The longevity of the Cartesian model of knowing confirms the strength of Spinoza’s own analysis of ways in which the fixity of mental pictures can obstruct the clarity of understanding. Often, the doggedness of human imagining is a harmless and unavoidable residue from the past. Yet it can also obstruct the assimilation and dissemination of new ways of thinking. In the context of climate change, it may serve to inhibit constructive thinking and practical response.

On the Spinozist model of human presence in Nature, thought is itself immersed in the wholeness of the natural world. Human minds glimpse that wholeness of Nature from within, in confused imaginings that are then refined by reason. Yet that notion of a wholeness of Nature itself rests on changeable, contingent ways of imagining, which themselves have a history. Spinoza’s articulations of wholeness date from a period before the development of sciences which can now give that idea clearer content.

Increased awareness of the basic tenets of climate science has brought a deeper sense of the wholeness of the planet and of its climate system. That wholeness now seems such an obvious truth that it can go unremarked that the very idea of the earth as an interconnected whole – and of its climate system as globally interconnected – are significant developments in intellectual history. Sarah Dry, in her study of the history of climate science, Waters of the World, tracks those developments through convergences of different subject areas and methods of inquiry.