 Like Descartes’ Meditations, the Discernement contains six sections, and also like the Meditations, it concludes with discussions of the union of and the distinction between the mind and the body (though while Cordemoy addresses them in this order, Descartes, in the 6th Meditation, first tackles the distinction, and later the nature of the union). But unlike Descartes, who had gone to some length to argue that the nature of the mind is to think, Cordemoy’s Fifth Discourse accepts this as a given. Further, Cordemoy does not provide an argument that the mind and body form a substantial union, but gives an example to show that they are united, that of the body moving when the mind wills that it do so. In fact, the union is defined in terms of this sort of interaction: to say that the mind and body are united simply is to say that they interact. (Thus the question of whether the problem of the mind-body union is distinct from that of mind-body interaction, which has been much discussed in Descartes scholarship, does not arise for Cordemoy.) The Fifth Discourse also contains Cordemoy’s expansion of his occasionalism to cover interaction between the mind and the body. God’s activity is required here on the grounds that as the union is defined in terms of the interaction of essentially distinct substances with mutually exclusive essences, we must go outside that union to account for the ability of one substance to effect change in the other.