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Text in bold indicates ideas related to the role of chance or "circumstance".

pp. 87-88

very animal has ideas because it has senses; up to a certain point it even associates those ideas; and man differs from the beasts in this respect only in a matter of degree. Some philosophers have even asserted that there is more difference between one given man and another than there is between a given man and a given beast. Thus it is not his understanding which constitutes the specific distinction of man among all other animals, but his capacity as a free agent. Nature commands all animals, and the beast obeys. Man receives the same impulsion, but he recognizes himself as being free to acquiesce or resist; and it is above all in this consciousness of his freedom that the spirituality of his soul reveals itself for physics explains in a certain way the mechanism of the senses and the formation of ideas, but in the power to will, or rather to choose, and in the feeling of that power, we see pure spiritual activity, of which the laws of mechanics can explain nothing.

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