Human nature is a concept of metaphysical and ethical significance for Spinoza. Spinoza is, on the one hand, committed to a metaphysical gradualism according to which the general composition of individual humans, as he presents it in the Ethics, that is, as a body and its mind, does “not pertain more to man than to other individuals, all of which, though in different degrees, are nevertheless animate” (E2p13s). But he ascribes, on the other hand, a specific common nature to humans and to things of the same kind in general: “Nothing can agree more with the nature of anything than other individuals of the same species” (E4app, ii/268; see also E4p35c1–c2). But what this human nature is, so Spinoza, is not adequately understood by most people, since they form their conception of “man” by an erroneous process of abstraction and based on an excess of images, which they are incapable to differentiate sufficiently and therefore haphazardly group together under general terms. This process is unreliable because it yields different results depending on individual experience, such that