Lecture IV

Now, if this energy doctrine, this law of the constancy of energy, which today dominates all of natural science, were correct, then there would be no freedom, then every idea of freedom would be a mere illusion. Therefore, for the followers of the law of the constancy of energy, freedom increasingly became an illusion. Just imagine how people like Wundt, for example, explain the freedom that one does feel after all. If I, let us say, am the donkey of the famous Buridan between two bundles of hay, left and right, which are the same size and the same taste, then if I were free, that is, if I were not pushed to one side or the other, I would have to starve to death because I could not make up my mind. When I have to decide not only between two such things, but between many, then, according to such psychologists, I am driven to it nevertheless, but because there are so many concepts that shoot into each other, what obsesses me inside and what works in confusion there, I decide at last and, because I cannot see what actually compels me to do it, I get the feeling of freedom. Yes, it is not ridiculous, it is really not ridiculous for the reason that what I have told you now – I did not expect at all that one would begin to laugh – is stated in numerous very learned works as a great achievement of modern thinking, which is born out of natural science; thus it is actually indecent toward science to laugh about something like that. Well, you see, freedom would be impossible if the law of conservation of energy were true. Because then I would be determined by everything that has gone before at every moment, the energies would merely be transformed, and freedom would have to be a mere illusion. This is what has happened as a result of the development of mankind in the 19th century, through the establishment of the law of the constancy of energy, that we have a view of nature that excludes freedom as an idea, makes it impossible, that makes man unconditionally a product of the necessary order of nature. Things were already prepared, I would like to say, people have felt this way for centuries. What about things like moral responsibility, ethics, religious conviction, which really cannot exist if there is only a natural order? The materialists of the 19th century were honest in a way, they therefore denied these ethical illusions of the old days and really did explain man as only a product of natural necessity. But others could not go along with this, partly because they did not have the courage, like David Friedrich Strauf? or Vogt, or partly because they had sinecures within which they were obliged to speak of freedom, ethics, and religion. You can't go into such things there. The matter had been awkward for a long time, and so it came about that people said to themselves: Yes, with science, you can only do something about necessity. This science proves that the world has emerged from a primeval nebula and that each successive state has always necessarily developed from the earlier one, that the sum of forces has remained constant and so on. With this science, there is no starting point for ethics, religion and so on. So away from this science! Nothing with science, only faith! You have to have a double accounting, on the one hand for the outside world, for the natural world: science; on the other hand, faith, which now determines ethics, even proves God. So we save ourselves to a completely different area than that of science.