 Spinoza’s ground-floor commitment to substance monism (i.e., to the metaphysical possibility of only one “substance”, or existentially and explanatorily independent thing) leaves him with the problem of how to understand the ontological status of finite thought. If only one substance exists, what are we to make of human minds? These cannot be thinking substances as they are, say, for Descartes or Leibniz. Short of condemning all finite thinking as illusory, Spinoza seems to have only one option left: to identify certain instances of God’s own thoughts with finite thinking. And this is exactly what Spinoza does: he proposes that we regard all finite ideas, and all the finite “minds” these ideas compose (see 2.1.1), as “parts” of the divine “infinite intellect”: