As a consequence of this inscrutably “spiritual” ability of the human being to resist the commands of nature, the human being, by exercising its freedom in concert with others, develops the capacity that Rousseau, coining a new word, calls, with a certain deliberate irony, perfectibility. Thanks to its freedom, the human being is a creature not of instinct, but of habit. Instincts are fixed: They belong to the involuntary and essentially predetermined realm of physics. Habits by contrast are plastic—they belong to the voluntary and essentially open-ended realm of “morals”; broadly speaking,
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