  One recent version of this caricature suggests that Descartes had a notion of human behavior that consisted of a “sense-represent-plan-move” cycle (Wheeler 2005, chap. 3). As has been mentioned, Descartes explained many human behaviors through the machine of the body, without mental intervention.  As he said in the Fourth Replies, “When people take a fall, and stick out their hands so as to protect their head, it is not reason that instructs them to do this” (7:230); rather, the machine of the body (material processes in the sense organs, brain, and muscles) produces this behavior, without any mental contribution. Descartes envisioned similar purely mechanistic explanations for many of the behaviors that arise from the passions or emotions. In this connection, the body acts first and the felt experience of the passion has the function of getting the mind to want to do what the body is already doing (Pass. I.37–40). In any event, Descartes by no means held that all human behavior does or should arise from rational deliberation. Which is not to say that he devalued rational deliberation when there is time and need to undertake it. But he was under no illusion that all effective human behavior stems from reason.