IX. The Idea of Freedom

This objection is easily intelligible, and yet it had its root in what is but a misapprehension of my meaning. My reply to it is this: If we want to get at the essence of human volition we must distinguish between the path along which volition attains to a certain degree of development, and the unique character which volition assumes as it approaches its goal. It is on the path towards the goal that the norms play a legitimate part. The goal consists of the realization of moral aims which are apprehended by pure intuition. Man attains such aims in proportion as he is able to rise at all to the level at which intuition grasps the Idea-content of the world. In any particular volition, other elements will, as a rule, be mixed up, as springs of action or motives, with such moral aims. But, for all that, intuition may be, wholly or in part, the determining factor in human volition. What one should do, that one does. One supplies the stage upon which, what one should do, becomes action. One's own action is what one lets come forth from oneself. The impulse, here, can only be wholly individual. And, in fact, only an action which issues out of intuition can be individual. To regard evil, the deed of a criminal, as a manifestation of the human individuality in the same sense as the embodiment of pure intuition, is a confusion which only becomes possible when blind instincts are reckoned as part of the human individuality.