The Passions of the Soul is, first and foremost, a book on psychology in which Descartes attempts to analyze the various passions, desires, and emotions, to understand them and explain their mechanism, thus allowing reason to control them and harness them to serve the individual's happiness in his emotional life. It is also a book on ethics, completing what its author had established in provisional ethics. In this book, the will plays an important role, not to eradicate passions and emotions, but rather to tame them and lead them toward this great victory in the individual's social life: the triumph of nobility of heart over stinginess, fear, hesitation, cowardice, and baseness. It is a book about the relationship of the soul to the body and the emotions and pleasures of each. The soul has its intellectual pleasures, and the body also has its pleasures and enjoyments, which must not be neglected in favor of the former under the pretext of the priority of the spiritual over the physical. Descartes never forgets this human being who carries the machinery of the body and must enjoy the blessings and bounties that this body allows him.