No thoughtful man can have any doubt, after the conclusions reached in
my prize-essay on _Moral Freedom_, that such freedom is to be sought, not anywhere in nature, but outside of it. The only freedom that exists is of a metaphysical character. In the physical world freedom is an impossibility. Accordingly, while our several actions are in no wise free, every man's individual character is to be regarded as a free act. He is such and such a man, because once for all it is his will to be that man. For the will itself, and in itself, and also in so far as it is manifest in an individual, and accordingly constitutes the original and fundamental desires of that individual, is independent of all knowledge, because it is antecedent to such knowledge.
All that it receives from knowledge is the series of
motives by which it successively develops its nature and makes itself
cognisable or visible; but the will itself, as something that lies
beyond time, and so long as it exists at all, never changes. Therefore
every man, being what he is and placed in the circumstances which
for the moment obtain, but which on their part also arise by strict
necessity, can absolutely never do anything else than just what at
that moment he does do. Accordingly, the whole course of a man's life, in all its incidents great and small, is as necessarily predetermined as the course of a clock.
The main reason of this is that the kind of metaphysical free act
which I have described tends to become a knowing consciousness--a
perceptive intuition, which is subject to the forms of space and time. By means of those forms the unity and indivisibility of the act are represented as drawn asunder into a series of states and events, which are subject to the Principle of Sufficient Reason in its four forms--and it is this that is meant by _necessity_. But the result of it all assumes a moral complexion. It amounts to this, that by what we do we know what we are, and by what we suffer we know what we deserve.
Further, it follows from this that a man's _individuality_ does not
rest upon the principle of individuation alone, and therefore is not
altogether phenomenal in its nature. On the contrary, it has its roots
in the thing-in-itself, in the will which is the essence of each
individual. The character of this individual is itself individual. But
how deep the roots of individuality extend is one of the questions
which I do not undertake to answer.
In this connection it deserves to be mentioned that even Plato, in his
own way, represented the individuality of a man as a free act.[1] He
represented him as coming into the world with a given tendency, which
was the result of the feelings and character already attaching to
him in accordance with the doctrine of metempsychosis. The Brahmin
philosophers also express the unalterable fixity of innate character
in a mystical fashion.
They say that Brahma, when a man is produced, engraves his doings and sufferings in written characters on his skull, and that his life must take shape in accordance therewith. They point to the jagged edges in the sutures of the skull-bones as evidence of this writing; and the purport of it, they say, depends on his previous life and actions. The same view appears to underlie the Christian, or rather, the Pauline, dogma of Predestination.
[Footnote 1: _Phaedrus_ and _Laws, bk_. x.]
But this truth, which is universally confirmed by experience, is
attended with another result. All genuine merit, moral as well as
intellectual, is not merely physical or empirical in its origin, but metaphysical; that is to say, it is given _a priori_ and not _a posteriori_; in other words, it lies innate and is not acquired, and therefore its source is not a mere phenomenon, but the thing-in-itself. Hence it is that every man achieves only that which is irrevocably established in his nature, or is born with him. Intellectual capacity needs, it is true, to be developed just as many natural products need to be cultivated in order that we may enjoy or use them; but just as in the case of a natural product no cultivation can take the place of original material, neither can it do so in the case of intellect.