Time & Perspective Quote by Corliss Lamont

Lamont’s line is a sly pivot in the free-will debate: instead of starting with metaphysics, he starts with the gut-level phenomenology of choosing. “Most men, I am convinced” reads like a deliberate narrowing of ambition. He’s not claiming a proof; he’s claiming a recurring human data point, the ordinary but “unmistakable” sensation that, at the hinge of consequence, you feel alternatives as live options. The rhetorical move is strategic: if determinism wants to demote freedom to an illusion, Lamont insists the “illusion” is oddly well-engineered, stubborn, and socially functional.

The phrase “final moment of significant choice” does a lot of work. This isn’t about trivial preferences; it’s about the crossroads where identity gets retroactively rewritten by one act. Lamont is cueing the reader to recall that specific internal theater: the pause, the self-address, the awareness of risk. In that charged interval, agency feels less like a theory and more like a moral fact. He’s smuggling in an ethical stake: if people experience themselves as able to “really decide,” responsibility can’t be treated as mere decoration.

Context matters. Lamont, a 20th-century humanist, was writing in an era fascinated by scientific explanation and skeptical of soul-talk. His intent isn’t to out-argue physics; it’s to defend the human-scale experience that makes democracy, law, and self-improvement intelligible. The subtext: even if causality is everywhere, the lived experience of deliberation is where we locate dignity - and where we decide to act as if our choices count.