If the whole design of our existence were to bring about a purely earthly condition of our race, all that would be required would be some infallible mechanism to direct our action; and we need be nothing more than wheels well fitted to the whole machine.  Freedom would then not only be useless, but even contrary to the purpose of existence; and good-will would be quite superfluous.  The world, in that case, would be very clumsily contrived—­would proceed to its goal with waste of power and by circuitous paths.  Rather, mighty World-Spirit, hadst thou taken from us this freedom, which, only with difficulty and by a different arrangement, thou canst fit to thy plans, and compelled us at once to act as those plans required!  Thou wouldst then arrive at thy goal by the shortest road, as the meanest of the inhabitants of thy worlds can tell thee.

But I am free, and therefore such a concatenation of cause and effect, in which freedom is absolutely superfluous and useless, cannot exhaust my whole destination.  I must be free; for not the mechanical act, but the free determination of free-will, for the sake of the command alone and absolutely for no other purpose (so says the inward voice of conscience)—­this alone determines our true worth.  The band with which the law binds me is a band for living spirits.  It scorns to rule over dead mechanism, and applies itself alone to the living and self-acting.  Such obedience it demands.  This obedience cannot be superfluous.

And, herewith, the eternal world rises more brightly before me, and the fundamental law of its order stands clear before the eye of my mind.  In that world the will, purely and only, as it lies, locked up from all eyes, in the secret dark of my soul, is the first link in a chain of consequences which runs through the whole invisible world of spirits; so in the earthly world the deed, a certain movement of matter, becomes the first link in a material chain which extends through the whole system of matter.  The will is the working and living principle in the world of Reason, as motion is the working and living principle in the world of the senses.  I stand in the centre of two opposite worlds, a visible in which the deed, and an invisible, altogether incomprehensible, in which the will, decides.  I am one of the original forces for both these worlds.  My will is that which embraces both.  This will is in and of itself a constituent portion of the supersensuous world.  When I put it in motion by a resolution, I move and change something in that world, and my activity flows on over the whole and produces something new and ever-during which then exists and needs not to be made anew.  This will breaks forth into a material act, and this act belongs to the world of the senses, and effects, in that, what it can.