More forcefully than any other philosopher, Spinoza affirms the rupture, now understood to be mental, that separates us from childhood. Starting with the annotations to the Short Treatise, and then in the scholium to IV, 39 of the Ethics, it seems that, if the mind is the idea of the body, there can be no transformation of the body without a transformation of the mind, which manifests as amnesia. Consequently, if the doctrine is to be coherent, the psychology of memory, such as it is laid out in the De natura corporum of Part II of the Ethics, must allow for at least certain hypotheses concern-ing the nature of this amnesia, especially when it comes to the question of whether it is total (effacement of memorial traces) or subjective (the images remain, but it is as if they were not experienced). But at the same time, Spinoza seems to indicate a different direction: namely, that amnesia must be also thought in the absence of transformation, if at least it is legitimate to apply it to childhood.

And everything invites us to go in this direction: it would take some bad faith to refuse the rapprochement of the two scholia to propositions 39. That of Part IV underscores the abyss that separates infancy from the age of adulthood; that of Part V invokes the change of the body of childhood into another, more capable body. It is remarkable, in the first, that from this abyss there follows for any ‘human of advanced years’ a sort of fluctuatio imaginationis between two beliefs: a belief in a difference in nature between the infant and oneself, which implies a transformation, and a belief in one's having been an infant at some point. Spinoza does not explicitly articulate the thesis of amnesia, but the latter is the link that justifies the passage from the anecdote of the metamorphosised human being to the question of the relation that we maintain with our own childhood. Furthermore, the relation in question falls under the ‘vague experience’ defined in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect: an analogical inference drawn from the observation of those resembling me. I know that I was at one point an infant, like I know that I will one day die: the conviction is of the same order in both cases, foreign to memory.