 Nonetheless, the claim that for Spinoza to conceive of x, one must conceive of its causes, faces at least two problems. First, it’s not clear how to reconcile this position with Spinoza’s account of the human mind. As we saw (2.2), cognition of the essence of human minds requires reference to actually existing bodies; yet, given Spinoza’s commitment to the attribute barrier (1.2), bodies cannot stand in a causal relation to anything mental. So either Spinoza’s account of the human mind is invalid by his own lights or (more likely) Spinoza allows for cognitions that do not depend on a thing’s causes. Second, since each finite thing depends on an “infinite” series of prior finite causes (E1p28), if cognition of a thing (or at least adequate cognition of it) requires a grasp of all its causes, this would put an implausible, “stratospherically high” (Bennett 1984) requirement on cognition. Indeed it would put such cognition outside the reach of minds like ours, since, as Spinoza admits, we simply cannot know the entire infinite series of finite things responsible for any given state of affairs in nature (TIE §100). Here Wilson’s insight about how Spinoza uses “involvement” is helpful: we can have adequate causal cognition of particular things, as long as we look to God (the first and universal cause of all things) and not to the infinite series of prior finite things as the relevant cause, and as long as we attempt to explain the essence of the particular, not its durational states. Spinoza’s doctrine of “common notions” (see 3.2.3) guarantees that we have adequate ideas of God under the attributes of extension and thought. And to know God as the cause of the essence of a particular thing is just to have what Spinoza calls “intuitive cognition” (see 3.2.5.)