Descartes' Thoughts On Immortality

Although he clearly believes that the human soul lives after the death of the body, he never talks about it in any of his published works, and he rarely talked about it in other writings of his. "From this it follows that the human body may indeed easily enough perish, but the mind is owing to its nature immortal." Later, he responds to Mersenne's complaint that his works do not establish "the immortality of the soul" by saying, "You should not be surprised. I could not prove that God could not annihilate the soul, but only that it is by nature entirely distinct from the body, and consequently it is not bound by nature to die with it." In other words, he cannot prove the soul is immortal, but he believes it is, by saying that even if the body dies, the soul does not.