tions, and my virtuous will, and blush for what I know to be best and purest in my nature, for the sake of which alone I would exist, as for a ridiculous folly. What is holiest in me is given as a prey to scorn.
Doubtless it was the love of this love, an interest in this interest, that impelled me, unconsciously, before I entered upon this inquiry which has now perplexed and distracted me, to regard myself, without farther question, as free and independent; doubtless it was this interest which has led me to carry out, even to conviction, an opinion which has nothing in its favour but its intelligibility, and the impossibility of proving its opposite; it was this interest which has hitherto restrained me from undertaking to explain any further, myself and my capacities.
The opposite system, barren and heartless indeed, but exhaustless in its explanations, will explain even this desire for freedom, and this aversion to the contrary doctrine. It explains everything which I can cite from my own consciousness against it, and as often as I say ‘thus and thus is the case,’ it replies with the same cool indifference, “I say so too; and I tell you besides why it must necessarily be so.” “Thou standest,” thus will it answer my complaints, “when thou speakest of thy heart, thy love, thy interest in this and that, at the point of immediate consciousness of thine own being, and thou hast confessed this already in asserting that thou thyself art the object of thy highest interest. Now it is already well known, and we have proved it above, that this thou for whom thou art so deeply interested, in so far as it is not an active power, is at least an impulse of thy individual inward nature; it is well known that every impulse, as surely as it exists,
