 First, a terminological warning: what Spinoza calls “imagination” shouldn’t be confused with what we are likely to mean by that term today. By imaginatio Spinoza understands sense experience (including cognition from signs and testimony) and derivative mental processes (including memory and the sort of manipulation of mental imagery we indeed might call “imagination”). Spinozistic imaginatio is distinct in virtue of both its content and its causes. First, it is cognition of external bodies as present; secondly, it is cognition acquired through ideas of affections, i.e., changes, of our own body, caused by other bodies: