MIND AND SOUL violation of the laws would be enough to prove that laws governing all human action cannot possibly exist.’ Kant, like Tolstoy, was a determinist, although he was not a hard determinist but a soft determinist That is to say, he believed that determinism was compatible with human freedom and spontaneity The human will, he said, is sensuous but free: that is to say, it is aVected by passion but not necessitated by passion ‘There is in man a power of self-determination, independently of any coercion through sensuous impulses.’ But the exercise of this power of self-determination has two aspects: empirical (perceptible in experience); and intelligible (graspable only by the intellect) Our free agency is the intelligible cause of sensible eVects; and these sensible phenomena are also part of an unbroken series that unfolds in accordance with unchangeable laws To reconcile human freedom with deterministic nature Kant says that nature operates in time, whereas the human will belongs to a non-phenomenal self that transcends time Throughout the centuries theologians had sought to reconcile human freedom with the omniscience of God by saying that God’s knowledge was outside time It was a novelty for a philosopher to seek to reconcile human freedom with the omnipotence of Nature by saying that human freedom was outside time It is indeed diYcult to reconcile Kant’s claim that the human will is atemporal with the examples he himself gives of free action, such as his rising from the chair at his desk But an impressive line of philosophers up to the present day have sought, like Kant, to show that freedom and determinism are compatible with each other It is surely correct that causal explanation (‘I knocked him over because I was pushed’) and explanation by reasons (‘I knocked him over to teach him a lesson’) are two radically diVerent types of explanation, each irreducible to the other Kant was surely right to emphasize this diVerence and to believe that it must be the basis of any reconciling project The reconciliation between freedom and determinism takes a baroque form in the metaphysics of Hegel Individual human choices such as Caesar’s decision to cross the Rubicon are actually determined by the world-spirit, who uses ‘the cunning of Reason’ to give eVect to its purposes But the necessity that operates at the level of the individual is an expression of the highest form of freedom, for freedom is the essential attribute of spirit and its ever increasing expression is the guiding force of history 244