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If 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 and 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 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.
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