before he is I, that is to say, he acts before he truly is—his act precedes and realizes his being;—a direct reversal of the ordinary doctrine, but a most important one as far as the establishment of human liberty is concerned; because, in making man's existence to depend upon his act, and in showing his act to be absolutely original and underived—an act of antagonism against the derivative modifications of his given nature, we encircle him with an atmosphere of liberty, and invest him with a moral character and the dread attribute of responsibility, which, of course would disappear if man, at every step, moved in the preordained footprints of fate, and were not, in some respect or other, unconditionally free. And move in these footprints he must, the bondsman of necessity in all things, if it be true that his real and proper substantive existence precedes and gives rise to his acts.
If this act of negation never took place, the sphere of sensation would be enlarged. The sensation would reign absorbing, undisputed, and supreme; or, in other words, man would, in every case, be monopolized by the passive state into which he had been cast. The whole of his being would be usurped by the passive modification into which circumstances had moulded it. But the act of negation or consciousness puts an end to this monopoly. Its presence displaces the sensation to a certain extent, however small that extent may be. An antagonism is now commenced against passion (for all sensation is passion), and who can say where this antagonism is to stop? (We shall show, in its proper place, that all morality centres in this antagonism.) The great unity of sensation, that is, the state which prevailed anterior to the dualisation of subject and object, is broken up, and man's sensations and other passive states of existence never again possess the entireness of their first unalloyed condition—that entireness which they possessed in his infantine years—that wholeness and singleness which was theirs before the act of negation broke the universe asunder into the world of man and the world of nature.
This, then, proves that consciousness, or the act of negation, is not the harmonious accompaniment and dependent, but is the antagonist and the violator of sensation. Let us endeavour once more to show that this act, from its very character, must be underived and free. The proof is as follows. Sensation is a given or derivative state. It has, therefore, from the first a particular positive character. But this act is nothing in itself; it has no positive character; it is merely the opposite—the entire opposite of sensation. But if it were given and derived as well as sensation, it would not be the entire opposite of sensation. It would agree with sensation in this, that both of them would be given. But it agrees with the sensation in nothing. It is thoroughly opposed to it. It is pure action, while the sensation is pure passion. The sensation is passive, and is opposed to consciousness because it is derivative. Consciousness is action, and is opposed to sensation because it is not derivative. If consciousness were a given state it would not be action at all; it would be nothing but passion. It would be merely one passion contending with another passion. But it is impossible to conceive any passion or given state of Being without some positive character besides its antagonist character. But this act of negation has no positive character—has no character at all except of this antagonist description. Besides, it is opposed to every passion. If consciousness co-exist with any passion, we have seen that it displaces it to a certain degree. Therefore, if consciousness were itself a passive or derivative state it would be suicidal, it would prevent itself from coming into manifestation. But passing by this reductio ad absurdum, we maintain that consciousness meets the given, the derivative in man, at every point—that it only manifests itself by doing so—and therefore we must conclude that it is not itself derivative, but is an absolutely original act, or, in other words, an act of perfect freedom.
Let us here note, in a very few words, the conclusions we have got to. At our first step we noticed the given, the natural, the unconscious man—a passive creature throughout all the modifications of his Being. At our second step we observed an act of antagonism or freedom taking place against sensation, and the other passive conditions of his nature, as we have yet more fully to see: and at our third step we found that man in virtue of this antagonism had become "I." These
