Nevertheless, Dante does not for a moment fail to insist on
the moral responsibility of man; he believes in free will. The belief
in the freedom of the will, in the popular sense of the words, has
always prevailed in Western countries. At all times men have been held
responsible for their actions, as though this freedom were a matter of
course. The case is otherwise with the religious and philosophical
doctrine, which labors under the difficulty of harmonizing the nature
of the will with the laws of the universe at large. We have here to do
with a question of more or less, which every moral estimate must take
into account. Dante is not wholly free from those astrological
superstitions which illumined the horizon of his time with deceptive
light, but they do not hinder him from rising to a worthy conception of
human nature. 'The stars,' he makes his Marco Lambert say
('Purgatorio,' xvi, 73), 'the stars give the first impulse to your
actions, but a light is given you to know good and evil, and free will,
which, if it endure the strain in its first battlings with the heavens,
at length gains the whole victory, if it be well nurtured.'
Others might seek the necessity which annulled human freedom in another
power than the stars, but the question was henceforth an open and
inevitable one. So far as it was a question for the schools or the
pursuit of isolated thinkers, its treatment belongs to the historian of
philosophy.
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