War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [783]
Man is the creation of an almighty, all-good, and all-knowing God. What then is sin, the concept of which follows from the consciousness of man’s freedom? That is a question for theology.
Men’s actions are subject to general, immutable laws expressed by statistics. In what, then, consists man’s responsibility before society, the concept of which follows from the consciousness of man’s freedom? That is a question for jurisprudence.
Man’s acts follow from his innate character and the motives acting upon him. What is conscience and the consciousness of the good and evil of acts following from the consciousness of freedom? That is a question for ethics.
A man, in connection with the common life of mankind, appears subject to the laws defining that life. But the same man, independent of that connection, appears free. How should the past life of peoples and of mankind be regarded—as a product of the free or unfree activity of men? That is a question for history.
Only in our self-confident time of the popularization of knowledge, thanks to that most powerful tool of ignorance—the spread of printing—has the question of freedom of will been reduced to grounds on which the question itself cannot exist. In our time the majority of so-called advanced people, that is, a crowd of ignoramuses, have taken the works of the naturalists, who study one side of the question, for the solution of the whole question.
The soul and freedom do not exist, because the life of man is expressed in muscular movements, and muscular movements are conditioned by nervous activity; the soul and freedom do not exist, because at some unknown period of time we descended from the apes—they say, write, and print, not even suspecting that thousands of years ago all religions and all thinkers not only recognized but never tried to deny that very law of necessity which they now try so zealously to prove by means of physiology and comparative zoology. They do not see that the role of natural science in this question consists only in serving as an instrument to throw light on one side of it. For the fact that, from the point of view of observation, reason and will are only secretions of the brain, and man, following a general law, could develop from lower animals at an unknown period of time, only clarifies from a new side a truth recognized thousands of years ago by all religious and philosophical theories, that from the viewpoint of reason man is subject to the laws of necessity, but does not advance by a hair 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 men descended from a handful of earth at a known period of time (in the first case the x is time, in the second the descent), and the question of how the consciousness of man’s freedom can be combined with the law of necessity to which man is subject cannot be resolved by comparative physiology and zoology, for in the frog, the rabbit, and the ape we can observe only muscular and nervous activity, while in man both muscular and nervous activity and consciousness.
The naturalists and their admirers, who think to solve this question, are like plasterers assigned to plaster one side of a church wall, who, taking advantage of the foreman’s absence, in a fit of zeal smear their plaster all over the windows, the icons, the scaffolding, and the as yet unreinforced walls, and rejoice at how, from their plastering point of view, everything comes out flat and smooth.
IX
For the solution of the question of freedom and necessity, history has the advantage over other branches of knowledge in which the same question is raised, that for history this question refers not to the essence of man’s will, but to the notion of the manifestation of that will in the past and under certain conditions.
For the