other and atoms repel one another.
Speaking of the interaction of heat and electricity and of
atoms, we cannot say why this occurs, and we say that it is
so because it is inconceivable otherwise, because it must be
so and that it is a law. The same applies to historical events.
Why war and revolution occur we do not know. We only
know that to produce the one or the other action, people
combine in a certain formation in which they all take part,
and we say that this is so because it is unthinkable otherwise, or in other words that it is a law.
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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
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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 viewtheological, historical,
ethical, or philosophicwe 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 willwhich forms the essence of his lifeman 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
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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
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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
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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 regardedas 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
knowledgethanks to that most powerful engine of ignorance, the diffusion of printed matterhas 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 peoplethat is, the crowd of ignoramuseshave 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
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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 theoriesthat
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,
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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
