ABSTRACT
Freedom is an ideal which throughout human evolution has inspired the most sublime philosophies and creeds. It has also mobilized man into the greatest battles of history and led him to the most significant and glorious victories. Any attempt to discover a satisfactory concept of freedom makes clear the fact that we do not suffer from a dearth of definitions but rather from a surfeit. There reigns a chaos and confusion of meanings, and it will be necessary to put some order into this semantic chaos, and to eliminate a few unnecessary concepts. A simple, common-sense reflection shows that there is and must be a co-efficient of power in the conception of freedom. There is an even more important reflection which occurs to a student of culture and of cultural processes, with reference to the freedom of philosophic detachment and of religious escape into Nirvana or the union with God.
