External powers may prevent me from doing what I will, but that is only to condemn me to do nothing or to be unfree. Not until they enslave my spirit, drive my motives out of my head, and put their own motives in the place of mine, do they really aim at making me unfree. That is the reason why the church attacks not only the mere doing, but especially the impure thoughts, i.e., motives of my action. And for the church all those motives are impure which she has not herself authorised. A church does not produce genuine slaves until her priests turn themselves into advisers of consciences, i.e., until the faithful depend upon the church, i.e., upon the confessional, for the motives of their actions. ADDITION TO REVISED EDITION (1918). In these chapters I have given an account of how every one may experience in his actions something which makes him aware that his will is free. It is especially important to recognise that we derive the right to call an act of will free from the experience of an ideal intuition realising itself in the act. This can be nothing but a datum of observation, in the sense that we observe the development of human volition in the direction towards the goal of attaining the possibility of just such volition sustained by purely ideal intuition. This attainment is possible because the ideal intuition is effective through nothing but its own self-dependent essence. Where such an intuition is present in the mind, it has not developed itself out of the processes in the organism (cp. pp. 146 ff.), but the organic processes have retired to make room for the ideal processes. Observation of an act of will which embodies an intuition shows that out of it, likewise, all organically necessary activity has retired. The act of will is free. No one can observe this freedom of will who is unable to see how free will consists in this, that, first, the intuitive factor lames and represses the necessary activity of the human organism, and then puts in its place the spiritual activity of a will guided by ideas. Only those who are unable to observe these two factors in the free act of will believe that every act of will is unfree. Those who are able to observe them win through to the recognition that man is unfree in so far as he fails to repress organic activity completely, but that this unfreedom is tending towards freedom, and that this freedom, so far from being an abstract ideal, is a directive force inherent in human nature. Man is free in proportion as he succeeds in realising in his acts of will the same disposition of mind, which possesses him when he is conscious in himself of the formation of purely ideal (spiritual) intuitions. XIII THE VALUE OF LIFE (OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM)