War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [791]
To the people who fought against the emerging truth of physical philosophy it seemed that, if they were to recognize that truth, faith in God, in the creation of the firmament, in the miracle of Joshua, son of Nun,7 would be destroyed. To the defenders of the laws of Copernicus and Newton—Voltaire, for instance—it seemed that the laws of astronomy destroyed religion, and he used the law of gravity as a weapon against religion.
In the same way now it seems that we need only recognize the law of necessity and the notions of the soul, of good and evil, and all state and church institutions based on those notions will be destroyed.
In the same way now as with Voltaire in his time, the uninvited defenders of the law of necessity use that law as a weapon against religion; whereas—exactly like Copernicus’s law in astronomy—the law of necessity in history not only does not destroy, but even consolidates the ground on which state and church institutions are built.
As in the question of astronomy then, so now in the question of history, all the difference in views is based on the recognition or non-recognition of an absolute unit serving as a measure of visible phenomena. In astronomy this was the immobility of the earth; in history it is the independence of the person—freedom.
As for astronomy the difficulty of recognizing the movement of the earth consisted in renouncing the immediate feeling of the immobility of the earth and the similar feeling of the movement of the planets, so for history the difficulty of recognizing the subjection of the person to the laws of space, time, and causes consists in renouncing the immediate feeling of the independence of one’s person. But, as in astronomy the new view said: “True, we do not feel the movement of the earth, but by assuming its immobility, we arrive at an absurdity; whereas, by assuming the movement which we do not feel, we arrive at laws,” so, too, in history the new view says: “True, we do not feel our dependence, but by assuming we are free, we arrive at an absurdity; whereas, by assuming our dependence on the external world, time, and causes, we arrive at laws.”
In the first case, the need was to renounce the consciousness of a nonexistent immobility in space and recognize a movement we do not feel; in the present case, it is just as necessary to renounce a nonexistent freedom and recognize a dependence we do not feel.
THE END
APPENDIX
A Few Words Apropos of the Book War and Peace
Publishing a work on which I have spent five years of ceaseless and exclusive labor, under the best conditions of life, I would like in a preface to that work to state my view of it and thereby forestall those perplexities which may arise in readers. I would like readers not to see or seek in my book what I did not want or was not able to express, and to pay attention to precisely what I wanted to express, but on which (given the conditions of its production) I did not consider it appropriate to dwell. Neither time nor my skill allowed me to fully carry out my intention, and I avail myself of the hospitality of a specialized journal to state, however briefly and incompletely, for those readers whom it might interest, the author’s view of his work.1
(1) What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wanted and was able to express, in the form in which it is expressed. Such a declaration of the author’s disregard of the conventional forms of artistic prose works might seem presumptuous, if it were premeditated and if it had no previous examples. The history of Russian literature since Pushkin’s time not only provides many examples of such departure from European forms, but does not offer even one example to the contrary. From Gogol’s Dead Souls to Dostoevsky’s Dead House,2 there is not a single work of artistic prose in the modern period of Russian literature,