The great natural forces lie outside us and we are not conscious of them: we call those forces gravitation, inertia, electricity, animal force, and so on, but we are conscious of the force of life in man and we call it freedom. But just as the force of gravitation, incomprehensible in itself but felt by every man, is only understood by us to the extent to which we know the laws of inevitability to which it is subject (from the first knowledge that all bodies have weight, up to Newton’s law), so too the force of freewill, incomprehensible in itself but of which everyone is conscious, is only
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