If history dealt only with external phenomena, the establishment of this simple and obvious law would suffice and we should have finished our argument. But the law of history relates to man. A particle of matter cannot tell us that it does not feel the law of attraction or repulsion and that that law is untrue, but man, who is the subject of history, says plainly: I am free and am therefore not subject to the law. The presence of the problem of man's free will, though unexpressed, is felt at every step of history. All seriously thinking historians have involuntarily encountered this question. All the contradictions and obscurities of history and the false path historical science has followed are due solely to the lack of a solution of that question. If the will of every man were free, if each could act as he pleased, all history would be a series of disconnected incidents. If in a thousand years even one man in a million could act freely, one single free act in violation of the laws governing human action would destroy the possibility of any laws for the whole of humanity. If there be a single law governing the actions of men, free will cannot exist, for then man's will is subject to that law. In this contradiction lies the problem which from most ancient times has occupied the best human minds.
Regarding man as a subject of observation, from whatever point of view, theological, historical, ethical, or philosophic, we find a general law of necessity to which he, like all that exists, is subject. Regarding him from within ourselves as what we are conscious of, we feel ourselves to be free. This consciousness is a source of self-cognition quite apart from reason. Through his reason man observes himself, but only through consciousness does he know himself. A man is only conscious of himself as living by the fact that he wills. His will, which forms the essence of his life, he recognizes as free. Were it not free it could not be limited. You say I am not free. But I have lifted my hand and let it fall. Everyone understands that this illogical reply is an irrefutable demonstration of freedom. A series of experiments proves that he, as an object of observation, is subject to certain laws, and he never resists the laws of gravity once he has become acquainted with them. The same series proves that complete freedom is impossible, that every action depends on organization, character, and motives; yet man never submits to those deductions. Learning that a stone falls downwards, he always expects the law to be fulfilled. Learning just as certainly that his will is subject to laws, he does not and cannot believe this. However often experiment shows that under the same conditions he will do the same thing, when he approaches for the thousandth time the action that always ends the same way, he feels as certainly convinced as before that he can act as he pleases. Without this irrational conception, which constitutes the essence of freedom, he cannot imagine life. He could not live, because all man's efforts are only efforts to increase freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity, power and subordination, health and disease, virtue and vice, are only greater or lesser degrees of freedom. A man having no freedom cannot be conceived of except as deprived of life.
Man is the creation of an all-powerful, all-good, and all-seeing God. What is sin, the conception of which arises from the consciousness of freedom? That is a question for theology. The actions of men are subject to general immutable laws expressed in statistics. What is man's responsibility to society? That is a question for jurisprudence. Man's actions proceed from his innate character and the motives acting upon him. What is conscience? That is a question for ethics. Man in connection with the general life of humanity appears subject to laws which determine that life. The same man apart from that connection appears to be free. How should the past life of nations be regarded, as the result of free or of constrained activity? That is a question for history. In our self-confident day, thanks to that most powerful engine of ignorance, the diffusion of printed matter, the majority of so-called advanced people have taken the work of the naturalists who deal with one side of the question for a solution of the whole problem. They say the soul and freedom do not exist, for life is expressed by muscular movements conditioned by nerves, and because at an unknown period we sprang from the apes. They do not suspect that thousands of years ago the same law of necessity was acknowledged by all the religions and all the thinkers and has never been denied. That man may have developed from lower animals only explains from a fresh side the truth that from the point of view of reason man is subject to necessity. It does not advance by a hair's breadth the solution of the question, which has another, opposite, side, based on the consciousness of freedom. The naturalists and their followers are like plasterers set to plaster one side of a church who, availing themselves of the absence of the chief superintendent, plaster over the windows, icons, woodwork, and still unbuttressed walls, and are delighted that from their point of view as plasterers everything is now so smooth and regular.
