Excerpt from The Principles of Intellectual Education
No man is born free. We are the slaves of our descent, of our breeding and nurture, of surrounding circumstances. From the moment of our birth to the hour of our death we walk loaded with fetters, which limit our movements, hamper our development, and modify even our essential characteristics. Our life is one long struggle to attain freedom, and if, as the years increase, we to some extent enlarge our liberty, on the other hand new bonds are forged and we become the slaves, not indeed of others directly, but of our own past selves. Of all slavery this is the worst, the most binding, the most intolerable, yet the most unescapable of all. For nothing can really free us from it - pure liberty is impossible. Greater freedom in one direction is balanced by greater servitude in another: our one aim must be to make the inevitable servitude a servitude to what is best under given conditions, a freedom from the bonds that are removable, a binding only by such shackles as may be the noblest out of those which the whole surrounding world may fix upon us. To dream of greater freedom is delusion - a delusion of dangerous import. Our activity is closely circumscribed.
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