Descartes is accused of proposing that the human soul is a “ghost in the machine.”
Does he think of the body mechanistically? It’s true that he speaks of “our body’s machine” that operates in large measure “unaided” ( The Passions of the Soul: An English Translation of Les Passions De L’Ame 
It would be a mistake to think that Descartes goes occult. The animal spirits run through the nerves like a “very fine air or wind” through a tube, and they are not “spectral” in the least: “They are merely bodies, like any other bodies except for being extremely small and moving very fast, like flames shooting from a bonfire” (section 10).
It seems that the charge sticks: the body is matter and all its operations occur by “unaided” mechanical processes.
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