Mean free path

“ It is carrying the notion of liberty too far, to suppose, because we are free-born Englishmen, that we may choose our own faith and go to heaven our own way! What would become of the right reverend and reverend guides and turnpike-men, if people were permitted to avoid the strait gate and go to their journey's end without paying? ”

“ And how shall you rise beyond your days and nights unless you break the chains which you at the dawn of your understanding have fastened around your noon hour?
In truth that which you call freedom is the strongest of these chains, though its links glitter in the sun and dazzle your eyes.
And what is it but fragments of your own self you would discard that you may become free?
If it is an unjust law you would abolish, that law was written with your own hand upon your own forehead. ”

“ The sight of the cross-roads is in a true sense the sign of the cross. For it is the sign of a truly Christian thing; that sharp combination of liberty and limitation which we call choice. A man is entirely free to choose between right and left, or between right and wrong. As I looked for the last time at the pale roads under the load of cloud, I knew that our civilisation had indeed come to the cross-roads. ”

“ Who ever heard of a church that had workers enough? Wherever there is a city, town, or village, there is work to be done in the direction of civic betterment.
Is your life restricted by certain responsibilities not of your own choosing, yet from which you cannot honorably escape—nay, would not escape? Do you long for freedom, for the power to carve out your own destiny in your own way? How swiftly you would move forward if you could tread the path of your own choosing! Do not think that you are unusual in this longing. It is difficult to be reconciled to the limitations placed upon us. ”

“ Imagine the same branch having made up its vegetable mind that it could live its own life apart from the vine, twisting its various fibres into all kinds of knots and snarls, according to its own idea of living, so that the sap from the main stem could only reach it in a minimum quantity. What a dearth of leaf, flower, and fruit would appear in the branch! Yet the figure is perfectly illustrative of the way in which most of us are interfering with the best use of the life that is ours.
Freedom is obedience to law. A bridge can be built to stand, only in obedience to the laws of mechanics. ”

“ Not only does truth point out the direction a man's life should take, but it opens the only road he can take. [323] Hence, all men will invariably, free or not, follow the road of truth;—some willingly, doing the work they have set themselves to do; others involuntarily, by submitting in spite of themselves to the law of life. It is in the power of choice that a man's freedom lies. ”

“ Along this road, as along any other road, we shall not reach Utopia; and since the Utopia of every person who possesses one is unique that perhaps need not be regretted. We shall not even, within any measurable period of time, reach a sanely free and human life fit to satisfy quite moderate aspirations. ”

“ The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty to think, feel, do, just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind much more to get rid of others. ”

“ The next instant he remembered again, with a throb of exhilaration that he was free. By her own act she had given him back his freedom—she had returned him to his life and to his work. As for her if she chose to fall back into her old bondage, who was there in heaven or on earth that could hold him to account? Every law that had been made by man since the beginning of law was upon his side; and every law declared to him that he was free. Free! The word went like the intoxication of joy to his head; then, even while the exhilaration lasted, he shivered and came abruptly to a halt. ”

“ Are you aware that those who carelessly do so, blink the whole of the world-old arguments between necessity and free-will? Whatever may be the rights of that quarrel, they are certainly not to be assumed in a passing epithet. But what else does the writer do, who tells us that an inevitable sequence, an irresistible growth, exists in the moral as well as in the physical world; and then says, as a seemingly identical statement, that it is the crown of philosophy to see immutable law, even in the complex action of human life? ”

“ Standing right at the gateway of our choice, at the parting of the ways, when we have fully resolved to take the path that is best for us, a hard and forbidding one compared with the easy way along the line of least resistance, doubt calls a halt. ”

“ One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self- interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. ”

“ Now they seemed unearthly, without any stain of human desire, without any worldly tarnish. He must be free. The latitude of his life must be unbounded by any human law, otherwise he would never attain. ”

“ If the scheme that I sketch out at the end of this book took form there would be local option eventually, and people will submit to what they themselves enact, whereas they chafe against the same thing when imposed from above. That is human nature, and it is a very valuable trait of human nature. It is the revolt against subjection, and the declaration that the objective of life is to be free. ”

“ Why, what’s the smoothness of a road, put against the freedom of a free-born American? And what does a broken zig-zag signify, comparable to knowing that the men what we have been pleased to send up to Congress, speaks handsome and straight, as we chooses they should? ”

“ The broad, downward path which leadeth to destruction, vitiating the strong and treading underfoot the helpless and the weak, or the steep, up-hill path, which shall lead us to a higher and purer national life,—a path needing courage and vigilance and devotion to pursue, but leading to assured success—the path of Christian morality—of salvation for one and all. ”

“ In paraphrased application to the tendencies of our day, it may truly be said that all roads lead to the great social reconstruction. The economic awakening of the workingman, and his realization of the necessity for concerted industrial action; the tendencies of modern education, especially in their application to the free development of the child; the spirit of growing unrest expressed through, and cultivated by, art and literature, all pave the way to the Open Road. ”

“ If man is not free, what becomes of the scaffolding of his moral sense? Or, if he can control his destiny, if by his own freewill he can interfere with the execution of the general plan, what becomes of God? ”

“ There are other ways, less clearly marked, more difficult to trace,—the way of moral indifference, the way of intellectual pride, the way of hypocrisy, the way of indecision. This last is not a single road; it is a net-work of sheep-tracks, crossing and recrossing the great highways, leading in every direction, and ending nowhere. The men who wander in these aimless paths go up and down through the world, changing their purposes, following one another blindly, forever travelling but never arriving at the goal of their journey. ”

“ We are all conscious of a will, conscious of a certain freedom in the exercise of our will, but wholly unconscious as to the line of separation between volition and environment. Part of our actions arise from fixed necessity, part are the result of free will. ”

“ The presence of the problem of man’s free will, though unexpressed, is felt at every step of history.
All seriously thinking historians have involuntarily encountered this question. All the contradictions and obscurities of history and the false path historical science has followed are due solely to the lack of a solution of that question.
If the will of every man were free, that is, if each man could act as he pleased, all history would be a series of disconnected incidents. ”

“ The significance of the traditional discussion of free will is that it reflects precisely a separation of moral activity from nature and the public life of men.
One has to turn from moral theories to the general human struggle for political, economic and religious liberty, for freedom of thought, speech, assemblage and creed, to find significant reality in the conception of freedom of will. Then one finds himself out of the stiflingly close atmosphere of an inner consciousness and in the open-air world. ”

“ I know that right and wrong are here comparative; and that it may be wise to continue in a path which you have already trodden, though it may not be the most direct, or the least rugged, rather than encounter the hedges and ditches which may lie between you and the straight and even road. But if you can satisfy yourself that the advantages of the direct road will, in all probability, more than balance the labour and risk of getting into it, you would be foolish not to make the change. ”

“ Where resistance ends and freedom begins, there is space; where freedom ends, and obstruction begins, there is matter. We find our sentient life to be made up, as regards movement, of a certain number and range of these two alternations; in other words, free spaces and resisting barriers. And we can, by the constructive power already mentioned, imagine other proportions of the two experiences; we can imagine the scope for movement, the absence of obstruction, to be enlarged more and more, to be counted by thousands and millions of miles ”

“ And there they walk the rather that others also may follow them, and departing from evil may be joined to them in the highway to heaven.—Jermin.
Every man has a highway of his own. It is formed, as our forefathers formed their roads, simply by walking often on it and without a pre-determined plan. Foresight and wisdom may improve the moral path, as much as they have in our day improved the material. The highway of the covetous is to depart from poverty and make for riches with all his might. In his eagerness to take the shortest cut he often falls over a precipice, or loses his way in a wood. ”

“ For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand—that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive master-minding—then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free men. ”

“ Let me be a free man—free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself—and i will obey every law, or submit to the penalty. ”

“ “He calls his wish, it comes; he sends it back,
And says, he call’d another; that arrives,
Meets the same welcome; yet he still calls on; 800
Till one calls him, who varies not his call,
But holds him fast, in chains of darkness bound,
Till nature dies, and judgment sets him free;
A freedom far less welcome than his chain.” ”

“ How far, and in what sense, can action which is determined by motives be said to be free? For a long time the advocates of free-will, in their eagerness to preserve moral responsibility, went so far as to deny all motives as influencing moral action. ”

“ Let no one believe that landing on the shores of “The land of the free, and the home of the brave” is a pleasant experience; it is a hard, harsh fact, surrounded by the grinding machinery of the law, which sifts, picks, and chooses; admitting the fit and excluding the weak and helpless. ”

“ I will fly to our fellow-citizens in the Southern States; I will on my knees conjure them, in the name of humanity, to abolish a traffic which causes it to bleed in every pore. If they are deaf to the pleadings of Nature, I will conjure them, for the sake of consistency, to cease to deprive their fellow-creatures of freedom, which their writers, their orators, Representatives, Senators, and even their Constitutions of Government, have declared to be the unalienable birthright of man. ”

“ And so they believed that it was possible to live outside of the state, in a condition of nature, and that when they stepped out of that condition of nature they did it of their own free will and were not constrained by any earthly power. ”

“ And before we have gone many steps, some sort of keeper or other meets us and says to us, 'Trespassers, back again to the road!' Life is rigidly hedged in and limited. To live as you like is the prerogative of a brute. To live as you ought, and to recognise and command by obeying the laws and limitations stamped upon our very nature and enjoined by our circumstances, is the freedom and the glory of a man. There are limitations, I say—fences on all sides. Men put up their fences; and they are often like the wretched wooden hoardings that you sometimes see limiting the breadth of a road. ”

“ In paths which they saw not, who thought me prisoner, in the paths of Thy righteousness, in the paths of Thy commandments....For every path is a way, but not every way is a path. Why then are those ways called paths, save because they are narrow? Broad is the way of the wicked, narrow the way of the righteous. ”

“ In fact, I have come to define civilization as the harmonious development of the body, the mind, and the heart. We make a mistake if we believe that this nation can fulfil its high destiny and mission either with mere athletes or mere scholars. We need the education of the moral sense; and if these good roads will enable men, women, and children to go more frequently to church, and there hear expounded the gospel and receive inspiration therefrom, that alone is reason enough for good roads. ”

“ A horse that is hitched with others to a wagon is not free not to walk in front of the wagon; and if it will not draw, the wagon will strike its legs, and it will go whither the wagon goes, and will pull it involuntarily. But, in spite of this limited freedom, it is free itself to pull the wagon or be dragged along by it. The same is true of man.
Whether this freedom is great or not, in comparison with that fantastic freedom which we should like to have, this freedom unquestionably exists, and this freedom is freedom, and in this freedom is contained the good which is accessible to man. ”