Despite our"reason," which accepts the scientific proofs that we are subject to naturalistic constraints as other creatures are, our"consciousness" senses freedom. Without this"meaningless feeling of freedom" life would be insupportable. All the concepts of our existence express this instinct for freedom, Tolstoy says: the notions of wealth and poverty, hunger and repletion, health and disease, are only terms for greater or lesser degrees of freedom. Our sense of free will can never be reconciled with the immutable laws of necessity; at best, we conclude that men and animals share nervous and muscular activity, but man has, in addition, consciousness.
History does not differentiate between free will and necessity. Rather, it relates how free will has manifested itself in the past and under what conditions it has operated. History is"our representation" of the action of free will, and we regard every event as a proportionate combination of free will with necessity. The more we know of the circumstances under which an act was performed, the less free the act seems. When a period of time has elapsed, allowing us to see more consequences of a particular act and its relation to previous acts, we see more and more necessities that determine the nature of the act. Free will, therefore, is an illusion we maintain because we cannot know all the factors contributing to the accomplished act.
With our limited knowledge, we can only conclude that human existence is made up of the"incomprehensible essence of life" and the"laws that give form to that essence." Our consciousness expresses the reality of free will, according to this scheme, while our reason expresses the laws of necessity. When we describe historical events, we express all the known factors as the laws of necessity, while those unknown we term free will. For historians to state, however, that free will (like Napoleon's genius) causes historical phenomena is analogous to astronomers recognizing freedom in the movement of heavenly bodies. As in science, we must seek to describe in history what can be observed, and then state what we know and admit what we do not know.
