 Two distinct notions of the soul occupied centre stage in the seventeenth century. One, stemming from Plato and the Pythagoreans, with theological trimmings by Augustine, had been given immense prestige by Descartes’ championing of it. This view was what Geach has called the “savage superstition … that a man consists of two pieces, body and soul, which come apart at death.” Geach adds, “the superstition is not mended but rather aggravated by conceptual confusion, if the soul-piece is supposed to be immaterial” (Geach 1969, 38).