could never examine them to see
whether they were right or not. Thus it is not any highly aspiring
emotional desire or any premature prejudice, but the solid old science of
logic that first and most determinedly shuts the door in face of the
claims of naturalism. If we combine this with what has already been said
on page 154, we shall see how dangerous it would be for naturalism to be
proved right in the dispute; for then it would be wholly wrong.

For, as it is only through the free, thinking mind that true and false can
be distinguished and brought into relation with things, so only through it
can we have an ideal of truth to be recognised and striven after, and that
spontaneous, pertinacious, searching, following, and discovering which
constitutes science as a whole and in detail. And in so far as naturalism
itself claims to be nothing more than an attempt towards this goal, it is
itself only possible on the basis of something which it denies.

Freedom of thought is also the most obvious example of that freedom of the
spirit in morally "willing," which it is the business of ethical science
to teach and defend. As in the one case thought shows itself superior to
the physiologically or psychologically conditioned sequence of its
concepts, so the free spirit, in the uniqueness of its moral laws, reveals
itself as lord over all the motives, the lower feelings of pleasure and
pain that have their play within us. As in the one case it is free to
measure according to the criteria of true or false, and thus is able to
intervene in the sequence of its own conceptions, correcting and
confirming, so in the other it is able to estimate by the criteria of good
or bad. As in the one case it carries within it its own fundamental laws
as logic, so in the other the moral ideals and fundamental judgments which
arise out of its own being. And in both cases it is free from nature and
natural law, and capable of subordinating nature to its own rules, in so
far as it "wills," and of becoming subordinate to nature--in erroneous
thinking and non-moral acting--in so far as it does not will.

Feeling, Individuality, Genius, and Mysticism.

The four things here mentioned are very closely associated with one
another, especially the second and third, as is easily perceived, but the
second is rooted in the first. And in the second and third there is
already to be discovered a factor which goes beyond the sphere of the
purely rational,