 This is the first, more intuitive sense in which human minds can be said to “actually exist”, the sense in which your mind exists now when processing these words. But however much we may be attached to our temporal selves and all that they feel, for Spinoza there is another sense of “actual existence”. In that second sense, a human mind is still essentially an “actually existing” idea of a certain “actually existing” bit of extension. But the relevant bit of extension is not the living human body, but its eternal essence – a certain eternally possible way that divine extension can modify itself to take on a certain ratio of motion and rest (cf. E2def[8]; G/II/100), i.e., a certain determinate functional pattern of physical activity. In its omniscience, the divine substance eternally understands itself as being capable of being modified in such more determinate ways – that is, of manifesting its own physical being as this or that snail or sunflower or human infant. Ideas of these eternal bodily essences are eternal “parts” of substance’s infinite intellect (E2p8). That is, for each bodily essence there is a divine idea that “expresses the essence of the body under a species of eternity” (E5p23s), as an eternal part of the infinite intellect.