Page 2275 - war-and-peace

movements and muscular movements are conditioned by
the activity of the nerves; the soul and free will do not exist
because at an unknown period of time we sprang from the
apes. They say this, not at all suspecting that thousands of
years ago that same law of necessity which with such ardor
they are now trying to prove by physiology and comparative
zoology was not merely acknowledged by all the religions
and all the thinkers, but has never been denied. They do
not see that the role of the natural sciences in this matter is
merely to serve as an instrument for the illumination of one
side of it. For the fact that, from the point of view of observa-
tion, reason and the will are merely secretions of the brain,
and that man following the general law may have developed
from lower animals at some unknown period of time, only
explains from a fresh side the truth admitted thousands of
years ago by all the religious and philosophic theoriesthat
from the point of view of reason man is subject to the law
of necessity; but 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.
If men descended from the apes at an unknown period
of time, that is as comprehensible as that they were made
from a handful of earth at a certain period of time (in the
first case the unknown quantity is the time, in the second
case it is the origin); and the question of how man’s con-
sciousness of freedom is to be reconciled with the law of
necessity to which he is subject cannot be solved by com-
parative physiology and zoology, for in a frog, a rabbit, or
an ape, we can observe only the muscular nervous activity,

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