r it be the need to consume food, exercise the brain, or whatever else), he can only see this unvarying direction of his will as a limitation placed upon it. It wouldn't be possible to limit something without it being free in the first place. A man's will seems limited precisely because he cannot conceive of it as anything but free.
You tell me I'm not free. But I have just raised my arm and put it down again. Everybody understands that this reply may be illogical, but it is also irrefutable evidence of freedom. It is an expression of consciousness and not subject to reason.
If consciousness of freedom was not a separate source of self-awareness independent of reason, it would be subject to reason and experience, which in fact it is not and never could be.
Every man discovers from a series of experiments and arguments that he, the object under examination, is subject to certain laws, and he submits to them; once he has been told about the law of gravity, for instance, or the law of impermeability, he will never try to overcome them. But he also discovers from the same series of experiments and reflections that the total freedom he is conscious of is an impossibility; any action depends on his organization, character and motivation. But he never submits to the conclusions offered by these experiments and arguments.
Once he knows from experience and reasoning that a stone falls in a downward direction man accepts this as beyond doubt and expects this known law to be observed in every instance. But when he knows also beyond doubt that his own will is subject to laws, he will not, and cannot, believe it.
However often a man learns from experience and reason that in the same circumstances and with the same character he will always do what he did before, the thousandth time he encounters the same circumstances with the same character and this leads to an action that always ends in the same way, he still feels beyond doubt that he is free to do whatever he wants, no less now than before the experiment. Every man, savage or sage, despite the irrefutable evidence provided by reason and experience that there is no possibility of two different courses of action emerging from exactly the same circumstances, still feels that without this nonsensical concept (the very essence of freedom) he cannot conceive of life. He feels that, however impossible it might be, it is still true; without that concept of freedom he would not only find life incomprehensible, he would be unable to live for a split second. Unable to live because all human striving, all the motivation for living, is nothing other than a striving towards greater freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity, authority and subjugation, strength and weakness, health and disease, culture and ignorance, labour and leisure, repletion and hunger, virtue and vice - these are all greater or lesser degrees of freedom.
To imagine a man without freedom is impossible except as a man deprived of life.
If reason sees the concept of freedom as a meaningless contradiction, like the possibility of doing two different things at exactly the same time or something occurring without a cause, this tells us one simple thing: consciousness is not subject to reason.
It is this unwavering, irrepressible consciousness of freedom, not subject to experience or reason, acknowledged by all thinking people and sensed by everybody without exception, this consciousness without which no concept of humanity is imaginable, that constitutes the other side of the question.
Man is the creation of an omnipotent, infinitely good and omniscient God. What is sin, the concept of which flows from man's consciousness of freedom? That is a question for theology.
All human actions are subject to universal and immutable laws which can be expressed in statistics. What is social responsibility, the concept of which flows from consciousness of freedom? That is a question for jurisprudence.
A man's actions flow from his innate character and motivation. What is conscience and the sense of right and wrong in relation to actions that flow from the consciousness of freedom? That is a question for ethics.
Man in connection with the life of humanity in general appears to be governed by laws determining that life. But the same man without that connection appears to be free. How are we to look on the past life of nations and humanity, as the product of activity by people who are free or not free? That is a question for history.
Only in our age of arrogance and the popularization of knowledge, thanks to that most powerful weapon of ignorance, the spread of the printed word, has the question of free will been transferred to new terrain where it cannot continue to exist as a question. In our day most of the so-called advanced people - nothing but a bunch of ignoramuses - have accepted the research of the natural scientists, which is only interested in one side of the question, as a solution to the question as a whole.
There is no soul and no free will, because the life of man is expressed in muscular movements, and muscular movements are conditioned by activity in the nervous system. There is no soul and no free will, because at some unknown period of time we descended from the apes. This is what they are saying, writing and printing, and it never even crosses their mind that thousands of years ago all religions and all thinkers were ready to acknowledge - in fact, they have never denied it - the very law of necessity which they are now trying so hard to prove by physiology and comparative zoology. They cannot see that the only thing the natural sciences can do for this question is to throw light on one side of it. For even if we can show empirically that reason and will are nothing but secretions of the brain, and man has followed a universal law of evolution by managing to develop from the lower animals at some unknown period of time, all of this will only give us a new angle on a truth which has been recognized for thousands of years by all religious and philosophic theories, that from the standpoint of reason man is subject to the laws of necessity; it does not contribute one iota to the solution of the problem, which has another side, diametrically opposite, based on the consciousness of freedom.
If men did descend from the apes at an unknown period of time, that is as intelligible as the idea that they were formed from a handful of earth at a known period of time (in the first case, X, the unknown quantity, stands for the date, in the second it stands for the method of formation), and the problem of reconciling man's consciousness of free will with the overriding law of necessity cannot be solved by comparative physiology and zoology, for one good reason: in the frog, the rabbit, and the monkey we can observe nothing but muscular and nervous activity, whereas in man we have muscular and nervous activity plus consciousness.
The natural scientists and their followers who think they are in the process of solving this problem are like plasterers commissioned to plaster one side of a church wall, who, in a rush of enthusiasm while the foreman is away, go on to plaster over the windows, the holy icons, the woodwork and the walls waiting to be buttressed, happy that from a plasterer's point of view everything has turned out so beautifully smooth and even.
CHAPTER 9
In solving the problem of free will versus necessity history has one advantage over the other branches of knowledge that have dealt with this question: for the purposes of history the problem concerns not the essential nature of man's will but the actual manifestation of that will in the past under certain specific conditions.
In attempting to solve this problem, history's position vis-a-vis the other sciences is the same as the relationship between applied and theoretical science.
History takes as its subject not the will of man, but our representation of that will.
So, the insoluble mystery of reconciling two opposites, freedom and necessity, does not exist for history as it does for theology, ethics and philosophy. History examines manifestations of human life in which these two opposites have already been reconciled.
In real life every historical event, every human action, is spelt out and understood, with no sense of contradiction, despite the fact that every event appears to be partly free, and partly determined by necessity.
To solve the problem of reconciling freedom and necessity and deciding on the essence of these two concepts, the philosophy of history can and must move in the opposite direction to that of the other sciences. Instead of first defining the actual concepts of freedom and necessity and then arranging living phenomena according to these definitions, history has to define the concepts of free will and necessity in among the vast multiplicity of relevant phenomena that are always dependent on free will and necessity.
However carefully we examine any representation of the activity of one man or several persons, we always regard it as having been produced by a combination of free will and the laws of necessity.
Whether we are discussing people migrating and vandals attacking, or decisions taken by Napoleon III, or the action taken by a man only an hour ago when he preferred one walk to all the others, we see nothing contradictory in any of this. The degree of freedom and necessity directing the actions of these men has been clearly defined for us.
It happens all too often that our concept of a greater or lesser amount of freedom varies according to our different attitudes to an event, but every human action unfailingly appears to us as a kind of compromise between free will and necessity. In every action examined we see a certain amount of freedom and a certain amount of necessity. And the same thing always happens: the more freedom we see in any action, the less necessity there is, and the greater the necessity the smaller the amount of freedom.
The proportions of freedom and necessity will rise and fall according to one's attitude to the event, but there is always an inverse ratio between them.
A drowning man who clutches at another drowning man and drags him under, or a starving mother weakened by feeding her baby who steals some food, or a man drilled and disciplined who obeys an order to kill a defenceless man in the course of duty - these people will all seem less guilty, in other words less free and more subject to the law of necessity, to anyone who knows their circumstances, and more free to anyone who did not know the man himself was drowning, the mother was starving, the soldier was on duty and so on. In the same way a man who committed a murder twenty years ago and has gone on living calmly and innocently in society ever since will seem less guilty, and what he did will seem more subject to the law of necessity, to anyone looking back on it after a lapse of twenty years than to someone looking at the same deed the day after it was done. And again, anything done by a madman, a man who was drunk or a violently excited man will seem less free and more inevitable to anyone who knows the mental state of the man who did the deed, and more free and less inevitable to someone who doesn't. In each case the concept of freedom increases or diminishes, and the concept of necessity diminishes or increases, according to the onlooker's point of view. The greater the necessity, the less freedom there is, and vice versa.
Religion, everyday common sense, the science of jurisprudence and history itself share the same understanding of this relationship between necessity and free will.
In every single case, where our concept of free will and necessity increases or diminishes there are only three basic variable entities: 1. The relationship between the man committing the act and the external world.
2. His relationship to time.
3. The relationship between him and the causes which led to the act.
The first variable (1) concerns the greater or lesser clarity with which we see the man's relation to the external world, the greater or lesser clarity of his particular situation in relation to everything existing along with him at the time. It is this point that makes it obvious that a drowning man is less free and more subject to necessity than a man standing on terra firma; it makes the actions of a man living in close contact with other people under crowded conditions, a man bound by ties of family, service or business, seem undoubtedly less free and more subject to necessity than those of a man living in solitude and seclusion.
If we study one man on his own, removed from his surroundings, all of his actions will seem to be free. But if we see the slightest relationship between him and his surroundings, if we see him in contact with anything at all, a man talking to him, a book that he is reading, a job that he is busy with, even the air he breathes or the light that falls on the objects around him, we shall soon see that every one of these circumstances has some kind of influence on him, and determines at least one aspect of his behaviour. And the more we take account of these influences, the more our perception of his freedom is reduced, and our concept of his being subject to necessity is increased.
The second variable (2) is the greater or lesser extent of a man's visible temporal relationship with the world, and the greater or lesser clarity by which we perceive the place in time occupied by his action. Because of this variable the fall of the first man, which led to the origin of the human race, stands out rather obviously as less free than the act of getting married is for a man of today. Because of this variable, the lives and actions of men who lived centuries ago and have a temporal connection with me cannot seem to me as free as the life of a contemporary, with all its consequences still unknown.
In the present case, this variability, our concept of greater or lesser freedom or necessity, will depend on the greater or lesser time-lapse between the action and our judgement of it.
If I examine something I did a moment ago in virtually the same circumstances that I am still in, there can be no doubt that my action appears to have been free. But if I start to pass judgement on something I did a month ago, now that my circumstances have changed I am bound to recognize that if that deed had not been done many of its beneficial, agreeable and even inevitable consequences would never have taken place. And if I allow memory to take me back even further to something I did ten years ago or more, the consequences of my action are even clearer but it will be difficult for me to imagine what might have happened if it had not taken place. The further back I go in memory, or, to put it another way, the longer I postpone judgement of my action, the more dubious my view of its freedom becomes.
The same variable degree of certainty about the role of free will in the general run of human affairs applies also to history. An event occurring in the present day appears beyond doubt to be the product of all the people known to have been concerned in it. But when it comes to an event more distant in time we can't help seeing its inevitable consequences, and this prevents us from imagining any other possibilities. And the further back we go in our examination of events, the less spontaneous they seem to have been.
The Austro-Prussian war appears beyond doubt to have been caused by the actions of that cunning man Bismarck, and so on.
The Napoleonic wars are a little more dubious, though they still seem to have been the consequences of heroes exercising their will. But in the Crusades we see an event with a clearly defined place in history, and without it the modern history of Europe is inconceivable, though the chroniclers of the Crusades saw those events as the direct consequences of a few persons exercising their will. And as for the migration of peoples, it never occurs to anybody nowadays that the renewal of the European world depended on an idea plucked out of the air by Attila the Hun. The further back we go with our studies of history, the more dubious is the concept of people determining events by the exercise of free will, and the more obvious the law of necessity becomes.
The third variable (3) is the greater or lesser degree to which we can apprehend that endless chain of causation demanded by our reason, in which every phenomenon, if it is to be properly understood, and therefore every human action, must have its own specific place, as a consequence of past actions and a cause of those to come.
It is this that makes our own actions and those of other people appear, on the one hand, all the freer and less subject to necessity the more we know of the physiological, psychological and historical laws deduced from observation as applicable to mankind, and the more thoroughly we have scrutinized the physiological, psychological or historical cause of an action, and, on the other hand, the simpler the action observed and the more straightforward the character and mind of the man whose action we are examining.
When we simply do not know the cause of an action - a crime, a good deed or something that has nothing to do with right and wrong - we put it down to maximum free will. In the case of a crime we particularly demand that it be punished; in the case of a good deed, we are especially appreciative of what was done. And when the action has nothing to do with right and wrong we think of it in terms of maximum individuality, originality and independence. But if a single one of the innumerable causes of the action is known to us, we allow for a certain element of necessity, we are less keen on retribution for a crime, less appreciative of merit in a good deed, less ready to acknowledge free will in relation to an action of ostensible originality. The fact that a criminal was brought up among villains mitigates his guilt. The self-sacrifice of a father, or a mother, or self-sacrifice with a view to possible reward is more comprehensible than gratuitous self-sacrifice, and therefore appears less deserving of sympathy and less the product of free will. The founder of a sect, or a party, or an inventor, appears less impressive once we understand the ins and outs of all the preparatory work that preceded his activity. If we conduct a whole series of experiments, and if our observation is constantly focused on a search for correspondence between the causes and effects of men's actions, the actions themselves will appear to be more determined by necessity and less by free will, the better we succeed in the linking of cause and effect. If the actions examined are simple ones, and we have a vast number of such actions available for study, our impression of their inevitability will be all the more completely confirmed. A dishonest deed by the son of a dishonest father, the bad behaviour of a woman who has drifted into certain company, the recidivism of a reformed drunkard, and so on - these are all actions which appear to be less freely determined the better we understand the reason behind them. And if the man whose behaviour we are studying happens to be someone at the lowest level of mental development, like a child, a madman or a simpleton, then, fully apprised of the reasons behind his