whereas it merely insists in exact conformity with
experience on the conditions under which self-determination
is possible. Conduct, according to the necessitarian,
depends on knowledge. Let a man certainly know
that there is poison in the cup of wine before him,
and he will not drink it. By the law of cause
and effect, his desire for the wine is overcome by
the fear of the pain or the death which will follow;
and so with everything which comes before him.
Let the consequences of any action be clear, definite,
and inevitable, and though Spinoza would not say that
the knowledge of them will be absolutely sufficient
to determine the conduct (because the clearest knowledge
may be overborne by violent passion), yet it is the
best which we have to trust to, and will do much if
it cannot do all. On this hypothesis, after a
diagnosis of the various tendencies of human nature,
called commonly the passions and affections, he returns
upon the nature of our ordinary knowledge to derive
out of it the means for their control: all these
tendencies of themselves seek their own objects—seek
them blindly and immoderately; and all the mistakes,
and all the unhappinesses of life, arise from the
want of due understanding of these objects, and a
just subordination of the desire for them. His
analysis is remarkably clear; but it is too long for
us to enter upon it; the important thing being the
character of the control which is to be exerted.
And to arrive at this, he employs a distinction of
great practical utility, and which is peculiarly his
own. Following his tripartite division of knowledge,
he finds all kinds of it arrange themselves under
one of two classes, and to be either adequate or inadequate.
By adequate knowledge he means not necessarily what
is exhaustive and complete, but what, as far as it
goes, is distinct and unconfused: by inadequate,
what we know merely as fact either derived from our
own sensations, or from the authority of others; but
of the connexion of which with other facts, of the
causes, effects, or meaning of which we know nothing.
We may have an adequate idea of a circle, though we
are unacquainted with all the properties which belong
to it; we conceive it distinctly as a figure generated
by the rotation of a line, one end of which is stationary.
Phenomena, on the other hand, however made known to
us—phenomena of the senses, and phenomena
of experience, as long as they remain phenomena merely,
and unseen in any higher relation—we can
never know except as inadequately. We cannot
tell what outward things are, by coming in contact
with certain features of them. We have a very
imperfect acquaintance even with our own bodies, and
the sensations which we experience of various kinds
rather indicate to us the nature of these bodies themselves
than of the objects which affect them. Now it
is obvious that the greater part of mankind act only
upon knowledge of this latter kind. The amusements,
even the active pursuits of most of us, remain wholly