Question IV: On the Impediments of Freedom

89. The causes which more greatly impede freedom, and in this way the human act, are of different kinds. Some proximately diminish or remove it, and these are only two: 1) one actual principle alone, namely the passions or movements of the sensitive appetite, for the movements or acts of reason and of the will concur in constituting the human act; 2) another habitual principle, namely habits (and habitual dispositions) with the attached custom, and these can also be found in reason and will. Besides these, 3) there are other causes which more remotely influence freedom, insofar as from them passions or habits or habitual dispositions can arise, such as bodily constitution, heredity, education, drunkenness and imperfect hypnosis, and several pathological or nervous states.