 There are, then, reasons to doubt that granting Spinoza's “rest and motion” a non-ordinary signification—energy, an unspecified basic quality, force of motion and resistance, intensifications of power — can in fact give us insight into the constitution or appearance of persisting, resistant, active bodies. But it is worth asking whether these doubts in fact rest on an inappropriate imaginative basis. It seems difficult imaginatively to represent variegated fields of energy, force, or any other quality in such a way as to make clear how bodies, with the persistent resistance and capacities for interaction we ordinarily represent them to have, could possible appear from or be constituted by them. But this sort of failure of imaginative thinking cannot count against the acceptability of a theory from a proper Spinozistic perspective. On his view, our knowledge of body as an object of imagination is inherently inadequate. Our imaginative ideas of bodies in their corporeality are limited to the ideas of modifications of our own bodies. These in turn reflect only in a confused and partial way the natures of both the bodies with which we are affected and our own. At no time is the full nature of any body reflected in any of the ideas we have through these affections, hence through anything we can imagine. Hence our imaginations cannot grasp the nature of body, and failure of the faculty of imagination to provide insight into the link between the fundamental basis for variety in matter and that variety itself is to be expected. All of this is clear from IIp16–31. Any appearance of insight into the nature of body gleaned from the imagination is as likely to be illusion as illumination.  And, as Schliesser (2017) remarks in emphasizing Spinoza's skepticism about knowledge of the natural world, for Spinoza, “when we locate things at a time and place, we are always in the realm of the imagination” (p. 175).