Chapter Chapter 361 · 第361章

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 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.