 It helps to be precise about the nature of Spinoza’s criticisms of general and abstract ideas: falling short of an epistemic ideal is not the same as utter inadequacy. Likewise, mind-dependence is not the same as illusion or error. (Neither Leibniz nor Kant, for example, would want to say that the idea or form of space is an error or an illusion.) Finally, Spinoza’s most extensive criticism of general ideas, in E2p40s2, is not a criticism of general ideas simpliciter, but only of most general ideas derived from sense experience (cf. Bennett 1984). In Spinoza’s view, as finite and embodied beings whose minds are essentially ideas of what happens to our bodies (2.2.1), we can’t avoid thinking in general terms. When our bodies interact with other bodies – when we smell roses, or stub our toes – these encounters leave impressions (“images”) on our bodies; the finitude of our bodies allows them to retain only a limited number of distinct “images” since over time they get overlaid and confused. The ideas we form by thinking the resulting composite “images”, and then predicate of indefinitely many other entities – ideas such as horse, animal, or being – represent distinctly only what the bodies we happen to come across have in common insofar as they can affect a human body. General ideas formed in this way are just as “confused”, inadequate and idiosyncratic, as any other imaginative idea (see 3.2.2). So, contrary to what the Aristotelians held, sense experience doesn’t suffice for true ideas of the essences of things. (Rather it gives rise to unending philosophical controversies, as each one of us fashions general types according to what we have experienced.)