6 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
conduct, and science. And it is among the sad signs of
the superficiality of contemporary thinking that a book
intending to coin a “new belief” from the results of re-
cent scientific research—David Friedrich Strauss’sThe
Old and New Belief—contains nothing on this question
but the words:
We need not here go into the question of the
freedom of human will. The supposed freedom of
indifferent choice has been recognized as an empty
phantom by every philosophy worthy of the name,
while the moral valuation of human conduct and
character remains untouched by the question.^1
I cite this passage, not because I think the book from
which it derives has any special significance, but because
it seems to me to express the opinion which the majority
of our thinking contemporaries have been able to achieve
on this question. Today, everyone who can claim to have
outgrown scientific kindergarten appears to know that
freedom cannot consist in choosing arbitrarily between
two possible actions. There is always, so it is claimed, a
quite specific reason why a person performs one specific
action from among several possibilities.
This seems obvious. Nevertheless, present-day oppo-
nents of freedom direct their principal attacks only
- D.F. Strauss (1808–1874),Der alte und der neue Glaube (1872).
A German theologian and philosopher, David Friedrich Strauss
developed a Hegelian theory of Biblical interpretation. He caused a
storm with his historical-criticalLife of Jesus, in which he called the
Gospels “a historical myth.”
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