 Of course, this interpretation of consciousness is of no use to someone looking to Spinoza for a theory of selective consciousness, on which consciousness distinguishes some mental states from others. This is because in Spinoza’s framework there is no idea of which there is no higher order idea. This follows, first, from divine omniscience (an all-knowing God has ideas of all things, including all ideas) and, second, from Spinoza’s understanding of ideas of ideas as ways of regarding the first-order ideas, not numerically distinct from them. More precisely, for Spinoza, an idea of idea A is just A considered only as an act of thinking (leaving aside its representational content) – or, to use his Scholastic terminology, it is the original idea considered in its “formal reality” alone: it is “the form of the idea…considered as a mode of thinking without relation to the object” (E2p21s).