# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1857_S23
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Certain Matters Connected Therewith, etc. 23

We too are now, though conditioned by our dependence upon God, certain — through immediate feeling, as the state within us in which we are compelled to think something as actual, without needing any knowledge derived from inferences — that we are free, that is, that we have the determining ground of our willing within ourselves, without experiencing any inner or outer compulsion, any being-determined such that the effect would follow inevitably. (Cf. Joh. Gerhard, loc. de libero arbitrio, c. 1.) The concept of freedom so understood stands opposed to that of natural necessity, since the arising activity of a power within the subject presupposes something other than that power itself, through which it undergoes determination, so that in this case it must now occur. In this sense man has not merely the capacity, of himself, through the activity of the powers immanent within him, to bring forth effects which are to be regarded as his own peculiar works (spontaneity); for these could still always be a necessary result, as natural fruits and expressions of his drives in interaction with influences from without; and man would then differ from the animals only by the higher and more clearly conscious direction of his faculties. It is a fact of the simple self-observation of our spirit, that the will, in its actions, is not always determined by outward circumstances (dependence upon the world and nature) or by inner constitution (drives and their representations), or by its own earlier activities, whereby it has already given itself a particular direction, but often solely by its momentary decision. We are also conscious of ourselves as persons, and indeed as such with whose I a definite individuality of psychical as well as bodily powers coexists — an individuality established by creation, mediated by procreation, and unfolded from within by one's own activity of will, or at the same time appropriated from without. This peculiarity of our being and life, which constitutes the particular existence of the individual, cannot be referred to the center of the I in self-consciousness, whereby personality exists, without presupposing an external world. God is an individual spirit only in the sense that He does not belong to the organism of a so-called genus; whether personality is absolute or not is determined by the nature of the content that is to be taken up into self-consciousness. God has the condition of His personhood not in some other being, but simply and absolutely in Himself; but the created individual exists only in distinction from its genus; therefore the content of its self-consciousness is nowhere a self-subsistent and absolutely self-contained whole, but something belonging to another, something in some way limited, a part of the world. The distinctions, without which even God could not be a unity full of life, in which He determines Himself — unless indeed we were to posit a dead being as the ground of His actions in Him —