Inevitability is the form.

Only by separating the two sources of cognition, related to one another
as form to content, do we get the mutually exclusive and separately
incomprehensible conceptions of freedom and inevitability.

Only by uniting them do we get a clear conception of man's life.

Apart from these two concepts which in their union mutually define one
another as form and content, no conception of life is possible.

All that we know of the life of man is merely a certain relation of free
will to inevitability, that is, of consciousness to the laws of reason.

All that we know of the external world of nature is only a certain
relation of the forces of nature to inevitability, or of the essence of
life to the laws of reason.

The great natural forces lie outside us and we are not conscious of
them; we call those forces gravitation, inertia, electricity, animal
force, and so on, but we are conscious of the force of life in man and
we call that freedom.

But just as the force of gravitation, incomprehensible in itself but
felt by every man, is understood by us only to the extent to which we
know the laws of inevitability to which it is subject (from the first
knowledge that all bodies have weight, up to Newton's law), so too the
force of free will, incomprehensible in itself but of which everyone is
conscious, is intelligible to us only in as far as we know the laws of
inevitability to which it is subject (from the fact that every man dies,
up to the knowledge of the most complex economic and historic laws).

All knowledge is merely a bringing of this essence of life under the
laws of reason.

Man's free will differs from every other force in that man is directly
conscious of it, but in the eyes of reason it in no way differs from
any other force. The forces of gravitation, electricity, or chemical
affinity are only distinguished from one another in that they are
differently defined by reason. Just so the force of man's free will
is distinguished by reason from the other forces of nature only by the
definition reason gives it. Freedom, apart from necessity, that is,
apart from the laws of reason that define it, differs in no way from
gravitation, or heat, or the force that makes things grow; for reason,
it is only a momentary undefinable sensation of life.

And as the undefinable essence of the force moving the heavenly bodies,
the undefinable essence of the forces of heat and electricity, or
of chemica