 What sort of “confusion” does Spinoza have in mind in E2p41d? Recall that imaginative cognition consists in ideas of affections of, or changes in, our own bodies that also present us, indirectly, with the external causes of these changes. (As Spinoza puts it, all our ideas of our own, externally-caused bodily affections “involve” the nature of the external cause [E2p16].) So the “confusion” inherent to imaginative cognition seems to do, first, with the fact that imaginative ideas have a content that is an amalgam of two distinct things: the current condition of some part of my body and the properties of the external cause (E2p16, E2p25; cf. Della Rocca 1996). For example, when I’m warmed by the sun, the nature of that bodily change depends on the nature of the sun together with the nature and current state of my own body. My perception of the bodily affection – of the increased warmth – tells me something about my own body and something about the sun; I have some insight into the relative properties of both things. But it doesn’t tell me about the intrinsic or fundamental nature either of my own body or the sun. It also doesn’t allow me to clearly separate out the relative contributions of the external cause and of my own body. (Indeed, Spinoza goes so far as to propose that that such ideas “indicate the condition of our own body more than the nature of the external bodies” [E2p16c2; emphasis added].)