War And Peace

If I examine something I did a moment ago in virtually the same circumstances that I am still in, there can be no doubt that my action appears to have been free. But if I start to pass judgement on something I did a month ago, now that my circumstances have changed I am bound to recognize that if that deed had not been done many of its beneficial, agreeable and even inevitable consequences would never have taken place. And if I allow memory to take me back even further to something I did ten years ago or more, the consequences of my action are even clearer but it will be difficult for me to imagine what might have happened if it had not taken place. The further back I go in memory, or, to put it another way, the longer I postpone judgement of my action, the more dubious my view of its freedom becomes.

The same variable degree of certainty about the role of free will in the general run of human affairs applies also to history. An event occurring in the present day appears beyond doubt to be the product of all the people known to have been concerned in it. But when it comes to an event more distant in time we can’t help seeing its inevitable consequences, and this prevents us from imagining any other possibilities. And the further back we go in our examination of events, the less spontaneous they seem to have been.

The Austro-Prussian war appears beyond doubt to have been caused by the actions of that cunning man Bismarck, and so on.

The Napoleonic wars are a little more dubious, though they still seem to have been the consequences of heroes exercising their will. But in the Crusades we see an event with a clearly defined place in history, and without it the modern history of Europe is inconceivable, though the chroniclers of the Crusades saw those events as the direct consequences of a few persons exercising their will. And as for the migration of peoples, it never occurs to anybody nowadays that the renewal of the European world depended on an idea plucked out of the air by Attila the Hun. The further back we go with our studies of history, the more dubious is the concept of people determining events by the exercise of free will, and the more obvious the law of necessity becomes.

The third variable (3) is the greater or lesser degree to which we can apprehend that endless chain of causation demanded by our reason, in which every phenomenon, if it is to be properly understood, and therefore every human action, must have its own specific place, as a consequence of past actions and a cause of those to come.

It is this that makes our own actions and those of other people appear, on the one hand, all the freer and less subject to necessity the more we know of the physiological, psychological and historical laws deduced from observation as applicable to mankind, and the more thoroughly we have scrutinized the physiological, psychological or historical cause of an action, and, on the other hand, the simpler the action observed and the more straightforward the character and mind of the man whose action we are examining.