________________________________________________
_ 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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