ABSTRACT
Spinoza writes for a reader well versed in Cartesian philosophy, who believes that thinking is a property of substantial finite minds. When Spinoza defines substance, the reader is led to acknowledge the possibility of another kind of thinking. Spinoza’s claim that infinite intellect is a mode that does not pertain to God’s essence allows Spinoza to deny that God’s essence includes intellect or will. Furthermore, Spinoza frequently indicates that the mental experience is not so much the perfect conceiving of the body as it is the muddled awareness of it. For Spinoza, adequate rational thinking is continuous with and built upon the inadequate imaginative thinking that corresponds to perceptual affectedness. The human mind is superior to others in that as the idea of a body that is complexly intertwined with its causal world and is capable of acting independently of it to a high degree, it is more capable of both imagining and reasoning.
