Ultimate Questions: The Consequences of Monism

Just as little, according to monistic principles, can the aims of our action be derived from an extra-human Beyond. In so far as we think them, they must stem from human intuition. Man does not take the purposes of an objective (transcendental) primordial Being and make them his own, but he pursues his own individual purposes given him by his moral imagination. The idea that realizes itself in an action is detached by man from the unitary world of ideas and made the basis of his will. Therefore it is not the commandments injected into this world from the Beyond that live in his action, but human intuitions belonging to this world itself. Monism knows no such world-dictator who sets our aims and directs our actions from outside. Man finds no such primal ground of existence whose counsels he might investigate in order to learn from it the aims to which he has to direct his actions. He is thrown back upon himself. It is he himself who must give content to his action. If he looks outside the world in which he lives for the grounds determining his will, he will look in vain. If he is to go beyond merely satisfying his natural instincts, for which Mother Nature has provided, then he must seek these grounds in his own moral imagination, unless he finds it more convenient to let himself be determined by the moral imaginations of others; in other words, either he must give up action altogether, or else he must act for reasons that he gives himself out of his world of ideas or that others select for him out of theirs. If he advances beyond merely following his life of sensuous instincts or carrying out the commands of others, then he will be determined by nothing but himself. He must act out of an impulse given by himself and determined by nothing else. It is true that this impulse is determined ideally in the unitary world of ideas; but in practice it is only by man that it can be taken from that world and translated into reality. The grounds for the actual translation of an idea into reality by man, monism can find only in man himself. If an idea is to become action, man must first want it, before it can happen. Such an act of will therefore has its grounds only in man himself. Man is then the ultimate determinant of his action. He is free.