 That is true of how the emotions figured in much of seventeenth-century metaphysics. Locating the emotions within their distinctive ontologies was an important, but sometimes challenging task for philosophers such as Descartes, Malebranche, and Spinoza. In doing so, they often tapped a broad metaphysical distinction between the active and the passive, which sometimes supported, and sometimes undermined those ontologies (see James 1997). The emotions also inform various approaches to the relation between mind and body, whether Descartes’s dualism, Hobbes’s materialism, Spinoza’s parallelism, or those of philosophers who refused to take a stand on the issue. Indeed, attempts to accommodate the emotions sometimes led to novel and intricate pictures of the relations between soul and body: Walter Charleton’s Natural History of the Passions (1674, 2nd ed., 1701), for instance, posits two souls, one that is rational and immaterial and one that is sensitive and extended, mediating between the rational soul and the body. The emotions were also important in accounts of personal identity, whether that is understood ontologically in the cases of Descartes and Spinoza, or psychologically in the case of Hume.