Freedom-Philosophy and Monism 167in metaphysical realism, which infers something extra-
human as true reality, but does not experience it.
For one and the same reason, naive and metaphysical
realism must both logically deny freedom. Both see in hu-
man beings merely executors of principles that have been
necessarily imposed upon them. Naive realism kills free-
dom through subjection to the authority of a perceptible
being, to a being thought of as analogous to a percept or,
finally, to the abstract inner voice that itinterprets as con-
science. Metaphysical realists, who merely infer some-
thing extra-human, cannot acknowledge freedom because
they see human beings as determined, mechanically or
morally, by a “being-in-itself.”
Because it acknowledges the validity of the world of
percepts, monism must acknowledge the partial validity
of naive realism. Anyone incapable of producing moral
ideas through intuition must receive them from others. To
the extent that humans receive their ethical principles
from without, they are in fact unfree. But monism as-
cribes equal significance to ideas and to percepts. Ideas,
however, can become manifest in human individuals. To
the extent that human beings obey impulses from that
side, they feel themselves to be free. But monism denies
any validity to a merely inferential metaphysics, and
therefore also to impulses to action deriving from so-
called “beings-in-themselves.” According to the monistic
view, human beings can act unfreely if they obey percep-
tible, external compulsion; they can act freely if they only
obey themselves. But monism cannot acknowledge an
unconscious compulsion lying behind both percepts and