actions and his simplicity of character and intelligence, we observe in all of this such a huge amount of necessity and so little free will that once we know the cause the action becomes predictable.
These three variable entities alone account for the concept of unfitness to plead, which exists in all legislative codes, and the idea of extenuating circumstances. The degree of accountability will be considered greater or lesser according to our greater or lesser knowledge of the circumstances experienced by the man under judgement, the greater or lesser time-lapse between his committing the crime and being brought to justice, and our greater or lesser understanding of the causes behind the action.
CHAPTER 10
Thus our sensation of free will and necessity gradually contracts or expands according to the greater or lesser degree of association with the external world, the greater or lesser degree of remoteness in time, and the greater or lesser degree of dependence on the causes through which we examine the phenomenon of a human life.
It follows that if we consider the situation of a man with maximum known association with the external world, a maximum time-lapse between his action and any judgement of it and maximum access to the causes behind his action, we get an impression of maximum necessity and minimal free will. Whereas if we consider a man with minimal dependence on external circumstances, whose action has been committed at the nearest possible moment to the present, and for reasons beyond our ken, then we get an impression of minimal necessity and maximum freedom of action.
But in neither case, however much we vary our standpoint, however much we clarify the man's association with the external world, however accessible we think this is, however much we lengthen or shorten the time-lapse, however understandable or opaque the reasons behind his action may appear to be, can we ever have any concept of absolute freedom of action or absolute necessity.
(1) However hard we try to imagine a man excluded from any influence of the external world, we can never achieve a concept of freedom in space. A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him, and his own body. I raise my arm and let it fall again. My action seems to be free, but when I start wondering whether I could have raised my arm in any direction, I notice that I moved it in the direction where the action encountered least resistance from any surrounding bodies or from my own bodily structure. If I chose one particular direction out of all those available I did so because in that direction I encountered least resistance. For my action to be completely free it would have to have encountered no resistance at all. In order to imagine a man who was completely free we would have to imagine him existing beyond space, an obvious impossibility.
(2) However much we shorten the time-lapse between action and judgement, we could never arrive at a concept of freedom within time. For if I examine an action performed only one second ago, I must still acknowledge it to be unfree, since the action is locked into the moment when it was performed. Can I lift my arm? I do lift it, but this sets me wondering: could I have decided not to lift my arm in that moment of time that has just gone by? To convince myself that I could, I do not lift my arm the next moment. But the non-lifting of my arm did not happen at that first moment when I was wondering about freedom. Time has gone by which I had no power to detain, and the hand which I lifted then and the air through which I lifted it are no longer the same as the air which now surrounds me and the hand that I now decide not to move. The moment when the first movement occurred is irrevocable, and at that moment there was only one action I could have performed, and whatever movement I made, that movement was the only one possible. The fact that the very next moment I decided not to lift my arm did not prove that I had the power not to lift it. And since there was only one possible movement for me at that one moment in time, it couldn't have been any other movement. In order to think of it as a free movement, it would have to be imagined as existing in the present on the very edge where past and future meet, which means beyond time, and that is impossible.
(3) However much we build up the difficulty of pinning down causes we can never arrive at a concept of complete freedom, the total absence of any cause. However elusive the cause behind an active expression of free will, our own or somebody else's, the first demand of an intelligent mind is to look for an assumed cause, without which no phenomenon is conceivable. I raise my arm in order to perform an action independent of any cause, but my wish to perform an action without a cause is the cause of my action.
But even if we could imagine a man excluded from all outside influence and examine one momentary action of his, performed in the present and unprovoked by any cause, thus reducing the infinitely small amount of necessity to zero, even then we would not have achieved a concept of complete free will in a man, because a creature impervious to all outside worldly influence, existing beyond time, and with no dependence on cause, is no longer a man.
In just the same way we could never conceive of a human action lacking any element of free will and entirely subject to the law of necessity.
(1) However much we expand our knowledge of the spatial conditions in which mankind dwells, such knowledge could never become complete since the number of these conditions is infinitely great, because space itself is inifinite. And as long as it remains true that not all the conditions that could influence a man can be defined, there can be no such thing as total necessity and there is always a certain amount of free will.
(2) However much we extend the time-lapse between an action under examination and our judgement of it, the period itself will be finite, whereas time is infinite, so here is another sense in which there can be no such thing as absolute necessity.
(3) However accessible the chain of causation behind a given action, we can never know the whole chain, because it is infinitely long, so once again we cannot attain absolute necessity.
And beyond that, even if we reduced the minimal amount of free will to zero by acknowledging its total absence in some cases - a dying man, an unborn baby, or an idiot - in the process of doing so we should have destroyed the very concept of what it is to be human, which is what we are examining, because once there is no free will, there is no man. And therefore the idea of a human action subject only to the law of necessity and devoid of all free will is just as impossible as the idea of a completely free human action.
Thus in order to imagine a human action subject only to the law of necessity and lacking all freedom, we would have to postulate knowledge of an infinite number of spatial conditions, an infinitely long period of time and an infinite line of causation.
And in order to imagine a man who was perfectly free and not subject to the law of necessity, we would have to imagine a man who existed beyond space, beyond time, and beyond all dependence on cause.
In the first case, if necessity was possible without free will, we would have to define the law of necessity in terms of necessity itself, which means form without content.
In the second case, if free will was possible without necessity, we would arrive at unconditional free will existing beyond space, time and cause, which by its own unconditional and limitless nature would amount to nothing but content without form.
In general terms, we would have arrived at two fundamentals underlying the entire world view of humanity - the unknowable essence of life and the laws that determine that essence.
Reason tells us: (1) Space and all the forms that give it visibility, matter itself, is infinite, and cannot be imagined otherwise. (2) Time is endless motion without a moment of rest, and cannot be imagined otherwise. (3) The connection between cause and effect has no beginning, and can have no end.
Consciousness tells us: (1) I alone exist, and I am everything that exists; consequently I include space; (2) I measure the course of time by a fixed moment in the present, in which moment alone I am aware of being alive; consequently I am beyond time; and (3) I am beyond cause, since I feel myself to be the cause of my own life in all its manifestations.
Reason gives expression to the laws of necessity. Consciousness gives expression to the essence of free will.
Unlimited freedom is the essence of life in man's consciousness. Necessity without content is human reason in its threefold form.
Free will is what is examined; necessity does the examining. Free will is content; necessity is form.
Only by separating the two sources of cognition, which are like form versus content, do we arrive at the mutually exclusive and separately unimaginable concepts of free will and necessity.
Only by bringing them together again do we arrive at a clear concept of human life.
Beyond these two concepts, which share a mutual definition when brought together, like form and content, there is no other possible representation of life.
All that we know about human life is a certain relationship between free will and necessity, or between consciousness and the laws of reason.
All that we know about the external world of nature is a certain relationship between the forces of nature and necessity, or between the essence of life and the laws of reason.
The forces of life in nature lie beyond us and our cognitive powers, and we put names to these forces: gravity, inertia, electricity, the life force and so on. But the force of life in man is not beyond our cognitive powers, and we call it free will.
But just as the force of gravity, intrinsically unintelligible despite being sensed by everyone, is understandable only in terms of the laws of necessity to which it is subject (from our first awareness that all bodies possess weight to Newton's law), the force of free will is also intrinsically unintelligible but recognized by all and understandable only in terms of the laws of necessity to which it is subject (all the way from the fact that all men die to knowledge of the most complex laws of economics or history).
All knowledge is simply the essence of life subsumed by the laws of reason.
Man's free will differs from all other forces in being accessible to human consciousness, but in the eyes of reason it is no different from any other force.
The forces of gravity, electricity or chemical affinity differ from each other only by being differently defined by reason. Similarly, the force of man's free will is distinguished by reason from the other forces of nature only by the definition assigned to it by reason. And free will divorced from necessity, from the laws of reason by which it is defined, is no different from gravity, heat or the force of organic growth; in the eyes of reason it is only a fleeting and indefinable sensation of life.
And just as the indefinable essence of the force that moves the heavenly bodies, the indefinable essence that drives heat, electricity, chemical affinity or the life force, forms the content of astronomy, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology and so on, the essence of the force of free will forms the subject matter of history. But just as the content of all science is the manifestation of this unknown essence of life, even though the essence itself can only be the subject of metaphysics, so too the manifestation of the force of man's free will in space, in time and in dependence on cause, forms the subject of history, while free will itself remains the subject of metaphysics.
In the biological sciences, what we know, we call the laws of necessity; what we don't know, we call the life force. The life force is simply an expression for an unexplainable leftover from what we know about the essence of life.
It is the same with history: what we know, we call the laws of necessity; what we don't know, we call free will. In the eyes of history free will is simply an expression for an unexplainable leftover from what we know about the laws of human life.
CHAPTER 11
History examines manifestations of human free will in relation to the external world existing in time and dependent on cause; in other words, it defines free will by the laws of reason, which means that history can be considered a science only to the extent that free will can be defined by those laws.
In the eyes of history the acknowledgement of human free will as a force capable of influencing historical events and therefore not subject to any laws is what the acknowledgement of free will in the movements of the heavenly bodies would be to astronomy.
Such an acknowledgement negates any possibility of the existence of laws, or indeed any kind of science. If there is even one freely moving body, the laws of Kepler and Newton go out of existence, along with any representation of the movement of the heavenly bodies. If there is a single human action determined by free will, all historical laws go out of existence, along with any representation of historical events.
For history the free will of human beings consists in lines of movement with one end disappearing into the unknown and the other belonging to the present time as man's consciousness of free will moves along in space and time, fully dependent on cause.
The more this field of movement unfolds before our eyes, the clearer its laws become. The discovery and definition of these laws is the purpose of history.
From the attitude now adopted by the science of history towards its subject matter, from the way it is going at present in looking for ultimate causes in man's free will, no scientific delineation of laws is possible, since, whatever limits we place on human freedom of action, the moment we recognize it as a force not subject to law, the existence of any law becomes impossible.
Only by infinitely limiting this freedom of action, reducing it to an infinitesimal minimum, shall we come to know the absolute impossibility of finding any causes, and then, instead of looking for them, history can set itself the task of looking for laws.
The search for these laws began a long time ago, and the new thinking methods which history has to adopt are being developed today even as the old way of looking at history marches towards self-destruction, still breaking everything down into ever tinier pieces in a vain search for the causes that lie behind things.
All branches of human science have gone the same way. Confronted by infinite smallness, mathematics, the most exact of all the sciences, drops the habit of continual sub-division and enters on a new process of integration of the infinitesimal unknown. Abandoning the concept of causation, mathematics now seeks a new law, a set of properties common to all infinitely small unknown elements.
The other sciences in their different ways have taken the same route. When Newton promulgated the law of gravity, he did not say that either the sun or the earth has the property of attraction. What he said was that all bodies, large and small, seem to have the property of attracting one another; in other words, putting to one side questions about the cause of the movements of bodies, he expressed one property common to all bodies, from the infinitely large to the infinitely small. The natural sciences are doing the same thing as they abandon the question of cause and search for laws. History is beginning to go the same way. And if the subject matter of history really is the study of the movements of peoples and humanity, rather than descriptions of episodes in the lives of individual people, it too is bound to abandon the concept of cause and look for laws that apply to all the equal and inseparably interconnected, infinitesimal elements of free will.
CHAPTER 12
Once the law of Copernicus had been discovered and demonstrated all it took was acknowledgement that the earth moves round the sun rather than vice versa for the entire cosmic view of the ancients to be destroyed. It might have been possible by the refutation of this law to carry on with the old ideas of motion, but in the absence of any such refutation it would seem impossible to carry on studying Ptolemaic worlds. Nevertheless, long after the discovery of the law of Copernicus Ptolemaic worlds continued to be a subject of study.
Once the first person had said and demonstrated that the birth-rate or crime-rate is subject to mathematical laws, that certain geographical and politico-economical laws determine this or that form of government, or that a given relationship between the population and the soil causes mass migration - from that moment the foundations on which history had been built were essentially destroyed.
It might have been possible by the refutation of the new laws to carry on with the former view of history, but in the absence of any such refutation it would seem impossible to carry on studying historical events as if they were the product of man's free will. For if a certain form of government has been set up, or a certain mass movement has taken place as a result of certain geographical, ethnographic or economic conditions, free will on the part of those persons who have been described as setting up that form of government or inspiring the mass migration cannot be regarded as the cause. And yet history goes on being studied in the same old way, in the teeth of laws of statistics, geography, political economy, comparative philology and geology that totally contradict its basic premises.
In the philosophy of physics the struggle between old and new attitudes was long and hard. Theology, the guardian of the old, called the new attitude an offence against divine revelation. But when truth prevailed theology re-established itself just as firmly on new territory.
And now in just the same way a long and hard struggle is being conducted between old and new attitudes to history, and in just the same way theology, guardian of the old, calls the new attitude an offence against revelation.
In both cases and on both sides the struggle arouses deep passions and obscures the truth. On one side fear and regret battle against the demolition of an edifice that has stood for centuries; on the other, there is an intense passion for destruction.
Those who fought against the new truth that was dawning in the philosophy of physics believed that acceptance of this truth would destroy all faith in God, the creation story and the miracle of Joshua.13 Defenders of the laws of Copernicus and Newton such as Voltaire, for instance, believed that the laws of astronomy would destroy religion, and he used the law of gravity as a weapon against religion.
In just the same way it now seems that once we accept the law of necessity we destroy all concepts of the soul, or good and evil, and all the towering political and ecclesiastical institutions founded on them.
Like Voltaire i