at the conscious mind exists on a separate, non-physical level. He thought that there are two separate but interacting realms, the mental and the material: the body and the mind. He thought that the mind could exist without the body. A possibility for why he thought that way could be that 'thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations and conscious experiences generally just seem utterly different from physical things' and/ or that 'at least one form of dualism provides for the possibility that the soul survives death' (Kirk 2003: 29-30). Another manifestation of this thought was the notion of the 'breath of life', which could itself survive death. Descartes thought that human beings 'are a compound of two very different kinds of thing;' the body is solid and it 'extended in space' and the mind (or soul) is what thinks and can exist without a body (References in Kirk 2003: 30). That idea lends itself well to the idea that the mind (or soul) is immortal; it could survive after death.
             Descartes' Dualism is 'Cartesian Dualism'; the mind and body are two different things. The most im
             ...