 Confronted with Spinoza’s account of mental adequacy, we might wonder how his two characterizations of this concept are supposed to hang together: why should an idea entirely contained in a mind also have certain intrinsic markings of truth, such as clarity and distinctness? One way to reconcile these two claims is to infer that for Spinoza only ideas whose “premises”, so to speak, are wholly contained in a given mind can also appear as manifestly or self-evidently true. (One might also wonder if finite minds like ours can ever manage to think anything truly “adequately”, if this requires that all of the “premises” of a given idea be contained in our minds [cf. Della Rocca 1996]. We come back to this question in 3.2.1.)