EIGHTH LECTURE
Human will is immerged in the world of instincts and passions. In the state of ordinary mental health passions increase the intensity of willing and diminish the freedom of willing, but without suppressing that freedom. In the state of complete mental disease, psychic mechanisms of insticts and affectivity suppress both the exercise and the freedom of will. In the state of mental health perfected by virtues, the virtues strengthen both the intensity and the freedom of willing.
Are the truly free acts rare or frequent in human existence? To answer this question it is to distinguish two categories of free acts: First, the acts of pure and perfect freedom; second, the acts of imperfect or mixed freedom. The first category presupposes that man has already reached that kind of freedom which we have called freedom of autonomy and which is something quite different from free will. The acts of free will belonging to this category are rare.
The second category presupposes only that man is in a sufficiently normal state of psychic health. The acts of free will belonging to this category are frequent in human existence, they even constitute the tissue of our life. But then the will gives ordinarily free consent to an automatic and dynamic mass of habits, virtues or vices which previoiusly influence it, and its free act is an act that engages the whole personality of man only on the condition that the whole past of the person is taken into account.
A third case must be considered. That is the case of the first act of free will. This act concerns the free determination of the last aim toward which we direct our life. It is accomplished when the child becomes psychologically an adult.
This first act of free will, which marks the emergence from childhood, may belong either to the first or the second category we have mentioned, but in the proportional manner fitting to the child.