What is it? the agreeable idea of going on horseback which
presents itself in your brain, the dominant idea, the determinant idea.
But, you will say, can I not resist an idea which dominates me? No, for
what would be the cause of your resistance? None. By your will you can
obey only an idea which will dominate you more.
Now you receive all your ideas; therefore you receive your wish, you
wish therefore necessarily. The word "liberty" does not therefore belong
in any way to your will.
You ask me how thought and wish are formed in us. I answer you that I
have not the remotest idea. I do not know how ideas are made any more
than how the world was made. All that is given to us is to grope for
what passes in our incomprehensible machine.
The will, therefore, is not a faculty that one can call free. A free
will is an expression absolutely void of sense, and what the scholastics
have called will of indifference, that is to say willing without cause,
is a chimera unworthy of being combated.
Where will be liberty then? in the power to do what one wills. I wish to
leave my study, the door is open, I am free to leave it.
But, say you, if the door is closed, and I wish to stay at home, I stay
there freely. Let us be explicit. You exercise then the power that you
have of staying; you have this power, but you have not that of going
out.
The liberty about which so many volumes have been written is, therefore,
reduced to its accurate terms, only the power of acting.
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