Second Epilogue: 1813-20 - Chapter VIII

by Leo Tolstoy

　　If history dealt only with external phenomena, the establishmentof this simple and obvious law would suffice and we should havefinished our argument. But the law of history relates to man. Aparticle of matter cannot tell us that it does not feel the law ofattraction or repulsion and that that law is untrue, but man, who isthe subject of history, says plainly: I am free and am therefore notsubject to the law.

　　The presence of the problem of man's free will, thoughunexpressed, is felt at every step of history.

　　All seriously thinking historians have involuntarily encounteredthis question. All the contradictions and obscurities of history andthe false path historical science has followed are due solely to thelack of a solution of that question.

　　If the will of every man were free, that is, if each man could actas he pleased, all history would be a series of disconnectedincidents.

　　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 thatman's in violation of the laws governing human action would destroythe possibility of the existence of any laws for the whole ofhumanity.

　　If there be a single law governing the actions of men, free willcannot exist, for then man's will is subject to that law.

　　In this contradiction lies the problem of free will, which from mostancient times has occupied the best human minds and from mostancient times has been presented in its whole tremendous significance.

　　The problem is that regarding man as a subject of observation fromwhatever point of view- theological, historical, ethical, orphilosophic- we find a general law of necessity to which he (likeall that exists) is subject. But regarding him from within ourselvesas what we are conscious of, we feel ourselves to be free.

　　This consciousness is a source of self-cognition quite apart fromand 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 ofreason is conceivable.

　　To understand, observe, and draw conclusions, man must first ofall be conscious of himself as living. A man is only conscious ofhimself as a living being by the fact that he wills, that is, isconscious of his volition. But his will- which forms the essence ofhis life- man recognizes (and can but recognize) as free.

　　If, observing himself, man sees that his will is always directedby one and the same law (whether he observes the necessity of takingfood, using his brain, or anything else) he cannot recognize thisnever-varying direction of his will otherwise than as a limitationof it. Were it not free it could not be limited. A man's will seems tohim to be limited just because he is not conscious of it except asfree.

　　You say: I am not and am not free. But I have lifted my hand and letit fall. Everyone understands that this illogical reply is anirrefutable demonstration of freedom.

　　That reply is the expression of a consciousness that is notsubject to reason.

　　If the consciousness of freedom were not a separate andindependent source of self-consciousness it would be subject toreasoning and to experience, but in fact such subjection does notexist 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 mansubmits to them and never resists the laws of gravity orimpermeability once he has become acquainted with them. But the sameseries of experiments and arguments proves to him that the completefreedom of which he is conscious in himself is impossible, and thathis every action depends on his organization, his character, and themotives acting upon him; yet man never submits to the deductions ofthese experiments and arguments. Having learned from experiment andargument that a stone falls downwards, a man indubitably believes thisand 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 thesame conditions and with the same character he will do the samething as before, yet when under the same conditions and with thesame character he approaches for the thousandth time the action thatalways ends in the same way, he feels as certainly convinced as beforethe experiment that he can act as he pleases. Every man, savage orsage, however incontestably reason and experiment may prove to himthat it is impossible to imagine two different courses of action inprecisely the same conditions, feels that without this irrationalconception (which constitutes the essence of freedom) he cannotimagine life. He feels that however impossible it may be, it is so,for without this conception of freedom not only would he be unableto understand life, but he would be unable to live for a singlemoment.

　　He could not live, because all man's efforts, all his impulses tolife, are only efforts to increase freedom. Wealth and poverty, fameand obscurity, power and subordination, strength and weakness,health and disease, culture and ignorance, work and leisure, repletionand hunger, virtue and vice, are only greater or lesser degrees offreedom.

　　A man having no freedom cannot be conceived of except as deprived oflife.

　　If the conception of freedom appears to reason to be a senselesscontradiction like the possibility of performing two actions at oneand the same instant of time, or of an effect without a cause, thatonly proves that consciousness is not subject to reason.

　　This unshakable, irrefutable consciousness of freedom,uncontrolled by experiment or argument, recognized by all thinkers andfelt by everyone without exception, this consciousness without whichno conception of man is possible constitutes the other side of thequestion.

　　Man is the creation of an all-powerful, all-good, and all-seeingGod. What is sin, the conception of which arises from theconsciousness of man's freedom? That is a question for theology.

　　The actions of men are subject to general immutable laws expressedin statistics. What is man's responsibility to society, the conceptionof which results from the conception of freedom? That is a questionfor jurisprudence.

　　Man's actions proceed from his innate character and the motivesacting upon him. What is conscience and the perception of right andwrong in actions that follows from the consciousness of freedom?That is a question for ethics.

　　Man in connection with the general life of humanity appearssubject to laws which determine that life. But the same man apart fromthat connection appears to free. How should the past life of nationsand of humanity be regarded- as the result of the free, or as theresult of the constrained, activity of man? That is a question forhistory.

　　Only in our self-confident day of the popularization of knowledge-thanks to that most powerful engine of ignorance, the diffusion ofprinted matter- has the question of the freedom of will been put ona level on which the question itself cannot exist. In our time themajority of so-called advanced people- that is, the crowd ofignoramuses- have taken the work of the naturalists who deal withone 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 muscularmovements are conditioned by the activity of the nerves; the souland free will do not exist because at an unknown period of time wesprang from the apes. They say this, not at all suspecting thatthousands of years ago that same law of necessity which with suchardor they are now trying to prove by physiology and comparativezoology was not merely acknowledged by all the religions and all thethinkers, but has never been denied. They do not see that the roleof the natural sciences in this matter is merely to serve as aninstrument for the illumination of one side of it. For the factthat, from the point of view of observation, reason and the will aremerely secretions of the brain, and that man following the general lawmay have developed from lower animals at some unknown period oftime, only explains from a fresh side the truth admitted thousandsof years ago by all the religious and philosophic theories- thatfrom the point of view of reason man is subject to the law ofnecessity; but it does not advance by a hair's breadth the solution ofthe question, which has another, opposite, side, based on theconsciousness of freedom.

　　If men descended from the apes at an unknown period of time, that isas comprehensible as that they were made from a handful of earth ata certain period of time (in the first case the unknown quantity isthe time, in the second case it is the origin); and the question ofhow man's consciousness of freedom is to be reconciled with the law ofnecessity to which he is subject cannot be solved by comparativephysiology and zoology, for in a frog, a rabbit, or an ape, we canobserve only the muscular nervous activity, but in man we observeconsciousness as well as the muscular and nervous activity.

　　The naturalists and their followers, thinking they can solve thisquestion, are like plasterers set to plaster one side of the wallsof a church who, availing themselves of the absence of the chiefsuperintendent of the work, should in an access of zeal plaster overthe windows, icons, woodwork, and still unbuttressed walls, and shouldbe delighted that from their point of view as plasterers, everythingis now so smooth and regular.