For, as it is only through the free, thinking mind that true and false can be distinguished and brought into relation with things, so only through it can we have an ideal of truth to be recognised and striven after, and that spontaneous, pertinacious, searching, following, and discovering which constitutes science as a whole and in detail. And in so far as naturalism itself claims to be nothing more than an attempt towards this goal, it is itself only possible on the basis of something which it denies.
Freedom of thought is also the most obvious example of that freedom of the spirit in morally “willing,” which it is the business of ethical science to teach and defend. As in the one case thought shows itself superior to the physiologically or psychologically conditioned sequence of its concepts, so the free spirit, in the uniqueness of its moral laws, reveals itself as lord over all the motives, the lower feelings of pleasure and pain that have their play within us. As in the one case it is free to measure according to the criteria of true or false, and thus is able to intervene in the sequence of its own conceptions, correcting and confirming, so in the other it is able to estimate by the criteria of good or bad. As in the one case it carries within it its own fundamental laws as logic, so in the other the moral ideals and fundamental judgments which arise out of its own being. And in both cases it is free from nature and natural law, and capable of subordinating nature to its own rules, in so far as it “wills,” and of becoming subordinate to nature—in erroneous thinking and non-moral acting—in so far as it does not will.
Feeling, Individuality, Genius, and Mysticism.
The four things here mentioned are very closely associated with one another, especially the second and third, as is easily perceived, but the second is rooted in the first. And in the second and third there is already to be discovered a factor which goes beyond the sphere of the purely rational, and is no longer accessible to our comprehension, but carries us over into the sphere of the fourth. This is really true even of the phenomena of moral consciousness and moral “freedom.” In this quality, and in the ethical ideal of “personality,” there is implied something that is inaccessible to a purely rational consideration, and is directly related to mystery and divination. (What is “personality”? We all feel it. We respect it from the depths of our soul wherever we meet it. We bow down before it unconditionally. But what it is no philosophy has ever yet been able definitely to state. In seeking to comprehend it intuition and feeling must always play the largest part.)