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