He quotes here as an example the case of a paralytic gentleman carried into the square in his servant’s arms during the revolt of 1542 and found after the tumult on the top of a church-tower. The terror had aroused in him such a will that he had climbed there. As a rule the paralytic does not will because he knows he cannot, what he can do at the most is to wish that he was in a different condition. It is quite inexact to say that he who is threatened and yields to the threat is deprived of his freedom of action. The old formula _coacti tamen volunt_ says as much. Whenever people have been clamouring for greater freedom of action, what they really wanted was to have the conditions of fact altered. “Everyone knows,” says Croce,[6] “that no _vultus instantis tyranni_ can extinguish the freedom of the soul; no ruler, be he ever so strong and violent, can prevent a rebellion, or when all else fails, a noble death outwardly affirming the freedom within.” Every step onward in Croce’s theories is admirably consequent upon the statements that have preceded it. As man in his theoretical activity apprehends the world and by knowing it makes it his, so through practical activity he collaborates in its creation. The second being grounded in the first, a will independent of knowing is unthinkable. The blind will is not will; the true will has eyes.[7] Without this it would be difficult to see how actions could be both free and necessary. Indeed one can say that up to these Italian theories all the contentions on liberty were waged between two tendencies, one leading to the ever-recurrent conclusions of Determinism, the other to the assertion of free will. To detect that actions are at once free and determined it was necessary that knowledge of the actual conditions of fact should be considered as the essential ground of any volition. Volition thus is not considered as arising in the void, but in a definite situation, under definite historical conditions, in relation to an event which cannot be eliminated. When the situation changes the act of will changes. This amounts to saying that it is necessitated by the situation in which it arises. But it also means that such act of will is free. For it does not make one with the situation, neither does it produce a duplicate of it. The volition-action produces something different, that is, something new; therefore it is initiative, creation, an act of freedom. Were it not so, a volition would not be an act of will and reality would not change through the action of men, it would not become, would not grow upon itself.