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🟡 War and Peace, Book 17: Second Epilogue (Full Audiobook) | Leo Tolstoy · Historical Adventure Audiobooks

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Speaker 1: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Translated by Aylmer and
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Speaker 1: Louise Maud. Second Epilogue. This is a LibriVox recording. All
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Speaker 1: LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information,
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Speaker 1: or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Lucy Perry.
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Speaker 1: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Second Epilogue. Chapter 1.
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Speaker 1: History is the life of nations and of humanity. to
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Speaker 1: seize and put into words, to describe directly the life
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Speaker 1: of humanity, or even of a single nation, appears impossible.
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Speaker 1: The ancient historians all employed one and the same method
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Speaker 1: to describe and seize the apparently elusive, the life of
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Speaker 1: a people. They described the activity of individuals who ruled
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Speaker 1: the people, and regarded the activity of those men as
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Speaker 1: representing the activity of the whole nation. The question, how
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Speaker 1: did individuals make nations act as they wished, and by
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Speaker 1: what was the will of these individuals themselves guided, the
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Speaker 1: ancients met by recognising a divinity which subjected the nations
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Speaker 1: to the will of a chosen man, and guided the
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Speaker 1: will of that chosen man so as to accomplish ends
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Speaker 1: that were predestined. For the ancients these questions were solved
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Speaker 1: by a belief in the direct participation of the deity
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Speaker 1: in human affairs. Modern history, in theory, rejects both these principles.
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Speaker 1: It would seem that having rejected the belief of the
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Speaker 1: ancients in man's subjection to the deity, and in a
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Speaker 1: predetermined aim toward which nations are led. Modern history should
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Speaker 1: study not the manifestations of power, but the causes that
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Speaker 1: produce it. But modern history has not done this. Having
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Speaker 1: in theory rejected the view held by the ancients, it
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Speaker 1: still follows them in practice. Instead of men endowed with
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Speaker 1: divine authority, and directly guided by the will of God,
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Speaker 1: modern history has given us either heroes endowed with extraordinary
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Speaker 1: superhuman capacities, or simply men of various kinds. from monarchs
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Speaker 1: to journalists, who lead the masses. Instead of the former
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Speaker 1: divinely appointed aims of the Jewish, Greek or Roman nations,
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Speaker 1: which ancient historians regarded as representing the progress of humanity,
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Speaker 1: modern history has postulated its own aims. The welfare of
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Speaker 1: the French, German or English people, or, in its highest abstraction,
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Speaker 1: the welfare and civilisation of humanity in general, by which
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Speaker 1: is usually meant that of the peoples occupying a small
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Speaker 1: north-westerly portion of a large continent. Modern history has rejected
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Speaker 1: the beliefs of the ancients, without replacing them by a
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Speaker 1: new conception, and the logic of the situation has obliged
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Speaker 1: the historians, after they had apparently rejected the divine authority
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Speaker 1: of the kings and the fate of the ancients, to
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Speaker 1: reach the same conclusion by another road, that is, to
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Speaker 1: recognise 1. nations guided by individual men, and 2. the
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Speaker 1: existence of a known aim to which these nations and
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Speaker 1: humanity at large attending. At the basis of the works
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Speaker 1: of all the modern historians, from gibbon to buckle, despite
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Speaker 1: their seeming disagreements and the apparent novelty of their outlooks,
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Speaker 1: lie those two old, unavoidable assumptions. In the first place,
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Speaker 1: the historian describes the activity of individuals who, in his opinion,
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Speaker 1: have directed humanity. One historian considers only monarchs, generals and
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Speaker 1: ministers as being such men, while another includes also orators,
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Speaker 1: learned men, reformers, philosophers and poets. Secondly, it is assumed
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Speaker 1: that the goal toward which humanity is being led is
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Speaker 1: known to the historians. To one of them, this goal
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Speaker 1: is the greatness of the Roman, Spanish or French realm.
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Speaker 1: To another, it is liberty, equality and a certain kind
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Speaker 1: of civilisation of a small corner of the world called Europe.
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Speaker 1: In 1789, a ferment arises in Paris. It grows, spreads
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Speaker 1: and is expressed by a movement of peoples from west
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Speaker 1: to east. Several times it moves eastward, and collides with
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Speaker 1: a counter-movement from the east, westward. In 1812 it reaches
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Speaker 1: its extreme limit, Moscow, and then, with remarkable symmetry, a
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Speaker 1: counter-movement occurs from east to west, attracting to it, as
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Speaker 1: the first movement had done, the nations of Middle Europe.
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Speaker 1: The counter-movement reaches the starting point of the first movement
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Speaker 1: in the west, Paris, and subsides. During that twenty-year period,
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Speaker 1: an immense number of fields were left untilled, houses were burned,
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Speaker 1: Trade changed its direction, millions of men migrated, were impoverished
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Speaker 1: or were enriched, and millions of Christian men professing the
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Speaker 1: law of love of their fellows slew one another. What
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Speaker 1: does all this mean? Why did it happen? What made
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Speaker 1: those people burn houses and slay their fellow men? What
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Speaker 1: were the causes of these events? What force made men
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Speaker 1: act so? These are the instinctive, plain and most legitimate
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Speaker 1: questions humanity asks itself when it encounters the monuments and
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Speaker 1: tradition of that period. For a reply to these questions,
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Speaker 1: the common sense of mankind turns to the science of history,
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Speaker 1: whose aim is to enable nations and humanity to know themselves.
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Speaker 1: If history had retained the conception of the ancients, it
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Speaker 1: would have said that God, to reward or punish his people,
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Speaker 1: gave Napoleon power and directed his will to the fulfilment
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Speaker 1: of the divine ends. And that reply would have been
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Speaker 1: clear and complete. One might believe or disbelieve in the
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Speaker 1: divine significance of Napoleon, but for anyone believing in it,
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Speaker 1: there would have been nothing unintelligible in the history of
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Speaker 1: that period, nor would there have been any contradictions. But
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Speaker 1: modern history cannot give that reply. Science does not admit
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Speaker 1: the conception of the ancients as to the direct participation
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Speaker 1: of the deity in human affairs, and therefore history ought
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Speaker 1: to give other answers. Modern history, replying to these questions, says,
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Speaker 1: you want to know what this movement means, what caused it,
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Speaker 1: and what force produced these events? Then listen. Louis XIV,
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Speaker 1: was a very proud and self-confident man. He had such
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Speaker 1: and such mistresses and such and such ministers, and he
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Speaker 1: ruled France badly. His descendants were weak men, and they
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Speaker 1: too ruled France badly, and they had such and such
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Speaker 1: favourites and such and such mistresses. Moreover, certain men wrote
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Speaker 1: some books at that time.
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Speaker 2: At the end of the.
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Speaker 1: 18th century, there were a couple of dozen men in
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Speaker 1: Paris who began to talk about all men being free
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Speaker 1: and equal. This caused people all over France to begin
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Speaker 1: to slash at and drown one another. They killed the
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Speaker 1: king and many other people. At that time, there was
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Speaker 1: a man in France of genius, Napoleon. He conquered everybody everywhere.
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Speaker 1: That is, he killed many people because he was a
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Speaker 1: great genius. And for some reason, he went to kill
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Speaker 1: Africans and killed them so well and was so cunning
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Speaker 1: and wise that when he returned to France, he ordered
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Speaker 1: everybody to obey him and they all obeyed him. Having
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Speaker 1: become an emperor, he again went out to kill people
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Speaker 1: in Italy, Austria and Prussia. And there too he killed
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Speaker 1: a great many. In Russia, there was an emperor, Alexander,
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Speaker 1: who decided to restore order in Europe and therefore fought
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Speaker 1: against Napoleon. In 1807, he suddenly made friends with him.
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Speaker 1: But in 1811, they again quarrelled and again began killing
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Speaker 1: many people. Napoleon led 600,000 men into Russia and captured Moscow.
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Speaker 1: Then he suddenly ran away from Moscow and the emperor Alexander,
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Speaker 1: helped by the advice of Stein and others, united Europe
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Speaker 1: to arm against the disturber of its peace. All Napoleon's
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Speaker 1: allies suddenly became his enemies, and their forces advanced against
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Speaker 1: the fresh forces he raised. The allies defeated Napoleon, entered Paris,
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Speaker 1: forced Napoleon to abdicate, and sent him to the island
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Speaker 1: of Alba, not depriving him of the title of emperor,
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Speaker 1: and showing him every respect, though five years before and
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Speaker 1: one year later they all regarded him as an outlaw
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Speaker 1: and a brigand. Then Louis XVIII, who till then had
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Speaker 1: been the laughing stock of both the French and the Allies,
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Speaker 1: began to reign, and Napoleon, shedding tears before his old guards,
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Speaker 1: renounced the throne and went into exile. Then the skilful
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Speaker 1: statesmen and diplomatists, especially Talleyroch, who managed to sit down
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Speaker 1: in a particular chair before anyone else, and thereby extended
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Speaker 1: the frontiers of France, talked in Vienna, and by these
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Speaker 1: conversations made the nations happy or unhappy. Suddenly the diplomatists
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Speaker 1: and monarchs nearly quarrelled, and were on the point of
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Speaker 1: again ordering their armies to kill one another. But just
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Speaker 1: then Napoleon arrived in France with a battalion, and the French,
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Speaker 1: who had been hating him, immediately all submitted to him.
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Speaker 1: But the Allied monarchs were angry at this, and went
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Speaker 1: to fight the French once more. And they defeated the
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Speaker 1: genius Napoleon, and, suddenly recognising him as a brigand, sent
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Speaker 1: him to the island of St Helena. And the exile,
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Speaker 1: separated from the beloved France so dear to his heart,
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Speaker 1: died a lingering death on that rock. and bequeathed his
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Speaker 1: great deeds to posterity. But in Europe a reaction occurred,
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Speaker 1: and the sovereigns once again all began to oppress their subjects.
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Speaker 1: It would be a mistake to think that this is ironic,
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Speaker 1: a caricature of the historical accounts. On the contrary, it
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Speaker 1: is a very mild expression of the contradictory replies, not
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Speaker 1: meeting the questions, which all the historians give, from the
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Speaker 1: compilers of memoirs and the histories of separate states, to
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Speaker 1: the writers of general histories and the new histories of
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Speaker 1: the culture of that period. The strangeness and absurdity of
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Speaker 1: these replies arise from the fact that modern history, like
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Speaker 1: a deaf man, answers questions no one has asked. If
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Speaker 1: the purpose of history be to give a description of
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Speaker 1: the movement of humanity and of the peoples, the first question,
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Speaker 1: in the absence of a reply to which all the
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Speaker 1: rest will be incomprehensible, is, what is the power that
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Speaker 1: moves peoples? To this, modern history laboriously replies, either that
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Speaker 1: Napoleon was a great genius, or that Louis XIV was
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Speaker 1: very proud, or that certain writers wrote certain books. All
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Speaker 1: that may be so, and mankind is ready to agree
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Speaker 1: with it, but it is not what was asked. All
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Speaker 1: that would be interesting if we recognised a divine power
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Speaker 1: based on itself and always consistently directing its nations through Napoleons,
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Speaker 1: Louis and the writers, but we do not acknowledge such
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Speaker 1: a power, and therefore before speaking about Napoleons, Louis and authors,
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Speaker 1: we ought to be shown the connection existing between these
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Speaker 1: men and the movement of the nations. If instead of
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Speaker 1: a divine power some other force has appeared, it should
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Speaker 1: be explained in what this new force consists, for the
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Speaker 1: whole interest of history lies precisely in that force. History
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Speaker 1: seems to assume that this force is self-evident and known
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Speaker 1: to everyone, but in spite of every desire to regard
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Speaker 1: it as known, anyone reading many historical works cannot help
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Speaker 1: doubting whether this new force, so variously understood by the
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Speaker 1: historians themselves, is really quite well known to everybody. End
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Speaker 1: of chapter 1. Recording by Lucy Perry.
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Speaker 3: In Bath.
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Speaker 1: On July 2nd, 2010. War and.
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Speaker 3: Peace.
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Speaker 4: Second Epilogue. Chapter 2. Read for LibriVox.org by Nathan King.
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Speaker 4: What force moves the nations? Biographical historians and historians of
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Speaker 4: separate nations understand this force as a power inherent in
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Speaker 4: heroes and rulers. In their narration, events occur solely by
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Speaker 4: the will of a Napoleon and Alexander, or in general,
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Speaker 4: of the persons they describe. The answers given by this
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Speaker 4: kind of historian to the question of what force causes
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Speaker 4: events to happen are satisfactory only as long as there
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Speaker 4: is but one historian to each event. As soon as
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Speaker 4: historians of different nationalities and tendencies begin to describe the
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Speaker 4: same event, the replies they give immediately lose all meaning,
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Speaker 4: for this force is understood by them all, not only differently,
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Speaker 4: but often in quite contradictory ways. One historian says that
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Speaker 4: an event was produced by Napoleon's power, another that it
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Speaker 4: was produced by Alexander's, a third that it was due
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Speaker 4: to the power of some other person. Besides this, historians
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Speaker 4: of that kind contradict each other even in their statement
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Speaker 4: as to the force on which the authority of some
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Speaker 4: particular person was based. Theirs, a Bonapartist, says that Napoleon's
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Speaker 4: power was based on his virtue and genius. Lanfrey, a Republican,
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Speaker 4: says it was based on his trickery and deception of
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Speaker 4: the people. So the historians of this class, by mutually
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Speaker 4: destroying one another's positions, destroy the understanding of the force
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Speaker 4: which produces events, and furnish no reply to history's essential question.
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Speaker 4: Writers of universal history who deal with all the nations
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Speaker 4: seem to recognize how erroneous is the specialist historian's view
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Speaker 4: of the force which produces events. They do not recognize
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Speaker 4: it as a power inherent in heroes and rulers, but
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Speaker 4: as the resultant of a multiplicity of various directed forces.
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Speaker 4: In describing a war of the subjugation of a people,
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Speaker 4: a general historian looks for the cause of the event
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Speaker 4: not in the power of one man, but in the
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Speaker 4: interaction of many persons connected with the event. According to
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Speaker 4: this view, the power of historical personages, represented as the
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Speaker 4: product of many forces, can no longer, it would seem,
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Speaker 4: be regarded as a force that itself produces events. Yet
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Speaker 4: in most cases universal historians still employ the conception of
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Speaker 4: power as a force that itself produces events, and treat
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Speaker 4: it as their cause. In their exposition, an historic character
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Speaker 4: is first the product of his time, and his power
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Speaker 4: only the resultant of various forces, and then his power
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Speaker 4: is itself a force producing events. Jervinus Schlosser and others,
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Speaker 4: for instance, at one time prove Napoleon to be a
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Speaker 4: product of the revolution, of the ideas of 1789 and
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Speaker 4: so forth, and at another plainly say that the campaign
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Speaker 4: of 1812 and other things they do not like were
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Speaker 4: simply the product of Napoleon's misdirected will, and that the
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Speaker 4: very ideas of 1789 were arrested in their development by
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Speaker 4: Napoleon's caprice. The ideas of the revolution and the general
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Speaker 4: temper of the age produce Napoleon's power. but Napoleon's power
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Speaker 4: suppressed the ideas of the revolution and the general temper
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Speaker 4: of the age. This curious contradiction is not accidental. Not
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Speaker 4: only does it occur at every step, but the universal
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Speaker 4: historian's accounts are all made up of a chain of
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Speaker 4: such contradictions. This contradiction occurs because after entering the field
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Speaker 4: of analysis, the universal historians stop halfway. To find competent
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Speaker 4: forces equal to the composite or resultant force, the sum
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Speaker 4: of the components must equal the resultant. This condition is
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Speaker 4: never observed by the universal historians, and so to explain
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Speaker 4: the resultant forces they are obliged to admit, in addition
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Speaker 4: to the insufficient components, another unexplained force affecting the resultant action.
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Speaker 4: Specialist historians describing the campaign of 1813 or the restoration
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Speaker 4: of the Bourbons plainly assert that these events were produced
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Speaker 4: by the will of Alexander. But the universal historian Jervinus,
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Speaker 4: refuting this opinion of the specialist historian, tries to prove
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Speaker 4: that the campaign of 1813 and the restoration of the
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Speaker 4: Bourbons were due to other things besides Alexander's will, such
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Speaker 4: as the activity of Stein, Metternich, Madame de Stael, Talleyrand, Fitch, Chateaubriand,
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Speaker 4: and others. The historian evidently decomposes Alexander's power into the components, Talleyrand, Chateaubriand,
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Speaker 4: and the rest, but the sum of the components, that
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Speaker 4: is the interactions of Chateaubriand, Talleyrand, Madame d'Estaille, and the others,
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Speaker 4: evidently does not equal the resultant, namely the phenomenon of
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Speaker 4: millions of Frenchmen submitting to the Bourbons. That Chateaubriand, Madame d'Estaille,
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Speaker 4: and others spoke certain words to one another only affected
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Speaker 4: their mutual relations, but does not account for the submission
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Speaker 4: of millions, and therefore, to explain how from these relations
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Speaker 4: of theirs the submission of millions of people resulted, that is,
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Speaker 4: how the component forces equal to 1 ae gave a
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Speaker 4: resultant equal to a thousand times A, the historians again
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Speaker 4: obliged to fall back on power, the force he had denied,
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Speaker 4: and to recognize it as the resultant of the forces,
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Speaker 4: that is, he has to admit an unexplained force acting
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Speaker 4: on the resultant. And that is just what the universal
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Speaker 4: historians do. And consequently, they not only contradict the specialist historians,
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Speaker 4: but contradict themselves. Peasants, having no clear idea of the
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Speaker 4: cause of rain, say... according to whether they want rain
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Speaker 4: or fine weather, the wind has blown the clouds away,
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Speaker 4: or the wind has brought up the clouds. And in
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Speaker 4: the same way, the universal historians sometimes, when it pleases
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Speaker 4: them and fits in with their theory, say that power
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Speaker 4: is the result of events. And sometimes, when they want
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Speaker 4: to prove something else, say that power produces events. A
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Speaker 4: third class of historians, the so-called historians of culture, following
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Speaker 4: the path laid down by the universal historians who sometimes
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Speaker 4: accept writers and ladies as forces producing events, again take
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Speaker 4: that force to be something quite different. They see it
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Speaker 4: in what is called culture, in mental activity. The historians
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Speaker 4: of culture are quite consistent in regard to their progenitors,
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Speaker 4: the writers of universal histories. For if historical events may
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Speaker 4: be explained by the fact that certain persons treated one
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Speaker 4: another in such and such ways, why not explain them
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Speaker 4: by the fact that such and such people wrote such
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Speaker 4: and such books. Of the immense number of indications accompanying
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Speaker 4: every vital phenomenon, these historians select the indication of intellectual
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Speaker 4: activity and say that this indication is the cause. But
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Speaker 4: despite their endeavors to prove that the cause of events
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Speaker 4: lies in intellectual activity, only by a great stretch can
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Speaker 4: one admit that there is any connection between intellectual activity
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Speaker 4: and the movement of peoples, and in no case can
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Speaker 4: one admit that intellectual activity controls people's actions. for that
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Speaker 4: view is not confirmed by such facts as the very
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Speaker 4: cruel murders of the French Revolution resulting from the doctrine
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Speaker 4: of the equality of man, or the very cruel wars
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Speaker 4: and executions resulting from the preaching of love. But even
18:05
Speaker 4: admitting as correct all the cunningly devised arguments with which
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Speaker 4: these historians are filled, admitting that nations are governed by
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Speaker 4: some undefined force called an idea, history's essential question still
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Speaker 4: remains unanswered. and to the former power of monarchs, and
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Speaker 4: to the influence of advisors and other people introduced by
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Speaker 4: the universal historians, another, newer force, the idea, is added,
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Speaker 4: the connection of which with the masses needs explanation. It
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Speaker 4: is possible to understand that Napoleon had power, and so
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Speaker 4: events occurred. With some effort, one may even conceive that Napoleon,
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Speaker 4: together with other influences, was the cause of an event.
18:42
Speaker 4: But how a book, Les Contrats Sociales, had the effect
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Speaker 4: of making Frenchmen begin to drown one another, cannot be
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Speaker 4: understood without an explanation of the causal nexus of this
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Speaker 4: new force with the event. Undoubtedly, some relation exists between
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Speaker 4: all who live contemporaneously, and so it is possible to
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Speaker 4: find some connection between the intellectual activity of men and
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Speaker 4: their historical movements, just as such a connection may be
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Speaker 4: found between the movements of humanity and commerce, handicraft, gardening,
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Speaker 4: or anything else you please. But why intellectual activity is
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Speaker 4: considered by the historians of culture to be the cause
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Speaker 4: or expression of the whole historical movement is hard to understand.
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Speaker 4: Only the following considerations can have led historians to such
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Speaker 4: a conclusion. 1. That history is written by learned men,
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Speaker 4: and so it is natural and agreeable for them to
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Speaker 4: think that the activity of their class supplies the basis
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Speaker 4: of the movement of all humanity, just as a similar
19:35
Speaker 4: belief is natural and agreeable to traders, agriculturalists, and soldiers,
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Speaker 4: if they do not express it That is merely because
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Speaker 4: traitors and soldiers do not write history. And two, that
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Speaker 4: spiritual activity, enlightenment, civilization, culture, ideas, are all indistinct, indefinite
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Speaker 4: conceptions under whose banner it is very easy to use
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Speaker 4: words having a still less definite meaning, and which can
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Speaker 4: therefore be readily introduced into any theory. But not to
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Speaker 4: speak of the intrinsic quality of histories of this kind,
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Speaker 4: which may possibly even be of use to someone for something,
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Speaker 4: The histories of culture, to which all general histories tend
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Speaker 4: more and more to approximate, are significant from the fact
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Speaker 4: that after seriously and minutely examining various religious, philosophic, and
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Speaker 4: political doctrines as cause of events, as soon as they
20:23
Speaker 4: have to describe an actual historic event, such as the
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Speaker 4: campaign of 1812, for instance, they involuntarily describe it as
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Speaker 4: resulting from an exercise of power, and say plainly that
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Speaker 4: that was the result of Napoleon's will. Speaking so... the
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Speaker 4: historians of culture involuntarily contradict themselves, and show that the
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Speaker 4: new force they have devised does not account for what
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Speaker 4: happens in history, and that history can only be explained
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Speaker 4: by introducing a power which they apparently do not recognize.
21:08
Speaker 5: A locomotive is moving. Someone asks, What moves it? A
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Speaker 5: peasant says the devil moves it. Another man says the
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Speaker 5: locomotive moves because its wheels go round. A third asserts
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Speaker 5: that the cause of its movement lies in the smoke
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Speaker 5: which the wind carries away. The peasant is irrefutable. He
21:26
Speaker 5: has devised a complete explanation. To refute him, someone would
21:30
Speaker 5: have to prove to him that there is no devil,
21:32
Speaker 5: or another peasant would have to explain to him that
21:34
Speaker 5: it is not the devil, but a German who moves
21:36
Speaker 5: the locomotive. Only then, as a result of the contradiction,
21:41
Speaker 5: will they see that they are both wrong. But the
21:43
Speaker 5: man who says that the movement of the wheels is
21:45
Speaker 5: the cause refutes himself, for having once begun to analyse,
21:49
Speaker 5: he ought to go on and explain further why the
21:51
Speaker 5: wheels go round. Until he has reached the ultimate cause
21:55
Speaker 5: of the movement of the locomotive, in the pressure of
21:57
Speaker 5: steam in the boiler, he has no right to stop
22:00
Speaker 5: in his search for the cause. The man who explains
22:03
Speaker 5: the movement of the locomotive by the smoke that is
22:05
Speaker 5: carried back, has noticed that the wheels do not supply
22:08
Speaker 5: an explanation, and has taken the first sign that occurs
22:11
Speaker 5: to him, and in his turn has offered that as
22:13
Speaker 5: an explanation. The only conception that can explain the movement
22:17
Speaker 5: of the locomotive is that of a force commensurate with
22:20
Speaker 5: the movement observed. The only conception that can explain the
22:23
Speaker 5: movement of the peoples is that of some force commensurate
22:27
Speaker 5: with the whole movement of the peoples. Yet, to supply
22:30
Speaker 5: this conception, various historians take forces of different kinds, all
22:35
Speaker 5: of which are incommensurate with the movement observed. Some see
22:38
Speaker 5: it as a force directly inherent in heroes, as the
22:41
Speaker 5: peasant sees the devil in the locomotive, others as a
22:45
Speaker 5: force resulting from several other forces, like the movement of
22:48
Speaker 5: the wheels, others again as an intellectual influence, like the
22:53
Speaker 5: smoke that is blown away. So long as histories are
22:56
Speaker 5: written of separate individuals, whether Caesars, Alexanders, Luthers or Voltaires,
23:01
Speaker 5: and not the histories of all, absolutely all those who
23:05
Speaker 5: take part in an event, it is quite impossible to
23:08
Speaker 5: describe the movement of humanity without the conception of a
23:11
Speaker 5: force compelling men to direct their activity towards a certain end.
23:16
Speaker 5: And the only such conception known to historians is that
23:19
Speaker 5: of power. This conception is the one handle by means
23:23
Speaker 5: of which the material of history, as at present expounded,
23:26
Speaker 5: can be dealt with, and anyone who breaks that handle off,
23:29
Speaker 5: as Buckle did, without finding some other method of treating
23:32
Speaker 5: historical material, merely deprives himself of the one possible way
23:36
Speaker 5: of dealing with it. The necessity of the conception of
23:40
Speaker 5: power as an explanation of historical events is best demonstrated
23:44
Speaker 5: by the universal historians and historians of culture themselves, for
23:48
Speaker 5: they professedly reject that conception, but inevitably have recourse to
23:53
Speaker 5: it at every step. In dealing with humanity's inquiry, The
23:57
Speaker 5: science of history up to now is like money in circulation,
24:01
Speaker 5: paper money and coin. The biographies and special national histories
24:05
Speaker 5: are like paper money. They can be used and can
24:07
Speaker 5: circulate and fulfil their purpose without harm to anyone and even, advantageously,
24:12
Speaker 5: as long as no one asks what is the security
24:15
Speaker 5: behind them. You need only forget to ask how the
24:18
Speaker 5: will of heroes produces events and such histories as Thiers
24:23
Speaker 5: will be interesting and instructive and may perhaps even possess
24:26
Speaker 5: a tinge of poetry. But, just as doubts with the
24:29
Speaker 5: real value of paper money arise, either because, being easy
24:33
Speaker 5: to make, too much of it gets made, or because
24:35
Speaker 5: people try to exchange it for gold, so also doubts
24:39
Speaker 5: concerning the real value of such histories arise, either because
24:43
Speaker 5: too many of them are written, or because, in his
24:46
Speaker 5: simplicity of heart, someone inquires, By what force did Napoleon
24:51
Speaker 5: do this? That is, once to exchange the current paper money,
24:55
Speaker 5: for the real gold of actual comprehension. The writers of
24:59
Speaker 5: universal histories, and of the history of culture, are like
25:03
Speaker 5: people who, recognising the defects of paper money, decide to
25:07
Speaker 5: substitute it for money made of metal that has not
25:10
Speaker 5: the specific gravity of gold. It may indeed make jingling coin,
25:14
Speaker 5: but will do no more than that. Paper money may
25:17
Speaker 5: deceive the ignorant, but nobody is deceived by tokens of
25:21
Speaker 5: base metal that have no value but merely jingle. as
25:24
Speaker 5: gold is gold, only if it is serviceable, not merely
25:27
Speaker 5: for exchange but also for use, so universal historians will
25:31
Speaker 5: be valuable only when they can reply to history's essential question,
25:35
Speaker 5: what is power? The universal historians give contradictory replies to
25:41
Speaker 5: that question, while the historians of culture evade it and
25:44
Speaker 5: answer something quite different, and as counters of imitation gold
25:48
Speaker 5: can be used only among a group of people who
25:50
Speaker 5: agree to accept them as gold. or among those who
25:53
Speaker 5: do not know the nature of gold, so universal historians
25:56
Speaker 5: and historians of culture, not answering humanity's essential question, serve
26:01
Speaker 5: as currency for some purpose of their own, only in
26:04
Speaker 5: universities and among the mass of readers who have a
26:06
Speaker 5: taste for what they call serious reading.
26:23
Speaker 6: Having abandoned the conception of the ancients as to the
26:35
Speaker 6: divine subjection of the will of a nation to some
26:38
Speaker 6: chosen man, and the subjection of that man's will to
26:41
Speaker 6: the deity, history cannot, without contradictions, take a single step,
26:47
Speaker 6: till it has chosen one of two things— either a
26:50
Speaker 6: return to the former belief in the direct intervention of
26:53
Speaker 6: the deity in human affairs, or a definite explanation of
26:57
Speaker 6: the meaning of the force producing historical events and termed power.
27:05
Speaker 6: A return to the first is impossible. The belief has
27:08
Speaker 6: been destroyed, and so it is essential to explain what
27:12
Speaker 6: is meant by power. Napoleon ordered an army to be
27:17
Speaker 6: raised and go to war. We are so accustomed to
27:21
Speaker 6: that idea and have become so used to it that
27:25
Speaker 6: the question, why did 600,000 men go to fight when
27:29
Speaker 6: Napoleon uttered certain words, seems to us senseless. He had
27:35
Speaker 6: the power and so what he ordered was done. This
27:40
Speaker 6: reply is quite satisfactory if we believe that the power
27:44
Speaker 6: was given him by God. But as soon as we
27:47
Speaker 6: do not admit that, it becomes essential to determine what
27:51
Speaker 6: is this power of one man over others. It cannot
27:57
Speaker 6: be the direct physical power of a strong man over
28:00
Speaker 6: a weak one, a domination based on the application or
28:04
Speaker 6: threat of physical force, like the power of Hercules, nor
28:09
Speaker 6: can it be based on the effect of moral force,
28:12
Speaker 6: as in their simplicity some historians think, who say that
28:16
Speaker 6: the leading figures in history are heroes, that is, men
28:20
Speaker 6: gifted with a special strength of soul and mind called genius.
28:26
Speaker 6: This power cannot be based on a predominance of moral strength, for,
28:31
Speaker 6: not to mention heroes such as Napoleon, about whose moral
28:35
Speaker 6: qualities opinions differ widely, history shows us that neither a
28:40
Speaker 6: Louis XI nor a Metternich, who ruled over millions of people,
28:45
Speaker 6: had any particular moral qualities. but on the contrary, were
28:50
Speaker 6: generally morally weaker than any of the millions they ruled over.
28:57
Speaker 6: If the source of power lies neither in the physical
29:00
Speaker 6: nor in the moral qualities of him who possesses it,
29:04
Speaker 6: it must evidently be looked for elsewhere in the relation
29:08
Speaker 6: to the people of the man who wields the power.
29:13
Speaker 6: And that is how power is understood by the science
29:15
Speaker 6: of jurisprudence, that exchange bank of history, which offers to
29:20
Speaker 6: exchange history's understanding of power for true gold. Power is
29:26
Speaker 6: the collective will of the people, transferred by expressed or
29:31
Speaker 6: tacit consent to their chosen rulers. In the domain of jurisprudence,
29:37
Speaker 6: which consists of discussions of how a state and power
29:40
Speaker 6: might be arranged, were it possible for all that to
29:43
Speaker 6: be arranged, it is all very clear. But when applied
29:47
Speaker 6: to history, that definition of power needs explanation. The science
29:54
Speaker 6: of jurisprudence regards the state and power as the ancients
29:58
Speaker 6: regarded fire, namely as something, existing absolutely. But for history,
30:04
Speaker 6: the state and power are merely phenomena, just as for
30:08
Speaker 6: modern physics, fire is not an element, but a phenomenon.
30:14
Speaker 6: From this fundamental difference between the view held by history
30:18
Speaker 6: and that held by jurisprudence, it follow that jurisprudence can
30:23
Speaker 6: tell minutely how, in its opinion, Power should be constituted,
30:28
Speaker 6: and what power, existing immutably outside time, is, but to
30:33
Speaker 6: history's questions about the meaning of the mutations of power,
30:37
Speaker 6: in time it can answer nothing. If power be the
30:41
Speaker 6: collective will of the people, transferred to their ruler, was
30:46
Speaker 6: Pugachev a representative of the will of the people? If not,
30:51
Speaker 6: then why was Napoleon I? Why was Napoleon III a
30:55
Speaker 6: criminal when he was taken prisoner at Boulogne? And why,
30:59
Speaker 6: later on, were those criminals whom he arrested? Do palace revolutions,
31:06
Speaker 6: in which sometimes only two or three people take part,
31:10
Speaker 6: transfer the will of the people to a new ruler?
31:14
Speaker 6: In international relations, is the will of the people also
31:18
Speaker 6: transferred to their conqueror? Was the will of the Confederation
31:22
Speaker 6: of the Rhine transferred to Napoleon in 1806? Was the
31:27
Speaker 6: will of the Russian people transferred to Napoleon in 1809,
31:31
Speaker 6: when our army, in alliance with the French, went to
31:35
Speaker 6: fight the Austrians? To these questions, three answers are possible.
31:43
Speaker 6: Either to assume, one, that the will of the people
31:46
Speaker 6: is always unconditionally transferred to the ruler or rulers they
31:50
Speaker 6: have chosen, and that therefore every emergence of a new power,
31:55
Speaker 6: every struggle against the power, once appointed, should be absolutely
32:00
Speaker 6: regarded as an infringement of the real power. Or, too,
32:07
Speaker 6: that the will of the people is transferred to the
32:09
Speaker 6: rulers conditionally, under definite and known conditions, and to show
32:14
Speaker 6: that all limitations, conflicts, and even destructions of power are
32:20
Speaker 6: result from a non-observance by the rulers of the conditions
32:24
Speaker 6: under which their power was entrusted to them. Or, three,
32:30
Speaker 6: that the will of the people is delegated to the
32:32
Speaker 6: rulers conditionally, but that the conditions are unknown and indefinite,
32:38
Speaker 6: and that the appearance of several authorities, their struggles and
32:42
Speaker 6: their falls, result solely from the greater or lesser fulfilment
32:47
Speaker 6: by the rulers of these unknown conditions on which the
32:51
Speaker 6: will of the people is transferred from some people to others.
32:57
Speaker 6: And these are the three ways in which the historians
33:00
Speaker 6: do explain the relation of the people to their rulers.
33:05
Speaker 6: Some historians, those biographical and specialist historians already referred to,
33:12
Speaker 6: in their simplicity, failing to understand the question of the
33:15
Speaker 6: meaning of power, seem to consider the that the collective
33:19
Speaker 6: will of the people is unconditionally transferred to historical persons,
33:24
Speaker 6: and therefore, when describing some single state, they assume that
33:29
Speaker 6: particular power to be the one absolute and real power,
33:33
Speaker 6: and that any other force opposing this is not a power,
33:37
Speaker 6: but a violation of power, mere violence. Their theory, suitable
33:44
Speaker 6: for primitive and peaceful periods of history, has the inconvenience,
33:49
Speaker 6: in application to complex and stormy periods in the life
33:53
Speaker 6: of nations during which various powers arise simultaneously and struggle
33:58
Speaker 6: with one another, that a legitimist historian will prove that
34:03
Speaker 6: a national convention, the Directory, and Bonaparte were mere infringers
34:08
Speaker 6: of the true power, while a republican and a Bonapartist
34:13
Speaker 6: will prove the one that a convention and the other
34:17
Speaker 6: that the empire was the real power and that all
34:20
Speaker 6: the others were violations of power. Evidently, the explanations furnished
34:26
Speaker 6: by these historians, being mutually contradictory, can only satisfy young children.
34:34
Speaker 6: Recognizing the falsity of this view of history, another set
34:38
Speaker 6: of historians say that power rests on a conditional delegation
34:42
Speaker 6: of the will of the people to their rulers and
34:45
Speaker 6: and that historical leaders have power only conditionally on carrying
34:49
Speaker 6: out the program that the will of the people has,
34:53
Speaker 6: but tacit agreement, prescribed to them. But what this program
34:57
Speaker 6: consists in, these historians do not say, or if they do,
35:02
Speaker 6: they continually contradict one another. Each historian, according to his
35:08
Speaker 6: view of what constitutes a nation's progress, looks for these
35:13
Speaker 6: conditions in the greatness of wealth, freedom, or enlightenment of
35:18
Speaker 6: citizens of France or some other country. But not to
35:22
Speaker 6: mention the historians' contradictions as to the nature of this program,
35:27
Speaker 6: or even admitting that some one general program of these
35:30
Speaker 6: conditions exists, the facts of history almost always contradict that theory.
35:37
Speaker 6: If the conditions under which power is entrusted consist in
35:40
Speaker 6: the wealth, freedom, and enlightenment of the people, How is
35:45
Speaker 6: it that Louis XIV and Ivan the Terrible end their
35:50
Speaker 6: reigns tranquilly, while Louis XVI and Charles I are executed
35:56
Speaker 6: by their people? To this question, historians reply that Louis
36:02
Speaker 6: XIV's activity, contrary to the program, reacted on Louis XVI.
36:09
Speaker 6: But why did it not react on Louis XIV or
36:11
Speaker 6: on Louis XV? Why should it react just on Louis XVI?
36:18
Speaker 6: And what is the time limit for such reactions? To
36:22
Speaker 6: these questions there are, and can be, no answers. Equally,
36:29
Speaker 6: little does this view explain why, for several centuries, the
36:33
Speaker 6: collective will is not withdrawn from certain rulers and their heirs,
36:38
Speaker 6: and then suddenly, during a period of fifty years, is
36:42
Speaker 6: transferred to the Convention, to the Directory, to Napoleon, to Alexander,
36:48
Speaker 6: to Louis XVIII, to Napoleon again, to Charles X, to Louis-Philippe,
36:56
Speaker 6: to a republican government, and to Napoleon III. When explaining
37:02
Speaker 6: these rapid transfers of the people's will, from one individual
37:06
Speaker 6: to another, especially in view of international relations, conquests and alliances,
37:13
Speaker 6: The historians are obliged to admit that some of these
37:17
Speaker 6: transfers are not normal delegations of the people's will, but
37:21
Speaker 6: are accidents dependent on cunning, on mistakes, on craft, or
37:27
Speaker 6: on the weakness of a diplomatist, a ruler, or a
37:30
Speaker 6: party leader. So that a greater part of the events
37:34
Speaker 6: of history, civil wars, revolutions, and conquests, are presented by
37:40
Speaker 6: these historians as not as the results of free transferences
37:44
Speaker 6: of the people's will, but as results of the ill-directed
37:48
Speaker 6: will of one or more individuals, that is, once again,
37:54
Speaker 6: as usurpations of power. And so, these historians also see
38:00
Speaker 6: and admit historical events which are exceptions to the theory.
38:06
Speaker 6: These historians resemble a botanist who, having noticed that some
38:11
Speaker 6: plants grow from seeds producing two cotyledons, should insist that
38:16
Speaker 6: all that grows does so by sprouting into two leaves,
38:20
Speaker 6: and that the palm, the mushroom, and even the oak,
38:23
Speaker 6: which blossom into full growth and no longer resemble two leaves,
38:28
Speaker 6: are deviations from the theory. Historians of the third class
38:34
Speaker 6: assume that the will of the people is transferred to
38:37
Speaker 6: historic personages conditionally, but that the conditions are unknown to us.
38:42
Speaker 6: They say that historical personages have power only because they
38:47
Speaker 6: fulfill the will of the people, which has been delegated
38:50
Speaker 6: to them. But in that case, if the force that
38:54
Speaker 6: moves nations lies not in the historic leaders, but in
38:58
Speaker 6: the nations themselves, what significance have those leaders? The leaders,
39:04
Speaker 6: these historians tell us, express the will of the people themselves.
39:08
Speaker 6: The activity of the leaders represents the activity of the people.
39:14
Speaker 6: But in that case, the question arises whether all the
39:17
Speaker 6: activity of the leaders serves as an expression of the
39:20
Speaker 6: people's will, or only some part of it. If the
39:24
Speaker 6: whole activity of the leaders serves as the expression of
39:28
Speaker 6: the people's will, as some historians suppose, then all the
39:32
Speaker 6: details of the court scandals contained in the biographies of
39:36
Speaker 6: Napoleon or Catherine serve to express the life of the nation,
39:40
Speaker 6: which is evident nonsense. But if it is only some
39:44
Speaker 6: particular side of the activity of a historical leader, which
39:48
Speaker 6: serves to express a people's life, as other so-called philosophical
39:53
Speaker 6: historians believe, then, to determine which side of the activity
39:58
Speaker 6: of a leader expresses the nation's life, we have first
40:02
Speaker 6: of all to know in what the nation's life consists.
40:07
Speaker 6: Met by this difficulty, Historians of that class devise some
40:12
Speaker 6: most obscure, impalpable and general abstraction which can cover all
40:17
Speaker 6: conceivable occurrences and declare this abstraction to be the aim
40:21
Speaker 6: of humanity's movement. The most usual generalizations adopted by almost
40:28
Speaker 6: all historians are freedom, equality, enlightenment, progress, civilization and culture.
40:37
Speaker 6: postulating some generalization as the goal of the movement of humanity,
40:42
Speaker 6: the historians study the men of whom the greatest number
40:46
Speaker 6: of monuments have remained, kings, ministers, generals, authors, reformers, popes,
40:53
Speaker 6: and journalists, to the extent to which, in their opinion,
40:58
Speaker 6: these persons have promoted or hindered that abstraction. But as
41:04
Speaker 6: it is in no way proved, that the aim of
41:06
Speaker 6: humanity does consist in freedom, equality, enlightenment or civilization, and
41:12
Speaker 6: as the connection of the people with the rulers and
41:15
Speaker 6: enlighteners of humanity is only based on the arbitrary assumption
41:20
Speaker 6: that the collective will of the people is always transferred
41:23
Speaker 6: to the men whom we have noticed, it happens that
41:27
Speaker 6: the activity of the millions who migrate, burn houses, abandon
41:32
Speaker 6: agriculture and destroy one another never is expressed in the
41:36
Speaker 6: account of the activity of some dozen people who did
41:40
Speaker 6: not burn houses, practice agriculture, or slay their fellow creatures.
41:46
Speaker 6: History proves this at every turn. Is the ferment of
41:50
Speaker 6: the peoples of the West at the end of the
41:52
Speaker 6: 18th century and their drive eastward explained by the activity
41:57
Speaker 6: of Louis XIV, XV, and XVI, their mistresses and ministers,
42:03
Speaker 6: and by the lives of Napoleon, Rousseau, Diderot, Beaumarchais, and others?
42:10
Speaker 6: Is the movement of the Russian people, eastward to Kazan
42:14
Speaker 6: and Siberia, expressed by details of the morbid character of
42:18
Speaker 6: Ivan the Terrible, and by his correspondence with Kurpsky? Is
42:23
Speaker 6: the movement of the peoples at the time of the Crusade,
42:26
Speaker 6: explained by the life and activity of the Godfrey's and
42:29
Speaker 6: the Louise's and their ladies? For us, That movement of
42:34
Speaker 6: the peoples from west to east, without leaders, with a
42:38
Speaker 6: crowd of vagrants and with Peter the Hermit, remains incomprehensible.
42:43
Speaker 6: And yet more incomprehensible is the cessation of that movement
42:48
Speaker 6: when a rational and sacred aim for the Crusade, the
42:51
Speaker 6: deliverance of Jerusalem, had been clearly defined by historic leaders. Popes,
42:57
Speaker 6: kings and knights incited the peoples to free the Holy Land.
43:02
Speaker 6: but the people did not go, for the unknown cause
43:05
Speaker 6: which had previously impelled them to go no longer existed.
43:10
Speaker 6: The history of the Gottfrieds and the Minnesingers can evidently
43:13
Speaker 6: not cover the life of the peoples, and the history
43:17
Speaker 6: of the Gottfrieds and the Minnesingers has remained the history
43:20
Speaker 6: of Gottfrieds and Minnesingers, but the history of the life
43:24
Speaker 6: of the peoples and their impulses has remained unknown. Still
43:29
Speaker 6: as does the history of authors and reformers explain to
43:33
Speaker 6: us the life of the peoples. The history of culture
43:38
Speaker 6: explains to us the impulses and conditions of life and
43:42
Speaker 6: thought of a writer or a reformer. We learn that
43:47
Speaker 6: Luther had a hot temper and said such and such things.
43:51
Speaker 6: We learn that Rousseau was suspicious and wrote such and
43:55
Speaker 6: such books secretly. but we do not learn why, after
43:59
Speaker 6: the Reformation, the peoples massacred one another, nor why, during
44:04
Speaker 6: the French Revolution, they guillotined one another. If we unite
44:10
Speaker 6: both these kinds of history, as is done by the
44:13
Speaker 6: newest historians, we shall have the history of monarchs and writers,
44:18
Speaker 6: but not the history of the life of the peoples.
44:24
Speaker 6: End of chapter 4 Recording by Ernst Patinama.
44:34
Speaker 7: War and Peace, Second Epilogue, Chapter 5. Read for LibriVox.org
44:38
Speaker 7: by Laurie Ann Walden. The life of the nations is
44:42
Speaker 7: not contained in the lives of a few men, for
44:44
Speaker 7: the connection between those men and the nations has not
44:47
Speaker 7: been found. The theory that this connection is based on
44:51
Speaker 7: the transference of the collective will of a people to
44:54
Speaker 7: certain historical personages is is a hypothesis unconfirmed by the
44:58
Speaker 7: experience of history. The theory of the transference of the
45:03
Speaker 7: collective will of the people to historic persons may perhaps
45:06
Speaker 7: explain much in the domain of jurisprudence and be essential
45:10
Speaker 7: for its purposes, but in its application to history, as
45:13
Speaker 7: soon as revolutions, conquests, or civil wars occur, that is,
45:18
Speaker 7: as soon as history begins, that theory explains nothing. The
45:23
Speaker 7: theory seems irrefutable just because the act of transference of
45:26
Speaker 7: the people's will cannot be verified, for it never occurred.
45:31
Speaker 7: Whatever happens, and whoever may stand at the head of affairs,
45:34
Speaker 7: the theory can always say that such and such a
45:37
Speaker 7: person took the lead because the collective will was transferred
45:40
Speaker 7: to him. The replies this theory gives to historical questions
45:44
Speaker 7: are like the replies of a man who, WATCHING THE
45:47
Speaker 7: MOVEMENTS OF A HERD OF CATTLE AND PAYING NO ATTENTION
45:50
Speaker 7: TO THE VARYING QUALITY OF THE PASTURAGE IN DIFFERENT PARTS
45:53
Speaker 7: OF THE FIELD, OR TO THE DRIVING OF THE HERDSMAN,
45:56
Speaker 7: SHOULD ATTRIBUTE THE DIRECTION THE HERD TAKES TO WHAT ANIMAL
45:59
Speaker 7: HAPPENS TO BE AT ITS HEAD. THE HERD GOES IN
46:03
Speaker 7: THAT DIRECTION BECAUSE THE ANIMAL IN FRONT LEAVES IT AND
46:05
Speaker 7: THE COLLECTIVE WILL OF ALL THE OTHER ANIMALS IS VESTED
46:08
Speaker 7: IN THAT LEADER. THAT IS WHAT HISTORIANS OF THE FIRST
46:11
Speaker 7: CLASS SAY, THOSE WHO ASSUME THE UNCONDITIONAL TRANSFERENCE OF THE
46:15
Speaker 7: PEOPLE'S WILL. If the animals leading the herd change, this
46:20
Speaker 7: happens because the collective will of all the animals is
46:23
Speaker 7: transferred from one leader to another, according to whether the
46:26
Speaker 7: animal is or is not leading them in the direction
46:29
Speaker 7: selected by the whole herd. Such is the reply of
46:33
Speaker 7: historians who assume that the collective will of the people
46:36
Speaker 7: is delegated to rulers under conditions which they regard as known.
46:41
Speaker 7: With this method of observation, it often happens that the observer,
46:44
Speaker 7: influenced by the direction he himself prefers— regards those as
46:48
Speaker 7: leaders who, owing to the people's change of direction, are
46:52
Speaker 7: no longer in front, but on one side, or even
46:55
Speaker 7: in the rear. If the animals in front are continually changing,
46:59
Speaker 7: and the direction of the whole herd is constantly altered,
47:03
Speaker 7: this is because, in order to follow a given direction,
47:05
Speaker 7: the animals transfer their will to the animals that have
47:08
Speaker 7: attracted our attention. And to study the movements of the herd,
47:12
Speaker 7: we must watch the movements of all the prominent animals
47:15
Speaker 7: moving on all sides of the herd. So say the
47:18
Speaker 7: third class of historians who regard all historical persons, from
47:22
Speaker 7: monarchs to journalists, as the expression of their age. The
47:27
Speaker 7: theory of the transference of the will of the people
47:29
Speaker 7: to historic persons is merely a paraphrase, a restatement of
47:33
Speaker 7: the question in other words. What causes historical events?
47:38
Speaker 6: Power.
47:40
Speaker 3: What is power?
47:41
Speaker 7: Power is the collective will of the people transferred to
47:44
Speaker 7: one person. Under what condition is the will of the
47:48
Speaker 7: people delegated to one person? On condition that that person
47:52
Speaker 7: expresses the will of the whole people. That is, power
47:56
Speaker 7: is power. In other words, power is a word the
47:59
Speaker 7: meaning of which we do not understand. If the realm
48:03
Speaker 7: of human knowledge were confined to abstract reasoning, then having
48:07
Speaker 7: subjected to criticism the explanation of power that juridical science
48:11
Speaker 7: gives us, humanity would conclude that power is merely a
48:15
Speaker 7: word and has no real existence. But to understand phenomena,
48:19
Speaker 7: man has, besides abstract reasoning, experience by which he verifies
48:24
Speaker 7: his reflections. And experience tells us that power is not
48:28
Speaker 7: merely a word, but an actually existing phenomenon. Not to
48:33
Speaker 7: speak of the fact that no description of the collective
48:36
Speaker 7: activity of men can do without the conception of power,
48:39
Speaker 7: The existence of power is proved both by history and
48:42
Speaker 7: by observing contemporary events. Whenever an event occurs, a man appears,
48:48
Speaker 7: or men appear, by whose will the event seems to
48:51
Speaker 7: have taken place. Napoleon III issues a decree, and the
48:55
Speaker 7: French go to Mexico. The King of Prussia and Bismarck
48:59
Speaker 7: issue decrees, and an army enters Bohemia. Napoleon I issues
49:04
Speaker 7: a decree, and an army enters Russia. Alexander I gives
49:08
Speaker 7: a command and the French submit to the Bourbons. Experience
49:12
Speaker 7: shows us that whatever event occurs, it is always related
49:16
Speaker 7: to the will of one or of several men who
49:18
Speaker 7: have decreed it. The historians, in accord with the old
49:22
Speaker 7: habit of acknowledging divine intervention in human affairs, want to
49:26
Speaker 7: see the cause of events in the expression of the
49:29
Speaker 7: will of someone endowed with power. But that supposition is
49:33
Speaker 7: not confirmed either by reason or by experience. On the
49:38
Speaker 7: one side, reflection shows that the expression of a man's will,
49:41
Speaker 7: his words, are only part of the general activity expressed
49:45
Speaker 7: in an event, as, for instance, in a war or
49:48
Speaker 7: a revolution. And so, without assuming an incomprehensible supernatural force,
49:54
Speaker 7: a miracle, one cannot admit that words can be the
49:57
Speaker 7: immediate cause of the movements of millions of men. On
50:01
Speaker 7: the other hand, even if we admitted that words could
50:04
Speaker 7: be the cause of events and History shows that the
50:07
Speaker 7: expression of the will of historical personages does not, in
50:11
Speaker 7: most cases, produce any effect. That is to say, their
50:14
Speaker 7: commands are often not executed, and sometimes the very opposite
50:18
Speaker 7: of what they order occurs. Without admitting divine intervention in
50:23
Speaker 7: the affairs of humanity, we cannot regard power as the
50:27
Speaker 7: cause of events. Power, from the standpoint of experience, is
50:31
Speaker 7: is merely the relation that exists between the expression of
50:34
Speaker 7: someone's will and the execution of that will by others.
50:39
Speaker 7: To explain the conditions of that relationship, we must first
50:42
Speaker 7: establish a conception of the expression of will, referring it
50:46
Speaker 7: to man and not to the deity. If the deity
50:50
Speaker 7: issues a command, expresses his will, as ancient history tells us,
50:54
Speaker 7: the expression of that will is independent of time and
50:57
Speaker 7: is not caused by anything. for the divinity is not
51:01
Speaker 7: controlled by an event. But speaking of commands that are
51:04
Speaker 7: the expression of the will of men, acting in time
51:07
Speaker 7: and in relation to one another, to explain the connection
51:10
Speaker 7: of commands with events we must restore, 1. The condition
51:15
Speaker 7: of all that takes place, the continuity of movement in time,
51:19
Speaker 7: both of the events and of the person who commands,
51:22
Speaker 7: and 2. The inevitability of the connection between the person
51:26
Speaker 7: commanding and those who execute his command. CHAPTER VI. ONLY
51:31
Speaker 7: THE EXPRESSION OF THE WILL OF THE DEITY, NOT DEPENDENT
51:33
Speaker 7: ON TIME, CAN RELATE TO A WHOLE SERIES OF EVENTS
51:41
Speaker 7: OCCURRING OVER A PERIOD OF YEARS OR CENTURIES. AND ONLY
51:43
Speaker 7: THE DEITY, INDEPENDENT OF EVERYTHING, can, by his sole will,
51:59
Speaker 7: determine the direction of humanity's movement. But man acts in time,
52:04
Speaker 7: and himself takes part in what occurs. Reinstating the first
52:09
Speaker 7: condition omitted, that of time, we see that no command
52:13
Speaker 7: can be executed without some preceding order having been given
52:17
Speaker 7: rendering the execution of the last command possible. No command
52:21
Speaker 7: ever appears spontaneously, or itself covers a whole series of occurrences.
52:27
Speaker 7: but each command follows from another, and never refers to
52:30
Speaker 7: a whole series of events, but always to one moment
52:33
Speaker 7: only of an event. When, for instance, we say that
52:38
Speaker 7: Napoleon ordered armies to go to war, we combine in
52:41
Speaker 7: one simultaneous expression a whole series of consecutive commands dependent
52:46
Speaker 7: one on another. Napoleon could not have commanded an invasion
52:50
Speaker 7: of Russia, and never did so. Today he ordered such
52:54
Speaker 7: and such papers to be written to Vienna, to Berlin,
52:57
Speaker 7: and to Petersburg, tomorrow such and such decrees and orders
53:01
Speaker 7: to the army, the fleet, the commissariat, and so on,
53:04
Speaker 7: and so on. Millions of commands, which formed a whole
53:07
Speaker 7: series corresponding to a series of events which brought the
53:11
Speaker 7: French armies into Russia. If throughout his reign Napoleon gave
53:15
Speaker 7: commands concerning an invasion of England, and expended on no
53:19
Speaker 7: other undertaking so much time and effort, and yet during
53:23
Speaker 7: his whole reign never once attempted to execute that design,
53:27
Speaker 7: but undertook an expedition into Russia, with which country he
53:30
Speaker 7: considered it desirable to be in alliance, a conviction he
53:34
Speaker 7: repeatedly expressed. This came about because his commands did not
53:38
Speaker 7: correspond to the course of events in the first case,
53:41
Speaker 7: but did so correspond in the latter. For an order
53:45
Speaker 7: to be certainly executed, it is necessary that a man
53:49
Speaker 7: should order what can be executed. But to know what
53:52
Speaker 7: can and what cannot be executed is impossible, not only
53:56
Speaker 7: in the case of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, in which
53:59
Speaker 7: millions participated, but even in the simplest event, for in
54:03
Speaker 7: either case millions of obstacles may arise to prevent its execution.
54:08
Speaker 7: Every order executed is always one of an immense number, unexecuted.
54:14
Speaker 7: All the impossible orders inconsistent with the course of events
54:17
Speaker 7: remain unexecuted. only the possible ones get linked up with
54:21
Speaker 7: the consecutive series of commands corresponding to a series of events,
54:25
Speaker 7: and are executed. Our false conception that an event is
54:30
Speaker 7: caused by a command which precedes it is due to
54:32
Speaker 7: the fact that when the event has taken place, and
54:35
Speaker 7: out of thousands of others those few commands which were
54:38
Speaker 7: consistent with that event have been executed, we forget about
54:41
Speaker 7: the others that were not executed because they could not be.
54:45
Speaker 7: Apart from that, the chief source of our error in
54:47
Speaker 7: this matter is due to the fact that in the
54:50
Speaker 7: historical accounts a whole series of innumerable, diverse, and petty events, such,
54:55
Speaker 7: for instance, as all those which led the French armies
54:58
Speaker 7: to Russia, is generalized into one event in accord with
55:02
Speaker 7: the result produced by that series of events, and corresponding
55:05
Speaker 7: with this generalization, the whole series of commands is also
55:09
Speaker 7: generalized into a single expression of will. We say that
55:13
Speaker 7: Napoleon wished to invade Russia, and invaded it. In reality,
55:18
Speaker 7: in all Napoleon's activity, we never find anything resembling an
55:22
Speaker 7: expression of that wish, but find a series of orders,
55:25
Speaker 7: or expressions of his will, very variously and indefinitely directed.
55:31
Speaker 7: Amid a long series of unexecuted orders of Napoleon's, one series,
55:36
Speaker 7: for the campaign of 1812, was carried out, Not because
55:40
Speaker 7: those orders differed in any way from the other, unexecuted orders,
55:44
Speaker 7: but because they coincided with the course of events that
55:46
Speaker 7: led the French army into Russia. Just as in stencil work,
55:50
Speaker 7: this or that figure comes out, not because the color
55:53
Speaker 7: was laid on from this side or in that way,
55:56
Speaker 7: but because it was laid on from all sides over
55:59
Speaker 7: the figure cut in the stencil. so that examining the
56:03
Speaker 7: relation in time of the commands to the events, we
56:06
Speaker 7: find that a command can never be the cause of
56:09
Speaker 7: the event, but that a certain definite dependence exists between
56:13
Speaker 7: the two. To understand in what this dependence consists, it
56:17
Speaker 7: is necessary to reinstate another omitted condition of every command
56:21
Speaker 7: proceeding not from the deity, but from a man, which is,
56:25
Speaker 7: that the man who gives the command himself takes part in.
56:29
Speaker 7: This relation of the commander to those he commands is
56:32
Speaker 7: just what is called power. This relation consists in the following.
56:38
Speaker 7: For common action, people always unite in certain combinations, in which,
56:43
Speaker 7: regardless of the difference of the aim set for the
56:45
Speaker 7: common action, the relation between those taking part in it
56:48
Speaker 7: is always the same. Men uniting in these combinations always
56:53
Speaker 7: assume such relations toward one another that the larger number
56:57
Speaker 7: take a more direct share. and the smaller number, a
57:00
Speaker 7: less direct share, and the collective action for which they
57:03
Speaker 7: have combined. Of all the combinations in which men unite
57:07
Speaker 7: for collective action, one of the most striking and definite
57:10
Speaker 7: examples is an army. Every army is composed of lower
57:15
Speaker 7: grades of the service, the rank and file, of whom
57:18
Speaker 7: there are always the greater number, of the next higher
57:21
Speaker 7: military rank, corporals and non-commissioned officers, of whom there are fewer,
57:26
Speaker 7: and of still higher officers, of whom there are still fewer,
57:30
Speaker 7: and so on to the highest military command which is
57:32
Speaker 7: concentrated in one person. A military organization may be quite
57:37
Speaker 7: correctly compared to a cone, of which the base with
57:41
Speaker 7: the largest diameter consists of the rank and file, the
57:44
Speaker 7: next higher and smaller section of the cone consists of
57:47
Speaker 7: the next higher grades of the army, and so on
57:50
Speaker 7: to the apex, the point of which will represent the commander-in-chief.
57:55
Speaker 7: The soldiers of whom there are the most form the
57:57
Speaker 7: lower section of the cone and its base. The soldier
58:01
Speaker 7: himself does the stabbing, hacking, burning, and pillaging, and always
58:05
Speaker 7: receives orders for these actions from men above him. He
58:08
Speaker 7: himself never gives an order. The non-commissioned officers, of whom
58:13
Speaker 7: there are fewer, perform the action itself less frequently than
58:16
Speaker 7: the soldiers, but they already give commands. An officer still
58:21
Speaker 7: less often acts directly himself, but commands still more frequently.
58:26
Speaker 7: A general does nothing but command the troops, indicates the objective,
58:30
Speaker 7: and hardly ever uses a weapon himself. The commander-in-chief never
58:35
Speaker 7: takes direct part in the action itself, but only gives
58:37
Speaker 7: general orders concerning the movement of the mass of the troops.
58:42
Speaker 7: A similar relation of people to one another is seen
58:44
Speaker 7: in every combination of men for common activity, in agriculture, trade,
58:49
Speaker 7: and every administration. and so without particularly analyzing all the
58:54
Speaker 7: contiguous sections of a cone and of the ranks of
58:56
Speaker 7: an army or the ranks and positions in any administrative
59:00
Speaker 7: or public business whatever from the lowest to the highest
59:04
Speaker 7: we see a law by which men to take associated
59:07
Speaker 7: action combine in such relations that the more directly they
59:11
Speaker 7: participate in performing the action, the less they can command,
59:15
Speaker 7: and the more numerous they are. While the less their
59:18
Speaker 7: direct participation in the action itself, the more they command,
59:22
Speaker 7: and the fewer of them there are, rising in this
59:24
Speaker 7: way from the lowest ranks to the man at the top,
59:27
Speaker 7: who takes the least direct share in the action, and
59:29
Speaker 7: the and directs his activity chiefly to commanding. This relation
59:35
Speaker 7: of the men who command to those they command is
59:38
Speaker 7: what constitutes the essence of the conception called power. Having
59:43
Speaker 7: restored the condition of time under which all events occur,
59:46
Speaker 7: find that a command is executed only when it is
59:49
Speaker 7: related to a corresponding series of events. Restoring the essential
59:54
Speaker 7: condition of relation between those who command and those who execute,
59:58
Speaker 7: We find that by the very nature of the case,
1:00:00
Speaker 7: those who command take the smallest part in the action itself,
1:00:04
Speaker 7: and that their activity is exclusively directed to commanding. When
1:00:10
Speaker 7: an event is taking place, people express their opinions and
1:00:28
Speaker 7: wishes about it, and, as the event results from the
1:00:31
Speaker 7: collective activity of many people, some one of the opinions
1:00:35
Speaker 7: or wishes expressed is sure to be fulfilled if but approximately.
1:00:39
Speaker 5: When one of the opinions expressed is fulfilled, that opinion
1:00:43
Speaker 5: gets connected with the event as a command preceding it.
1:00:47
Speaker 5: Men are hauling a log. Each of them expresses his
1:00:50
Speaker 5: opinion as to how and where to haul it. They
1:00:53
Speaker 5: haul the log away, and it happens that this is
1:00:55
Speaker 5: done as one of them said, he ordered it. There
1:00:58
Speaker 5: we have command and power in their primary form. The
1:01:01
Speaker 5: man who worked most with his hands could not think
1:01:04
Speaker 5: so much about what he was doing, or reflect on
1:01:07
Speaker 5: or command what would result from the common activity, while
1:01:10
Speaker 5: the man who commanded more would evidently work less with
1:01:13
Speaker 5: his hands on account of his greater verbal activity. When
1:01:17
Speaker 5: some larger concourse of men direct their activity to a
1:01:20
Speaker 5: common aim, there is a yet sharper division of those who,
1:01:24
Speaker 5: because their activity is given to directing and commanding, take
1:01:27
Speaker 5: less part in the direct work. When a man works alone,
1:01:32
Speaker 5: he always has a certain set of reflections, which, as
1:01:35
Speaker 5: it seems to him, directed his past activity, justify his
1:01:38
Speaker 5: present activity, and guide him in planning his future actions.
1:01:42
Speaker 5: Just the same is done by a concourse of people,
1:01:44
Speaker 5: allowing those who do not take a direct part in
1:01:47
Speaker 5: the activity to devise considerations, justifications, and surmises concerning their
1:01:52
Speaker 5: collective activity. For reasons known or unknown to us, the
1:01:57
Speaker 5: French began to drown and kill one another, and, corresponding
1:02:01
Speaker 5: to the event, its justification appears in people's belief that
1:02:04
Speaker 5: this was necessary for the welfare of France, for liberty
1:02:08
Speaker 5: and for equality. People ceased to kill one another, and
1:02:12
Speaker 5: this event was accompanied by its justification in the necessity
1:02:15
Speaker 5: for a centralisation of power, resistance to Europe, and so on.
1:02:20
Speaker 5: Men went from the west to the east, killing their
1:02:22
Speaker 5: fellow men. and the event was accompanied by phrases about
1:02:25
Speaker 5: the glory of France, the baseness of England, and so on.
1:02:29
Speaker 5: History shows us that these justifications of the events have
1:02:32
Speaker 5: no common sense, and are all contradictory, as in the
1:02:35
Speaker 5: case of killing a man as the result of recognising
1:02:37
Speaker 5: his rights, and the killing of millions in Russia for
1:02:40
Speaker 5: the humiliation of England. But these justifications have a very
1:02:44
Speaker 5: necessary significance in their own day. These justifications release those
1:02:48
Speaker 5: who produce the events from moral responsibility. These temporary aims
1:02:53
Speaker 5: are like the broom fixed in front of a locomotive
1:02:56
Speaker 5: to clear the snow from the rails in front. They
1:02:59
Speaker 5: clear men's moral responsibilities from their path. Without such justification,
1:03:04
Speaker 5: there would be no reply to the simplest question that
1:03:06
Speaker 5: presents itself when examining each historical event. How is it
1:03:11
Speaker 5: that millions of men commit collective crimes, make war, commit murder,
1:03:15
Speaker 5: and so on? With the present complex forms of political
1:03:19
Speaker 5: and social life in Europe, Can any event that is
1:03:21
Speaker 5: not prescribed, decreed or ordered by monarchs, ministers, parliaments or
1:03:25
Speaker 5: newspapers be imagined? Is there any collective action which cannot
1:03:29
Speaker 5: find its justification in political unity, in patriotism, in the
1:03:32
Speaker 5: balance of power or in civilisation? So that every event
1:03:37
Speaker 5: that occurs inevitably coincides with some expressed wish and, receiving
1:03:41
Speaker 5: a justification, presents itself as the result of the will
1:03:45
Speaker 5: of one man or of several men. In whatever direction
1:03:49
Speaker 5: a ship moves, the flow of the waves it cuts
1:03:52
Speaker 5: will always be noticeable ahead of it. To those on
1:03:54
Speaker 5: board the ship, the movement of those waves will be
1:03:57
Speaker 5: the only perceptible motion. Only by watching closely, moment by moment,
1:04:02
Speaker 5: the movement of that flow, and comparing it with the
1:04:05
Speaker 5: movement of the ship, do we convince ourselves that every
1:04:08
Speaker 5: bit of it is occasioned by the forward movement of
1:04:10
Speaker 5: the ship, and that we were led into error by
1:04:13
Speaker 5: the fact that we ourselves were imperceptibly moving. We see
1:04:18
Speaker 5: the same if we watch moment by moment, the movement
1:04:21
Speaker 5: of historical characters, that is, re-establish the inevitable condition of
1:04:25
Speaker 5: all that occurs, the continuity of movement in time, and
1:04:28
Speaker 5: do not lose sight of the essential connection of historical
1:04:31
Speaker 5: persons with the masses. When the ship moves in one direction,
1:04:35
Speaker 5: there is one and the same wave ahead of it.
1:04:38
Speaker 5: When it turns frequently, the wave ahead of it also
1:04:40
Speaker 5: turns frequently, but, wherever it may turn, there will always
1:04:44
Speaker 5: be the wave anticipating its movement. Whatever happens, it always
1:04:48
Speaker 5: appears that just that event was foreseen and decreed. Wherever
1:04:52
Speaker 5: the ship may go, the rush of water which neither
1:04:54
Speaker 5: directs nor increases its movement foams ahead of it, and,
1:04:58
Speaker 5: at a distance, seems to us not merely to move
1:05:01
Speaker 5: of itself, but to govern the ship's movement also. Examining
1:05:05
Speaker 5: only those expressions of the will of historical persons which,
1:05:09
Speaker 5: as commands, were related to events, historians have assumed that
1:05:13
Speaker 5: the events depended on those commands. but examining the events themselves,
1:05:18
Speaker 5: and the connection in which the historical persons stood to
1:05:21
Speaker 5: the people, we have found that they and their orders
1:05:24
Speaker 5: were dependent on events. The incontestable proof of this deduction
1:05:28
Speaker 5: is that, however many commands were issued, the event does
1:05:33
Speaker 5: not take place unless there are other causes for it,
1:05:36
Speaker 5: but as soon as an event occurs, be it what
1:05:39
Speaker 5: it may, then out of all the continually expressed wishes
1:05:42
Speaker 5: of different people, some will always be found which by
1:05:45
Speaker 5: their meaning and their time of utterance are related as
1:05:48
Speaker 5: commands to the events. Arriving at this conclusion, we can
1:05:52
Speaker 5: reply directly and positively to these two essential questions of history. 1.
1:05:58
Speaker 5: What is power? 2. What force produces the movement of
1:06:03
Speaker 5: the nations? 1. Power is the relation of a given
1:06:07
Speaker 5: person to other individuals, in which the more this person
1:06:11
Speaker 5: expresses opinions, predictions and justifications of the collective action that
1:06:14
Speaker 5: is performed, the less is his participation in that action.
1:06:18
Speaker 5: Number two, the movement of nations is caused not by power,
1:06:23
Speaker 5: nor by intellectual activity, nor even by a combination of
1:06:26
Speaker 5: the two as historians have supposed, but by the activity
1:06:30
Speaker 5: of all the people who participate in the events, and
1:06:33
Speaker 5: who always combine in such a way that those taking
1:06:36
Speaker 5: the largest direct share in the event take on themselves
1:06:39
Speaker 5: the least responsibility, and vice versa. Morally, the wielder of
1:06:44
Speaker 5: power appears to cause the event. Physically, it is those
1:06:48
Speaker 5: who submit to the power. But, as the moral activity
1:06:51
Speaker 5: is inconceivable without the physical, the cause of the event
1:06:55
Speaker 5: is neither in the one nor in the other, but
1:06:57
Speaker 5: in the union of the two. Or, in other words,
1:07:00
Speaker 5: the conception of a cause is inapplicable to the phenomena
1:07:03
Speaker 5: we are examining. In the last analysis, we reached the
1:07:07
Speaker 5: circle of infinity, that final limit to which in every
1:07:11
Speaker 5: domain of thought Man's reason arrives if it is not
1:07:14
Speaker 5: playing with the subject. Electricity produces heat. Heat produces electricity.
1:07:20
Speaker 5: Atoms attract each other and atoms repel one another. Speaking
1:07:24
Speaker 5: of the interaction of heat and electricity and of atoms,
1:07:27
Speaker 5: we cannot say why this occurs, and we say that
1:07:30
Speaker 5: it is so because it is inconceivable otherwise, because it
1:07:34
Speaker 5: must be so, and that it is a law. The
1:07:38
Speaker 5: same applies to historical events. Why war and revolution occur,
1:07:42
Speaker 5: we do not know. We only know that to produce
1:07:46
Speaker 5: the one or the other action, people combine in a
1:07:48
Speaker 5: certain formation, in which they all take part, and we
1:07:52
Speaker 5: say that this is so, because it is unthinkable otherwise,
1:07:55
Speaker 5: or in other words, that it is a law.
1:08:09
Speaker 2: WAR AND PEACE. SECOND EPILOGUE. CHAPTER VIII. Read for LibriVox.org.
1:08:17
Speaker 2: If history dealt only with external phenomena, the establishment of
1:08:20
Speaker 2: this simple and obvious law would suffice, and we should
1:08:24
Speaker 2: have finished our argument. But the law of history relates
1:08:27
Speaker 2: to man. A particle of matter cannot tell us that
1:08:31
Speaker 2: it does not feel the law of attraction or repulsion,
1:08:34
Speaker 2: and that that law is untrue. But man, who is
1:08:37
Speaker 2: the subject of history, says plainly, I am free, and
1:08:41
Speaker 2: am therefore not subject to the law. The presence of
1:08:44
Speaker 2: the problem of man's free will, though unexpressed, is felt
1:08:48
Speaker 2: at every step of history. All seriously thinking historians have
1:08:53
Speaker 2: involuntarily encountered this question. All the contradictions and obscurities of history,
1:08:58
Speaker 2: and the false path historicalists science has followed are due
1:09:02
Speaker 2: solely to the lack of a solution to that question.
1:09:06
Speaker 2: If the will of every man were free, that is,
1:09:08
Speaker 2: if each man could act as he pleased, all history
1:09:11
Speaker 2: would be a series of disconnected incidents. If in a
1:09:15
Speaker 2: thousand years even one man in a million could act freely,
1:09:19
Speaker 2: that is, as he chose— it is evident that one
1:09:22
Speaker 2: single free act of that man's, in violation of the
1:09:25
Speaker 2: laws governing human action, would destroy the possibility of the
1:09:29
Speaker 2: existence of any laws for the whole of humanity. If
1:09:33
Speaker 2: there be a single law governing the actions of men,
1:09:36
Speaker 2: free will cannot exist, for then man's will is subject
1:09:40
Speaker 2: to that law. In this contradiction lies the problem of
1:09:44
Speaker 2: free will, which from most ancient times has occupied the
1:09:48
Speaker 2: best human minds and from most ancient times has been
1:09:51
Speaker 2: presented in its whole tremendous significance. The problem is, that
1:09:57
Speaker 2: regarding man as a subject of observation from whatever point
1:10:00
Speaker 2: of view, theological, historical, ethical, or philosophic, we find a
1:10:05
Speaker 2: general law of necessity to which he, like all that exists,
1:10:08
Speaker 2: is subject. But regarding him from within ourselves as what
1:10:13
Speaker 2: we are conscious of, we feel ourselves to be free.
1:10:17
Speaker 2: This consciousness is a source of self-cognition quite apart from
1:10:21
Speaker 2: and independent of reason. Through his reason man observes himself,
1:10:26
Speaker 2: but only through consciousness does he know himself. Apart from
1:10:30
Speaker 2: consciousness of self, no observation or application of reason is conceivable.
1:10:35
Speaker 2: To understand, observe, and draw conclusions, man must first of
1:10:39
Speaker 2: all be conscious of himself as living. A man is
1:10:43
Speaker 2: only conscious of himself as a living being by the
1:10:45
Speaker 2: fact that he wills, that is, is conscious of his volition.
1:10:49
Speaker 2: But his will, which forms the essence of his life,
1:10:53
Speaker 2: man recognizes, and can but recognize, as free. If, observing himself,
1:10:59
Speaker 2: man sees that his will is always directed by one
1:11:02
Speaker 2: and the same law, whether he observes the necessity of
1:11:05
Speaker 2: taking food, using his brain, or anything else, he cannot
1:11:09
Speaker 2: recognize this never-varying direction of his will otherwise than as
1:11:13
Speaker 2: a limitation of it. Were it not free, It could
1:11:16
Speaker 2: not be limited. A man's will seems to him to
1:11:20
Speaker 2: be limited just because he is not conscious of it
1:11:23
Speaker 2: except as free. You say, I am not and am
1:11:26
Speaker 2: not free. But I have lifted my hand and let
1:11:29
Speaker 2: it fall. Everyone understands that this illogical reply is an
1:11:33
Speaker 2: irrefutable demonstration of freedom. That reply is the expression of
1:11:37
Speaker 2: a consciousness that is not subject to reason. If the
1:11:41
Speaker 2: consciousness of freedom were not a separate and independent source
1:11:44
Speaker 2: of self-consciousness, it would be subject to reasoning and to experience.
1:11:49
Speaker 2: But in fact such subjection does not exist, and is inconceivable.
1:11:55
Speaker 2: A series of experiments and arguments proves to every man
1:11:57
Speaker 2: that he, as an object of observation, is subject to
1:12:00
Speaker 2: certain laws, and man submits to them and never resists
1:12:04
Speaker 2: the laws of gravity or impermeability once he has become
1:12:07
Speaker 2: acquainted with them. But the same series of experiments and
1:12:11
Speaker 2: arguments proves to him that that the complete freedom of
1:12:14
Speaker 2: which he is conscious in himself is impossible, and that
1:12:17
Speaker 2: his every action depends on his organization, his character, and
1:12:21
Speaker 2: the motives acting upon him. Yet man never submits to
1:12:25
Speaker 2: the deductions of these experiments and arguments. Having learned from
1:12:29
Speaker 2: experiment and argument that a stone falls downwards, a man
1:12:32
Speaker 2: indubitably believes this, and always expects the law that he
1:12:35
Speaker 2: has learned to be fulfilled. But learning just as certainly
1:12:39
Speaker 2: that his will is subject to laws, he does not
1:12:42
Speaker 2: and cannot believe this. However often experiment and reasoning may
1:12:47
Speaker 2: show a man that under the same conditions and with
1:12:50
Speaker 2: the same character he will do the same thing as before, yet,
1:12:54
Speaker 2: when under the same conditions and with the same character
1:12:57
Speaker 2: he approaches for the thousandth time the action that always
1:13:00
Speaker 2: ends in the same way, he feels as certainly convinced
1:13:04
Speaker 2: as before the experiment that he can act as he pleases.
1:13:08
Speaker 2: Every man, savage or sage, however incontestably reason and experiment
1:13:12
Speaker 2: may prove to him that it is impossible to imagine
1:13:15
Speaker 2: two different courses of action in precisely the same conditions,
1:13:19
Speaker 2: feels that without this irrational conception, which constitutes the essence
1:13:23
Speaker 2: of freedom, he cannot imagine life. He feels that, however
1:13:27
Speaker 2: impossible it may be, it is so, for without this
1:13:31
Speaker 2: conception of freedom not only would he be unable to
1:13:34
Speaker 2: understand life, but he would be unable to live for
1:13:36
Speaker 2: a single moment. He could not live because all man's
1:13:40
Speaker 2: efforts and all his impulses to life are only efforts
1:13:43
Speaker 2: to increase freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity, power
1:13:47
Speaker 2: and subordination, strength and weakness, health and disease, culture and ignorance,
1:13:53
Speaker 2: work and leisure, repletion and hunger, virtue and vice, are
1:13:58
Speaker 2: only greater or lesser degrees of freedom. A man having
1:14:02
Speaker 2: no freedom cannot be conceived of except as deprived of life.
1:14:07
Speaker 2: If the conception of freedom appears to reason to be
1:14:10
Speaker 2: a senseless contradiction, like the possibility of performing two actions
1:14:14
Speaker 2: at one and the same instant of time, or of
1:14:16
Speaker 2: an effect without a cause, that only proves that consciousness
1:14:21
Speaker 2: is not subject to reason. This unshakable, irrefutable consciousness of freedom,
1:14:27
Speaker 2: uncontrolled by experiment or argument, recognized by all thinkers and
1:14:32
Speaker 2: felt by everyone without exception— This consciousness, without which no
1:14:36
Speaker 2: conception of man is possible, constitutes the other side of
1:14:40
Speaker 2: the question. Man is the creation of an all-powerful, all-good,
1:14:45
Speaker 2: and all-seeing God. What is sin, the conception of which
1:14:49
Speaker 2: arises from the consciousness of man's freedom? That is a
1:14:52
Speaker 2: question for theology. The actions of man are subject to
1:14:56
Speaker 2: general immutable laws expressed in statistics. What is man's responsibility
1:15:01
Speaker 2: to society? the conception of which results from the conception
1:15:04
Speaker 2: of freedom. That is a question for jurisprudence. Man's actions
1:15:10
Speaker 2: proceed from his innate character and the motives acting upon him.
1:15:15
Speaker 2: What is conscience and the perception of right and wrong
1:15:18
Speaker 2: in actions that follows from the consciousness of freedom? That
1:15:22
Speaker 2: is a question for ethics. Man, in connection with the
1:15:26
Speaker 2: general life of humanity, appears subject to laws which determine
1:15:30
Speaker 2: that life. but the same man, apart from that connection,
1:15:33
Speaker 2: appears to be free. How should the past life of
1:15:37
Speaker 2: nations and of humanity be regarded? As the result of
1:15:40
Speaker 2: the free, or as the result of the constrained activity
1:15:43
Speaker 2: of man? That is a question for history. Only in
1:15:49
Speaker 2: our self-confident day of the popularization of knowledge, thanks to
1:15:53
Speaker 2: that most powerful engine of ignorance, the diffusion of printed matter,
1:15:57
Speaker 2: Has the question of the freedom of will been put
1:15:59
Speaker 2: on a level on which the question itself cannot exist?
1:16:04
Speaker 2: In our time, the majority of so-called advanced people, that is,
1:16:08
Speaker 2: the crowd of ignoramuses, have taken the work of the
1:16:11
Speaker 2: naturalists who deal with one side of the question for
1:16:13
Speaker 2: a solution of the whole problem. They say, and write,
1:16:17
Speaker 2: and print, that the soul and freedom do not exist,
1:16:20
Speaker 2: for the life of man is expressed by muscular movements,
1:16:23
Speaker 2: and muscular movements are conditioned by the activity of the nerves.
1:16:26
Speaker 2: the soul and free will do not exist, because at
1:16:29
Speaker 2: an unknown period of time we sprang from the apes.
1:16:33
Speaker 2: They say this, not at all suspecting that thousands of
1:16:36
Speaker 2: years ago that same law of necessity, which, with such
1:16:40
Speaker 2: ardour they are now trying to prove by physiology and
1:16:43
Speaker 2: comparative zoology, was not merely acknowledged by all the religions
1:16:47
Speaker 2: and all the thinkers, but has never been denied. They
1:16:51
Speaker 2: do not see that the role of the natural sciences
1:16:53
Speaker 2: in this matter is merely to serve as an instrument,
1:16:56
Speaker 2: for the illumination of one side of it. For the
1:16:59
Speaker 2: fact that, from the point of view of observation, reason
1:17:03
Speaker 2: and the will are merely secretions of the brain, and
1:17:05
Speaker 2: that man, following the general law, may have developed from
1:17:08
Speaker 2: lower animals at some unknown period of time, only explains
1:17:12
Speaker 2: from a fresh side the truth admitted thousands of years
1:17:15
Speaker 2: ago by all the religious and philosophic theories, that from
1:17:19
Speaker 2: the point of view of reason man is subject to
1:17:21
Speaker 2: the law of necessity. but it does not advance by
1:17:25
Speaker 2: a hair's breadth the solution of the question, which has another,
1:17:28
Speaker 2: opposite side, based on the consciousness of freedom. If men
1:17:33
Speaker 2: descended from the apes at an unknown period of time,
1:17:36
Speaker 2: that is as comprehensible as that they were made from
1:17:39
Speaker 2: a handful of earth at a certain period of time.
1:17:41
Speaker 2: In the first case the unknown quantity is the time,
1:17:44
Speaker 2: in the second case it is the origin. And the
1:17:47
Speaker 2: question of how man's consciousness of freedom is to be
1:17:50
Speaker 2: reconciled with the law of necessity to which he is subject,
1:17:53
Speaker 2: cannot be solved by comparative physiology and zoology, for in
1:17:57
Speaker 2: a frog, a rabbit, or an ape we can observe
1:18:00
Speaker 2: only the muscular nervous activity, but in man we observe
1:18:04
Speaker 2: consciousness as well as the muscular and nervous activity. The
1:18:09
Speaker 2: naturalists and their followers, thinking they can solve this question,
1:18:13
Speaker 2: are like plasterers set to plaster one side of the
1:18:16
Speaker 2: walls of a church, who, availing themselves of the absence
1:18:19
Speaker 2: of the chief superintendent of the work, should, in an
1:18:22
Speaker 2: access of zeal, plaster over the windows, icons, woodwork, and
1:18:26
Speaker 2: still unbutterous walls, and should be delighted that from their
1:18:30
Speaker 2: point of view, as plasterers, everything is now so smooth
1:18:33
Speaker 2: and regular. End of chapter 8. This recording is in
1:18:38
Speaker 2: the public domain.
1:18:44
Speaker 5: War and Peace. Second Epilogue. Chapter 9. Read for LibriVox.org
1:18:49
Speaker 5: by Kate McKinn. For the solution of the question of
1:18:53
Speaker 5: free will or inevitability, history has this advantage over other
1:18:57
Speaker 5: branches of knowledge in which the question is dealt with,
1:19:01
Speaker 5: that for history this question does not refer to the
1:19:04
Speaker 5: essence of man's free will, but its manifestation in the
1:19:07
Speaker 5: past and under certain conditions. In regard to this question,
1:19:13
Speaker 5: HISTORY STANDS TO THE OTHER SCIENCES AS EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE STANDS
1:19:16
Speaker 5: TO ABSTRACT SCIENCE. THE SUBJECT FOR HISTORY IS NOT A
1:19:20
Speaker 5: MAN'S WILL ITSELF, BUT OUR PRESENTATION OF IT. AND SO
1:19:25
Speaker 5: FOR HISTORY, THE INSOLUBLE MYSTERY PRESENTED BY THE INCOMPATIBILITY OF
1:19:29
Speaker 5: FREE WILL AND INEVITABILITY DOES NOT EXIST AS IT DOES
1:19:32
Speaker 5: FOR THEOLOGY, ETHICS AND PHILOSOPHY. HISTORY SURVEYS A PRESENTATION OF
1:19:37
Speaker 5: MAN'S LIFE IN WHICH THE UNION OF THESE TWO CONTRADICTIONS
1:19:40
Speaker 5: HAS ALREADY TAKEN PLACE. In actual life, each historic event,
1:19:45
Speaker 5: each human action, is very clearly and definitely understood, without
1:19:49
Speaker 5: any sense of contradiction, although each event presents itself as
1:19:53
Speaker 5: partly free and partly compulsory. To solve the question of
1:19:56
Speaker 5: how freedom and necessity are combined, and what constitutes the
1:20:00
Speaker 5: essence of these two conceptions, the philosophy of history can
1:20:04
Speaker 5: and should follow a path contrary to that taken by
1:20:07
Speaker 5: other sciences. Instead of first defining the conceptions of freedom
1:20:11
Speaker 5: and inevitability in themselves, and then ranging the phenomena of
1:20:15
Speaker 5: life under these definitions, history should deduce a definition of
1:20:19
Speaker 5: the conception of freedom and inevitability themselves from the immense
1:20:23
Speaker 5: quantity of phenomena of which it is cognizant and that
1:20:26
Speaker 5: always appear dependent on these two elements. Whatever presentation of
1:20:31
Speaker 5: the activity of many men or of an individual we
1:20:34
Speaker 5: may consider, we always regard it as the result partly
1:20:38
Speaker 5: of man's free will and partly of the law of inevitability.
1:20:42
Speaker 5: Whether we speak of the migration of the peoples and
1:20:44
Speaker 5: the incursions of the barbarians, or of the decrees of
1:20:47
Speaker 5: Napoleon III, or of someone's action an hour ago in
1:20:51
Speaker 5: choosing one direction out of several for his walk, we
1:20:54
Speaker 5: are unconscious of any contradiction. The degree of freedom and
1:20:58
Speaker 5: inevitability governing the actions of these people is clearly defined
1:21:01
Speaker 5: for us. Our conception of the degree of freedom often
1:21:05
Speaker 5: varies according to differences in the point of view from
1:21:08
Speaker 5: which we regard the event, but every human action appears
1:21:11
Speaker 5: to us as a certain combination of freedom and inevitability.
1:21:16
Speaker 5: In every action we examine, we see a certain measure
1:21:19
Speaker 5: of freedom and a certain measure of inevitability, and always
1:21:24
Speaker 5: the more freedom we see in any action, the less
1:21:26
Speaker 5: inevitability do we perceive, and the more inevitability, the less freedom.
1:21:32
Speaker 5: The proportion of freedom to inevitability decreases and increases according
1:21:36
Speaker 5: to the point of view from which the action is regarded,
1:21:39
Speaker 5: but their relation is always one of inverse proportion. A
1:21:44
Speaker 5: sinking man who clutches at another and drowns him, or
1:21:47
Speaker 5: a hungry mother exhausted by feeding her baby who steals
1:21:50
Speaker 5: some food, or a man trained to discipline who on
1:21:54
Speaker 5: duty at the word of command kills a defenceless man.
1:21:57
Speaker 5: seem less guilty, that is, less free and more subject
1:22:01
Speaker 5: to the law of necessity, to one who knows the
1:22:04
Speaker 5: circumstances in which these people were placed, and more free
1:22:07
Speaker 5: to one who does not know that the man was
1:22:09
Speaker 5: himself drowning, that the mother was hungry, that the soldier
1:22:13
Speaker 5: was in the ranks, and so on. Similarly, a man
1:22:17
Speaker 5: who committed a murder twenty years ago, and has since
1:22:20
Speaker 5: lived peaceably and harmlessly in society, seems less guilty, and
1:22:24
Speaker 5: his action more due to the law of inevitability, to
1:22:27
Speaker 5: someone who considers his action after twenty years have elapsed,
1:22:30
Speaker 5: than to one who examined it the day after it
1:22:32
Speaker 5: was committed. And, in the same way every action of
1:22:36
Speaker 5: an insane, intoxicated, or highly excited man appears less free
1:22:40
Speaker 5: and more inevitable to one who knows the mental condition
1:22:43
Speaker 5: of him who committed the action, and seems more free
1:22:46
Speaker 5: and less inevitable to one who does not know it.
1:22:50
Speaker 5: In all these cases, the conception of freedom is increased
1:22:53
Speaker 5: or diminished, and the conception of compulsion diminished, is correspondingly
1:22:57
Speaker 5: decreased or increased, according to the point of view from
1:23:00
Speaker 5: which the action is regarded, so that the greater the
1:23:04
Speaker 5: conception of necessity, the smaller the conception of freedom, and
1:23:08
Speaker 5: vice versa. Religion, the common sense of mankind, the science
1:23:13
Speaker 5: of jurisprudence, and history itself, understand alike this relation between
1:23:17
Speaker 5: necessity and freedom. All cases, without exception, in which our
1:23:22
Speaker 5: conception of freedom and necessity is increased and diminished, depend
1:23:26
Speaker 5: on three considerations. 1. The relation to the external world
1:23:31
Speaker 5: of the man who commits the deeds. 2. His relation
1:23:35
Speaker 5: to time. 3. His relation to the causes leading to
1:23:40
Speaker 5: the action. The first consideration is the clearness of our
1:23:44
Speaker 5: perception of the man's relation to the external world, and
1:23:47
Speaker 5: the greater or lesser clearness of our understanding of the
1:23:50
Speaker 5: definite position occupied by the man in relation to everything
1:23:54
Speaker 5: coexisting with him. This is what makes it evident that
1:23:58
Speaker 5: a drowning man is less free and more subject to
1:24:01
Speaker 5: necessity than one standing on dry ground, and that makes
1:24:04
Speaker 5: the action of a man closely connected with others in
1:24:07
Speaker 5: a thickly populated district, or of one bound by family,
1:24:11
Speaker 5: official or business duties, seem certainly less free and more
1:24:14
Speaker 5: subject to necessity than those of a man living in
1:24:17
Speaker 5: solitude and seclusion. If we consider a man alone, apart
1:24:22
Speaker 5: from his relation to everything around him, each action of
1:24:25
Speaker 5: his seems to us free. But if we see his
1:24:29
Speaker 5: relation to anything around him, if we see his connection
1:24:32
Speaker 5: with anything whatever, with a man who speaks to him,
1:24:35
Speaker 5: a book he reads, the work on which he is engaged,
1:24:39
Speaker 5: even with the air he breathes or the light that
1:24:41
Speaker 5: falls on the things about him, we see that each
1:24:44
Speaker 5: of these circumstances has an influence on him and controls
1:24:48
Speaker 5: at least some side of his activity. And, The more
1:24:51
Speaker 5: we perceive of these influences, the more our conception of
1:24:54
Speaker 5: his freedom diminishes, and the more our conception of the
1:24:58
Speaker 5: necessity that weighs on him increases. The second consideration is
1:25:02
Speaker 5: the more or less evident time relation of the man
1:25:05
Speaker 5: to the world and the clearness of our perception of
1:25:08
Speaker 5: the place the man's action occupies in time. That is,
1:25:11
Speaker 5: the ground which makes the fall of the first man,
1:25:14
Speaker 5: resulting in the production of the human race, appear evidently
1:25:17
Speaker 5: less free than a man's entry into marriage to-day. It
1:25:21
Speaker 5: is the reason why the life and activity of people
1:25:23
Speaker 5: who lived centuries ago and are connected with me in
1:25:26
Speaker 5: time cannot seem to me as free as the life
1:25:29
Speaker 5: of a contemporary, the consequences of which are still unknown
1:25:33
Speaker 5: to me. The degree of our conception of freedom or
1:25:36
Speaker 5: inevitability depends in this respect on the greater or lesser
1:25:40
Speaker 5: lapse of time between the performance of the action and
1:25:43
Speaker 5: our judgment of it. If I examine an act I
1:25:47
Speaker 5: performed a moment ago, in approximately the same circumstances as
1:25:50
Speaker 5: those I am in now, my action appears to me
1:25:53
Speaker 5: undoubtedly free. But, if I examine an act performed a
1:25:57
Speaker 5: month ago, then being in different circumstances, I cannot help
1:26:01
Speaker 5: recognising that, if that act had not been committed, much
1:26:04
Speaker 5: that resulted from it, good, agreeable, and even essential, would
1:26:08
Speaker 5: not have taken place. If I reflect on an action
1:26:12
Speaker 5: still more remote, ten years ago or more, then the
1:26:15
Speaker 5: consequences of my action are still plainer to me, and
1:26:19
Speaker 5: I find it hard to imagine what would have happened
1:26:22
Speaker 5: had that action not been performed. The farther I go
1:26:25
Speaker 5: back in memory, or what is the same thing the
1:26:28
Speaker 5: farther I go forward in my judgment, the more doubtful
1:26:31
Speaker 5: becomes my belief in the freedom of my action. In history,
1:26:35
Speaker 5: we find a very similar progress of conviction concerning the
1:26:39
Speaker 5: part played by free will in the general affairs of humanity.
1:26:43
Speaker 5: A contemporary event seems to us to be indubitably the
1:26:47
Speaker 5: doing of all the known participants, but with a more
1:26:50
Speaker 5: remote event we already see its inevitable results, which prevent
1:26:53
Speaker 5: our considering anything else possible, and the farther we go
1:26:57
Speaker 5: back in examining events, the less arbitrary do they appear.
1:27:02
Speaker 5: The Austro-Prussian war appears to us undoubtedly the result of
1:27:06
Speaker 5: the crafty conduct of Bismarck and so on. The Napoleonic
1:27:10
Speaker 5: wars still seem to us, though already questionably, to be
1:27:14
Speaker 5: the outcome of their hero's will. But, in the Crusades,
1:27:18
Speaker 5: we already see an event occupying its definite place in history,
1:27:22
Speaker 5: and without which we cannot imagine the modern history of Europe, though,
1:27:25
Speaker 5: to the chroniclers of the Crusades, that event appeared as
1:27:29
Speaker 5: merely due to the will of certain people. In regard
1:27:32
Speaker 5: to the migration of the peoples, it does not enter
1:27:35
Speaker 5: anyone's head today to suppose that the renovation of the
1:27:38
Speaker 5: European world depended on Attila's caprice. the farther back in
1:27:43
Speaker 5: history the object of our observation lies, the more doubtful
1:27:46
Speaker 5: does the free will of those concerned in the event become,
1:27:49
Speaker 5: and the more manifest the law of inevitability. The third
1:27:53
Speaker 5: consideration is the degree to which we apprehend that endless
1:27:57
Speaker 5: chain of causation, inevitably demanded by reason, in which each
1:28:01
Speaker 5: phenomenon comprehended, and therefore man's every action, must have its
1:28:05
Speaker 5: definite place as a result of what has gone before,
1:28:08
Speaker 5: and as a cause of what will follow. the better
1:28:11
Speaker 5: we are acquainted with the physiological, psychological and historical laws
1:28:15
Speaker 5: deduced by observation and by which man is controlled, and
1:28:18
Speaker 5: the more correctly we perceive the physiological, psychological and historical
1:28:22
Speaker 5: causes of the action, and the simpler the action we
1:28:25
Speaker 5: are observing, and the less complex the character and mind
1:28:28
Speaker 5: of the man in question, the more subject to inevitability,
1:28:31
Speaker 5: and the less free do our actions and those of
1:28:34
Speaker 5: others appear. When we do not at all understand the
1:28:37
Speaker 5: cause of an action, whether a crime, a good action,
1:28:40
Speaker 5: or even one that is simply non-moral, we ascribe a
1:28:43
Speaker 5: greater amount of freedom to it. In the case of
1:28:46
Speaker 5: a crime, we most urgently demand the punishment for such
1:28:49
Speaker 5: an act. In the case of a virtuous act, we
1:28:52
Speaker 5: rate its merit most highly. In an indifferent case, we
1:28:56
Speaker 5: recognize in it more individuality, originality, and independence. But, if
1:29:02
Speaker 5: even one of the innumerable causes of the act is
1:29:04
Speaker 5: known to us, we recognize a certain element of necessity,
1:29:08
Speaker 5: and are less insistent on punishment for the crime, or
1:29:11
Speaker 5: the acknowledgement of the merit of the virtuous act, or
1:29:14
Speaker 5: the freedom of the apparently original action. That a criminal
1:29:18
Speaker 5: was reared among male factors, mitigates his fault in our eyes.
1:29:22
Speaker 5: The self-sacrifice of a father or mother is, or self-sacrifice
1:29:26
Speaker 5: with the possibility of a reward, is more comprehensible than
1:29:29
Speaker 5: gratuitous self-sacrifice, and therefore seems less deserving of sympathy and
1:29:34
Speaker 5: less the result of free will. The founder of a
1:29:37
Speaker 5: sect or party, or an inventor, impresses us less when
1:29:41
Speaker 5: we know how or by what the way was prepared
1:29:44
Speaker 5: for his activity. If we have a large range of examples,
1:29:48
Speaker 5: If our observation is constantly directed to seeking the correlation
1:29:51
Speaker 5: of cause and effect in people's actions, their actions appear
1:29:54
Speaker 5: to us more under compulsion and less free the more
1:29:58
Speaker 5: correctly we connect the events with the causes. If we
1:30:01
Speaker 5: examine simple actions, and had a vast number of such
1:30:05
Speaker 5: actions under observation, our conception of their inevitability would be
1:30:09
Speaker 5: still greater. The dishonest conduct of the son of a
1:30:12
Speaker 5: dishonest father, the misconduct of a woman who had fallen
1:30:16
Speaker 5: into bad company, a drunkard's relapse into drunkenness, and so on,
1:30:20
Speaker 5: are actions that seem to us less free the better
1:30:23
Speaker 5: we understand their cause. If the man whose actions we
1:30:27
Speaker 5: are considering is on a very low stage of mental development,
1:30:30
Speaker 5: like a child, a madman, or a simpleton, then, knowing
1:30:33
Speaker 5: the causes of the act, and the simplicity of the
1:30:36
Speaker 5: character and intelligence in question, we see so large an
1:30:40
Speaker 5: element of necessity, and so little free will, that as
1:30:43
Speaker 5: soon as we know the cause prompting the action, we
1:30:45
Speaker 5: can foretell the result. On these three considerations alone is
1:30:50
Speaker 5: based the conception of irresponsibility for crimes, and the extenuating
1:30:54
Speaker 5: circumstances admitted by all legislative codes. The responsibility appears greater
1:31:00
Speaker 5: or less according to our greater or lesser knowledge of
1:31:03
Speaker 5: the circumstances in which the man was placed whose action
1:31:06
Speaker 5: is being judged, and according to the greater or lesser
1:31:09
Speaker 5: interval of time between the commission of the action and
1:31:12
Speaker 5: its investigation, and according to the greater or lesser understanding
1:31:16
Speaker 5: of the causes that led to the action. Thus our
1:31:20
Speaker 5: conception of free will and inevitability gradually diminishes.
1:31:29
Speaker 2: Or increases, according to the greater or lesser connection with
1:31:44
Speaker 2: the external world, the greater or lesser remoteness of time,
1:31:48
Speaker 2: and the greater or lesser dependence on the causes in
1:31:51
Speaker 2: relation to which we contemplate a man's life. So that
1:31:55
Speaker 2: if we examine the case of a man whose connection
1:31:58
Speaker 2: with the external world is well known, where the time
1:32:01
Speaker 2: between the action and its examination is great, and where
1:32:04
Speaker 2: the causes of the action are most accessible, we get
1:32:07
Speaker 2: the conception of a maximum of inevitability and a minimum
1:32:11
Speaker 2: of free will. If we examine a man little dependent
1:32:15
Speaker 2: on external conditions, whose action was performed very recently, and
1:32:19
Speaker 2: the causes of whose actions are beyond our ken, we
1:32:22
Speaker 2: get the conception of a minimum of inevitability and a
1:32:25
Speaker 2: maximum of freedom. In neither case, however we may change
1:32:31
Speaker 2: our point of view, however plain we may make to
1:32:33
Speaker 2: ourselves the connection between the man and the external world,
1:32:37
Speaker 2: however inaccessible it may be to us, however long or
1:32:40
Speaker 2: short the period of time— however intelligible or incomprehensible the
1:32:45
Speaker 2: causes of the action may be, can we ever conceive
1:32:48
Speaker 2: either complete freedom or complete necessity. 1. To whatever degree
1:32:55
Speaker 2: we may imagine a man to be exempt from the
1:32:57
Speaker 2: influence of the external world, we never get a conception
1:33:00
Speaker 2: of freedom in space. Every human action is inevitably conditioned
1:33:04
Speaker 2: by what surrounds him and by his own body. I
1:33:07
Speaker 2: lift my arm and let it fall. My action seems
1:33:11
Speaker 2: to me to be free, But asking myself whether I
1:33:13
Speaker 2: could raise my arm in every direction, I see that
1:33:16
Speaker 2: I raised it in the direction in which there was
1:33:18
Speaker 2: the least obstruction to that action, either from things around
1:33:21
Speaker 2: me or from the construction of my own body. I
1:33:24
Speaker 2: chose one out of all the possible directions because in
1:33:27
Speaker 2: it there were fewest obstacles. For my action to be free,
1:33:31
Speaker 2: it was necessary that it should encounter no obstacles. To
1:33:35
Speaker 2: conceive of a man being free, we must imagine him
1:33:37
Speaker 2: outside space, which is evidently impossible. 2. HOWEVER MUCH WE
1:33:43
Speaker 2: APPROXIMATE THE TIME OF JUDGMENT TO THE TIME OF THE DEED,
1:33:47
Speaker 2: WE NEVER GET A CONCEPTION OF FREEDOM IN TIME. FOR
1:33:50
Speaker 2: IF I EXAMINE AN ACTION COMMITTED A SECOND AGO, I
1:33:53
Speaker 2: MUST STILL RECOGNIZE IT AS NOT BEING FREE, FOR IT
1:33:56
Speaker 2: IS IRREVOCABLY LINKED TO THE MOMENT AT WHICH IT WAS COMMITTED.
1:33:59
Speaker 2: CAN I LIFT MY ARM? I LIFT IT, BUT ASK MYSELF,
1:34:03
Speaker 2: COULD I HAVE ABSTAINED FROM LIFTING MY ARM AT THE
1:34:05
Speaker 2: MOMENT THAT HAS ALREADY PASSED? TO CONVINCE MYSELF OF THIS,
1:34:09
Speaker 2: I DO NOT LIFT IT THE NEXT MOMENT. but I
1:34:12
Speaker 2: am now not abstaining from doing so at the first
1:34:14
Speaker 2: moment when I ask the question. Time has gone by
1:34:18
Speaker 2: which I could not detain. The arm I then lifted
1:34:21
Speaker 2: is no longer the same as the arm I now
1:34:23
Speaker 2: refrain from lifting, nor is the air in which I
1:34:26
Speaker 2: lifted it the same that now surrounds me. The moment
1:34:29
Speaker 2: in which the first movement was made is irrevocable, and
1:34:32
Speaker 2: at that moment I could make only one movement, and
1:34:35
Speaker 2: whatever movement I made would be the only one. that
1:34:38
Speaker 2: I did not lift my arm a moment later does
1:34:40
Speaker 2: not prove that I could have abstained from lifting it then.
1:34:44
Speaker 2: And since I could make only one movement at that
1:34:46
Speaker 2: single moment of time, it could not have been any other.
1:34:50
Speaker 2: To imagine it as free, it is necessary to imagine
1:34:52
Speaker 2: it in the present, on the boundary between the past
1:34:55
Speaker 2: and the future, that is, outside time, which is impossible. 3.
1:35:02
Speaker 2: However much the difficulty of understanding the causes may be
1:35:05
Speaker 2: increased— We never reach a conception of complete freedom, that is,
1:35:09
Speaker 2: an absence of cause. However inaccessible to us may be
1:35:13
Speaker 2: the cause of the expression of will in any action,
1:35:16
Speaker 2: our own or another's, the first demand of reason is
1:35:19
Speaker 2: the assumption of and search for a cause, for without
1:35:23
Speaker 2: a cause no phenomenon is conceivable. I raise my arm
1:35:26
Speaker 2: to perform an action independently of any cause, but my
1:35:30
Speaker 2: wish to perform an action without a cause is the
1:35:32
Speaker 2: cause of my action. But even if— imagining a man
1:35:36
Speaker 2: quite exempt from all influences, examining only his momentary action
1:35:40
Speaker 2: in the present, unevoked by any cause. We were to
1:35:44
Speaker 2: admit so infinitely small a remainder of inevitability as equalled zero.
1:35:48
Speaker 2: We should even then not have arrived at the conception
1:35:51
Speaker 2: of complete freedom in man. For a being uninfluenced by
1:35:55
Speaker 2: the external world, standing outside of time and independent of cause,
1:35:59
Speaker 2: is no longer a man. In the same way we
1:36:02
Speaker 2: can never imagine the action of a man quite devoid
1:36:05
Speaker 2: of freedom and entirely subject to the law of inevitability. 1.
1:36:10
Speaker 2: However we may increase our knowledge of the conditions of
1:36:13
Speaker 2: space in which man is situated, that knowledge can never
1:36:16
Speaker 2: be complete, for the number of those conditions is as
1:36:19
Speaker 2: infinite as the infinity of space. And therefore, so long
1:36:23
Speaker 2: as not all the conditions influencing men are defined, there
1:36:27
Speaker 2: is no complete inevitability, but a certain measure of freedom remains. 2.
1:36:33
Speaker 2: However we may prolong the period of time between the
1:36:36
Speaker 2: action we are examining and the judgment upon it, that
1:36:39
Speaker 2: period will be finite, while time is infinite, and so
1:36:42
Speaker 2: in this respect, too, there can never be absolute inevitability. 3.
1:36:48
Speaker 2: However accessible may be the chain of causation of any action,
1:36:52
Speaker 2: we shall never know the whole chain, since it is endless,
1:36:55
Speaker 2: and so again we may never reach absolute inevitability. But
1:37:00
Speaker 2: besides this, even if, admitting the remaining minimum of freedom
1:37:04
Speaker 2: to equal zero, we assumed in some given case, as
1:37:07
Speaker 2: for instance in that of a dying man, an unborn babe,
1:37:10
Speaker 2: or an idiot, complete absence of freedom, by doing so
1:37:14
Speaker 2: we should destroy the very conception of man in the
1:37:17
Speaker 2: case we are examining. For as soon as there is
1:37:19
Speaker 2: no freedom, there is also no man. And so the
1:37:22
Speaker 2: conception of the action of a man subject solely to
1:37:25
Speaker 2: the law of inevitability, without any element of freedom, is
1:37:29
Speaker 2: just as impossible as the conception of a man's completely
1:37:32
Speaker 2: free action. And so to imagine the action of a
1:37:35
Speaker 2: man entirely subject to the law of inevitability, without any freedom,
1:37:40
Speaker 2: we must assume the knowledge of an infinite number of
1:37:42
Speaker 2: space relations, an infinitely long period of time, and an
1:37:46
Speaker 2: infinite series of causes. To imagine a man perfectly free,
1:37:50
Speaker 2: and not subject to the law of inevitability, we must
1:37:53
Speaker 2: imagine him all alone, beyond space, beyond time, and free
1:37:57
Speaker 2: from dependence on cause. In the first case, if inevitability
1:38:02
Speaker 2: were possible without freedom, we should have reached a definition
1:38:04
Speaker 2: of inevitability by the laws of inevitability itself, that is,
1:38:08
Speaker 2: a mere form without content. In the second case, if
1:38:13
Speaker 2: freedom were possible without inevitability, we should have arrived at
1:38:16
Speaker 2: unconditioned freedom beyond space, time, and cause, which, by the
1:38:20
Speaker 2: fact of its being unconditioned and unlimited, would be nothing,
1:38:24
Speaker 2: or mere content without form. We should, in fact, have
1:38:28
Speaker 2: reached those two fundamental of which man's whole outlook on
1:38:32
Speaker 2: the universe is constructed, the incomprehensible essence of life, and
1:38:36
Speaker 2: the laws defining that essence. Reason says, 1. Space, with
1:38:43
Speaker 2: all the forms of matter that give it visibility, is infinite,
1:38:46
Speaker 2: and cannot be imagined otherwise. 2. Time is infinite motion
1:38:50
Speaker 2: without a moment of rest and is unthinkable otherwise. 3.
1:38:54
Speaker 2: The connection between cause and effect has no beginning and
1:38:58
Speaker 2: can have no end. Consciousness says, 1. I alone am,
1:39:05
Speaker 2: and all that exists is but me. Consequently, I include space. 2.
1:39:11
Speaker 2: I measure flowing time by the fixed moment of the
1:39:14
Speaker 2: present in which alone I am conscious of myself as living. Consequently,
1:39:18
Speaker 2: I am outside time. 3. I am beyond cause, for
1:39:23
Speaker 2: I feel myself to be the cause of every manifestation
1:39:26
Speaker 2: of my life. Reason gives expression to the laws of inevitability.
1:39:32
Speaker 2: Consciousness gives expression to the essence of freedom. Freedom not
1:39:37
Speaker 2: limited by anything is the essence of life in man's consciousness.
1:39:41
Speaker 2: Inevitability without content is man's reason in its three forms.
1:39:46
Speaker 2: Freedom is the thing examined. Inevitability is what examines. Freedom
1:39:51
Speaker 2: is the content, inevitability is the form. Only by separating
1:39:56
Speaker 2: the two sources of cognition, related to one another as
1:39:59
Speaker 2: form to content, do we get the mutually exclusive and
1:40:02
Speaker 2: separately incomprehensible conceptions of freedom and inevitability. Only by uniting
1:40:08
Speaker 2: them do we get a clear conception of man's life.
1:40:13
Speaker 2: Apart from these two concepts, which in their union mutually
1:40:16
Speaker 2: define one another as form and content, no conception of
1:40:19
Speaker 2: life is possible. All that we know of the life
1:40:23
Speaker 2: of man is merely a certain relation of free will
1:40:26
Speaker 2: to inevitability, that is, of consciousness to the laws of reason.
1:40:31
Speaker 2: All that we know of the external world of nature
1:40:34
Speaker 2: is only a certain relation of the forces of nature
1:40:36
Speaker 2: to inevitability, or of the essence of life to the
1:40:39
Speaker 2: laws of reason. The great natural forces lie outside us,
1:40:44
Speaker 2: and we are not conscious of them. We call those
1:40:46
Speaker 2: forces gravitation, inertia, electricity, animal force, and so on. But
1:40:51
Speaker 2: we are conscious of the force of life in man,
1:40:54
Speaker 2: and we call that freedom. But just as the force
1:40:57
Speaker 2: of gravitation, incomprehensible in itself but felt by every man,
1:41:02
Speaker 2: is understood by us only to the extent to which
1:41:04
Speaker 2: we know the laws of inevitability to which it is subject,
1:41:07
Speaker 2: from the first knowledge that all bodies have weight up
1:41:10
Speaker 2: to Newton's law— So too the force of free will,
1:41:14
Speaker 2: incomprehensible in itself, but of which everyone is conscious, is
1:41:18
Speaker 2: intelligible to us only in as far as we know
1:41:20
Speaker 2: the laws of inevitability to which it is subject, from
1:41:23
Speaker 2: the fact that every man dies up to the knowledge
1:41:26
Speaker 2: of the most complex economic and historic laws. All knowledge
1:41:31
Speaker 2: is merely a bringing of this essence of life under
1:41:33
Speaker 2: the laws of reason. Man's free will differs from every
1:41:38
Speaker 2: other force in that man is directly conscious of it,
1:41:41
Speaker 2: but in the eyes of reason it in no way
1:41:43
Speaker 2: differs from any other force. The forces of gravitation, electricity,
1:41:47
Speaker 2: or chemical affinity are only distinguished from one another in
1:41:51
Speaker 2: that they are differently defined by reason. Just so, the
1:41:54
Speaker 2: force of man's free will is distinguished by reason from
1:41:57
Speaker 2: the other forces of nature only by the definition that
1:42:00
Speaker 2: reason gives it. Freedom, apart from necessity, that is, apart
1:42:05
Speaker 2: from the laws of reason that define it, differs in
1:42:08
Speaker 2: no way from gravitation. or heat, or the force that
1:42:11
Speaker 2: makes things grow. For reason, it is only a momentary,
1:42:14
Speaker 2: undefinable sensation of life. And as the undefinable essence of
1:42:19
Speaker 2: the force moving the heavenly bodies, the undefinable essence of
1:42:23
Speaker 2: the forces of heat and electricity, or of chemical affinity,
1:42:27
Speaker 2: or of the vital force, forms the content of astronomy, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology,
1:42:34
Speaker 2: and so on, just in the same way does the
1:42:37
Speaker 2: force of free will form the content of history. But
1:42:41
Speaker 2: just as the subject of every science is the manifestation
1:42:44
Speaker 2: of this unknown essence of life, while that essence itself
1:42:47
Speaker 2: can only be the subject of metaphysics, even the manifestation
1:42:51
Speaker 2: of the force of free will in human beings, in space,
1:42:54
Speaker 2: in time, and independence on cause, forms the subject of history,
1:42:59
Speaker 2: while free will itself is the subject of metaphysics. In
1:43:03
Speaker 2: the experimental sciences, what we know we call the Laws
1:43:07
Speaker 2: of Inevitability. What is unknown to us we call vital force.
1:43:12
Speaker 2: Vital force is only an expression for the unknown remainder
1:43:15
Speaker 2: over and above what we know of the essence of life.
1:43:19
Speaker 2: So also in history. What is known to us we
1:43:21
Speaker 2: call laws of inevitability. What is unknown we call free will.
1:43:26
Speaker 2: Free will is for history only an expression for the
1:43:29
Speaker 2: unknown remainder of what we know about the laws of
1:43:32
Speaker 2: human life. End of chapter 10 This recording is in
1:43:37
Speaker 2: the public domain.
1:43:51
Speaker 5: History examines the manifestations of man's free will in connection
1:43:56
Speaker 5: with the external world in time and independence on cause.
1:44:00
Speaker 5: That is, it defines this freedom by the laws of reason,
1:44:03
Speaker 5: and so history is a science only in so far
1:44:07
Speaker 5: as this free will is defined by those laws. The
1:44:10
Speaker 5: recognition of man's free will as something capable of influencing
1:44:14
Speaker 5: historical events, that is, as not subject to laws, is
1:44:18
Speaker 5: the same for history as the recognition of a free
1:44:21
Speaker 5: force moving the heavenly bodies would be for astronomy. That
1:44:25
Speaker 5: assumption would destroy the possibility of the existence of laws,
1:44:29
Speaker 5: that is, of any science whatever. If there is even
1:44:33
Speaker 5: a single body moving freely, then the laws of Kepler
1:44:37
Speaker 5: and Newton are negatived, and no conception of the movement
1:44:40
Speaker 5: of the heavenly bodies any longer exists. If any single
1:44:44
Speaker 5: action is due to free will, then not a single
1:44:47
Speaker 5: historical law can exist, nor any conception of historical events.
1:44:52
Speaker 5: For history, lines exist of the movement of human wills,
1:44:56
Speaker 5: one end of which is hidden in the unknown, but
1:44:59
Speaker 5: at the other end of which a consciousness of man's
1:45:01
Speaker 5: will in the present moves in space, time, and dependence
1:45:05
Speaker 5: on cause. The more this field of motion spreads out
1:45:08
Speaker 5: before our eyes, the more evident are the laws of
1:45:11
Speaker 5: that movement. To discover and define those laws is the
1:45:15
Speaker 5: problem of history. From the standpoint from which the science
1:45:19
Speaker 5: of history now regards its subject on the path it
1:45:21
Speaker 5: now follows, seeking the causes of events in man's free will,
1:45:25
Speaker 5: a scientific enunciation of those laws is impossible, for however
1:45:29
Speaker 5: man's free will may be restricted, as soon as we
1:45:32
Speaker 5: recognise it as a force not subject to law, the
1:45:35
Speaker 5: existence of law becomes impossible. Only by reducing this element
1:45:40
Speaker 5: of free will to the infinitesimal, that is, by regarding
1:45:44
Speaker 5: it as an infinitely small quantity, can we convince ourselves
1:45:48
Speaker 5: of the absolute inaccessibility of the causes, and then instead
1:45:51
Speaker 5: of seeking causes, history will take the discovery of laws
1:45:55
Speaker 5: as its problem. The search for these laws has long
1:45:59
Speaker 5: been begun, and the new methods of thought which history
1:46:02
Speaker 5: must adopt are being worked out simultaneously, with a self-destruction
1:46:06
Speaker 5: toward which, ever dissecting and dissecting the causes of phenomena,
1:46:10
Speaker 5: the old method of history is moving. All human sciences
1:46:15
Speaker 5: have travelled along that path, arriving at infinitesimals. Mathematics, the
1:46:20
Speaker 5: most exact of sciences, abandons the process of analysis and
1:46:24
Speaker 5: enters on the new process of the integration of unknown,
1:46:27
Speaker 5: infinitely small quantities. Abandoning the conception of cause, mathematics seeks law.
1:46:35
Speaker 5: that is, the property common to all unknown, infinitely small, elements.
1:46:40
Speaker 5: In another form, but along the same path of reflection,
1:46:42
Speaker 5: the other sciences have proceeded. When Newton enunciated the law
1:46:46
Speaker 5: of gravity, he did not say that the sun or
1:46:49
Speaker 5: the earth had a property of attraction. He said that
1:46:53
Speaker 5: all bodies, from the largest to the smallest, have the
1:46:55
Speaker 5: property of attracting one another. That is, leaving aside the
1:46:59
Speaker 5: question of the cause of the movement of the bodies,
1:47:01
Speaker 5: he expressed the property common to all bodies, from the
1:47:05
Speaker 5: infinitely large to the infinitely small. The same is done
1:47:08
Speaker 5: by the natural sciences, leaving aside the question of cause
1:47:12
Speaker 5: they seek for laws. History stands on the same path,
1:47:16
Speaker 5: and if history has for its object the study of
1:47:18
Speaker 5: the movement of the nations and of humanity, and not
1:47:20
Speaker 5: the narration of episodes in the lives of individuals, it too,
1:47:24
Speaker 5: setting aside the conception of cause, should seek the laws
1:47:27
Speaker 5: common to all, inseparably, inconnected, infinitesimal elements of free will.
1:47:32
Speaker 5: End of chapter 11 This recording is in.
1:47:41
Speaker 3: The public domain. From the time the Law of Copernicus
1:47:51
Speaker 3: was discovered and proved, the mere recognition of the fact
1:47:55
Speaker 3: that it was not the sun but the earth that
1:47:57
Speaker 3: moves suffice to destroy the whole cosmography of the ancients.
1:48:02
Speaker 3: by disproving that law it might have been possible to
1:48:05
Speaker 3: retain the old conception of the movement of the bodies
1:48:09
Speaker 3: but without disproving it it would seem impossible to continue
1:48:13
Speaker 3: studying the ptolemaic worlds but even after the discovery of
1:48:18
Speaker 3: the law of copernicus the Ptolemaic worlds were still studied
1:48:22
Speaker 3: for a long time. From the time the first person
1:48:27
Speaker 3: said and proved that the number of births or of
1:48:30
Speaker 3: crimes is subject to mathematical laws and that this or
1:48:34
Speaker 3: that mode of government is determined by certain geographical and
1:48:38
Speaker 3: economic conditions, and that certain relations of population to soil
1:48:44
Speaker 3: produce migration of peoples, the foundation on which history has
1:48:48
Speaker 3: been built were destroyed in their essence. By refuting these
1:48:52
Speaker 3: new laws, the former view of history might have been retained,
1:48:57
Speaker 3: but without refuting them, it would seem impossible to continue
1:49:00
Speaker 3: studying historic events as a result of man's free will.
1:49:05
Speaker 3: For if a certain mode of government was established or
1:49:08
Speaker 3: certain migrations of people took place in consequence of such
1:49:12
Speaker 3: and such geographic, ethnographic or economic conditions, then the free
1:49:18
Speaker 3: will of those individuals who appear to us to have
1:49:21
Speaker 3: established that mode of government or occasioned the migrations can
1:49:26
Speaker 3: no longer be regarded as the cause. And yet the
1:49:30
Speaker 3: former history continues to be studied side by side with
1:49:33
Speaker 3: the laws of statistics Geography, political economy, comparative philology and geology,
1:49:41
Speaker 3: which directly contradict its assumptions. The struggle between the old
1:49:46
Speaker 3: views and the new was long and stubbornly fought out
1:49:50
Speaker 3: in physical philosophy. Theology stood on guard for the old
1:49:54
Speaker 3: views and accused the new of violating revelation. But when
1:49:59
Speaker 3: truth conquered, theology established itself just as firmly on the
1:50:03
Speaker 3: new foundations. Just as prolonged and stubborn is the struggle
1:50:07
Speaker 3: now proceeding between the old and the new conception of history,
1:50:11
Speaker 3: and theology in the same way starts on guard for
1:50:14
Speaker 3: the old views and accuses the new view of subverting revelation.
1:50:20
Speaker 3: In the one case, as in the other, on both
1:50:23
Speaker 3: sides the struggle provokes passion and stifles truth. On the
1:50:28
Speaker 3: one hand, there is fear and regret for the loss
1:50:30
Speaker 3: of the whole edifice constructed through the ages. On the
1:50:34
Speaker 3: other is the passion for destruction. To the men who
1:50:38
Speaker 3: fought against the rising truth of physical philosophy, it seemed
1:50:42
Speaker 3: that if they admitted that truth, it would destroy faith
1:50:46
Speaker 3: in God, in the creation of the firmament, and in
1:50:49
Speaker 3: the miracle of Joshua, the son of Nun. To the
1:50:52
Speaker 3: defenders of the laws of Copernicus and Newton, to Voltaire
1:50:56
Speaker 3: for example, it seemed that the laws of astronomy destroyed religion.
1:51:02
Speaker 3: and he utilized the law of gravitation as a weapon
1:51:05
Speaker 3: against religion. Just so it now seems as if we
1:51:09
Speaker 3: have only to admit the law of inevitability to destroy
1:51:13
Speaker 3: the conception of the soul, of good and evil, and
1:51:17
Speaker 3: all the institutions of state and church that have been
1:51:20
Speaker 3: built on those conceptions. So too, like Voltaire in his time,
1:51:26
Speaker 3: uninvited defenders of the law of inevitability, today use that
1:51:31
Speaker 3: law as a weapon against religion. Though the law of
1:51:34
Speaker 3: inevitability in history, like the law of Copernicus in astronomy,
1:51:39
Speaker 3: far from destroying, even strengthens the foundation on which the
1:51:43
Speaker 3: institutions of state and church are erected. As in the
1:51:47
Speaker 3: question of astronomy then, though in the question of history now,
1:51:53
Speaker 3: The whole difference of opinion is based on the recognition
1:51:56
Speaker 3: or non-recognition of something absolute, serving as a measure of
1:52:01
Speaker 3: visible phenomena. In astronomy, it was the immovability of the earth.
1:52:07
Speaker 3: In history, it is the independence of personality, free will.
1:52:13
Speaker 3: As with astronomy, the difficulty of recognizing the motion of
1:52:17
Speaker 3: the earth lay in abandoning the immediate sensation of the
1:52:21
Speaker 3: earth's fixity and of the motion of the planets. So
1:52:26
Speaker 3: in history, the difficulty of recognizing the subjection of personality
1:52:31
Speaker 3: to the laws of space, time, and cause lies in
1:52:35
Speaker 3: renouncing the direct feeling of the independence of one's own personality.
1:52:41
Speaker 3: But as in astronomy, the new view said, It is
1:52:45
Speaker 3: true that we do not feel the movement of the earth,
1:52:48
Speaker 3: but by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity. while
1:52:53
Speaker 3: by admitting its motion, which we do not feel, we
1:52:56
Speaker 3: arrive at loss. So also in history, the new view says,
1:53:02
Speaker 3: it is true that we are not conscious of our dependence,
1:53:05
Speaker 3: but by admitting our free will, we arrive at absurdity,
1:53:10
Speaker 3: while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on
1:53:13
Speaker 3: time and on cause, we arrive at loss. In the
1:53:18
Speaker 3: first case, it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of
1:53:22
Speaker 3: an unreal immobility in space and to recognize emotion we
1:53:26
Speaker 3: did not feel. In the present case, it is similarly
1:53:30
Speaker 3: necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist and
1:53:35
Speaker 3: to recognize independence of which we are not conscious. End
1:53:42
Speaker 3: of Chapter 12 End of War and Peace Second Epilogue
1:53:48
Speaker 3: End of the novel War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
1:53:54
Speaker 3: This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.