 Given the importance of the concept of consciousness to contemporary philosophy of mind, it is perhaps unsurprising that Spinoza’s readers have tried to extract a full-blown theory of consciousness also from the rare appearances of terms such as conscius and conscientia in his writings. Such efforts are also unsurprising given Spinoza’s historical placement between Descartes (often taken to define thought in terms of consciousness) and Leibniz (who distinguishes thinking as a perfectly general property from consciousness as a property of higher minds alone) (cf. LeBuffe 2010). Interpreters return again and again to certain questions: did Spinoza even have a theory of consciousness in a recognizable sense? If he did, was it an internally consistent and adequately defended theory? Was it meant to distinguish conscious and unconscious ideas (and so also conscious and unconscious minds [see 2.1.1])? Did Spinoza posit universal (but perhaps scalar or graded) consciousness, just as he posited universal (but scalar or graded) mindedness (see 2.1.3)?