l otherwise than as a limitation of
it. Were it not free it could not be limited. A man's will seems to him
to be limited just because he is not conscious of it except as free.

You say: I am not free. But I have lifted my hand and let it fall.
Everyone understands that this illogical reply is an irrefutable
demonstration of freedom.

That reply is the expression of a consciousness that is not subject to
reason.

If the consciousness of freedom were not a separate and independent
source of self-consciousness it would be subject to reasoning and
to experience, but in fact such subjection does not exist and is
inconceivable.

A series of experiments and arguments proves to every man that he, as
an object of observation, is subject to certain laws, and man submits to
them and never resists the laws of gravity or impermeability once he
has become acquainted with them. But the same series of experiments
and arguments proves to him that the complete freedom of which he is
conscious in himself is impossible, and that his every action depends
on his organization, his character, and the motives acting upon him; yet
man never submits to the deductions of these experiments and arguments.
Having learned from experiment and argument that a stone falls
downwards, a man indubitably believes this and always expects the law
that he has learned to be fulfilled.

But learning just as certainly that his will is subject to laws, he does
not and cannot believe this.

However often experiment and reasoning may show a man that under the
same conditions and with the same character he will do the same thing as
before, yet when under the same conditions and with the same character
he approaches for the thousandth time the action that always ends in the
same way, he feels as certainly convinced as before the experiment
that he can act as he pleases. Every man, savage or sage, however
incontestably reason and experiment may prove to him that it is
impossible to imagine two different courses of action in precisely the
same conditions, feels that without this irrational conception (which
constitutes the essence of freedom) he cannot imagine life. He feels
that however impossible it may be, it is so, for without this conception
of freedom not only would he be unable to understand life, but he would
be unable to live for a single moment.

He could not live, because all man's efforts, all his impulses to life,
are only efforts to increase freed