mind is no simple idea; it embraces various
contents which bear the relation of stages to one another, and each higher
stage presupposes the one below it. Freedom is, first of all, the word
which expresses that we are really agents, not mere points of transit for
phenomena foreign to ourselves, but starting-points of phenomena peculiar
to us, actual causes, beings who are able to initiate activity, to control
things and set them in motion. Here the whole question of freedom becomes
simply the question of the reality and causality of the will. Is the will
something really factual, or is it only the strange illusion to which
Spinoza, for instance, referred in his illustration of the flying stone?
It would be purely an illusion of that kind if materialism were the true
interpretation of things, and the psychical were nothing more than an
accompaniment of other "true" realities, and even if the doctrine of
psychical atoms we have already mentioned were correct.

This idea of freedom speedily rises to a higher plane. Freedom is always
freedom from something, in this case from a compulsion coming from
outside, and from things and circumstances foreign to us. In maintaining
freedom of the mind it is asserted that it can preserve its own nature and
laws in face of external compulsion or laws, and in face of the merely
psychological compulsion of the "lower courses of thought," even from the
"half-natural" laws of the association of ideas. Thus "freedom" is
pre-eminently freedom of thought. And in speaking thus we are presupposing
that the mind has a nature of its own, distinguished even from the purely
psychological nature, and has a code of laws of its own, lying beyond the
scope of all natural laws, which psychical motives and physical conditions
may prevent it following, but which they can never suspend or pull down to
their own level.

"Der Mensch ist frei, und waer' er in Ketten geboren."

Here at last we arrive at what is so often exclusively, but erroneously,
included under the name of freedom, or "freedom of the will," that is
practical freedom, the freedom to recognise moral laws and ideals, and to
form moral judgments against all psychological compulsion, and to will to
allow ourselves to be determined by these. From this question of moral
freedom we might finally pass to that with which it is usual over-hastily
to begin: the problem of so-called freedom of choice, of the "equilibrium"
of the will, a problem in whic