 Second, that my mind has some actually existing body for its essential intentional object also doesn’t mean that I know this body adequately. Far from it: “we have only completely confused cognition of our body” (E2p13s; cf. E2p27). There are several reasons Spinoza is led to this pessimistic verdict. For one, as we saw, the human mind is essentially an idea of some existing body and of “nothing else” (E2p13). In particular, the human is not essentially an idea of the many causes responsible for that body’s composition and continued functioning. But, on Spinoza’s conception of knowledge, understanding these causes would be necessary for a complete knowledge of that body (E1ax4; cf. Donagan 1988: 129).