 For Spinoza, there is only one substance, the existence of which is demonstrated by a version of the ontological argument, that is thought of as being both God and Nature. It is an unending controversy whether Spinoza was a pantheist, or an atheist who called nature ‘God’ because it was the one true substance and existed necessarily. Everything else is a mode of this one substance. The view is analogous to a claim that the universe is space-time as a whole, with matter as distortions in it. If this were true, material objects would be modes of space-time. The analogy would be more exact if one also thought of the laws of nature as equivalent to the divine intellect immanent in nature. Spinoza’s view represents the extreme end of stressing the status of substance as the fundamental existent conceived of as wholly necessary and self-subsistent: that is, criteria (i) and (ii) in the original list come to take on maximum weight. Nothing but the universe as a whole meets this criterion fully.