SECOND EPILOGUE
10. CHAPTER X
(continued)
(2) However much we approximate the time of judgment to the time
of the deed, we never get a conception of freedom in time. For if I
examine an action committed a second ago I must still recognize it
as not being free, for it is irrevocably linked to the moment at which
it was committed. Can I lift my arm? I lift it, but ask myself:
could I have abstained from lifting my arm at the moment that has
already passed? To convince myself of this I do not lift it the next
moment. But I am not now abstaining from doing so at the first
moment when I asked the question. Time has gone by which I could not
detain, the arm I then lifted is no longer the same as the arm I now
refrain from lifting, nor is the air in which I lifted it the same
that now surrounds me. The moment in which the first movement was made
is irrevocable, and at that 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.
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