The appearance of the ambivalent theme of the infans adultus at the two extremes of the ethical progression, namely the first and third kinds of knowledge, carries the investigation into the status of such a change, in the very last pages of the Ethics, to its highest degree. Everything happens, as we will see, as if the question of the continuity of essence, in the process of growth, could not be resolved: the book concludes without seeming to elucidate either the relation of the wise to the ignorant, or the relation of the wise to other human beings, and not even that of the wise to the ‘former self’ that they had been. Thus we must first of all concern ourselves with the delicate status of ethical change. The Preface to Part IV of the Ethics having reiterated that perfection is a transition, not a transformation, Spinoza multiplies the indications in favour of its being a rupture: the image of growth, treated as a quasi-transformation; the gap between the wise and the ignorant, compared to that of a specific difference; finally and above all, the incompatibility of the instituta vitae formulated so dramatically at the beginning of the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. We will say that the ethical progression has all the traits of a transformation but without being one.