FIFTH LECTURE
The second part of the course will deal with the Nature of freedom. In the first section of this part, we shall try to analyse philosophically the act of free will.
In contradistinction to the sensitive or animal inclinations, the will, that is, the power of spiritual appetition, is rooted in the intellect. And because the intellect disengages from singular desirable things the idea of what is good (that is of being, apprehended in one of its universal aspects), the will tends by nature towards what is good in every respect to the human subject. This natural tendency is a necessary one. Human will, having an infinite capacity to love, cannot not desire happiness, even absolute happiness.
Now, from the very fact that human will is necessarily determined by the desire of absolute hapiness, it follows that everything which is not perfect happiness is unable to determine the will as a necessitant cause. To this lack of necessitating attraction, proper to every particular good, corresponds in the will an indetermination which is not a potential indeterminatioin, but an active and dominative one.
This indetermination of the will is awakened when the intellect judges of an act to be done, and sees that the good of which the act would be the effectuation is at once good and not good. Therefore it is the will which makes this good capable here and now of being absolutely judged as something which must and should be effectuated. The active indetermination of the will consists in the mastering by the will of the practical judgment which determines it.