《War And Peace》 Epilogue2 CHAPTER VIII
by Leo Tolstoy
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.
name=Marker15>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.
