om. Wealth and poverty, fame and
obscurity, power and subordination, strength and weakness, health and
disease, culture and ignorance, work and leisure, repletion and hunger,
virtue and vice, are only greater or lesser degrees of freedom.

A man having no freedom cannot be conceived of except as deprived of
life.

If the conception of freedom appears to reason to be a senseless
contradiction like the possibility of performing two actions at one and
the same instant of time, or of an effect without a cause, that only
proves that consciousness is not subject to reason.

This unshakable, irrefutable consciousness of freedom, uncontrolled by
experiment or argument, recognized by all thinkers and felt by everyone
without exception, this consciousness without which no conception of man
is possible constitutes the other side of the question.

Man is the creation of an all-powerful, all-good, and all-seeing God.
What is sin, the conception of which arises from the consciousness of
man's freedom? That is a question for theology.

The actions of men are subject to general immutable laws expressed in
statistics. What is man's responsibility to society, the conception of
which results from the conception of freedom? That is a question for
jurisprudence.

Man's actions proceed from his innate character and the motives acting
upon him. What is conscience and the perception of right and wrong
in actions that follows from the consciousness of freedom? That is a
question for ethics.

Man in connection with the general life of humanity appears subject
to laws which determine that life. But the same man apart from that
connection appears to be free. How should the past life of nations and
of humanity be regarded--as the result of the free, or as the result of
the constrained, activity of man? That is a question for history.

Only in our self-confident day of the popularization of
knowledge--thanks to that most powerful engine of ignorance, the
diffusion of printed matter--has the question of the freedom of will
been put on a level on which the question itself cannot exist. In our
time the majority of so-called advanced people--that is, the crowd of
ignoramuses--have taken the work of the naturalists who deal with one
side of the question for a solution of the whole problem.

They say and write and print that the soul and freedom do not exist,
for the life of man is expressed by muscular movements and muscular
movements are cond