THE FREE SPIRIT
Freedom is not as precious to the members of this postwar generation
as it was to some of their ancestors. The nation which once followed
the leadership of Mazzini and Garibaldi now suffers a dictatorship with
apparently little protest. In England, the stronghold of liberalism,
a conservative government places a censorship upon the words of the
man who is probably that country’s best-known writer. Socialism has
its beginnings in that passion for freedom and humanity which inspired
the youth of the early nineteenth century and ends at Moscow with a
constitution from which even a Bill of Rights is omitted. In America
we now see that democracy does not guarantee liberty. The government
shows decreasing respect for the immunities of the individual. Crowd
movements spread intolerance and are ever demanding more strict
regulation in matters of personal conduct and private judgment. One
frequently hears the remark, “The talk about personal liberty is
disgusting nonsense.”
There are various reasons for this change of spirit. The individual
rather willingly permits himself to be transformed from a private
person to a numerical unit in his group or mass because as part of
a public he gains power through the force of numbers. Individualism
in a society in which every one is chiefly interested in industrial
competition tends to become little more than the stock argument of
those who wish to defend economic privilege. Other privileges are lost
sight of in a standardized world. Moreover, as people begin to see that
freedom is not something with which all men are equally endowed by
their creator, but is achieved in varying degree, there is a tendency
to minimize its importance. We are naturally somewhat suspicious of
the freedom of others. Those who themselves have little capacity for
it would impose their own limitations upon all others. From childhood
onward we wish to be able to do what we see others doing. When this
is impossible, there is a tendency to restrain them from doing what
we cannot do. Masterful spirits grant themselves privileges which may
appear wicked to the crowd. The free mind allows too much. When on
the other hand a person who has not attained some degree of mastery
declares his independence, we do not speak of him as free, we say that
he “takes liberties.”
Thus where the ideals of the educated mind prevail there is a general
gain in freedom through increase in mastery. Where the ideals of the
ignorant and wrongly educated predominate, there is a decline in
freedom and an increase in the disposition to take liberties. It is the
custom today to rule out of the consideration of values any reference
to the things of the mind, and to try to ground all values, freedom
included, on a strictly economic and legal foundation, as if they were
produced by and existed only for a brainless and impersonal equilibrium
of social forces. We are beginning to see that for a people which loses
sight of the inwardness of the sources of freedom, constitutional
guarantees do not long guarantee, and each power-seeking group begins
to take liberties with the organized life of the community. The
so-called liberalism of those modern writers who make apology for this
sort of thing has in it little of the spirit of liberal education. It
is rather the plebeianization of scholarship. I as a liberal am not
obliged to throw my hat in the air over each degradation of value that
marks the triumphant progress of democracy.
It is the ideal of the educated man, not the demands of the crowd which
is the best guarantee of freedom. I believe we are chiefly indebted to
this ideal for such freedom as we enjoy. Education when it is genuine
must for its own sake move in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom.
It must wander where truth leads the way. It must attain independence
of judgment and a certain decent privacy for contemplation. It is in
itself freedom from servitude and from routine. It broadens one’s
interests and hence one’s sympathetic understanding of others. Nothing
human is alien to it. The educated mind, having business of its own,
minds its own business. Hence it grows in tolerance. Freedom is always
freedom for something,--freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom
from meddlesome interference, freedom from the crushing weight of
authority and tradition, freedom in matters of religious belief. Every
such freedom is largely the result of the influence of education, and
each exists in any community in inverse ratio to its ignorance and
provincialism.
The classical tradition has its origin, as we saw, in the efforts of
Greek philosophers to teach free men the essentials of the good life.
It has by no means remained true to its ideal, but each rediscovery
of its meaning has had a liberalizing effect. The modern sense of the
worth of the individual--which is only recently on the decline--and
the humanist philosophy of education alike show the influence of the
Renaissance. The eighteenth century, stilted and formal as it was,
could with some justification call itself the age of the Enlightenment.
It was the age of Voltaire, the age of great educational advance. It
was also the age from which we derive most of our pronouncements about
liberty and the rights of man. I would almost go so far as to say that
when education is not liberalizing, it is not really education but is
a highly systematized species of propaganda. This liberalizing quality
is so essential to education, and is so clearly a way of the spiritual
life, that its presence determines the genuineness of any movement or
philosophy that may bear the name Liberalism.
The term “free spirit” has been so frequently abused, that I hesitate
to use it. It suggests Rousseau’s Emile, educated to obey only the
benign laws of nature and his own impulses. “He follows no formula,
yields neither to authority nor to example, and neither acts nor speaks
save as it seems best to him.” One thinks of such phrases as Max
Stirner’s “Ego and His Own,” or Whitman’s “Spontaneous Me,” or “The
Beautiful Soul” of nineteenth century Romanticism. One is reminded of
the young woman from Nebraska who came to live in Greenwich Village,
New York City, and said her soul felt as if it had taken off its shoes
and stockings. The cult of spiritual freedom had quite a vogue in New
York a few years ago. I believe it originated in the Latin Quarter of
Paris. The devotee of it displayed his free spirit by wearing a flowing
tie and corduroy trousers, by his obvious disdain of barbershops and
laundries, by his talk which was mostly about sex, socialism and the
new art, and by his general air of lassitude and disillusionment.
I believe that this pose, together with much of the sentimental
liberalism which passes for “emancipation” among intellectuals, may
be traced back to Jean Jacques Rousseau. Nearly all the basic ideas
of contemporary liberalism as well as those of the “newer education”
frequently associated with the liberal movement, may be found in the
writings of Rousseau. It is amusing to hear liberals proclaim these old
ideas as if they were the most advanced theories of life and education.
And you have but to compare Rousseau with Erasmus or Voltaire or Huxley
to see how far away he is from the spirit of liberal education. The
latter is tender-hearted and hard-headed. Rousseau is soft-headed and
hard-hearted. An emotional egoism feeds on dreams of social revolt
and of an idyllic return to nature. Rousseau hates civilization, with
its duties and responsibilities. He becomes romantic and sentimental
about Nature. His ideal of the free man is Robinson Crusoe. “We are
born sensible.” “The natural man is complete in himself; he is the
numerical unit, the absolute whole, who is related only to himself or
to his fellow-man. Civilized man is but a fractional unit.” “Civilized
man is born, lives and dies in a state of slavery. At his birth he
is stitched in swaddling clothes; at his death he is nailed in a
coffin, and as long as he preserves the human form he is fettered by
our institutions.” Hence if you would educate, “Observe nature and
follow the route which she traces for you.” “All wickedness comes from
weakness. A child is bad only because he is weak; make him strong and
he will be good.” “Keep the child dependent on things alone, and you
will have followed the order of nature in his education.” “Do not let
him know what obedience is when he acts, nor what control is when
others act for him. Equally in his actions and in yours let him feel
his liberty.”
“O men, be humane; it is your foremost duty.... Why would you take from
those little innocents the enjoyment of a time so short and of a good
so precious which they cannot abuse? Why would you fill with bitterness
and sorrow those early years so rapidly passing, which will no more
return to them than to you? Fathers, do you know the moment when death
awaits your children? Do not prepare for yourselves regrets by taking
from them the few moments which nature has given them.”
“The only habit which a child should be allowed to form is to contract
no habit whatsoever.”
“It is absolutely certain that the learned societies of Europe are but
so many public schools of falsehood; and very surely there are more
errors in the Academy of Sciences than in the whole tribe of Hurons.”
“Happy the people among whom one can be good without effort and just
without virtue.”
I trust that these passages selected almost at random from Rousseau’s
treatise on education, “Emile,” do not give a wholly unfair impression
of this author’s philosophy of life. Man in the state of nature is wise
and good. Civilization has corrupted him by enslaving him. If he does
evil it is not because he is bad, but because he is weak. We should not
hang the criminal but blame the society which made him what he is.
The proper function of education is to enable the individual--the
little innocent--to grow up naturally without discipline, without
forming any habits, never sacrificing present enjoyment to future
knowledge, inspired always by the ideal of that happy state in which
one may be good without effort. The ideal education therefore is the
life of the North American aborigine or what Rousseau imagined such a
life to be. Freedom here is the return to nature.
From the times of Hobbes and of Montaigne onward there seems to have
been a growing interest in “Man in the state of nature.” But whereas
with most writers this interest was largely a matter of theory and
speculation, with Rousseau man in the state of nature becomes an ideal,
a norm.
It would appear that in this dream of the return to nature, there
is symbolized an infantile wish to escape from the tasks and
responsibilities and restraints of adult life. Psychologists speak
of such an “infantile return” as _regression_. This regressive ideal
of freedom is a very different thing from the liberalizing influence
of education as I understand it. I have characterized education as a
victory won over one’s wish-fancies and childish egoism, as the lifting
of the problems of life to higher and more significant dilemmas, as
the attainment of mastery. A humanistic liberalism seeks freedom
as broadmindedness; it strives for a highly civilized, urbane and
sophisticated state of mind in which insight is deepened and interest
is widened. Rousseauian liberalism seeks freedom in relaxation of
effort, in denial of the claims of civilization, in the idealization of
nature and of primitive man.
Many persons who today style themselves liberals are of the Rousseauian
type. There are those who proudly call themselves rebels. A certain
naturalism is carried to the point of hostility to form as such
and to orderliness of any sort. There is frequently a disdain of
“respectability,” and a tendency to play the intellectual vagabond.
I think this is one reason why certain liberals are much taken with
modern imitations of the primitive in art. The element of regression
which characterizes the paintings and sculpture of certain “rebels” is
patent to the psychologist. Many of these works of art closely resemble
the typical drawings of dementia praecox patients. In dementia,
regression, or infantile return, is complete and final. The patient
is free from a disturbing world, having returned to precisely the
“sensibility,” as Rousseau terms it, with which he was born.
Utopian schemes of social reconstruction, and the notion that merely
changing the present system would put an end once for all to human
misery, are in many cases disguised forms of the wish to return to
childhood and thus escape the vicissitudes of adult life in civilized
society. The burden of our industrial civilization is so great that it
is no wonder many should take this path of escape. However, the utopian
fantasy is by no means confined to those who have the hardest struggle.
And there can be no objection to it when it inspires well-considered
efforts for social improvement. There is a type of “liberal” however,
who regards the attempt to solve any concrete problem of civilization
as a compromise of his idealism.
Another aspect of the philosophy of Rousseau has influenced
contemporary liberalism with somewhat paradoxical results. The basis of
that happy state in which one may be just without virtue is elaborated
in “The Social Contract.” Rousseau was not the first to hold the
contract theory of organized society. Both Hobbes and Locke made use
of this idea. But with Rousseau it becomes a doctrine with distinctly
illiberal implications. The argument is somewhat as follows:
Man finds it impossible to continue in the blissful state of nature.
In order to preserve their freedom, men voluntarily enter into a
mutual agreement, according to which each gives over his individual
sovereignty and receives back an equal portion of the common will,
leaving him as free as he was before. Thus there comes into being a
collective sovereign power. All others are of course usurpations and
are destructive of freedom. This new sovereign can do no wrong, there
is no need to protect the individual against it because it is made up
precisely of the wills of all individuals, and the people will not do
injury to themselves since each seeks happiness. Such sovereignty,
which is really the absolute dominion of the mass over its members, can
neither be delegated nor divided, and its exercise is _liberty_.
But is it? This tree is known by the fruit it bears. Notice that for
purposes of this theory, all aspects of the individual will are now
denied except those which may be pooled into a sort of group will and
drawn out again in equal and identical portions for all men. That is,
society is transformed from a plurality of individuals to the unity
of a mass. Man acting as a mass unit takes precedence in all things
over man acting as a private person. Privacy is gone. Liberty is not
personal independence, but the freedom of the group to do what it wills
unchecked. Mass action can do no wrong. According to the logic of this
view no proper bounds may be set to the rule of “the people,” except
such as the sovereign will itself chooses to set. Accordingly, liberty
becomes the rule of all over each in any matter whatsoever concerning
which neighbors choose to restrain or meddle with one another. This
means that myself as person must in all things take orders from that
attenuated public-meeting self of me and of other men which we have
each received in equal portion from the mass will. Everything unique in
me is whittled away from this mass-self and I count only by virtue of
my membership as a numerical unit of the group. And now since any check
or hindrance to the sovereignty of the mass is seen as an unjustifiable
restriction upon its liberty, there is a tendency to extend the tyranny
of the mass to every possible human concern. The demand for liberty
is no longer the assertion of the right of private judgment for those
capable of exercising it; it is “Let the people rule.” No wonder men
come to distinguish between personal liberty and the rights of The
People. The idolatry of the mass turns freedom inside out.
So much for theory. In common practice each majority tends to regard
itself as the sovereign will and play the tyrant, all in the name of
liberty. Each militant minority and struggle group in society seeks
by hook or crook to capture the machinery of law and force its will
upon the public, and in the effort to make its own group will the
sovereign will, the members of each group persuade themselves that in
thus resisting restraint upon their particular mass movement they are
fighting for liberty. A spirit of factiousness spreads through the
community, restriction and regulation increase and multiply, all in
the exercise of crowd-liberty. If your crowd is now in possession of
social power, you are called a conservative. If it is still struggling
to make its will supreme, you may call yourself a liberal. It is an
ironical turn of history that brings it about that many restrictions
upon the freedom of the individual are advocated in the name of
liberalism. Liberalism shades off into a form of radicalism which would
set up a dictatorship to accomplish its ends. Many people use the terms
interchangeably. Radicals in recent years, as the illiberal aims of the
movement unmask themselves, tend to repudiate the name liberal, and
to denounce the liberal as one who having started out along a certain
road, hesitates or turns back at the last minute. Such liberalism finds
itself in the difficult position of having proposed measures which it
hesitated to carry out. It is embarrassed by its own radical offspring.
Such liberalism has little in common with that which is the aim of
liberal education. As it appears in contemporary America, it is a
sort of abortive mass movement caused by the mingling of two social
philosophies which for want of better terms I will call the Lockean and
the Rousseauian traditions.
John Locke wrote his essay on Government at the close of the
seventeenth century. This book together with his “Essay on the Human
Understanding,” did much to shape the thinking of the eighteenth
century, and made a strong impression upon Samuel Adams, Thomas
Paine, Jefferson and other leaders of the American Revolution. The
“self-evident truths” set forth in our Declaration of Independence
clearly reveal this influence. I do not wish to imply that Locke
was the author of American liberalism. He merely has his place in a
tradition which goes back to Magna Charta and is essentially British.
The quarrel between the colonies and the ministers of King George was
a phase of the greater struggle between Parliament and the crown.
For centuries the Englishman has stood up for his individual rights,
has stubbornly resisted any attempt of the sovereign to invade his
privacy or to seize his property without his consent. The Englishman is
naturally jealous of his government. He looks upon it with suspicion
and seeks to limit its exercise of power. He gives it no peace until it
guarantees him security from interference with his personal freedom.
Jefferson’s remark that that government is best which governs least
is typical of the spirit of British liberalism. It was this spirit
which inspired the revolt of the Puritans against both the King and the
Church. The same sentiment is expressed in the petition of Rights which
was presented to the throne about the time that Locke wrote the essay
on government. And it was in this same spirit that the founders of the
Republic framed the Constitution of the United States. They rather
grudgingly granted the government certain specific powers, and sought
by means of various checks and balances to limit the exercise of them.
Even then the public was so alive to the dangers of the new sovereignty
that it refused to adopt the constitution until it was amended by the
addition of the Bill of Rights.
There were added to this assertion of the inalienable rights of the
individual in opposition to the sovereign power the deeper sense of
the importance of the individual gained in the Reformation, and the
insistence upon the right and duty of exercising private judgment which
came with the rationalism of the eighteenth century. The eighteenth
century, with its “appeal to reason” in opposition to the authority
of priest and Bible, was in fact an intellectual declaration of
independence which became for educated minds an essential part of the
liberal tradition. Liberalism owes much to the Deists and men like
Hume. It is not a mere coincidence that a large number of the leaders
of the American Revolution were “freethinkers.” Thus liberalism became
something more than a political movement. It became a philosophy of
personal liberty, of independence of authority, of tolerance. The
rights which the liberal claimed for himself he was--at least in
theory--willing to grant to others. He took the side of the “under
dog.” The tradition is best represented in England by such men as
Priestley, Martineau, Kingsley, Cobden, Bright, Morley, J. S. Mill,
Huxley, and in America by Paine, Jefferson, Channing, Emerson, Theodore
Parker, Lincoln, and Ingersoll.
The decline of liberalism to the level of Bryanism, the betrayal by
“One Hundred Percent Americanism” of the spirit in which the Republic
was founded, the spread of bigotry among the masses, the prevailing
partisan spirit and the illiberalism of professed “liberals,” the
changing of our constitution from a guarantee of personal liberty to
the authorization of Federal interference with the daily habits and
customs of the individual--these are not matters for which we may hold
recent immigrants responsible. They are, I regret to say, symptomatic
of tendencies which are most commonly manifest among Americans of
British descent. They show how far the spirit of a nation may drift
in one hundred and fifty years when it renounces its intellectual
leadership.
Liberalism as a political movement was early divorced from liberalism
as an intellectual movement. The former became Andrew Jacksonism,
“shirt-sleeve democracy,” free-soil-ism, abolitionism, populism, the
Single Tax movement, opposition to big business, Progressiveism.
Ever since the time of the settlement of New England the pioneer and
frontiersman, the “debtor class,” the town laborer and the farmer,
have had to carry on a struggle against the “money powers” of the
large industrial centers. The conflict of “the poor against the
rich”--generally characterized by a demand for governmental regulation
of industry and cheap money--reached its culmination in the “Free
Silver” issue of 1896. Of this “battle for humanity,” the author of
“Our Times” quotes William Allen White.
“It was a fanaticism like the Crusades. Indeed, the delusion that was
working on the people took the form of religious frenzy. Sacred hymns
were torn from their pious tunes to give place to words which deified
the cause and made gold--and all its symbols, capital, wealth,
plutocracy--diabolical. At night, from ten thousand little white
schoolhouse windows, lights twinkled back vain hope to the stars.
For the thousands who assembled under the schoolhouse lamps believed
that when their legislature met and their governor was elected, the
millennium would come by proclamation. They sang their barbaric
songs in unrhythmic jargon, with something of the same mad faith
that inspired the martyrs going to the stake. Far into the night the
voices rose--women’s voices, children’s voices, the voices of old
men, of youths and of maidens, rose on the ebbing prairie breezes, as
the crusaders of the revolution rode home, praising the people’s will
as though it were God’s will, and cursing wealth for its iniquity. It
was a season of shibboleths and fetiches and slogans. Reason slept;
and the passions--jealousy, covetousness, hatred--ran amuck; and
whoever would check them was crucified in public contumely.”
The demand for governmental regulation has been on the increase since
1896 and has almost worked a revolution in our form of government. I
will not discuss the degree to which such an extension of the powers
of the central government is desirable. I am aware of the fact that
the motive is largely that of protecting the economic independence
of the average individual. The point I wish to make is that the
methods advocated reveal the change that has come over liberalism.
Notwithstanding Jefferson’s statement about the government which
governed least, the extensions of the powers of government have not
ever been limited to matters industrial, and we find men calling
themselves liberals accepting all sorts of restrictions upon their
liberty without complaint. Liberalism has taken on a partisan
spirit with all the intolerance, hysteria, and coerciveness that
usually characterizes crowd movements. The same elements that voted
“liberal” with Mr. Bryan thirty years ago, later supported Bryan the
fundamentalist, and today are staunch prohibitionists. I cannot help
feeling that something of the fundamentalist was lurking under the
skin of the American liberal all along. The tradition of personal
independence derived from our British ancestors had about reached this
stage of decline, when efforts were made to supplant it with a very
different type of liberalism from continental Europe.
The “old liberalism” was in theory individualistic; the “new
liberalism” was socialistic. It brought with it such ideas as “the
class struggle,” “mass action,” the “cooperative commonwealth.”
Freedom was to be gained for all in the form of the “emancipation”
of the working class. Youthful intellectuals idealized the
proletariat, organized socialist locals, talked about the “materialist
interpretation of history,” denounced “the capitalists,” addressed
one another as “comrade,” closed their letters to one another with
the words, “Yours for the Revolution,” and a few took the trouble to
study the writings of Karl Marx. The old liberalism was seen as mere
“bourgeois idealogy,” mental slavery, a system of ideas fabricated by
the master class in order to keep the working class in perpetual wage
slavery. The new liberal felt himself intellectually emancipated. If
he was very, very liberal, he styled himself a radical. The movement
reached its maximum strength about the year 1910, and then began
to decline. It appealed to some who had been liberals of the older
American type, but the response of labor was negligible. Radicalism
professed to be a spontaneous revolt of oppressed working people. In
fact it was a cult, with its dogmas about labor, which existed chiefly
among middle-class intellectuals. Its leaders--and it consisted mostly
of leaders with very little rank and file--were seldom working men.
Although its economic creed is the product of the nineteenth century,
a study of the history of this movement would show it to be in direct
line of descent from Rousseau. Many of the basic ideas are distinctly
Rousseauian. Civilization, which Rousseau hated, is now the wicked
capitalist system. There is the same emphasis on the collective will,
on mass action, on the idea of revolution, the same belief that The
People is the only rightful sovereign, that society exists by virtue
of a sort of covenant among men which can be altered at will, and that
universal happiness may be attained by changing the system which is
responsible for all misery and misbehavior.
Radicalism, carried to its logical conclusion, is Communism, in which
there is no pretense of liberalism, no place for freedom. It has
greatest appeal for a type of mind which is by nature doctrinaire
and inelastic, and its propaganda tends to fixed opinion and to
illiberalism. A generation ago Nietzsche said of it,
“In every country of Europe, and the same in America, there is at
present something which makes an abuse of this name: a very narrow,
prepossessed, enchained class of spirits, who desire almost the
opposite of what our intentions and instincts prompt.... Briefly and
regrettably, they belong to the _levellers_, these wrongly named free
spirits--as glib-tongued and scribe-fingered slaves of the democratic
taste and its modern ideas: all of them men without solitude, without
personal solitude, blunt honest fellows to whom neither courage nor
honorable conduct ought to be denied; only, they are not free, and
are ludicrously superficial, especially in their innate partiality
for seeing the cause of almost _all_ human misery and failure in
the old forms in which society has hitherto existed--a notion which
happily inverts the truth entirely! What they would fain attain with
all their strength, is the universal, green-meadow happiness of the
herd, together with security, safety, comfort, and alleviation of
life for everyone.”
The word liberal is commonly associated with that extension of
democracy which the crowd thinks is progress. If you favor this
progress, you are said to be a liberal. If you doubt that it is
progress you are thought to oppose progress as such and so are
a conservative. If the progress of democracy were accompanied
by a corresponding advance of culture and gain in wisdom and
broadmindedness, this use of the term liberal would be appropriate.
Men become free only as they achieve self-government. I take it that a
man governs himself to the degree that he acts upon his own judgment.
Freedom thus presupposes first that people are capable of judging
things for themselves, and second, that they are permitted to do so.
If the progress of democracy resulted in fewer laws and wiser laws,
we should in time have self-government. But the reverse is the case:
the extension of democracy brings about an extension of the powers of
government and the multiplication of foolish laws. It does not follow
that people’s judgment is improved because they can vote about more
and more things. Nor is there any assurance that they will not begin
voting about things that are none of their business and thus destroy
the right of private judgment, which is the exercise of freedom. You
do not decide things for yourself when everything is submitted to a
referendum or regulated by the legislature. If the people or their
representatives should vote to establish a censorship of books, or to
prohibit smoking tobacco, or to compel church attendance on Sunday,
that would be democracy; but it would not be a gain for freedom.
Self-government is impossible when every private matter is turned into
a public question. Men with third-rate minds--and there are enough of
them once they get together to constitute a solid majority--shrink from
the responsibility of exercising private judgment, but are prepared and
eager to decide any matter whatsoever once it becomes a public issue.
They are, moreover, disinclined to allow a large measure of personal
freedom to one another or to any one. Self-government in a democracy
therefore means not private judgment but national independence,
universal franchise, and no constitutional restraints upon the will of
the majority. In common practice, “liberty” is the legally recognized
right of the crowd to tell the individual what he may not do in matters
which concern only himself. Any man has _liberty_ when he has a voice
in the government of the land. He has _freedom_ when he governs
himself. His freedom may be prevented either by lack of judgment or by
outside interference. The effect of education in the community is to
improve judgment and lessen outside interference with the exercise of
it. Properly defined, a liberal is a person who strives for precisely
these results. Liberalism, in this sense, and education are the same.
I said that a man is free when he acts according to his own judgment.
This does not mean that the free man is able to choose anything he
wishes. Necessity constrains him just as it does the unfree. It means,
however, that his assent or dissent in any matter follows from his
personal insight into the implications of the situation. He does the
required thing even when he does not like it, because he has the
intelligence to see that it is required under the circumstances. He is
not compelled to take some other person’s word as to what is required.
He is free not only because he is independent of the will of another in
reaching his decision, but primarily because he knows what he is doing
and why he does it.
There is a very old, extra-canonical legend according to which the Lord
Jesus, passing by, saw a man digging in the field on the Sabbath day,
and he said to the man, “If thou knowest what thou doest, blesséd art
thou; if thou knowest not, curséd art thou.”