However, our attitude in regard to this problem has, indeed, been essentially changed by modern thought. There can be no further talk of a vague freedom of the will, of a capacity to act in one manner or another unaffected by anything that preceded and by the whole environment; the fact of the subjection of man to a destiny, both external and internal, is forced upon us with overwhelming power. Whether the idea of freedom in every sense is shown to be invalid is another question; perhaps the problem is not so much solved as put on one side. In any case, if a fundamental problem--one that has been discussed from the earliest times--is suddenly declared to be finally solved, the suspicion must soon arise that the solution appears to be self-evident only because certain presuppositions which are in no way self-evident are implicitly assumed in it. The surrender of every kind of freedom meets in the first place with the suspicion that thereby far more is lost than we think or intend; that much is lost to which it is impossible to surrender all claim. Great trouble is taken to prove that the denial of freedom by no means does away with the possibility of an ethical moulding of life. Yet it might be shown without difficulty that, in attempts of this kind, either the freedom, rejected in its ordinary sense, finds entrance again altered and deepened--as, for example, in the philosophy of Spinoza--or the ethic that remains after freedom has been denied retains only the name, and in itself signifies something merely mechanical. But why do we insist upon the ethical; why does so much depend upon its continuance? For this reason: that upon it depends whether life merely _happens to_ us or also _from_ us; whether we are simply parts of a rigid world-mechanism or self-determining co-operators in the building up of reality. If the former hypothesis is true, we are no more than the platform upon which events become connected; and we can possess no other unity than a summation of the multiplicity. A unity of this kind could not possibly attain to independence and transcendence; could not make an inner judgment upon events; could not take up a conflict in opposition to the condition of life as it is immediately experienced. The conception of conduct would inevitably be degraded to that of mere occurrence. We should cease to have inner unity and be comprehensive selves; we should not be able to speak of disposition and conviction: for it is of the essence of all these things that they cannot be imparted, but must arise newly and spontaneously just in the individual, and for this a concentration of life, an elevation to self-conscious and self-determining activity, is necessary.