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In Descartes cosmology, the universe is essentially mechanical in character. Copernican heliocentrism is accepted, and planetary motion is explained in terms of a swirling '''vortex''' of material particles. Earth, as a moving planet, is the center of its own smaller vortex. This explains gravity without supposing, as did Aristotle, that the sphere of earth was at rest in its natural place; the center of the universe. It also made it reasonable to suppose that other planets had their own attractive vorticies, and were thus other worlds. [[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]]
Aristotle's theory of physiology posited three souls or vital principles, the nutritive soul, responsible for nutrition and reproduction, and comprising the entirety of the soul in plants, the sensitive soul, responsible for perception, locomotion, imagination, and desire, was added to the sensitive soul in animals. A third component, the intellectual soul was found uniquely in human beings. [[CiteRef::Shields (20112009)]][[CiteRef::Van der Eijk (2000)]] Descartes rejected the nutritive and sensitive souls, supposing their functions were instead performed by corpuscular mechanisms, which he outlined in his ''Treatise on Man''. [[CiteRef::Descartes (2007)]] Descartes mental substance served roughly the same role as Aristotles' intellectual soul. Animals, according to Descartes, are complex automata composed of physical substance only and cannot be said to think, feel, or love in the way that human beings or God can; these properties being made possible by mental substance [[CiteRef::DesChene (2001)]][[CiteRef::Clarke (1992)]][[CiteRef::Descartes (2007)]]. Descartes posited a mental substance for theological, metaphysical, and scientific reasons. He supposed that thought could not be mechanized, since all the machines known to him were specialized to perform one particular function, but human reason was a general purpose instrument.[[CiteRef::Hatfield (1992)]][[CiteRef::Cottingham (1992)]]
