Spinoza’s answer involves this fundamental point. There are some machines that exist for a purpose. We may, if we choose, regard it as _the nature_ of such a machine to accomplish this purpose. In proportion as it accomplishes it we call it good; in proportion as it fails we call it bad. Thus a clock is mechanical enough, a matter of cogwheels and springs, but that is not _the nature_ of a clock, for we can recognize such an implement without knowing anything about these same cogwheels and springs, if only we know that the thing keeps time. As it keeps accurate time we call it a good clock, and as it loses or gains we call it a bad one. It is true that we do not exactly blame the clock if it goes wrong; we rather blame the clock-maker. But there is no reason why we should cease to blame the clock-maker, were we to convince ourselves that he too was a mechanism, and owed his lack of skill to the physical constitution of hands and brain. In a word, a mechanism whose nature is to perform a certain function may nevertheless be a good or a bad mechanism for the purpose, and is praiseworthy or blameworthy in so far as it performs its function well or ill. It is only then a mechanism that reveals in its behavior the pursuit of a purpose that may be regarded as good or bad. So too it is only such a mechanism that may be regarded as more or less free, more or less bound. This notion of freedom and bondage that Spinoza here introduces, turns on a distinction which all of us make without realizing the difficulty of defining what we mean by it. It is the distinction between a being and its environment. With respect to each thing Spinoza divides nature into two parts: one part he calls the inner nature of the thing; the other, nature external to it. Now in one use of the term “nature” this distinction seems to be an impossible one; for in so far as I regard a man’s body as composed of atoms obeying the laws of mechanics, everything that takes place among these atoms is the resultant of the relation of these atoms to all others in the universe. “It is impossible,” Spinoza himself sees it--“it is impossible for a man not to be a part of nature and not to follow its general order.”