 Spinoza’s doctrine of the eternity of the mind, one of last subjects of the Ethics, has occasioned some of the most impatient and uncharitable comments on the part of his readers (most famously perhaps, Bennett 1984 describes it as “rubbish” leading others to write rubbish). The cause for this impatience is Spinoza’s declaration that in Part 5 he will discuss “the mind’s duration without relation to the body” (E5p20s), a declaration some see as a blatant violation of his commitment to mind-body identity in Part 2 (E2p7s). But of course an identity of one thing with another doesn’t rule out the possibility of discussing one but not the other, a procedure in which Spinoza engages again and again (for example, in introducing the possibility of ideas of ideas [see 2.3]). Spinoza is moreover quite explicit that there is no eternity of human minds without a corresponding eternity of bodies, and, far from contradicting any commitments about mind-body relations made in Part 2, the doctrine of the eternity of the mind in Part 5 arguably brings to light the full meaning of those earlier commitments.