Freedom not limited by anything is the essence of life, in
man’s consciousness. Inevitability without content is man’s
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reason in its three forms.
Freedom is the thing examined. Inevitability is what examines. Freedom is the content. Inevitability is the form.
Only by separating the two sources of cognition, related
to one another as form to content, do we get the mutually
exclusive and separately incomprehensible conceptions of
freedom and inevitability.
Only by uniting them do we get a clear conception of
man’s life.
Apart from these two concepts which in their union
mutually define one another as form and content, no conception of life is possible.
All that we know of the life of man is merely a certain
relation of free will to inevitability, 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 inevitability, or of
the essence of life to the laws of reason.
The great natural forces lie outside us and we are not
conscious of them; we call those forces gravitation, inertia,
electricity, animal force, and so on, but we are conscious of
the force of life in man and we call that freedom.
But just as the force of gravitation, incomprehensible in
itself but felt by every man, is understood by us only to the
extent to which we know the laws of inevitability to which
it is subject (from the first knowledge that all bodies have
weight, up to Newton’s law), so too the force of free will, incomprehensible in itself but of which everyone is conscious,
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evitability to which it is subject (from the fact that every
man dies, up to the knowledge of the most complex economic and historic laws).
All knowledge is merely a bringing of this essence of life
under the laws of reason.
Man’s free will differs from every other force in that man
is directly conscious of it, but in the eyes of reason it in no
way differs from any other force. The forces of gravitation,
electricity, or chemical affinity are only distinguished from
one another in that they are differently defined by reason.
Just so the force of man’s free will is distinguished by reason from the other forces of nature only by the definition
reason gives it. Freedom, apart from necessity, that is, apart
from the laws of reason that define it, differs in no way from
gravitation, or heat, or the force that makes things grow;
for reason, it is only a momentary undefinable sensation of
life.
And as the undefinable essence of the force moving the
heavenly bodies, the undefinable essence of the forces of heat
and electricity, or of chemical affinity, or of the vital force,
forms the content of astronomy, physics, chemistry, botany,
zoology, and so on, just in the same way does the force of
free will form the content of history. But just as the subject
of every science is the manifestation of this unknown essence of life while that essence itself can only be the subject
of metaphysics, even the manifestation of the force of free
will in human beings in space, in time, and in dependence
on cause forms the subject of history, while free will itself is
the subject of metaphysics.
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In the experimental sciences what we know we call the
laws of inevitability, what is unknown to us we call vital
force. Vital force is only an expression for the unknown remainder over and above what we know of the essence of
life.
So also in history what is known to us we call laws of inevitability, what is unknown we call free will. Free will is for
history only an expression for the unknown remainder of
what we know about the laws of human life.
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Chapter XI
History examines the manifestations of man’s free will
in connection with the external world in time and in dependence on cause, that is, it defines this freedom by the laws of
reason, and so history is a science only in so far as this free
will is defined by those laws.
The recognition of man’s free will as something capable of influencing historical events, that is, as not subject to
laws, is the same for history as the recognition of a free force
moving the heavenly bodies would be for astronomy.
That assumption would destroy the possibility of the existence of laws, that is, of any science whatever. If there is
even a single body moving freely, then the laws of Kepler
and Newton are negatived and no conception of the movement of the heavenly bodies any longer exists. If any single
action is due to free will, then not a single historical law can
exist, nor any conception of historical events.
For history, lines exist of the movement of human wills,
one end of which is hidden in the unknown but at the other
end of which a consciousness of man’s will in the present
moves in space, time, and dependence on cause.
The more this field of motion spreads out before our eyes,
the more evident are the laws of that movement. To discover
and define those laws is the problem of history.
From the standpoint from which the science of history
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now regards its subject on the path it now follows, seeking
the causes of events in man’s freewill, a scientific enunciation of those laws is impossible, for however man’s free will
may be restricted, as soon as we recognize it as a force not
subject to law, the existence of law becomes impossible.
Only by reducing this element of free will to the infinitesimal, that is, by regarding it as an infinitely small quantity,
can we convince ourselves of the absolute inaccessibility of
the causes, and then instead of seeking causes, history will
take the discovery of laws as its problem.
The search for these laws has long been begun and the
new methods of thought which history must adopt are being worked out simultaneously with the self-destruction
toward whichever dissecting and dissecting the causes of
phenomenathe old method of history is moving.
All human sciences have traveled along that path. Arriving at infinitesimals, mathematics, the most exact of
sciences, abandons the process of analysis and enters on the
new process of the integration of unknown, infinitely small,
quantities. Abandoning the conception of cause, mathematics seeks law, that is, the property common to all unknown,
infinitely small, elements.
In another form but along the same path of reflection
the other sciences have proceeded. When Newton enunciated the law of gravity he did not say that the sun or the
earth had a property of attraction; he said that all bodies
from the largest to the smallest have the property of attracting one another, that is, leaving aside the question of the
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erty common to all bodies from the infinitely large to the
infinitely small. The same is done by the natural sciences:
leaving aside the question of cause, they seek for laws. History stands on the same path. And if history has for its object
the study of the movement of the nations and of humanity
and not the narration of episodes in the lives of individuals,
it too, setting aside the conception of cause, should seek the
laws common to all the inseparably interconnected infinitesimal elements of free will.
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Chapter XII
From the time the law of Copernicus was discovered and
proved, the mere recognition of the fact that it was not the
sun but the earth that moves sufficed to destroy the whole
cosmography of the ancients. By disproving that law it
might have been possible to retain the old conception of
the movements of the bodies, but without disproving it, it
would seem impossible to continue studying the Ptolemaic
worlds. But even after the discovery of the law of Copernicus the Ptolemaic worlds were still studied for a long time.
From the time the first person said and proved that the
number of births or of crimes is subject to mathematical
laws, and that this or that mode of government is determined by certain geographical and economic conditions,
and that certain relations of population to soil produce migrations of peoples, the foundations on which history had
been built were destroyed in their essence.
By refuting these new laws the former view of history
might have been retained; but without refuting them it
would seem impossible to continue studying historic events
as the results of man’s free will. For if a certain mode of
government was established or certain migrations of peoples took place in consequence of such and such geographic,
ethnographic, or economic conditions, then the free will of
those individuals who appear to us to have established that
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mode of government or occasioned the migrations can no
longer be regarded as the cause.
And yet the former history continues to be studied side
by side with the laws of statistics, geography, political economy, comparative philology, and geology, which directly
contradict its assumptions.
The struggle between the old views and the new was long
and stubbornly fought out in physical philosophy. Theology stood on guard for the old views and accused the new
of violating revelation. But when truth conquered, theology
established itself just as firmly on the new foundation.
Just as prolonged and stubborn is the struggle now proceeding between the old and the new conception of history,
and theology in the same way stands on guard for the old
view, and accuses the new view of subverting revelation.
In the one case as in the other, on both sides the struggle
provokes passion and stifles truth. On the one hand there is
fear and regret for the loss of the whole edifice constructed
through the ages, on the other is the passion for destruction.
To the men who fought against the rising truths of physical philosophy, it seemed that if they admitted that truth it
would destroy faith in God, in the creation of the firmament, and in the miracle of Joshua the son of Nun. To the
defenders of the laws of Copernicus and Newton, to Voltaire
for example, it seemed that the laws
