Freedom is the highest principle, the essence of things. It is even superior to truth, considered from the purely theoretical standpoint, or rather, it is the highest Truth. For that very reason it is not an abstraction, but the supreme reality. But this reality, the source of all other realities, precisely because it is freedom, cannot be an empirical datum , an immediate, brutal, and fatal fact . If freedom were given, or made, or produced, as the facts of the physical order are produced, it would not be freedom.
True freedom is the freedom which creates itself , or realizes itself .
And since it is, as we have just seen, the necessary instrument of freedom, we conclude that the understanding, the theoretical reason, the faculty which divides the ego into subject and object, is the auxiliary of practical reason, the organ of the will, the servant of freedom. But time is the intuitive faculty itself, the theoretical reason perceiving things successively . Theoretical reason, or the understanding, is therefore the means, the organ, which practical reason employs to realize itself. But this object, which the magician Reason shows to the ego, the external world, the non-ego, is in turn composed of a multitude of egos, of personalities apart from mine. In order to become a reality, the ideal ego divides itself into a plurality of historical subjects, and realizes itself in the moral relations established between them, and these relations are the source of natural, penal, and political rights.