Chapter 8 chapter eight

If history is the study of external phenomena, it will suffice to formulate such a simple and clear law, and we can conclude our discussion.But the laws of history concern humans.A particle of matter cannot say to us that it is completely unaware of the law of attraction or repulsion, and that that law is therefore false; but man, the object of historical research, says plainly: I am free and therefore belong to nothing. law category. Every step in history makes people feel that there is a self-evident question of the freedom of human consciousness. All serious historians encounter this problem without knowing it.All the contradictions and ambiguities of history, the wrong path taken by this science, are entirely due to the fact that this problem has not been resolved.

Suppose everyone has a free will, that is, if everyone can act as he pleases.The whole of history would be a series of incoherent accidents. If, in a thousand years, one man in a million has the possibility of acting freely, that is, as he pleases, it is clear that a single act of liberty by that man which violates the law would destroy the It is possible for any human law to exist. If there were only one law governing human action, free will could not exist, because the human will is subject to that law. Such paradoxes exist in the question of freedom of the will, which has occupied the most eminent human minds since ancient times, and which has been raised in its full significance.

The problem is that, if we regard man as an object of observation, from whatever point of view—theological, historical, moral, philosophical—we find that man, like everything that exists, is subject to universal laws of necessity.But if we look at him from within as something we are conscious of, we feel ourselves free. This consciousness is completely independent and independent of the source of rational self-knowledge.Man observes himself through reason; and only through consciousness does he know himself. Any observation and use of reason is inconceivable without self-awareness. To understand, observe, and reason, one must first be aware that one is alive.Only when a man wills, that is, is conscious of his will, does he know that he is alive.But man can only be aware of the will free when he is aware of the will which constitutes the substance of his being.

If, when a man observes himself, he sees that his will always acts according to the same law (he observes the necessity of eating, or the workings of the mind, or any other phenomenon), he cannot but keep his will To move in the same direction is regarded as a limitation of the will, and without freedom there is no limitation at all.A man feels his will is limited precisely because he realizes that his will is free. You say: I am not free.But I raised my hand and put it down again.Everyone understands that this illogical answer is proof of an irrefutable freedom. This answer falls outside the category of manifestations of rational consciousness.

It would be demonstrable and experimental if free consciousness were not an independent source of self-knowledge independent of reason, but that is not the case, and it is inconceivable. A series of experiments and demonstrations have shown to each individual that he, as an object of observation, obeys certain laws; and once man has recognized the laws of gravitational impermeability, he obeys them and never resists them.But the same series of experiments and demonstrations showed to him that such complete freedom as he felt within himself could not exist, that his every action depended upon his constitution, his character, and the motives which affected him; But human beings never obey the conclusions of these experiments and demonstrations.

A man who knows, by experiment and demonstration, that a pile of stones falls, believes this without doubt, and in any case expects that law which he knows to be fulfilled. But he does not believe this, and cannot believe it, when he knows equally without doubt that his will is subject to certain laws. Although experiments and arguments have repeatedly shown a man that under the same circumstances, with the same character, he will do the same thing as before, but when he is under the same circumstances, with the same character, the thousandth The first time he did something that would always lead to the same result, he was still as sure as before the experiment that he could do whatever he wanted.Every man, whether savage or thinker, feels to him that there is no such unreasonable Without the idea (which constitutes the essence of freedom), he cannot imagine life.This seemed to him to be so, although it was impossible, for without the concept of freedom he would not only be unable to understand life but would not be able to live it for a single moment.

He cannot live because all human efforts, all motives for existence, are but efforts to increase freedom.Riches and poverty, glory and obscurity, power and subjection, strength and weakness, health and disease, education and ignorance, work and leisure, food and hunger, morality and vice, are all but higher or lower degrees of liberty. A man who is not free can only be seen as a man whose life has been taken from him. If reason considers the concept of freedom to be a meaningless contradiction, like the possibility of two different actions under the same conditions, or the possibility of an action without reason, that only proves that consciousness does not belong to rational category.

This unshakable and undeniable sense of freedom, not subject to experiment or demonstration, recognized by all thinkers, and perceived by everyone without exception, without which no free consciousness of any conception of man is possible, This constitutes the other side of the problem. Man is the creation of the Almighty, All-Good, All-Knowing God.What is the evil that arises from the free consciousness of man?This is a question of theology. Human action falls within the category of general invariable laws expressed statistically.What is the responsibility of man to society (this concept also arises from the consciousness of freedom)?This is a question of jurisprudence.

Man's actions spring from his innate character and the motives which influence him.What is conscience, and what is the knowledge of good and evil in action that springs from free consciousness?This is a question of ethics. Viewed in connection with the entire life of man, man is subject to the laws that determine this life.But, not from this connection, a man seems free.How should the past life of peoples and mankind be regarded—as the product of men's free actions, or as the products of their illegitimate actions?This is a matter of history. Only in our age of widespread knowledge and self-confidence, the most powerful tool against ignorance—the spread of printed matter—raises the question of freedom of the will to a place where the question itself cannot exist.In our time, most of the so-called advanced men, that is to say, a group of ignorant people, are engaged in the work of naturalists, studying one aspect of a problem in order to obtain the answer to the whole problem.

Soul and freedom do not exist, because human life is the expression of muscular movements, and muscle movements are controlled by the activity of nerves; soul and free will do not exist, because in ancient times we are descended from apes, so they say, Written and printed in books, there is no doubt that the law of inevitability that they are now so diligently proving with physiology and comparative zoology was not only recognized by all religions and all thinkers thousands of years ago, but has never been recognized. people deny.They don't know that on this issue, natural science can only explain one aspect of the issue.For, from the point of view of observation, reason and will are nothing but secretions of the brain, and according to general laws man may have developed from the lower animals at an unknown age, and this fact is only obtained from a new This aspect illustrates the truth admitted thousands of years ago by all religious and philosophical theories that, from the point of view of reason, man is subject to a series of laws of necessity, but it does not at all contribute to the solution of this problem, which has established On the opposite side of the free consciousness.

If man evolved from an ape at an unknown time, it is as understandable as saying that he was made of a handful of earth at a certain period (the unknown of the former is time, the unknown of the latter is origin. ), and the question of how man's free consciousness is combined with the law of necessity to which he obeys cannot be solved by comparative physiology and zoology, because from frogs, rabbits and apes, we can only observe muscle and nerve activity, But from people, we can observe both muscle activity and neural activity, and we can also observe consciousness. The naturalists, and their disciples, who think they can solve the problem, are like the plasterers who were appointed to paint one of the walls of the church, but who, in the absence of the superintendent, in a moment of enthusiasm, painted the windows, the statues, The scaffolding, the walls without buttresses, they were happy, everything was smooth and smooth from their point of view as plasterers.