quite superfluous. The world, in that case,
would be very clumsily contrived--would proceed to its goal with waste
of power and by circuitous paths. Rather, mighty World-Spirit, hadst
thou taken from us this freedom, which, only with difficulty and by a
different arrangement, thou canst fit to thy plans, and compelled us
at once to act as those plans required! Thou wouldst then arrive at
thy goal by the shortest road, as the meanest of the inhabitants of
thy worlds can tell thee.

But I am free, and therefore such a concatenation of cause and effect,
in which freedom is absolutely superfluous and useless, cannot exhaust
my whole destination. I must be free; for not the mechanical act, but
the free determination of free-will, for the sake of the command
alone and absolutely for no other purpose (so says the inward voice of
conscience)--this alone determines our true worth. The band with which
the law binds me is a band for living spirits. It scorns to rule
over dead mechanism, and applies itself alone to the living and
self-acting. Such obedience it demands. This obedience cannot be
superfluous.

And, herewith, the eternal world rises more brightly before me, and
the fundamental law of its order stands clear before the eye of my
mind. In that world the _will_, purely and only, as it lies, locked up
from all eyes, in the secret dark of my soul, is the first link in a
chain of consequences which runs through the whole invisible world
of spirits; so in the earthly world the _deed_, a certain movement
of matter, becomes the first link in a material chain which extends
through the whole system of matter. The will is the working and living
principle in the world of Reason, as motion is the working and living
principle in the world of the senses. I stand in the centre of two
opposite worlds, a visible in which the deed, and an invisible,
altogether incomprehensible, in which the will, decides. I am one
of the original forces for both these worlds. My will is that which
embraces both. This will is in and of itself a constituent portion of
the supersensuous world. When I put it in motion by a resolution, I
move and change something in that world, and my activity flows on over
the whole and produces something new and ever-during which then exists
and needs not to be made anew. This will breaks forth into a material
act, and this act belongs to the world of the senses, and effects, in
that, what it can.

I have not to wait unt