 Spinoza characterizes experiential vaga as experience that is “without order for the intellect” and as “experience that is not determined by the intellect” (Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, ¶19). This experience is called “random” because “it comes to us by chance, and since ”we have no other experiment to oppose it“; perception attained in this mode it ”remains with us unshaken“. Perception from random experience can, then, be shaken by opposing experiment, but there is nothing here that suggests this is a matter of less random experience overruling more, rather than multiple random experiences conflicting with one another. Moreover, Spinoza really never tells us what it would be for experience to be ”ordered for“ or ”determined by“ the intellect. It is tempting to suppose that he meant, following Bacon, from whom the term ”experientia vaga“ is borrowed, that experience is not vague insofar as it ”proceeds by fixed law, without interruption and in regular order“. (Bacon, Novum Organon, Book I, Aphorism 100). But it is unclear, given Spinoza's general denigration of sense experience as generating only inadequate ideas of things, how the intellect could order the collection of sense experience by law, and it is equally unclear how the result of doing so would shore up the inadequacy of the resulting  observations.[15]  Bennett, who resists the standard view that Spinoza thought experience irrelevant to knowledge, and cites the possibility of experientia non-vaga, i.e., experience as directed by the intellect, as evidence for this, concedes that Spinoza is entirely silent about experientia non-vaga, offering no account of what it might be, other than ”the experience of someone who puts to nature questions dictated to him by Spinoza's philosophy“ (Bennett 1984, p. 24). Bennett's suggestion that a characterization of this might have to wait until we learn more about how the senses function seems a non-starter, though. For if we conceive the senses as objects of empirical, experimental study, then we cannot learn about them until we know how to order our experience, so the question is begged; and if we conceive of them as objects for non-experiential, non-experimental philosophical reflection, then what more by way of the Spinozistic carrying out of this sort of work is there to be done than Spinoza does in the  Ethics?[16]