SECOND EPILOGUE
8. CHAPTER VIII
(continued)
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 freedom. 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.
|