SIXTH LECTURE
The will is master of the very judgment which determines it: how is it possible that the will masters in this way the judgment which determines the will itself?
The answer lies in the Aristotelian axiom: causes belonging to different orders are causes of one another. In the act of free will, which is an act without succession, the will and the intellect involve each other. The will, to be determined, needs a practical judgment of the intellect. Such or such a judgment, placed before the mind by the intellect, will specify the movement of the will in the order of formal extrinsic causality (order of specification). And in the order of efficient causality (order of exercise), the will itself makes such or such a judgment efficient or grasping in existence, that is efficaciously determining, because this judgment corresponds to what is here and now the operating subject in its ultimate formation and actuality, by virtue of the movement of the will.
Thus the will, through the circuit of its power of exercise or efficiency, exerts specificating action on the judging intellect, that is on the very power of specificating human activity. In such a case we are facing a paradoxical primacy of the exercise or of the pure order of existence over the specification or over the pure order of essence and form. That paradox, which is not a contradiction, but corresponds to the deficiency of every good that is not the Good in regard to the acting and dominating spirit, is the very mystery of freedom.