it; and however extravagant it may be thought in me to do so, I propose to analyse the properties of that nature as if it were a mathematical figure.”  Mind, being, as we have seen, nothing else than the idea corresponding to this or that affection of body; we are not, therefore, to think of it as a faculty, but simply and merely as an act.  There is no general power called intellect, any more than there is any general abstract volition, but only hic et ille intellectus et haec et illa volitio, and again, by the word Mind, is understood not merely acts of will or intellect, but all forms also of consciousness of sensation or emotion.  The human body being composed of many small bodies, the mind is similarly composed of many minds, and the unity of body and of mind depends on the relation which the component portions maintain towards each other.  This is obviously the case with body, and if we can translate metaphysics into common experience, it is equally the case with mind.  There are pleasures of sense and pleasures of intellect; a thousand tastes, tendencies, and inclinations form our mental composition; and evidently since one contradicts another, and each has a tendency to become dominant, it is only in the harmonious equipoise of their several activities, in their due and just subordination, that any unity of action or consistency of feeling is possible.  After a masterly analysis of all these tendencies (the most complete by far which has ever been made by any moral philosopher), Spinoza arrives at the principles under which such unity and consistency can be obtained as the condition upon which a being so composed can look for any sort of happiness.  And these principles, arrived at as they are by a route so different, are the same, and are proposed by Spinoza as being the same, as those of the Christian Religion.

It might seem impossible in a system which binds together in so inexorable a sequence the relations of cause and effect, to make a place for the action of human self-control; but consideration will show, that however vast the difference between those who deny and those who affirm the liberty of the will (in the sense in which the expression is usually understood), it is not a difference which affects the conduct or alters the practical bearings of it.  It is quite possible that conduct may be determined by laws; laws as absolute as those of matter; and yet that the one as well as the other may be brought under control by a proper understanding of those laws.  Now, experience seems plainly to say, that while all our actions arise out of desire—­that whatever we do, we do for the sake of something which we wish to be or to obtain—­we are differently affected towards what is proposed to us as an object of desire, in proportion as we understand the nature of such object in itself and in its consequences.  The better we know the better we act, and the fallacy of all common arguments against necessitarianism lies in the assumption that it leaves no room for self-direction;