chapter 5

The “Physical” Interlude

Alison Peterman

1 Introduction*
In a 1675 letter to Spinoza, Tschirnhaus solicits Spinoza’s “general treatise
on physics,” writing that he knows of Spinoza’s progress on this subject
from “the lemmata attached to the second part of your Ethics, which
provide a ready solution to many problems in physics” (Ep. 59).
Tschirnhaus is thinking of the bit of the Ethics that is introduced by
Spinoza’s claim in the scholium to E2p13 that in order to understand the
human mind, “it is necessary to premise a few things concerning the nature
of bodies.” Spinoza goes on to offer one definition, five axioms, and seven
lemmas about the nature and motion of bodies in general, followed by six
postulates about the human body in particular. The remaining proposi-
tions of Part II constitute a naturalized psychology and epistemology at
least partially grounded in those axioms, lemmas, and postulates.
Besides this part of the Ethics, the only places Spinoza discusses speci-
fically the properties of bodies and the causes of their motion are his
Principles of Cartesian Philosophy and some of his letters to Oldenburg,
Tschirnhaus, Hudde, and Jelles. The latter are concerned primarily with
methodological questions and with interpreting the results of specific
experiments, with any physics confined to some critical comments on
Descartes’s collision rules. While the former is squarely a treatise on
physics, it is very hard to extract Spinoza’s own positions from it, since it
is ostensibly a reconstruction of Descartes’s Principles. So it is natural that
Tschirnhaus looks to this part of the Ethics, which has been dubbed the
“physical interlude,” “digression,” or “treatise,” for a guide to Spinoza’s
physics.
But Spinoza responds to Tschirnhaus’s letter, which presses for further
insight concerning the nature and origin of motion, the causes of the

* I am very grateful to Yitzhak Melamed and Alan Gabbey for discussion.

102

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 The “Physical” Interlude 103
variety of corporeal forms, and the principles governing the composition
of bodies, by admitting that his views on these questions are “not yet
written out in due order,” and so he must “reserve them for another
occasion” (Ep. 60). Tschirnhaus keeps bugging him about related topics
(e.g., Eps. 65, 80, and 82), and Spinoza keeps punting (e.g., Ep. 83) until
his death two years later. So in what follows, I will discuss the claims that
the interlude makes about bodies, but I will also provide reasons to think
that Tschirnhaus was wrong that this was a considered attempt at physics.
The interlude’s main purpose is to provide the barest grounds for
explaining how the affections of the body are represented by the mind,
and Spinoza’s claims in it reflect his commitment to very general meta-
physical principles more than they do a serious consideration of the
nature of matter in motion and its laws.

2 The Interlude’s Purpose and Context

Part II of the Ethics is “On the Nature and Origin of the Mind.”
Propositions 11 through 13, leading up to the interlude, establish some
core claims about the nature of the human mind. First, the essence of man
is “constituted by” modes of thinking (E2p11d). Second, “the first thing
that constitutes the being of a human mind” is an idea of a finite, singular
thing that actually exists. By E2p12, the human mind must perceive
“whatever happens in the object of the idea constituting the human
Mind.” If that object turns out to be a body, that means that the human
mind must perceive what Spinoza calls the “affections” of the human body,
or modes of the body resulting from its interaction with other bodies.
Finally, E2p13 shows that the object of the human mind is the body, “or
a certain mode of Extension which actually exists, and nothing else.”
The first conjunct is proven from the fact that we feel the affections of
the human body (E2a4), coupled with E2p9c and E2p11c, which Spinoza
takes to entail that we wouldn’t feel those affections if a human mind
weren’t the idea of that body. The second is proven from E2p12, along with
the claim that we don’t have ideas of the affections of anything else (E2a5).
In the scholium to E2p13, which introduces the interlude, Spinoza writes
that to gain further insight into the human mind and its union with the
body, we must “first know adequately the nature of our Body.” That is
because everything that is a mode of extension has a mind, and
a mind–body union, in the sense outlined in propositions 11 through 13.
But we would like to know what makes the human mind different from
caterpillar and diamond minds.

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 104 a li s o n p e te r m a n
Why does Spinoza think that we can learn about the mind by
learning about the body, and why does he think that we must learn
about it that way? In answer to the first question, Spinoza explains that
ideas differ in accordance with certain differences in their objects. Note
that Spinoza does not deploy the resources of E2p7s, which allows him
isomorphism of the causal organization of the mental and the physical
world, nor does he appeal to that claim, from that same scholium, that
the mind and the body are “one and the same thing, but expressed in
two ways.”
If he had, the second question would have been raised with a clear
urgency: if minds and bodies are isomorphic or identical, why is it
necessary to learn about the body in order to learn about the mind,
even if it is possible? As it is, the object–idea relation seems more
explanatorily asymmetric than identity or causal isomorphism. But the
question is not so easily dissolved, because Spinoza denies the most
obvious way of explaining why the features of an object are explana-
torily prior to the features of the idea of the object when he denies that
an idea’s formal features are caused by its object (E2p5). In fact, when
Spinoza announces that it is necessary to understand the body to
understand the mind, he simply declines to provide justification:
“I cannot explain this here, nor is that necessary for the things
I wish to demonstrate” (E2p13s). These passages raise many interesting
questions, but Spinoza’s thinking for the purposes of the interlude is
this: the human mind immediately represents all and only the affec-
tions of the human body, and to understand those ideas in the mind,
we must understand their object.
The interlude has two main sections: the axioms, lemma, and a lone
definition, which are demonstrated in geometrical order and concern
bodies in general, and the postulates, which are not demonstrated and
concern the human body in particular. The first part is sometimes
divided further, on the basis of Spinoza’s comment, about halfway
through, that we are moving from discussing “the simplest bodies,
which are distinguished from one another only by motion and rest,
speed and slowness,” to “composite bodies” (C 460). I will divide the
first part topically instead, because Spinoza does not tell us if all or just
some of the foregoing part of the interlude is concerned only with
these simple bodies. For example, it is possible our first subjects – A1’,
A2’, and L2 – concern all bodies, even though they come before
Spinoza’s indication that we are moving on from the simplest bodies.
In 4, I will discuss the postulates.

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 The “Physical” Interlude 105
3 The Axioms and Lemmas
Spinoza introduces the first part of the interlude by explaining that
a mind is more capable of perceiving many things as its object is more
capable of being affected in many ways. He concludes by explaining:
By this, then, we see how a composite Individual can be affected in many
ways, and still preserve its nature. (E2p13s)
This conclusion, along with the account of the relationship that such an
individual has with its parts, is one of the central contributions of the
interlude to the Ethics. Note that it does not mention bodies, extension,
or motion. Although “Individual” is defined in terms of bodies and the
axioms and lemmas en route to this conclusion do address bodies speci-
fically, I will try to show throughout this chapter that this is largely
superficial, and that the real work of the proofs and the spirit of the
propositions apply equally to modes of any attribute. But for now, we
start with Spinoza’s definition of “body,” which is the first definition of
Part II:
By body I understand a mode that in a certain and determinate way
expresses God’s essence insofar as he is considered as an extended thing.
We do not get a further characterization of the nature of extension.

3.1 A1’, A2’, and L2

The interlude begins with two axioms:
A1’: All bodies move or are at rest.
A2’: Each body moves now more slowly, now more quickly.
The only time either is cited by name is when A1’ is used to prove L3; we
will look at that use in 3.2. But they have two important functions behind
the scenes. The first is that they allow Spinoza to assume from now on
that every body is in motion or at rest, that every body has a particular
speed, and that one body can change its speed without changing its
identity. We will see how this plays out in later lemmas, but one thing
is worth noting right up front: “motion,” “rest,” “slowly,” and “quickly”
are not defined here or anywhere else in the Ethics. Tschirnhaus asks right
away for the definition of motion (Ep. 52) and is denied it. In his
insightful analysis of Spinoza on matter and motion, Eric Schliesser has
shown that a number of Spinoza’s contemporaries and close successors

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 106 a li s o n p e te r m a n
complained about the lacuna (Schliesser, “Spinoza and the Philosophy of
Science,” 14). So have contemporary commentators (e.g., Lachterman,
“Physics”; Rivaud, “Physique”).
The second function of A1’ and A2’ is the epistemological work they do
together with L2:
L2: All bodies agree in certain things.
L2 is not used in the interlude, but proves two propositions later in the
Ethics. First, Spinoza argues at E2p38 that “Those things which are
common to all, and which are equally in the part and in the whole, can
only be conceived adequately.” The corollary argues that humans do have
some of these adequate “common notions” because bodies do have such
common “things,” citing L2. Second, Spinoza appeals to L2 with E2p38 at
E5p4 to show that through these notions, we can form “some clear and
distinct concept” of every affection of our body. This is essential to our
ability to control the passions, which makes the following question more
pressing: what, exactly, do we adequately cognize when we cognize these
common things? Are A1’ and A2’ common notions themselves, or are the
common notions supposed to provide us with adequate ideas of the terms
that are used in those axioms, like motion, rest, and speed? If the first, what
does this knowledge amount to without the knowledge of what motion
is? If the second, since we don’t get a definition of motion out of it, what
do we learn about motion? My best guess is that Spinoza thinks that we
have an immediate, non-discursive knowledge by acquaintance of what
extension, motion and rest, and speed and slowness are. But how does
this translate into anything like, say, mathematical laws? Is this the sort of
knowledge of our affections that will actually help us control the pas-
sions? And if we know them in virtue of their being general, how does
that square with Spinoza’s claim that true knowledge is knowledge of
particulars?1
A1’, A2’, and L2 trap us in a kind of circle. The proof at 2p38d that we
have some adequate ideas of bodies relies on the claim at L2 that bodies
share these certain properties, which rests on A1’ and A2’. The only obvious
way that A1’ and A2’ can be justified is if they are ideas of such common
properties. But Spinoza’s readers have all had trouble even recognizing
these ideas in their own minds, no less appreciating that they are adequate.
So it seems like all we can do is take Spinoza’s word for it.

1
For further discussion of the common notions, see Gueroult, Spinoza II, 126–129; Schliesser,
“Spinoza and the Philosophy of Science,” 15–16.

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 The “Physical” Interlude 107
3.2 L1, L3, and L3c
L1 reads:
Bodies are distinguished from one another by reason of motion and rest,
speed and slowness, and not by reason of substance.
Spinoza provides a proof for the second part of the lemma, from earlier
parts of the Ethics, but he claims that the first part is “known through
itself.” Far from being “known through itself,” the very meaning of the
lemma is difficult to discern. In light of the second half of the lemma,
where Spinoza denies that there is a real distinction between bodies, the
first half has naturally been read as an account of what makes two bodies
distinct from one another. Is that what is going on in L1?
It is important to disentangle a cluster of questions that are sometimes
run together under the heading of “individuation.” There are at least three:
a. What is it that makes body A one body?
b. What is it that makes body A and body B two bodies?
c. What is it that makes body A the individual that it is, rather than
a different individual?
Does Spinoza think that L1 provides an answer to any of these?
Certainly, there is precedent among Spinoza’s influences for answering
these questions in terms of motion. Descartes claims in Principles II 23 that
all variety in matter depends on motion (CSM 1 232 | AT VIIIA 52–53). He
is concerned there with the origin of numerical variety (b), although he is
primarily focused on the origin of qualitative variety, or the “diversity of
forms” in matter. Descartes goes on to address (a) and (c) when he defines
“one body” as “whatever is transferred at a given time” (CSM 1 233 |
AT VIIIA 53), including composite bodies. Spinoza rejects this for com-
posite bodies; as we will see, he answers (a) and (c) for complex bodies in
terms of the relationship among their parts.
The idea that Spinoza takes motion to be responsible for the variety in
matter in some sense does have textual support. In Ep. 6, he affirms that
size, shape, and motion are responsible for qualitative variety. In Ep. 81, his
comment that Descartes cannot demonstrate the existence of a variety
of bodies because he conceives extension as “an inert mass” seems to imply
that motion is responsible for numerical variety in matter (but see
Peterman, “Principles”). Most suggestive of all is a set of loosely related
passages, concentrated in the Short Treatise, in which Spinoza claims that
God causes particular bodies in some sense immediately, by immediately
causing an infinite mode (KV I 3, 5, 8), which is motion in extension

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 108 a li s o n p e te r m a n
(KV I 9, KV II 20; see also TTP 7 6). As a result, “[e]ach and every
particular thing that comes to exist becomes such through motion and
rest” (KV II Pref.). But these scattered and general remarks do not help in
understanding precisely how motion constitutes the distinctions between
bodies.
Is L1 an answer to (a) or (c) for simple bodies? It is hard to answer these
questions decisively without a clarification of “by reason of motion and
rest,” and without a supporting apparatus, like Descartes’s or Hobbes’s,
that includes definitions of “place,” “space,” “motion,” and “extension.”
On one natural interpretation, Spinoza means, like Descartes, to identify
a body as whatever is moved together, so that two simple bodies are
distinguished from one another when they are in relative motion. But
this would make it hard to make sense of A2’, that one body can move now
more slowly, now more quickly. If what makes a body the body that it is
involves, say, its speed, then unless it involves some range of speeds, it
cannot retain its nature through changes in speed.
What about (b) – does motion constitute the distinction between two
simple bodies? Again, it is difficult to answer this without knowing the
precise sense in which bodies are supposed to be distinguished by motion
and rest, but a natural interpretation is that they are distinguished by being
in motion relative to one another, without their identities being consti-
tuted by their state of motion. If this is right, and Spinoza does not think
that the state of motion of a body constitutes its identity, then either the
identities of the two bodies in question are characterized independently of
their state of motion – let us say, intrinsically, as complex bodies are – or
they are characterized in terms of their distinctions from other bodies.
The first does not seem plausible, since then the distinctions between two
bodies should be parasitic on differences in their respective identities. So it
looks like if the answer is (b), the nature or essence of a simple body is
articulated purely in terms of extrinsic relational properties.
Spinoza uses language similar to L1 after A2’’, where he announces that
he is moving from simple to complex bodies and identifies simple bodies as
those that are distinguished “solely” by reason of motion and rest. If the
addition of this “solely” indicates that complex bodies as well are “distin-
guished by reason of motion and rest,” and if Spinoza means this uni-
vocally for simple and complex bodies, then this undermines the idea that
Spinoza is providing an account of what constitutes the distinction among
simple bodies. Even if “by reason of motion and rest” is the only way that
simple bodies differ from one another, that does not by itself entail that this
is what grounds the fact that they are distinct individuals.

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 The “Physical” Interlude 109
Perhaps the use to which L1 is put will shed some light on its meaning.
L1 is used only in the proofs of L3 and L4. In L4, only the second part of the
claim, that there is no real distinction between bodies, is used. L3 reads:
L3: A body which moves or is at rest must be determined to motion or rest
by another body, which has also been determined to motion or rest by
another, and that again by another, and so on, to infinity.
The main work of the proof is done by 1p28:
Every singular thing, or any thing which is finite and has a determinate
existence, can neither exist nor be determined to produce an effect unless it
is determined to exist and produce an effect by another cause, which is also
finite and has a determinate existence.
The proof of L3 proceeds:
Bodies (by 2d1) are singular things which (by L1) are distinguished from one
another by reason of motion and rest; and so (by 1p28), each must be
determined necessarily to motion or rest by another singular thing, viz.
(by 2p6) by another body, which (by A1) either moves or is at rest.
Spinoza is trying to show that any change in a body’s state of motion or rest
must be caused by another finite body. But what sort of change is a change
in a body’s state of motion or rest? 1p28 concerns two types of phenomena:
the determination of a thing to exist, and the determination of a thing to
produce an effect, which latter, oversimplifying wildly for the sake of space,
I’ll call the determination of a thing to acquire a property.2 Which of these
is the determination to motion or rest – a change in identity or just
a change in a property? If the former, that suggests a constitutive reading
of L1, with Spinoza showing here that another body must be the cause of
a change in motion and hence the generation of a new body. The latter is
consistent with a non-constitutive reading of L1. I think the wording of the
proof suggests the latter, although it cannot be settled by looking at this
proof alone.
There will be more on this when we look at the corollary to L3, but for
now, consider just two observations about L3 and its proof. First, whether
Spinoza is thinking of a determination to motion or rest as a change in

2
To underline how wild a simplification this is, a “singular thing” is earlier defined as whatever jointly
produces an effect (E2d7). But Spinoza seems to be restricting singular things there to composite
bodies, whereas he is focusing here on the simplest bodies. Nonetheless, there may well be
a connection between the talk of “producing an effect” here and in the definition of a singular
thing, but we do not have the space here to trace this.

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 110 a li s o n p e te r m a n
identity or just a change in property, the proof is completely independent
of the nature of bodies and motion. All we need to know about bodies and
motion is what A2’ tells us: changes in motion are at least among the
changes that a body can undergo. Then, given that bodies count as singular
things, L3 falls right out of Ip28. The proof goes through with “bodies” and
“motion” as empty placeholders, so it sheds no more light on those
concepts.
Second, not only is there nothing special about motion here, but there is
nothing relating a body’s motion with its power to determine other bodies.
Spinoza shows that a change in body B’s state of motion must be caused by
another body, A, and then uses A1’ to conclude that body A must have
some state of motion, since all bodies do. There is no indication how, or
even that, A’s motion is implicated in its ability to determine B’s motion –
that A’s motion is the causally relevant property of A. In fact, the proof
would go through even if the change in B’s property were some other
property than motion, assuming that a body could have such a property.
We learn nothing about any special role that the motions of bodies have
in changing the motions of other bodies, and certainly nothing like
a quantitative account of how the motions of some bodies result in the
motions of others, like Descartes’s law of conservation of quantity of
motion.
The corollary to L3 is Spinoza’s version of a proto-inertial principle:
L3c: From this it follows that a body in motion moves until it is determined
by another body to rest; and that a body at rest also remains at rest until it is
determined to motion by another.
Spinoza appeals to self-evidence, but then offers a proof:
For when I suppose that body A, say, is at rest, and do not attend to any
other body in motion, I can say nothing about body A except that it is at
rest. If afterwards it happens that body A moves, that of course could not
have come about from the fact that it was at rest. For from that nothing else
could follow but that body A would be at rest.
Pari passu for a body transitioning from motion to rest. What is going on
in this proof?
Consider first similar passages in Spinoza’s influences, Descartes and
Hobbes. Descartes’s first law of nature is: “any object, in and of itself,
always perseveres in the same state; and thus what is moved once always
continues to be moved” (CSM 1 241–242 | AT VIIIA 62). For his part, not
only does Spinoza not identify his as a law or a “secondary cause” of any

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 The “Physical” Interlude 111
kind,3 he never even uses L3c. Descartes’s argument for the law contains
two parts, besides his appeal to God’s immutability, which Spinoza does
not make. First, Descartes invokes the Principle of Sufficient Reason to
argue that if a part of matter, insofar as it is “simple and undivided,” has
any property, it will retain that property unless “something should come
from elsewhere” to change it; rest and motion are just among the properties
governed by this law (his version of the proof in chapter 7 of Le Monde
(CSM 1 93 | AT XI 38) also does not treat rest and motion as special
properties). But he goes on to argue that “rest is contrary to motion, and
nothing can be moved to its contrary, or to its own destruction, by its own
nature.” This argument does not apply to any property, but only to natural
contraries.
Hobbes’s version of the principle at De corpore 8.19 is also proven using
the Principle of Sufficient Reason, but quite differently. Hobbes argues
that an isolated resting body has no reason to move in one direction rather
than another, while an isolated moving body has no reason to come to rest
at one moment rather than another.4
We can see an appeal to the Principle of Sufficient Reason in Spinoza’s
claim that from a body at rest, “nothing else could follow but that body
A would be at rest.” But why does Spinoza think that nothing in the
isolated body could serve as a reason for it to start moving? Spinoza does
not explicitly avail himself of Descartes’s general point that if an undivided
part of matter has any property, it will retain that property until it is
changed by an external cause; Spinoza’s proof only deals with motion and
rest. But neither does he appeal to special features of motion and rest. Later
in the Ethics, Spinoza does develop the resources to appeal to contraries:
E3p5 establishes that “things of a contrary nature” cannot be in the same
subject. But he does not invoke contraries here, and such a proof would
leave open that a body could spontaneously change its speed, since it does
not entail any contrariety between motions at two different speeds. There is
no allusion to Hobbes’s deployment of the special relationship of motion
and rest to space and time. There is also no consideration in Spinoza (or in
Descartes or Hobbes) of the relationship of motion in different frames or of
empirical considerations in favor of the proposition, as in Galileo’s treat-
ment of similar principles.5

3
See also Gabbey, “Natural Philosophy,” 156; Garber, “Laws,” 61; Schliesser, “Spinoza’s Philosophy of
Science,” 7–8.
4
Garber (“Laws,” 49) and Gueroult (Spinoza, 154–155) argue that Hobbes is a bigger influence on
Spinoza here, largely on the basis that neither appeals to God’s immutability.
5
For more on the development of proto-inertial principles, see Gabbey, “Force and Inertia.”

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 112 a li s o n p e te r m a n
What Spinoza’s proof seems to be relying on is something else: there is
nothing else in the body that could serve as a reason because there is
nothing else in the body at all:
[W]hen I suppose that body A, say, is at rest, and do not attend to any other
body in motion, I can say nothing about body A except that it is at rest.
Does Spinoza mean that there is really nothing to be said about a body
other than characterizing its state of motion? We cannot attribute a shape
to it? A size? The fact that it is a mode of extension? That it has God for
a cause?6 Spinoza clearly doesn’t mean it to apply to composite bodies,
since we know we can say plenty about those beyond characterizing their
state of motion. But does he really mean it about simple bodies?
If there is truly nothing to be said about a simple body, be it qualitative
or quidditative, except that it has a certain state of motion, then the
constitutive reading of L1 would seem to be right. But then L1 would
only provide the grounds of distinctions between bodies in virtue of
providing grounds of the identity of each, namely, that a body just is
a state of motion. But recall the problems we saw with this view, like the
fact that Spinoza asserts as axiomatic that a body can move “now more
slowly, now more quickly.” Moreover, this suggests that something can be
said about body A in isolation without attending to any other body at all.
If motion is purely relational, as if Spinoza is providing a purely relational
account of the distinction between two bodies, then it is impossible to say
anything about a body’s state of motion when it is considered in isolation
from any other bodies.
Schliesser makes the interesting observation that L3c, unlike Cartesian
inertia, is not restricted to rectilinear motion (“Spinoza and the Philosophy
of Science,” 16), although Descartes proves this as a separate law. Spinoza
seems to accept such a restriction as an axiom in the DPP, but he also
expresses some reservations about Descartes’s justification of the principle
(C 277). Finally, it is worth noting that Spinoza does not himself make
what would seem to be a natural connection between L3c and E3p6’s claim
that each thing “strives to persevere in its being,” which evokes Descartes’s
first law with the phrase “quantum in se est.” And while Spinoza never calls
L3c a law, he does write at TTP 16 that it is “the supreme law of Nature”
that “each thing endeavors to persist in its present being, quantum in se
6
If Spinoza is in earnest that nothing can be said about a mode of extension except whether it is in
motion or at rest, this undermines the claims of some commentators that extension is inherently
“dynamic” or in motion, since the fact that a body is a mode of God is supposed to be responsible at
least in part for its state of motion – see 3.4.

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 The “Physical” Interlude 113
est.” If it is possible to find a principled relationship among these similar
claims about the persistence of being and the persistence of motion, we do
not have the space to do it here.

3.3 A1’’ and A2’’

After the account of what can be said about a (simple) body in isolation
from others, A1’’ and A2’’ concern how the states of motion of these simple
bodies change when they come into contact with one another. They are the
closest that we get in the interlude to collision rules. A1’’ and A2’’ are very
different from one another. A1’’ is an important, very general, metaphysical
principle that is the single most frequently-used axiom or lemma from the
interlude, while A2’’ is a very specific physical principle that is used once in
a way that is not very important.
A1’’ is the claim that: all modes by which a body is affected by another
body follow both from the nature of the body affected and at the same time
from the nature of the affecting body, so that one and the same body may
be moved differently according to differences in the nature of the bodies
moving it. And conversely, different bodies may be moved differently by
one and the same body.
If this axiom is plausible, its plausibility owes nothing to the fact that it
deals with bodies and motion specifically. It cannot even be true of simple
bodies if there is “nothing to be said” of a simple body other than its state of
motion or rest, since, like A2’, A1’’ presupposes the survival of a body
through changes in speed. If a simple body just is a state of motion or rest,
then, if it is affected and a new state of motion or rest results, the original
body has been annihilated. So there is no body that bears a “mode by which
it is affected.” This is the first time that the entity “mode by which a body is
affected” appears in the interlude; it is introduced (again) with no theore-
tical basis, and it is impossible to make sense of on the constitutive reading
of L1, if a body is defined solely in terms of its relational distinctions from
other bodies.
Understanding this axiom better would require a more careful account
of what it is to be a “mode by which a body is affected.” Such a mode is
either a mode of a mode, since a body itself is a mode of extended
substance, or it is just a mode of substance, which is part of a complex
individual made up of other modes of substance. If the former, we would
like an account of what it means to be a mode of a mode; if the latter, we
would like to know what the difference is between the modes that are parts
of the body and those that are “affections” of the body. This is a particularly

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 114 a li s o n p e te r m a n
interesting question for motion, which Spinoza seems to be treating,
following Descartes, as a mode of the body moved. But the question is
whether this is compatible with the anti-Cartesian claim that a body is itself
a mode and not a substance.
Behind A1’’ is Spinoza’s intuition that effects always involve their
proximate causes, but it is not clear how this is supposed to apply to the
transmission of motion through contact. In the DPP, the closest we get to
a similarly general principle of physical change upon interaction is A19,
which does not appear in Descartes’s original, and stipulates that: when
two bodies which have opposite modes come into contact with one
another, either both are constrained to suffer some variation, or else at
least one of them is.
The first part of this axiom is still very far from A1’’ – it does not, for
example, say that the variation that a body suffers must involve the nature
of the other body, and it is only concerned with opposite modes. But
the second part seems to contradict A1’’ – if only one of the bodies is
constrained to “suffer some variation,” that means that it is possible that
one body doesn’t change at all. If A1’’ is supposed to be bidirectional
(if every body that affects another is itself affected), then it should entail
that it is impossible for one of the bodies to undergo no change, because
then it would bear no mark of the interaction at all, no less a mark of the
nature of the affecting body. Of course, Spinoza may mean to make A1’’
unidirectional.
Despite proving A1’’ only for simple bodies, Spinoza uses it only for
complex human bodies. A1’’ is most important in the proof of E2p16,
where Spinoza uses it to show that our ideas of the affections of our bodies
involve the nature of the objects affecting us, so that we “perceive the
nature” of those bodies when we perceive those affections. A1’’ is significant
in its role in explaining how the mind represents the body and the things
outside of it, and is of less interest as a claim about physics.
A2’’ stands out from the rest of the interlude: it alone approaches
quantitative, it is the only thing like a specific collision rule of the kind
that Descartes offers in the Principles, and it is the only claim that is not
better understood as an attribute-neutral metaphysical principle. But it is
not derived from any previous axioms or lemmas – no less laws of nature,
like Descartes’s – and it is only used once. What is its origin and purpose?
Descartes discusses oblique impacts of this kind in Optics II (CSM 1
157–161 | AT VI 93–101), as part of his discussion of the reflection of light,
providing a demonstration from geometrical symmetry of the kind that
Spinoza favors in the Principles of Cartesian Philosophy. It is likely that

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 The “Physical” Interlude 115
Spinoza accepts such a justification and files the details under “to put in
order later.” But why does Spinoza include this, as opposed to any other
considerations about the geometry of collision or any other collision?
Descartes’s collision rules in the Principles are proven, for the most part,
from the principle of the conservation of quantity of motion, a principle
that, I think, Spinoza does not favor (Peterman, Physics). Perhaps Spinoza
thinks of this as the safest and most general thing he can say about
collisions. But note that it only concerns the direction of collisions and
involves no commitments about the speed of the incoming or outgoing
body or any mechanism by which the surface exerts an influence on the
speed or direction of the body – that is, details of the “modes by which the
body is affected” by the surface.7
A2’’ is used along with Post. 5 to prove E2p17c, which explains how we
are able to regard as present bodies that are no longer present. It is
interesting that the proof of E2p17, which deals with veridical perception,
does not cite either of these: all Spinoza says there is that if a body is affected
by another body, it will regard that body as present, and he omits the
details of the physical mechanism by which this occurs. It seems he feels
it necessary to give a more detailed account of why a “mode by which
a body is affected” can last beyond the initial interaction or impact. This is
interesting: Spinoza never told us how long a mode by which a body is
affected lasts, but this suggests that he may have been thinking of it as
instantaneous. The proof of E2p17c is also one case where Spinoza applies
a principle that is apparently restricted to simple bodies in a context in
which it is not clear that only simple bodies are involved, which suggests
that he may think of the simple body as an idealization that can be applied
to complex bodies in certain contexts.

3.4 Definition, A3’’, L4 through L7

Spinoza announces after A2’’ that he is moving on to discuss composite
bodies. He starts by providing a definition of a composite body or
“Individual”:
When a number of bodies, whether of the same or of different size, are so
constrained by other bodies that they lie upon one another, or if they so
move, whether with the same degree or different degrees of speed, that they
communicate their motions to each other in a certain fixed manner, we shall

7
There is nothing like, e.g., Spinoza’s affirmation in the TTP that “when one body strikes a smaller
body, it only loses as much of its own motion as it communicates to the other” (TTP 4 1).

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 116 a li s o n p e te r m a n
say that those bodies are united with one another and that they all together
compose one body or individual, which is distinguished from the others by
this union of bodies.
Spinoza tells us here the condition of a body’s being one body, and that it is
distinguished from others by being a certain type of union: one in which
a certain relationship, or ratio, is maintained among its parts. He does not
yet tell us what constitutes the essence or nature of that individual,
although through the rest of the interlude, which is devoted to showing
how an individual can retain its nature through certain kinds of changes,
assumes that the individual preserves its nature if and only if this ratio is
preserved, so it is reasonable to think that this ratio is what makes the
individual the individual that it is.
A3’’, which characterizes the difference between hard, soft, and fluid,
bodies is not used explicitly, but Spinoza has these definitions here so that
he can appeal to the softness and fluidity of the parts of the human body
later, at Posts. 2 and 5, and 2p17.
L4 through L7 each detail some specific ways that an individual can
change while retaining its nature; they all depend on the idea that as long as
the parts of an individual retain the relevant relationship with one another –
their “ratio” – the individual will “retain its nature . . . without any change
of form.” The ratio may be preserved even when the individual’s parts are
replaced (L4), its parts grow or shrink (L5), its parts change their directions
(L6), and it changes its speed or direction as a whole. L6 is not used; L4 is
used in one epistemic claim: “the parts composing the human Body pertain
to the essence of the Body itself only insofar as they communicate their
motions to one another in a certain fixed manner. . . and not insofar as they
can be considered as Individuals, without relation to the human Body”
(2p24d). L5 and L7 are used once, together, to show that the power of the
body can be increased or decreased, which seems to indicate that Spinoza
thinks that those changes involve an increase or decrease in the power of
the body while L4 and L6 do not (perhaps because L5 and L7 involve
quantitative gains and losses – in size and speed, respectively). Spinoza
concludes that “we see how a composite Individual can be affected in many
ways and still preserve its nature.”
This is perhaps the most widely-discussed aspect of the interlude, so
I refer the reader to rich discussions like those by Garrett (“Metaphysical
Individuation”), Matheron (Individu), and Rice (“Individuation”) and con-
fine myself here to a few observations. First, how far is Spinoza motivated
here by the consideration of bodies, specifically? The characterization of the

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 The “Physical” Interlude 117
nature of an individual as the relationship among its parts is very general.
At E2p15, Spinoza leverages E27 to show that the human mind is composite,
which suggests that he thinks the human mind has the same relationship to
its parts as the human body does. In other places – like E2p13, E2p11’s claim
that the idea of the human body is “prior in nature” to the other ideas in the
human mind, and E3p12’s claim that the mind strives to preserve the
existence of the body – the mind seems to be an individual in virtue of
representing a physical individual and not in virtue of its parts maintaining
a certain relationship with one another.
Thinking about what motivates Spinoza to adopt this definition of an
individual leads to a second question: at what ontological level does the
Spinozistic individual live, and especially, what is the ontological status
of this individual body compared to that of the simplest bodies? The fact
that Spinoza starts with the simplest bodies makes them sound funda-
mental or more basic than the individuals. But Spinoza’s comments to
the effect that the parts of the human body are themselves complex
individuals, and the parts of those complex, and so on, suggest a kind
of proto-Leibnizian picture in which nature is one big individual, com-
posed of individuals all the way down. If this is accurate, then it is
reasonable to read the simplest bodies as idealizations – either there are,
in fact, no simplest bodies, or else complex bodies may be treated as
simplest bodies only in a certain respect in certain contexts. Descartes
admits as much of his “inertial” bodies (although it’s not clear that
Cartesian inertial bodies correspond to Spinozan simple bodies, since
Spinoza seems to treat complex bodies as subject to state- and being-
preserving laws as well).
Finally, there is the question of the precise nature of this “ratio of
motion and rest.” The use of the phrase “motion and rest” here as well as
in Spinoza’s discussion of simple bodies earlier in the interlude has been
subject to a number of attempts to flesh it out in terms of “force,” “power,”
or “energy” (see, e.g., Gueroult, Spinoza; Klever, “Moles”; Viljanen,
Spinoza’s Geometry of Power). In the DPP, Spinoza does follow Descartes
in acknowledging a use of “motion” that refers to a force of motion rather
than local motion, a use that contributes to the difficulty of understanding
Spinoza’s meaning (see Garrett, “Metaphysical Individuation” and
Peterman, “Principles”; for a more general guide to accounts of motion
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Gabbey, “Motion”). But
there is no philosophical or historical reason to read “motion and rest” as
anything like “energy” or “power.” Given that, as I have shown, Spinoza
doesn’t provide a mechanism by which local motion can cause other

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 118 a li s o n p e te r m a n
motions, any reading of the “ratio of motion and rest” in terms of force is
quite speculative. Spinoza provides no quantitative treatment of this ratio
(other than an early, discarded attempt at KV II 9), and it certainly is not
a single quantity like energy. The best reading of “ratio of motion and rest”
that the interlude supports is no more specific than this: Spinoza thinks
that complex physical things are identified by a relationship among their
parts, which concerns the motion of those parts.
There are also attempts to read quantitatively the interlude’s conclu-
sion that, as we proceed in building individuals “to infinity, we shall
easily conceive that the whole of nature is one Individual, whose parts, i.e.
all bodies, vary in infinite ways, without any change of the whole
individual.” But it would be a mistake, too, to read this conserved ratio
as a quantity like Descartes’s quantity of motion, which he claims is
conserved in the whole universe. As Schliesser notes that Samuel Clarke
recognized, maintenance of this ratio is compatible with variation in the
quantity of motion in the universe (“Spinoza and the Philosophy of
Science,” 14), and Spinoza does not claim in the Ethics that such
a quantity is globally conserved.

4 Postulates
Having given an account of how less composite bodies combine to form
more composite ones, and shown how this kind of complexity allows an
individual body to be affected in many ways while still preserving its
nature, Spinoza provides six postulates that establish that the human
body is a highly composite individual (Post. 1) and outline several of its
properties. We learn that the human body has fluid, soft, and hard parts
(Post. 2) that allow it to receive impressions of external bodies (Post. 5); we
saw in 3.4 that these are used to develop a theory of hallucination in the
demonstration of 2p17c. Spinoza also asserts that the human body requires
other bodies for its preservation (Post. 4) and that it is affected by and can
affect other bodies (Post. 4 and 6).
None of the postulates are proven at all, no less through the interlude,
although some of them use terms defined in the interlude. How do we
know about these postulates, and how certain are they? Usually when
Spinoza asserts things without proof, he labels them axioms, but he labels
the postulates differently. The most important use to which the postulates
are put is the theory of veridical and non-veridical perception, developed in
the propositions immediately following the interlude; at the end of that,
Spinoza concludes:

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 The “Physical” Interlude 119
We see, therefore, how it can happen (as it often does) that we regard as
present things that do not exist. This can happen from other causes also, but
it is sufficient for me here to have shown one through which I can explain it
as if I had shown it through its true cause; still, I do not believe that I wander
far from the true [cause] since all those postulates which I have assumed
contain hardly anything that is not established by experience which we
cannot doubt, after we have shown that the human Body exists as we are
aware of it. (See p13c.) (E2p17s)
This is a complicated passage, but it strongly suggests that Spinoza does not
regard the postulates as certain (for a more extended defense of this claim,
see Meshelski, “Definition”). These postulates are used, as a group, more
frequently than the axioms and lemmas are in the rest of the Ethics, which
raises an interesting question: given how reliant Spinoza’s theories of the
affects and of perception are on these postulates, what do we make of the
“geometrical order” of the last three parts of the Ethics?

5 Conclusion
I have tried to motivate the claim that the interlude has been somewhat
over-read as a “physics” and under-read as a guide to understanding
Spinoza’s picture of the relationship between the mind and the body – in
particular, of Spinoza’s account of how the mind represents bodies through
sense perception. It does not inform us about the nature of extension or
motion, and its use of those terms offers little illumination. The real
argumentative and conceptual work of the interlude is attribute-neutral.
Why is this? A natural answer is that Spinoza wanted to leverage E2p7 to
use these causal laws of bodies to develop isomorphic laws of minds. But
Spinoza never does this, except in E2p15, where he uses E2p7 and the
interlude to prove that the mind has parts like the body does. We must
know about the body to learn about the mind because the mind perceives
the ideas of the affections of the body, so we need to know about the nature
of those affections. But those affections are specifically physical. So the
reason for the lack of specificity, I believe, is just what Spinoza says to
Tschirnhaus in his last letter to him: he never had the chance to put his
thoughts in order on this topic. As a result, the principles developed in the
interlude are maximally general and consistent, in Spinoza’s mind, with
a number of more specific physics (see also Lachterman, “Physics”).
Given this place of the interlude in the Ethics, it is not surprising that
tracing the proofs of the axioms, lemmas, and postulates and their use
shows that the interlude is not a kind of digression, as it is often treated.

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 120 a li s o n p e te r m a n
It is about as integrated with the rest of the Ethics as any set of a dozen
propositions – the lemmas are used as frequently outside the interlude as in
it, and they are proven using previous propositions. They do not seem to
have an especially tight relationship with one another more than with the
other propositions of the Ethics. That is because Spinoza is building them
with an eye toward a variety of concerns about human perceptual and
affective life, and not toward building any kind of an informative or
coherent physics. As a result, we get a retrofitted physics that will do the
job of supporting those points about the mind that Spinoza wishes to
make, as he puts it, “as if [he] had shown it through its true cause.”

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