War and Peace

history dealt only with external phenomena, the establishment of this
simple and obvious law would suffice and we should have finished our
argument. But the law of history relates to man. A particle of matter
cannot tell us that it does not feel the law of attraction or repulsion
and that that law is untrue, but man, who is the subject of history,
says plainly: I am free and am therefore not subject to the law.

The presence of the problem of man’s free will, though unexpressed, is
felt at every step of history.

All seriously thinking historians have involuntarily encountered this
question. All the contradictions and obscurities of history and the
false path historical science has followed are due solely to the lack of
a solution of that question.

If the will of every man were free, that is, if each man could act as he
pleased, all history would be a series of disconnected incidents.

If in a thousand years even one man in a million could act freely, that
is, as he chose, it is evident that one single free act of that man’s
in violation of the laws governing human action would destroy the
possibility of the existence of any laws for the whole of humanity.

If there be a single law governing the actions of men, free will cannot
exist, for then man’s will is subject to that law.

In this contradiction lies the problem of free will, which from most
ancient times has occupied the best human minds and from most ancient
times has been presented in its whole tremendous significance.

The problem is that regarding man as a subject of observation
from whatever point of view—theological, historical, ethical, or
philosophic—we find a general law of necessity to which he (like all
that exists) is subject. But regarding him from within ourselves as what
we are conscious of, we feel ourselves to be free.

This consciousness is a source of self-cognition quite apart from and
independent of reason. Through his reason man observes himself, but only
through consciousness does he know himself.

Apart from consciousness of self no observation or application of reason
is conceivable.

To understand, observe, and draw conclusions, man must first of all be
conscious of himself as living. A man is only conscious of himself as
a living being by the fact that he wills, that is, is conscious of
his volition. But his will—which forms the essence of his life—man
recognizes (and can but recognize) as free.

If, observing himself, man sees that his will is always directed by
one and the same law (whether he observes the necessity of taking
food, using his brain, or anything else) he cannot recognize this
never-varying direction of his will otherwise than as a limitation of
it. Were it 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 my hand and let it fall.
Everyone understands that this illogical reply is an irrefutable
demonstration of freedom.

That reply is the expression of a consciousness that is not subject to
reason.

If the consciousness of freedom were not a separate and independent
source of self-consciousness it would be subject to reasoning and
to experience, but in fact such subjection does not exist and is
inconceivable.

A series of experiments and arguments proves to every man that he, as
an object of observation, is subject to certain laws, and man submits to
them and never resists the laws of gravity or impermeability once he
has become acquainted with them. But the same series of experiments
and arguments proves to him that the complete freedom of which he is
conscious in himself is impossible, and that his every action depends
on his organization, his character, and the motives acting upon him; yet
man never submits to the deductions of these experiments and arguments.
Having learned from experiment and argument that a stone falls
downwards, a man indubitably believes this and always expects the law
that he has learned to be fulfilled.

But learning just as certainly that his will is subject to laws, he does
not and cannot believe this.

However often experiment and reasoning may show a man that under the
same conditions and with the same character he will do the same thing as
before, yet when under the same conditions and with the same character
he approaches for the thousandth time the action that always ends in the
same way, he feels as certainly convinced as before the experiment
that he can act as he pleases. Every man, savage or sage, however
incontestably reason and experiment may prove to him that it is
impossible to imagine two different courses of action in precisely the
same conditions, feels that without this irrational conception (which
constitutes the essence of freedom) he cannot imagine life. He feels
that however impossible it may be, it is so, for without this conception
of freedom not only would he be unable to understand life, but he would
be unable to live for a single moment.

He could not live, because all man’s efforts, all his impulses to life,
are only efforts to increase freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and
obscurity, power and subordination, strength and weakness, health and
disease, culture and ignorance, work and leisure, repletion and hunger,
virtue and vice, are only greater or lesser degrees of freedom.

A man having no freedom cannot be conceived of except as deprived of
life.

If the conception of freedom appears to reason to be a senseless
contradiction like the possibility of performing two actions at one and
the same instant of time, or of an effect without a cause, that only
proves that consciousness is not subject to reason.

This unshakable, irrefutable consciousness of freedom, uncontrolled by
experiment or argument, recognized by all thinkers and felt by everyone
without exception, this consciousness without which no conception of man
is possible constitutes the other side of the question.

Man is the creation of an all-powerful, all-good, and all-seeing God.
What is sin, the conception of which arises from the consciousness of
man’s freedom? That is a question for theology.

The actions of men are subject to general immutable laws expressed in
statistics. What is man’s responsibility to society, the conception of
which results from the conception of freedom? That is a question for
jurisprudence.

Man’s actions proceed from his innate character and the motives acting
upon him. What is conscience and the perception of right and wrong
in actions that follows from the consciousness of freedom? That is a
question for ethics.

Man in connection with the general life of humanity appears subject
to laws which determine that life. But the same man apart from that
connection appears to be free. How should the past life of nations and
of humanity be regarded—as the result of the free, or as the result of
the constrained, activity of man? That is a question for history.

Only in our self-confident day of the popularization of knowledge—thanks
to that most powerful engine of ignorance, the diffusion of printed
matter—has the question of the freedom of will been put on a level on
which the question itself cannot exist. In our time the majority of
so-called advanced people—that is, the crowd of ignoramuses—have taken
the work of the naturalists who deal with one side of the question for a
solution of the whole problem.

They say and write and print that the soul and freedom do not exist,
for the life of man is expressed by muscular movements and muscular
movements are conditioned by the activity of the nerves; the soul and
free will do not exist because at an unknown period of time we sprang
from the apes. They say this, not at all suspecting that thousands of
years ago that same law of necessity which with such ardor they are now
trying to prove by physiology and comparative zoology was not merely
acknowledged by all the religions and all the thinkers, but has never
been denied. They do not see that the role of the natural sciences in
this matter is merely to serve as an instrument for the illumination
of one side of it. For the fact that, from the point of view of
observation, reason and the will are merely secretions of the brain, and
that man following the general law may have developed from lower animals
at some unknown period of time, only explains from a fresh side
the truth admitted thousands of years ago by all the religious and
philosophic theories—that from the point of view of reason man is
subject to the law of necessity; but it does not advance by a hair’s
breadth the solution of the question, which has another, opposite, side,
based on the consciousness of freedom.

If men descended from the apes at an unknown period of time, that is
as comprehensible as that they were made from a handful of earth at a
certain period of time (in the first case the unknown quantity is the
time, in the second case it is the origin); and the question of how
man’s consciousness of freedom is to be reconciled with the law of
necessity to which he is subject cannot be solved by comparative
physiology and zoology, for in a frog, a rabbit, or an ape, we can
observe only the muscular nervous activity, but in man we observe
consciousness as well as the muscular and nervous activity.

The naturalists and their followers, thinking they can solve this
question, are like plasterers set to plaster one side of the walls of
a church who, availing themselves of the absence of the chief
superintendent of the work, should in an access of zeal plaster over the
windows, icons, woodwork, and still unbuttressed walls, and should be
delighted that from their point of view as plasterers, everything is now
so smooth and regular.