Conscious Human Action 9desires, but not knowing the causes by which they
are determined. Thus the child believes that it
freely desires the milk; the angry boy, that he freely
demands revenge; and the coward flight. Again,
drunkards believe it is a free decision to say what,
when sober again, they will wish that they had not
said, and since this prejudice is inborn in all
humans, it is not easy to free oneself from it. For,
although experience teaches us sufficiently that
people are least able to moderate their desires and
that, moved by contradictory passions, they see
what is better and do what is worse, yet they still
consider themselves free, and this because they
desire some things less intensely and because some
desires can be easily inhibited through the recollec-
tion of something else that is familiar.^3
Because this view is expressed clearly and definitely, it
is easy to discover the fundamental error in it. Just as a
stone necessarily carries out a specific movement in re-
sponse to an impact, human beings are supposed to carry
- Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). Marrano-Dutch philosopher of Jew-
ish-Portuguese parentage. Expelled from the Synagogue, he sup-
ported himself by grinding lenses and devoted himself to philosophy,
especially Cartesianism, deriving a kind of “rational pantheism”
from it. See Rudolf Steiner,The Riddles of Philosophy. “Spinozism is
a world conception that seeks theground of all world events in God,
and derives all process according to external necessary laws from
this ground, just as mathematical truths are derived from axioms
(p.161).” Spinoza was important to Goethe and to German Romantic
idealism generally. See Yirmiyahu Yovel,Spinoza and Other Here-
tics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).