Читать книгу Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation. Reprinted from Green's Philosophical Works, vol. II., with Preface by Bernard Bosanquet онлайн

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14. If, however, the question is persisted in, 'Has a man power over the determinations of his will?' we must answer both 'yes' and 'no.' 'No,' in the sense that he is not other than his will, with ability to direct it as the will directs the muscles. 'Yes,' in the sense that nothing external to him or his will or self-consciousness has power over them. 'No,' again, in the sense that, given the man and his object as he and it at any time are, there is no possibility of the will being determined except in one way, for the will is already determined, being nothing else than the man as directed to some object. 'Yes,' in the sense that the determining object is determined by the man or will just as much as the man or will by the object. The fact that the state of the man, on which the nature of his object at any time depends, is a result of previous states, does not affect the validity of this last assertion, since (as we have seen [1]) all these states are states of a self-consciousness from which all alien determination, all determination except through the medium of self-consciousness, is excluded.