War And Peace: Epilogue 2 - CHAPTER VIII

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IF HISTORY had to deal with external phenomena, the establishment of this

simple and obvious law would be sufficient, and our argument would be at an end.

But the law of history relates to man. A particle of matter cannot tell us that

it does not feel the inevitability of attraction and repulsion, and that the law

is not true. Man, who is the subject of history, bluntly says: I am free, and so

I am not subject to law.

The presence of the question of the freedom of the will, if not openly

expressed, is felt at every step in history.

All seriously thinking historians are involuntarily led to this question. All

the inconsistencies, and the obscurity of history, and the false path that

science has followed, is due to that unsolved question.

If the will of every man were free, that is, if every man could act as he

chose, the whole of history would be a tissue of disconnected accidents.

If one man only out of millions once in a thousand years had the power of

acting freely, that is, as he chose, it is obvious that a single free act of

that man in opposition to the laws governing human action would destroy the

possibility of any laws whatever governing all humanity.

If there is but one law controlling the actions of men, there can be no free

will, since men's will must be subject to that law.

In this contradiction lies the question of the freedom of the will, which

from the most ancient times has occupied the best intellects of mankind, and has

from the most ancient times been regarded as of immense importance.

Looking at man as a subject of observation from any point of

view—theological, historical, ethical, philosophical—we find a general law of

necessity to which he is subject like everything existing. Looking at him from

within ourselves, as what we are conscious of, we feel ourselves free.

This consciousness is a source of self-knowledge utterly apart and

independent of reason. Through reason man observes himself; but he knows himself

only through consciousness.

Apart from consciousness of self, any observation and application of reason

is inconceivable.

To understand, to observe, to draw conclusions, a man must first of all be

conscious of himself as living. A man knows himself as living, not otherwise

than as willing, that is, he is conscious of his free will. Man is conscious of

his will as constituting the essence of his life, and he cannot be conscious of

it except as free.

If subjecting himself to his own observation, a man perceives that his will

is always controlled by the same law (whether he observes the necessity of

taking food, or of exercising his brain, or anything else), he cannot regard

this never-varying direction of his will otherwise than as a limitation of it.

If it were not free, it could not be limited. A man's will seems to him to be

limited just because he is not conscious of it except as free. You say: I am not

free. But I have lifted and dropped my hand. Everybody understands that this

illogical reply is an irrefutable proof of freedom.

This reply is an expression of a consciousness not subject to reason.

If the consciousness of freedom were not a separate source of self-knowledge

apart from reason, it would be controlled by reasoning and experience. But in

reality such control never exists, and is inconceivable.

A series of experiments and arguments prove to every man that he, as an

object of observation, is subject to certain laws, and the man submits to them,

and never, after they have once been pointed out to him, controverts the law of

gravity or of impenetrability. But the same series of experiments and arguments

proves to him that the complete freedom of which he is conscious in himself is

impossible; that every action of his depends on his organisation, on his

character, and the motives acting on him. But man never submits to the

deductions of these experiments and arguments.

Learning from experience and from reasoning that a stone falls to the ground,

a man unhesitatingly believes this; and in all cases expects the law he has

learnt to be carried out.

But learning just as incontestably that his will is subject to laws, he does

not, and cannot, believe it.

However often experience and reasoning show a man that in the same

circumstances, with the same character, he does the same thing as before, yet on

being led the thousandth time in the same circumstances, with the same

character, to an action that always ends in the same way, he feels just as

unhesitatingly convinced that he can act as he chooses, as ever. Every man,

savage and sage alike, however incontestably reason and experience may prove to

him that it is impossible to imagine two different courses of action under

precisely the same circumstances, yet feels that without this meaningless

conception (which constitutes the essence of freedom) he cannot conceive of

life. He feels that however impossible it may be, it is so; seeing that, without

that conception of freedom, he would be not only unable to understand life, but

could not live for a single instant.

He could not live because all men's instincts, all their impulses in life,

are only efforts to increase their freedom. Wealth and poverty, health and

disease, culture and ignorance, labour and leisure, repletion and hunger, virtue

and vice, are all only terms for greater or less degrees of freedom.

To conceive a man having no freedom is impossible except as a man deprived of

life.

If the idea of freedom appears to the reason a meaningless contradiction,

like the possibility of doing two actions at a single moment of time, or the

possibility of an effect without a cause, that only proves that consciousness is

not subject to reason.

That unwavering, irrefutable consciousness of freedom, not influenced by

experience and argument, recognised by all thinkers, and felt by all men without

exception, that consciousness without which no conception of man is reliable,

constitutes the other side of the question.

Man is the creation of an Almighty, All-good, and All-wise God. What is sin,

the conception of which follows from man's consciousness of freedom? That is the

question of theology.

Men's actions are subject to general and invariable laws, expressed in

statistics. What is man's responsibility to society, the conception of which

follows from his consciousness of freedom? That is the question of

jurisprudence.

A man's actions follow from his innate character and the motives acting on

him. What is conscience and the sense of right and wrong in action that follows

from the consciousness of freedom? That is the question of ethics.

Man in connection with the general life of humanity is conceived as governed

by the laws that determine that life. But the same man, apart from that

connection, is conceived of as free. How is the past life of nations and of

humanity to be regarded—as the product of the free or not free action of men?

That is the question of history.

Only in our conceited age of the popularisation of knowledge, thanks to the

most powerful weapon of ignorance—the diffusion of printed matter—the question

of the freedom of the will has been put on a level, on which it can no longer be

the same question. In our day the majority of so-called advanced people—that is,

a mob of ignoramuses—have accepted the result of the researches of natural

science, which is occupied with one side only of the question, for the solution

of the whole question.

There is no soul and no free will, because the life of man is expressed in

muscular movements, and muscular movements are conditioned by nervous activity.

There is no soul and no free will, because at some unknown period of time we

came from apes, they say, and write, and print. Not at all suspecting that

thousands of years ago all religions and all thinkers have admitted—have never,

in fact, denied—that same law of necessity, which they are now so strenuously

trying to prove by physiology and comparative zoology. They do not see that

natural science can do no more in this question than serve to illumine one side

of it. The fact that, from the point of view of observation, the reason and the

will are but secretions of the brain, and that man, following the general law of

development, may have developed from lower animals at some unknown period of

time, only illustrates in a new aspect the truth, recognised thousands of years

ago by all religious and philosophic theories, that man is subject to the laws

of necessity. It does not advance one hair's-breadth the solution of the

question, which has another opposite side, founded on the consciousness of

freedom.

If men have descended from apes at an unknown period of time, that is as

comprehensible as that they were fabricated out of a clod of earth at a known

period of time (in the one case the date is the unknown quantity, in the other

the method of fabrication); and the question how to reconcile man's

consciousness of free will with the law of necessity to which he is subject

cannot be solved by physiology and zoology, seeing that in the frog, the rabbit,

and the monkey we can observe only muscular and nervous activity, while in man

we find muscular and nervous activity plus consciousness.

The scientific men and their disciples who suppose they are solving this

question are like plasterers set to plaster one side of a church wall, who, in

the absence of the chief superintendent of their work, should in the excess of

their zeal plaster over the windows, and the holy images, and the woodwork, and

the scaffolding, and rejoice that from the plasterers' point of view everything

was now so smooth and even.

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1. Ebooks list page : 85
2. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER VIII
3. War And Peace: Epilogue 2 - CHAPTER IX
4. War And Peace: Epilogue 2 - CHAPTER VII
5. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER X
6. War And Peace: Epilogue 2 - CHAPTER IV
7. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER XI
8. War And Peace: Epilogue 2 - CHAPTER II
9. War And Peace: Epilogue 2 - CHAPTER I
10. War And Peace: Epilogue 2 - CHAPTER XI
11. War And Peace: Epilogue 2 - CHAPTER X
12. War And Peace: Epilogue 2 - CHAPTER XII
13. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER IX
14. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER II
15. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER III
16. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER XVI