religion, and he utilized the law of gravitation as a weapon
against religion.
Just so it now seems as if we have only to admit the law of
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inevitability, to destroy the conception of the soul, of good
and evil, and all the institutions of state and church that
have been built up on those conceptions.
So too, like Voltaire in his time, uninvited defenders of
the law of inevitability today use that law as a weapon against
religion, though the law of inevitability in history, like the
law of Copernicus in astronomy, far from destroying, even
strengthens the foundation on which the institutions of
state and church are erected.
As in the question of astronomy then, so in the question
of history now, the whole difference of opinion is based on
the recognition or nonrecognition of something absolute,
serving as the measure of visible phenomena. In astronomy
it was the immovability of the earth, in history it is the independence of personalityfree will.
As with astronomy the difficulty of recognizing the
motion of the earth lay in abandoning the immediate sensation of the earth’s fixity and of the motion of the planets,
so in history the difficulty of recognizing the subjection of
personality to the laws of space, time, and cause lies in renouncing the direct feeling of the independence of one’s
own personality. But as in astronomy the new view said: ‘It
is true that we do not feel the movement of the earth, but
by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity, while
by admitting its motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at
laws,’ so also in history the new view says: ‘It is true that we
are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our
free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws.’
In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.
