The existence of a nobility has, then, a double advantage:  it helps to maintain on the one hand the rights of possession, and on the other the right of birth belonging to the king.  For the king is the first nobleman in the country, and, as a general rule, he treats the nobility as his humble relations, and regards them quite otherwise than the commoners, however trusty and well-beloved.  It is quite natural, too, that he should have more confidence in those whose ancestors were mostly the first ministers, and always the immediate associates, of his own.  A nobleman, therefore, appeals with reason to the name he bears, when on the occurrence of anything to rouse distrust he repeats his assurance of fidelity and service to the king.  A man’s character, as my readers are aware, assuredly comes to him from his father.  It is a narrow-minded and ridiculous thing not to consider whose son a man is.

FREE-WILL AND FATALISM.

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.