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Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom – F W J Schelling

How often does it not happen that a man shows a tendency to evil from childhood on, from a time when, empirically viewed, we can scarcely attribute freedom and deliberation to him, so that we can anticipate that neither punishment nor teaching will move him, and who subsequently really turns out to be the twisted limb which we anticipated in the bent twig.

But no one questions his responsibility, and all are as convinced of the guilt of this person as one could be if every single act had been in his control.

This common judgment of a tendency to do evil, (a tendency which in its origin is entirely unconscious and even irresistible) as being a free deed, points to an act and thus to a life before this life.

Only it must not just be thought of as prior in time, since what is intelligible is altogether outside time.

In creation there is the greatest harmony, and nothing is so separate and sequent as we must represent it, but the subsequent cooperates in what precedes it and everything occurs at the same time in one magic stroke.

Therefore man, who here appears as fixed and determined, took on a specific form in first creation and is born as that which he is from eternity, since this primal act determined even the nature and condition of his corporealization.

The greatest obstacle to the doctrine of freedom has ever been the relation of the assumed accidental nature of human conduct to the unity of the world-whole as previously planned in divine reason.