Since, then, the volitional act is freedom, the question as to whether in a given case an individual has or has not been free, is equivalent to this other question: _Has there really been volition_ (action) in that case? This question can have and has (as any one who lends an ear to such discussions as are frequently heard can verify) but two meanings. The first is, whether the case under discussion be _action_ or _event,_ and, therefore, if it be or be not accurate to present it as an individual act. For example:--Was Jacobinism the crime or the glory of Voltaire and Rousseau? Was the defeat of Waterloo the fault of Marshal Grouchy? The second is, if it be really a question of _action,_ what, _precisely,_ has that action been? For example:--What were the respective parts of Voltaire and of Rousseau in the propaganda of the revolutionary spirit and of the Jacobin mode of thought? What did Marshal Grouchy really know and will when, instead of listening to Exelmans and to others of his generals and marching whither the cannon was thundering, he obeyed to the letter the order he had received and attacked the Prussian army corps of Thielman? [Sidenote: _Inconceivability of the absolute absence of action._] There is a third meaning that is to be excluded: namely, as to whether at a given moment of time there has been any sort of action or, on the contrary, a void and total absence of action. For the only case in which the individual does not act is that in which he is dead or partially dead, be the death physiological or spiritual, that of a corpse or of a madman. The glory of putting poor madmen on a level with the guilty and the delinquent is to be left to the thinkers of the "new school of penal law." In every other case, man always acts, always wills, and is always responsible and free, because life, so long as it lasts, is nothing but a web of volitions and therefore of free acts. He is also responsible for the acts that contribute to put man in such conditions as amount to madness more or less transitory, and so of irresponsibility: such is the case of drunkenness and of moral dangers imprudently sought, and so on. At no point of life does the _practically indifferent_ exist.