If one opines that a slave may yet be inwardly free, he says in fact only the most indisputable and trivial thing. For who is going to assert that any man is _wholly_ without freedom? If I am an eye-servant, can I therefore not be free from innumerable things, _e. g._ from faith in Zeus, from the desire for fame, and the like? Why then should not a whipped slave also be able to be inwardly free from unchristian sentiments, from hatred, of his enemy, etc.? He then has "Christian freedom," is rid of the unchristian; but has he absolute freedom, freedom from everything, _e. g._ from the Christian delusion, or from bodily pain, etc.?
In the meantime, all this seems to be said more against names than against the thing. But is the name indifferent, and has not a word, a shibboleth, always inspired and--fooled men? Yet between freedom and ownness there lies still a deeper chasm than the mere difference of the words.
All the world desires freedom, all long for its reign to come. O enchantingly beautiful dream of a blooming "reign of freedom," a "free human race"!--who has not dreamed it? So men shall become free, entirely free, free from all constraint! From all constraint, really from all? Are they never to put constraint on themselves any more? "Oh yes, that, of course; don't you see, that is no constraint at all?" Well, then at any rate they are to become free from religious faith, from the strict duties of morality, from the inexorability of the law, from--"What a fearful misunderstanding!" Well, _what_ are they to be free from then, and what not?
The lovely dream is dissipated; awakened, one rubs his half-opened eyes and stares at the prosaic questioner. "What men are to be free from?"--From blind credulity, cries one. What's that? exclaims another, all faith is blind credulity; they must become free from all faith. No, no, for God's sake,--inveighs the first again,--do not cast all faith from you, else the power of brutality breaks in. We must have the republic,--a third makes himself heard,--and become--free from all commanding lords. There is no help in that, says a fourth: we only get a new lord then, a "dominant majority"; let us rather free ourselves from this dreadful inequality.--O hapless equality, already I hear your plebeian roar again! How I had dreamed so beautifully just now of a paradise of _freedom_, and what impudence and licentiousness now raises its wild clamor! Thus the first laments, and gets on his feet to grasp the sword against "unmeasured freedom." Soon we no longer hear anything but the clashing of the swords of the disagreeing dreamers of freedom.