For Spinoza, as for Descartes, the metaphysical commitment to substance underwrote a rationalist epistemology that strongly privileges reason and intuition over sensation and imagination. The distinctive character of Spinoza’s epistemological rationalism is rooted in his principle that “the order and connection of ideas is the order and connection of things”. For Descartes, the mind and the body are, though intimately connected, radically heterogeneous. How it is that the mind comes to know thi