 Spinoza’s account of willing is developed in opposition to Descartes’s account, on several fronts. First, and perhaps most famously, Spinoza denies that human beings have a free (undetermined) will (E1app; G/II/78). The freedom that Descartes finds undeniable in introspection is for Spinoza only a manifestation of the depths of our ignorance about how we actually have been determined to act. Second, Descartes had proposed that we distinguish intellect as a faculty for forming representations, from will as a faculty for judging the truth value of these representations. Spinoza rejects both the idea that there are any faculties over and above particular ideas and volitions (cf. 2.1.1), and the separation of the representational and volitional elements. Instead he proposes that we see the volitional element as intrinsic to representation, such that we “affirm insofar as [we] perceiv[e]” (E2p49s [III.B(ii)]; G/II/134). In consequence Spinozistic ideas are belief-like: they “affirm” – posit the existence of – the things they represent. On this picture, in thinking of my dog, for example, I thereby affirm her existence.