  Another line of discussion that relates to the problem of dualism and the nature of ideas is advanced in 1734 by Ghanaian philosopher Anton Amo. An extraordinarily interesting thinker in his own right, Amo advances a critique of Descartes’s assertion that the mind can sense, that is, that the immaterial mind can passively receive sensory information. In his dissertation, On the Apatheia of the Human Mind, or The Absence of Sensation and the Faculty of Sense in the Human Mind and Their Presence in our Organic and Living Body, Amo states that the human mind is spirit, and that spirit is that substance that is purely active. Following the narrative of the commitment to the metaphysical reality of substance as the common feature of rationalists through this period, Amo sits firmly in the rationalist camp. But it is on the basis of this particular definition of substance that Amo distinguishes his view from Descartes’s. According to Descartes, the mind can sense. For Amo, sensation, which is purely passive, cannot be a feature of the spiritual, purely active substance of mind. There are two threads of Amo’s critique. First, he is concerned to uphold the soul in the lofty position that it deserves given its status as purely active. His critique of Descartes on this point intersects with the objections raised by Elisabeth: the mind, being immaterial, cannot interact with material things. Thus, the mind cannot have sensation of material objects (Amo, 75). Second, Amo wishes to emphasize the essential nature of the body for human beings. On his view, “to live and to have sensation” are inseparable predicates. All living things feel; all feeling things live. But, on his view, “to live” is to be embodied. This allows Amo to call into question Descartes’s claim, in Meditations II, that he is nothing but a thinking thing. For Amo, it is impossible for the “thinking thing” to live without a body. Amo is thus a dualist, like Descartes, but with the important difference of removing sensation from the mind, and locating it in the body. This move simultaneously preserves the pure activity of the mind and boosts the importance of the body in the entity that is a human being.