 One ground for reading teleology out of the conatus principle and for regarding both teleology and that principle as fundamentally irrelevant to Spinoza's physical theory is that the latter's first explicit appearance in part III of the Ethics comes long after Spinoza presents his accounts of extended nature and the basic mechanics of modes thereof, indeed in a way that makes it very hard to see how any teleology could be involved at all. Ip28 denies that any singular thing can be determined to exist or to produce an effect unless it has been so determined by a prior finite cause, ad infinitum. The use made of Ip28 in IIp9 suggests that Spinoza intends Ip28 to articulate not just a necessary condition on modal existence and determination, but the exclusive means by which finite modes are brought to existence and determined to have any particular effects. This seems to allow no room for action of bodies in their own right, no residual space for any contribution to the motions of bodies of the active striving of the moving bodies themselves. Moreover, Spinoza expressly denies that nature is a teleological system, and claims that final causal/teleological explanations “turns nature completely upside down. For what is really a cause it considers as an effect, and conversely, what is an effect it considers as a cause” (Appendix, I).