at
moment I could make only one movement, and whatever movement I made
would be the only one. That I did not lift my arm a moment later does
not prove that I could have abstained from lifting it then. And since I
could make only one movement at that single moment of time, it could not
have been any other. To imagine it as free, it is necessary to imagine
it in the present, on the boundary between the past and the future--that
is, outside time, which is impossible.

(3) However much the difficulty of understanding the causes may be
increased, we never reach a conception of complete freedom, that is,
an absence of cause. However inaccessible to us may be the cause of the
expression of will in any action, our own or another's, the first demand
of reason is the assumption of and search for a cause, for without a
cause no phenomenon is conceivable. I raise my arm to perform an action
independently of any cause, but my wish to perform an action without a
cause is the cause of my action.

But even if--imagining a man quite exempt from all influences, examining
only his momentary action in the present, unevoked by any cause--we were
to admit so infinitely small a remainder of inevitability as equaled
zero, we should even then not have arrived at the conception of complete
freedom in man, for a being uninfluenced by the external world, standing
outside of time and independent of cause, is no longer a man.

In the same way we can never imagine the action of a man quite devoid of
freedom and entirely subject to the law of inevitability.

(1) However we may increase our knowledge of the conditions of space
in which man is situated, that knowledge can never be complete, for the
number of those conditions is as infinite as the infinity of space. And
therefore so long as not all the conditions influencing men are defined,
there is no complete inevitability but a certain measure of freedom
remains.

(2) However we may prolong the period of time between the action we are
examining and the judgment upon it, that period will be finite, while
time is infinite, and so in this respect too there can never be absolute
inevitability.

(3) However accessible may be the chain of causation of any action, we
shall never know the whole chain since it is endless, and so again we
never reach absolute inevitability.

But besides this, even if, admitting the remaining minimum of freedom to
equal zero, we assumed in some given case--as for instan