In these chapters I have given an account of how every one may
experience in his actions something which makes him aware that his
will is free. It is especially important to recognise that we derive
the right to call an act of will free from the experience of an ideal
intuition realising itself in the act. This can be nothing but a datum
of observation, in the sense that we observe the development of human
volition in the direction towards the goal of attaining the possibility
of just such volition sustained by purely ideal intuition. This
attainment is possible because the ideal intuition is effective through
nothing but its own self-dependent essence. Where such an intuition is
present in the mind, it has not developed itself out of the processes
in the organism (cp. pp. 146 ff.), but the organic processes have
retired to make room for the ideal processes. Observation of an act
of will which embodies an intuition shows that out of it, likewise,
all organically necessary activity has retired. The act of will is
free. No one can observe this freedom of will who is unable to see
how free will consists in this, that, first, the intuitive factor
lames and represses the necessary activity of the human organism,
and then puts in its place the spiritual activity of a will guided by
ideas. Only those who are unable to observe these two factors in the
free act of will believe that every act of will is unfree. Those who
are able to observe them win through to the recognition that man is
unfree in so far as he fails to repress organic activity completely,
but that this unfreedom is tending towards freedom, and that this
freedom, so far from being an abstract ideal, is a directive force
inherent in human nature. Man is free in proportion as he succeeds
in realising in his acts of will the same disposition of mind, which
possesses him when he is conscious in himself of the formation of
purely ideal (spiritual) intuitions.