War And Peace

Only in our age of arrogance and the popularization of knowledge, thanks to that most powerful weapon of ignorance, the spread of the printed word, has the question of free will been transferred to new terrain where it cannot continue to exist as a question. In our day most of the so-called advanced people – nothing but a bunch of ignoramuses – have accepted the research of the natural scientists, which is only interested in one side of the question, as a solution to the question as a whole.

There is no soul and no free will, because the life of man is expressed in muscular movements, and muscular movements are conditioned by activity in the nervous system. There is no soul and no free will, because at some unknown period of time we descended from the apes. This is what they are saying, writing and printing, and it never even crosses their mind that thousands of years ago all religions and all thinkers were ready to acknowledge – in fact, they have never denied it – the very law of necessity which they are now trying so hard to prove by physiology and comparative zoology. They cannot see that the only thing the natural sciences can do for this question is to throw light on one side of it. For even if we can show empirically that reason and will are nothing but secretions of the brain, and man has followed a universal law of evolution by managing to develop from the lower animals at some unknown period of time, all of this will only give us a new angle on a truth which has been recognized for thousands of years by all religious and philosophic theories, that from the standpoint of reason man is subject to the laws of necessity; it does not contribute one iota to the solution of the problem, which has another side, diametrically opposite, based on the consciousness of freedom.

If men did descend from the apes at an unknown period of time, that is as intelligible as the idea that they were formed from a handful of earth at a known period of time (in the first case, X, the unknown quantity, stands for the date, in the second it stands for the method of formation), and the problem of reconciling man’s consciousness of free will with the overriding law of necessity cannot be solved by comparative physiology and zoology, for one good reason: in the frog, the rabbit, and the monkey we can observe nothing but muscular and nervous activity, whereas in man we have muscular and nervous activity plus consciousness.

The natural scientists and their followers who think they are in the process of solving this problem are like plasterers commissioned to plaster one side of a church wall, who, in a rush of enthusiasm while the foreman is away, go on to plaster over the windows, the holy icons, the woodwork and the walls waiting to be buttressed, happy that from a plasterer’s point of view everything has turned out so beautifully smooth and even.

CHAPTER 9

In solving the problem of free will versus necessity history has one advantage over the other branches of knowledge that have dealt with this question: for the purposes of history the problem concerns not the essential nature of man’s will but the actual manifestation of that will in the past under certain specific conditions.

In attempting to solve this problem, history’s position vis-à-vis the other sciences is the same as the relationship between applied and theoretical science.

History takes as its subject not the will of man, but our representation of that will.

So, the insoluble mystery of reconciling two opposites, freedom and necessity, does not exist for history as it does for theology, ethics and philosophy. History examines manifestations of human life in which these two opposites have already been reconciled.

In real life every historical event, every human action, is spelt out and understood, with no sense of contradiction, despite the fact that every event appears to be partly free, and partly determined by necessity.

To solve the problem of reconciling freedom and necessity and deciding on the essence of these two concepts, the philosophy of history can and must move in the opposite direction to that of the other sciences. Instead of first defining the actual concepts of freedom and necessity and then arranging living phenomena according to these definitions, history has to define the concepts of free will and necessity in among the vast multiplicity of relevant phenomena that are always dependent on free will and necessity.

However carefully we examine any representation of the activity of one man or several persons, we always regard it as having been produced by a combination of free will and the laws of necessity.

Whether we are discussing people migrating and vandals attacking, or decisions taken by Napoleon III, or the action taken by a man only an hour ago when he preferred one walk to all the others, we see nothing contradictory in any of this. The degree of freedom and necessity directing the actions of these men has been clearly defined for us.