moment when he says, 'It is my will, therefore I shall do so; and ask yourself, ask too the man, whether he could not will and act otherwise. {44} Without doubt, you will reply, as he will do, 'Assuredly,' and this it is that reveals the fact of liberty; it consists wholly in the resolution which man takes after the deliberation is at an end; it is the resolution that is the proper act of man, which is through him and through him alone; a simple act, independent of all the facts which precede or accompany it, identical in the most varied circumstances, always the same, whatever be its motives or its results. "At the same time that man feels himself free, and is conscious of the power of commencing by his own will alone a series of facts, he recognises that his will is subjected to the empire of a certain law, which takes different names, according to the circumstances to which it is applied--moral law, reason, good sense, &c ... Man is free, but according even to man's own way of thinking, his will is not arbitrary; he may use it in an absurd, senseless, unjust, and culpable manner, and whenever he uses it a certain rule must govern it. The observance of this rule is his duty, the task assigned to his liberty." {45} It is that act of a will (that is to say of a will strictly brought back to its central and essential limits) acting freely in the intimate recesses of his being, which, in the case of disobedience to the law of duty, constitutes in man sin, and entails on him its responsibility. Is this responsibility exclusively personal, and limited to the author of the act, or communicated, so to say, by contagion, and transmitted in a certain measure to his descendants? I am still considering only actual appreciable acts, such as they produce and manifest themselves in the moral life of the human race.