 This passage as quoted is strongly suggestive of the libertarian reading, especially the bit at the end, but there is actually an issue of translation that needs to be addressed. A more literal translation of the last clause – “… quam si non possemus non amplecti” – is “… than if we were not able to not embrace it.” This latter language is in fact similar to the language in the Fourth Meditation, where Descartes sounds quite compatibilist. He says in the Fourth Meditation that “the will consists simply in our ability to do or not do something” (CSM 2:40), but he also says in the same breath that our will is free in cases where it is irresistibly compelled to affirm a clearly and distinctly perceived truth. The will does not possess a two-way power in such instances, but it still consists in an ability to do or not do. That is to say, the will has in its arsenal a capacity to affirm and a capacity to deny, but not a two-way contra-causal power. Ragland would presumably respond to the translational concerns about Principles I.37 by saying that there is a larger and more pressing philosophical concern: that Descartes holds that volitions are praiseworthy, but volitions cannot be said to be praiseworthy if they could not be otherwise (Ragland, 61–62, 77–78). However, we might present the same concern back to the libertarian: if a volition is a modification of a mental substance, and it materializes in that substance without a prior modification as its cause, volitions would seem to pop into existence from nowhere, and the will instead would be a loose cannon. Perhaps Ragland might respond here by introducing the notion of agent causation and saying that, for Descartes, a mental substance itself is able to generate a volition, and not as a result of the activity of any of its modes. However, there are tremendous difficulties in trying to make sense of how agent causation would work in a substance-mode ontology. If we imagined a substance with no modes whatsoever – in line with the thought experiment that Spinoza presents in Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being (84) – it is difficult to make any sense at all of the process by which a volition would form in that substance. If the substance has no modes, but then it all of a sudden had a volition, there would be no reason why it formed that particular volition rather than some other, and there would be no reason why it formed the volition at that particular moment and not at a different moment. If we do start positing reasons, in terms of some specific underlying mental activity that was brewing beforehand and was a precursor to the volition, we could then think about the case of two identical substances that both have that same underlying activity and a lot more activity besides. If both substances are identical and have all of the same modes, we could ask if a volition could occur in one that did not occur in the other. But the same set of concerns would seem to arise. There would be no reason for the volition to appear, in which case it would again be random, and the notion of accountability for volitions would make little sense.