elf-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. 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
subordination. All these tendencies of themselves seek their own
objects--seek them blindly and immoderately; and the mistakes and the
unhappinesses of life arise from the want of due understanding of these
objects, and a just moderation 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. 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 does not mean what is exhaustive
and complete, but what, as far as it goes, is distinct and unconfused:
by inadequate, he means what we know merely as fact either derived from
our own sensations, or from the authority of others, while of the
connexion of it with other facts, of the causes, effects, or meaning of
it 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 comin