Voices

Baruch Spinoza

Biophysical soul

Illustration generated with ChatGPT by OpenAI, prompted and selected by Greg Conrad Smith, 2026.

Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.

–Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, in Works of Spinoza (New York: Dover, 1995), as quoted by Joseph LeDoux in The Emotional Brain (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 267.