nsciousness 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 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 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 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. Conduct may be determined by laws--laws as
absolute as those of matter; and yet 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: it merely insists, in exact conformity with
experience, on the conditions under which s