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Updated: June 29, 2025
That for centuries European thinkers only thought in order to prove something nowadays, on the contrary, we are suspicious of every thinker who "wishes to prove something" that it was always settled beforehand what WAS TO BE the result of their strictest thinking, as it was perhaps in the Asiatic astrology of former times, or as it is still at the present day in the innocent, Christian-moral explanation of immediate personal events "for the glory of God," or "for the good of the soul": this tyranny, this arbitrariness, this severe and magnificent stupidity, has EDUCATED the spirit; slavery, both in the coarser and the finer sense, is apparently an indispensable means even of spiritual education and discipline.
It has abandoned the primitive doctrine of God's arbitrariness and indifference, and substituted the doctrine that He is willing, and even eager, to hear the desires of His creatures i. e., their private notions, born of experience, as to what would be best for them.
"The hardest thing to bear," the taller one, he of the short trousers, was saying, as he dropped his shapely wrist over the iron arm of the bench, "the hardest thing for the individual, under the present system, is the arbitrariness of the assignments of life. The chief advantage of the Bellamy scheme seems to me to be in its harmonious adjustments, so to speak.
In Rome severe measures were often taken against movements which threatened the Roman official worship, but it was done at the discretion of the administration and not according to hard-and-fast rules; hence the practice was somewhat varying, and a certain arbitrariness inevitable.
It was a requital of Saul's deed in his early bright days, when, with his hastily raised levies, he scattered the Ammonites. It is one gleam of light amid the stormy sunset. There were men ready to hazard their lives even then, because of the noblest of Saul's acts, which no tyrannical arbitrariness or fierceness of later days had blotted out.
Arbitrariness the term seems the nearest we have to express the idea, but it is not quite happy, and the use of the more expressive German word "Willkür" might be pardoned is as great a danger in a democracy as in an autocracy, and it is less capable of remedy. The "divine right of the odd man" "to govern wrong" is too often assumed as an article of political faith.
There is an extraordinary arbitrariness about the way in which great success is allotted in this world. Who shall say that in one case out of every two, relative success is in proportion to relative merit? Nor need this be said in anything of a grumbling or captious spirit.
At bottom, the question lay between absolute power and free government, between arbitrariness and legality; and, on this field, both parties were determined not to accept a serious and final defeat.
Nevertheless, despite the danger of more or less arbitrariness, of more or less oppression of the individual, any government must be made strong enough perfectly to maintain order and peace among its subjects. Order is earth's as well as heaven's first law. The goddess Themis in the early Greek mythology was the goddess of order as well as the supplier of themistes or decisions.
With still greater arbitrariness, and yet with appreciation of the significance of Strauss' endeavour, we might set as the date of the full impact of this movement upon cherished religious convictions, that of the publication of his Leben Jesu, 1835. This movement has supported with abundant evidence the insight of the philosophers as to the nature of revelation.
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