THE ASSERTION AND DENIAL OF THE WILL. 373
necessary form, which here appears as the law of motivation, — such a man will regard it as just as absurd to doubt the inevitable nature of an action when the motive is presented to a given character, as to doubt that the three angles of any triangle are together equal to two right angles. Priestley has very sufficiently proved the necessity of the individual action in his "Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity;" but Kant, whose merit in this respect is specially great, first proved the coexistence of this necessity with the freedom of the will in itself, i.e., apart from the phenomenon,[1] by establishing the distinction between the intelligible and the empirical character. I entirely adhere to this distinction, for the former is the will as thing-in-itself so far as it appears in a definite individual in a definite grade, and the latter is this phenomenon itself as it exhibits itself in time in the mode of action, and in space in the physical structure. In order to make the relation of the two comprehensible, the best expression is that which I have already used in the introductory essay, that the intelligible character of every man is to be regarded as an act of will outside time, and therefore indivisible and unchangeable, and the manifestation of this act of will developed and broken up in time and space and all the forms of the principle of sufficient reason is the empirical character as it exhibits itself for experience in the whole conduct and life of this man. As the whole tree is only the constantly repeated manifestation of one and the same tendency, which exhibits itself in its simplest form in the fibre, and recurs and is easily recognised in the construction of the leaf, shoot, branch, and trunk, so all a man's deeds are merely the constantly repeated expression, somewhat varied in form, of his intelligible character, and the induction based on the sum of all these expressions gives us his empirical
- ↑ "Critique of Pure Reason," first edition, pp. 532-558; fifth edition, pp. 560-586; and "Critique of Practical Reason," fourth edition, pp. 169-179; Rosenkranz's edition, pp. 224-231.
