarely interpreted as a frank Cartesian materialist, but he knew Regius’s work, and this is the most natural way to take what he says. In the Short Treatise, written about 1662, he expresses himself more clearly on this subject than in the later Ethics.

The “mind,” he says in the earlier work, is an idea generated by the body, and the relationship of “union with” is simply the reciprocal of the generation-relation.[^29] “The Soul is an Idea which is in the thinking thing, arising from the existence of a thing which is in Nature.”[^30] It “has its origin from the body,” and its changes depend “(only) on the body.”[^31] Sensation results from changes in “proportions” between motion and rest in the sensory organs.