解放军文职招聘考试Freedom

 Freedom

It is not only true that most people entirely misun­derstand Freedom, but I sometimes think I have not yet met one person who rightly understands it. The whole Universe is absolute Law. Freedom only opens entire activity and license under the law. To the degraded or undeveloped—and even to too many others—the thought of freedom is a thought of escaping from law— which, of course, is impossible. More precious than all worldly riches is Freedom—freedom from the pain­ful constipation and poor narrowness of ecclesiasticism —freedom in manners, habiliments, furniture, from the silliness and tyranny of local fashions—entire freedom from party rings and mere conventions in Poli­tics—and better than all, a general freedom of oneself from the tyrannic domination of vices, habits, appe­tites, under which nearly every man of us (often the greatest brawler for freedom), is enslaved. Can we at­tain such enfranchisement —the true Democracy—and the height of it? While we are from birth to death the subjects of irresistible law, enclosing every movement and minute, we yet escape, by a paradox, into true free will. Strange as it may seem, we only attain to freedom by a knowledge of, and implicit obedience to Law. Great —unspeakably great—is the Will! The free Soul of man. At its greatest, understanding and obeying the laws, it can then, and then only, maintain true liberty. For there is to the highest, that law as ab­solute as any—more absolute than any —the Law of Liberty. The shallow, as intimated, consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent law of Laws, namely, the fusion and combination of the conscious will, or partial individual law, with those universal, eternal, unconscious ones, which run through all Time, pervade history, prove immortality, give moral purpose to the entire objective world, and the last dignity to hu­man life.