War and peace ( Constance Garnett-1900)

2. Though we may make the period of time intervening between an act and our criticism of it as long as we choose, that period will be finite, and time is infinite, and so in this respect too the circle of necessity is not complete.

3. However easy the chain of causation of any act may be to grasp, we shall never know the whole chain, since it is endless, and so again we cannot attain absolute necessity.

But apart from that, even if, reducing the minimum of freewill till it is equivalent to nil, we were to admit in some case—as, for instance, that of a dying man, an unborn babe, an idiot—a complete absence of freewill, we should in so doing have destroyed the very conception of man, in the case we are examining; since as soon as there is no freewill, there is no man. And therefore the conception of the action of a man subject only to the law of necessity, without the smallest element of freewill, is as impossible as the conception of a completely free human action.

Thus to conceive a human action subject only to the law of necessity without freewill, we must assume a knowledge of an infinite number of conditions in space, an infinitely long period of time, and an infinite chain of causation.

To conceive a man perfectly free, not subject to the law of necessity, we must conceive a man outside of space, outside of time, and free from all dependence on cause.

In the first case, if necessity were possible without freewill, we should be brought to a definition of the laws of necessity in the terms of the same necessity, that is, to mere form without content.

In the second case, if freewill were possible without necessity, we should come to unconditioned freewill outside of space, and time, and cause, which by the fact of its being unconditioned and unlimited would be nothing else than content without form.

We should be brought in fact to these two fundamental elements, of which man’s whole cosmic conception is made up—the incomprehensible essence of life and the laws that give form to that essence.

Reason says: 1. space with all the forms given it by its visibility— matter—is infinite, and is not thinkable otherwise.

2. Time is infinite movement without one moment of rest, and it is not otherwise thinkable.

3. The connection of cause and effect has no beginning, and can have no end.

Consciousness sa}^: 1. I alone am, and all that exists is only /; consequently I include space.

2. I measure moving time by the unchanging moment of the present, in which alone 1 am conscious of myself living; consequently I am outride of time, and

3. I am outside of cause, since I feel myself the cause of every phenomenon of my life.

Reason gives expression to the laws of necessity. Consciousness gives expression to the reality of freewill.

Freedom unlimited by anything is the essence of life in man’s consciousness. Necessity without content is man’s reason with its three forms of thought.

Freewill is what is examined: Necessity is what examines. Freewill is content: Necessity is form.

It is only by the analysis of the two sources of knowledge, standing to one another in the relation of form and content, that the mutually exclusive, and separately inconceivable ideas of freewill and necessity are formed.

Only by their synthesis is a clear conception of the life of man gained.

Outside these two ideas—in their synthesis mutually definitive as form and content—no conception of life is possible.

All that we know of men’s life is only a certain relation of freewill to necessity, that is, of consciousness to the laws of reason.

All that we know of the external world of nature is only a certain relation of the forces of nature to necessity, or of the essence of life to the laws of reason.

The forces of the life of nature lie outside us, and not subject to our consciousness; and we call these forces gravitation, inertia, electricity, vital force, and so on. But the force of the life of man is the subject of our consciousness, and we call it freewill.

But just as the force of gravitation—in itself incomprehensible, though felt by every man—is only so far understood by us as we know the laws of necessity to which it is subject (from the first knowledge that all bodies are heavy down to Newton’s law), so too the force of freewill, unthinkable in itself, but recognised by the consciousness of every man, is only so far understood as we know the laws of necessity to which it is subject (from the fact that every man dies up to the knowledge of the most complex economic or historic laws).

All knowledge is simply bringing the essence of life under the laws of reason.

Man’s freewill is distinguished from every other force by the fact that it is the subject of man’s consciousness. But in the eyes of reason it is not distinguished from any other force.

The forces of gravitation, of electricity, or of chemical affinity, are only distinguished from one another by being differently defined by

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