Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/153

 is this, it also appears thus to that thought which is deepest and which has found completion in itself. The highest law of visibleness is, as we have said, this: that the thing appearing splits itself into an infinite manifoldness. This ‘more’ becomes visible, on every occasion, as more than what proceeds at any particular moment from the sum total of appearance, and so on into infinity; hence, this ‘more’ itself appears infinite. But it is as clear as noonday that it acquires this infinity only because it is on each occasion visible and thinkable, and that it is to be discovered only by its contrast to what follows eternally from the sum total, and by its being more than this. But, apart from this need of thinking it, it exists, this ‘more than everything infinite,’ which has the power of presenting itself eternally; this ‘more,’ I say, exists in pure simplicity and invariability from the very beginning, and in all infinity it does not become more than this ‘more,’ nor does it become less. Nothing but its visibleness as more than the infinite—and in no other way can it become visible in its highest purity—creates the infinite and all that appears to appear in it. Now, where this ‘more’ actually enters as such a visible ‘more’—but it can only enter in an act of will—there essence itself, which alone exists and alone can exist, and which exists of itself and by itself, divine essence enters into appearance and makes itself directly visible; and in that place there exists, for that very reason, true originality and freedom, and so there is also a belief in them.

105. So, to the general question whether man is free or not, there is no general answer; for, just because man is free in the lower sense, because he begins in indecisive vacillation and hesitation, he may be free, or he may not be free, in the higher sense of the word. In reality, the way in which anyone answers this question is the clear mirror of his true inward being. He who is in fact no