lations 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; 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 i