War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [786]
(3) The third basis is the greater or lesser accessibility for us of that endless linking of causes that constitutes the inevitable demand of reason and in which every phenomenon comprehended, and therefore every human action, should have its definite place, as a consequence of what precedes and a cause of what follows.
This is that basis owing to which our own and other people’s actions appear to us, on the one hand, as more free and less subject to necessity, the more we know of those physiological, psychological, and historical laws man is subject to, deduced from observation, and the more correctly we perceive the physiological, psychological, or historical cause of the action; and on the other hand, the simpler the observed action itself and the less complex the character and mind of the man whose action we are examining.
When we totally fail to understand the cause of an act—whether an evil deed, a good deed, or even an act indifferent to good and evil—we recognize in such an act a greater share of freedom. If it is an evil deed, we most of all demand punishment for such an act; if it is a good deed, we most of all appreciate such an act. If it is indifferent, we recognize its greater individuality, originality, freedom. But if just one of the countless reasons is known to us, we already recognize a certain share of necessity and demand a lesser requital for the crime, recognize a lesser merit in the good deed, a lesser freedom in the seemingly original act. The fact that a criminal was brought up among evildoers already extenuates his guilt. The selflessness of a father, of a mother, selflessness with a possibility of reward, is more comprehensible than causeless selflessness, and therefore appears less deserving of sympathy, less free. The founder of a sect or party, the inventor, surprise us less when we know how and by what his activity was prepared for. If we have a large series of experiences, if our observation is constantly directed at finding the correlation of causes and effects in people’s actions, their actions appear the more necessary and the less free to us, the more correctly we connect effects with causes. If the examined actions are simple, and we have for observation an enormous number of such actions, our notion of their necessity will be more complete. The dishonest act of the son of a dishonest father, the bad behavior of a woman who ended up in a certain milieu, a drunkard’s return to drinking, and so on, are actions which appear the less free to us, the more comprehensible we find their cause. And if the person himself whose actions we are examining stands on the lowest level of mental development, like a child, a madman, a simpleton, then, knowing the causes of the action and the incomplexity of his character and mind, we already see so large a share of necessity and so small of freedom, that once the cause that is to produce the action is known to us, we can predict the act.
Only on these three bases have irresponsibility for crimes and extenuating circumstances, which exist in all legal codes, been constructed. Responsibility appears greater or lesser, depending on a greater or lesser knowledge of the conditions in which the man whose action is being reviewed found himself, and on the greater or lesser span of time from the committing of the act to the judging of it, and on the greater or lesser understanding of the causes of the act.
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Thus our notion of freedom and necessity gradually decreases or increases, depending on the greater or lesser connection with the external world, the greater or lesser distance in time, and the greater or lesser dependence on causes in which we examine the phenomenon of human life.
So that, if we examine a man in such a situation that his connection with the external world is most fully known,