KNOWLEDGE error one should suspend judgement whenever the intellect fails to present a clear and distinct idea Spinoza’s response is to say that error is not anything positive Error— which occurs only at the Wrst level of knowledge—consists not in the presence of any idea, but in the absence of some other idea which should be present: Thus, when we look at the sun, and imagine that it is about two hundred feet away from us, this imagination by itself does not amount to an error; our error is rather the fact that while we thus imagine we not know either the true distance of the sun or the cause of our fancy (Ibid.) As for suspension of judgement, that is possible indeed, but not by any free act of will When we say that someone suspends judgement, we merely mean that she sees that she does not have an adequate perception of the matter in question Even in dreams we suspend our judgement, when we dream that we dream (Eth, 66) The Epistemology of Leibniz Spinoza’s epistemology consists of a series of attempts to reconcile what we naturally say and think about knowledge and experience with his metaphysical thesis that ideas in the mind and motions in the body are just two aspects of individual items in the life of the single substance which is God and nature Leibniz’s epistemology is likewise an attempt to match ordinary speech and thought to a metaphysical system—but to one diametrically opposite to Spinoza’s, in which ideas and motions, so far from being substantially identical with each other, have no interaction at all and belong to two diVerent and wholly independent series of events, linked only by the harmony pre-established in the mind of God Given Leibniz’s oYcial theory of monads, it is hard to see how he could have, in the normal sense, any epistemology at all How, for instance, could he give any account of sense-perception, since there are no transactions between the mind and the external world? How could he take an interest in the debate about which of our ideas are innate and which are acquired, since for him every single idea is an internal product of the mind alone? Yet in fact one of the most substantial of Leibniz’s works is a work of 142