Abstract
Spinoza said that the only extended substance is the whole extended world and that finite bodies are not substances, i.e. are not worthy of a thing-like status in a fundamental metaphysics. He had reasons for this doctrine, though they do not occur in his official ‘demonstration’ that there is only one substance (Ethics 1, proposition 14). One reason was the view that an ultimately thing-like status cannot be accorded to something that is divisible. That was certainly Leibniz’s view, and there are textual grounds for attributing it to Spinoza also, though the evidence for that is somewhat diffuse. But there is also an argument that occurs in a localized manner, in a passage I shall quote below; and my purpose in this paper is to expound it