 To understand why Spinoza might be attracted to mode necessitarianism, we need to consider a few additional details of his ontology of modes. I have been lumping modes together into a single ontological category: everything that is not a substance. But Spinoza sometimes distinguishes between two types of modes, infinite modes and finite modes. Unfortunately, Spinoza gives only a very sparse account of infinite modes in the Ethics, and he makes very few explicit textual references to them outside the  Ethics.[8]  When Georg Schuller wrote to Spinoza to ask him for examples of these curious entities, Spinoza replied with obscure gems like “the face of the whole universe” and “absolutely infinite intellect” (Ep64). If the best elucidation of an elaborate philosophical doctrine makes reference to “the face of the whole universe,” that may be a good sign that the doctrine needs further development. Unfortunately for Spinoza’s readers, infinite modes appear to do some significant work in his metaphysics, so they cannot simply be ignored if one wants to understand Spinoza’s modal commitments.