On the other hand the conception of Moral Freedom is inseparable from that of Originality.  A man may be said, but he cannot be conceived, to be the work of another, and at the same time be free in respect of his desires and acts.  He who called him into existence out of nothing in the same process created and determined his nature—­in other words, the whole of his qualities.  For no one can create without creating a something, that is to say, a being determined throughout and in all its qualities.  But all that a man says and does necessarily proceeds from the qualities so determined; for it is only the qualities themselves set in motion.  It is only some external impulse that they require to make their appearance.  As a man is, so must he act; and praise or blame attaches, not to his separate acts, but to his nature and being.

That is the reason why Theism and the moral responsibility of man are incompatible; because responsibility always reverts to the creator of man and it is there that it has its centre.  Vain attempts have been made to make a bridge from one of these incompatibles to the other by means of the conception of moral freedom; but it always breaks down again.  What is free must also be original.  If our will is free, our will is also the original element, and conversely.  Pre-Kantian dogmatism tried to separate these two predicaments.  It was thereby compelled to assume two kinds of freedom, one cosmological, of the first cause, and the other moral and theological, of human will.  These are represented in Kant by the third as well as the fourth antimony of freedom.

On the other hand, in my philosophy the plain recognition of the strictly necessary character of all action is in accordance with the doctrine that what manifests itself even in the organic and irrational world is will.  If this were not so, the necessity under which irrational beings obviously act would place their action in conflict with will; if, I mean, there were really such a thing as the freedom of individual action, and this were not as strictly necessitated as every other kind of action.  But, as I have just shown, it is this same doctrine of the necessary character of all acts of will which makes it needful to regard a man’s existence and being as itself the work of his freedom, and consequently of his will.  The will, therefore, must be self-existent; it must possess so-called a-se-ity.  Under the opposite supposition all responsibility, as I have shown, would be at an end, and the moral like the physical world would be a mere machine, set in motion for the amusement of its manufacturer placed somewhere outside of it.  So it is that truths hang together, and mutually advance and complete one another; whereas error gets jostled at every corner.

What kind of influence it is that moral instruction may exercise on conduct, and what are the limits of that influence, are questions which I have sufficiently examined in the twentieth section of my treatise on the Foundation of Morality.  In all essential particulars an analogous influence is exercised by example, which, however, has a more powerful effect than doctrine, and therefore it deserves a brief analysis.