To think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call “human
nature,” the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man
is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically;
thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by
instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the
function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free
to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your
nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival—so that for
you, who are a human being, the question “to be or not to be” is the question
“to think or not to think.”
A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He
needs a code of values to guide his actions.