Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE MEANING OF CIVIL LIBERTY. Liberty, in its absolute sense, means the faculty of willing, and the power of doing what has been willed, without influence from any other source, or from without. It means self-determination, unrestrained- ness of action. In this absolute meaning, there is but one free Being, because there is but one Being whose will is absolutely independent upon any influence, but that which he wills himself, and whose power is adequate to his absolute will who is Almighty. Liberty, self-determination, unrestrainedness of action, ascribed to any other being, or applied to any other sphere of action, has necessarily a relative and limited, therefore an approximative sense only. With this modification, however, we may apply the idea of freedom to all spheres of action and reflection.i i It will be observed that the terms Liberty and Freedom are used here as synonymes. Originally they meant the same. The German Freiheit (literally Frcehood) is still the term for our Liberty and Freedom; but as it happened in so many cases in our language where a Saxon and Latin term existed for the same idea, each acquired in the course of time a different shade of the original meaning, either permanently so, or at least under certain circumstances. Liberty and Freedom are still used in many cases as synonymous. We speak of the freedom as well as the liberty of human agency. It cannot be otherwise, since we have but one adjective, namely Free, although we have two nouns. When these are used as distinctive terms, freedom means the general, liberty the specific. We say: The slave was restored to freedom; and we speak of the liberty of the press, of civil liberty. Still, no orator or poet would hesitate to say, freedom of the press, if rhetorically or metrical...
Synopsis
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