Page 2277 - war-and-peace

Chapter IX

For the solution of the question of free will or inevita-
bility, history has this advantage over other branches of
knowledge in which the question is dealt with, that for his-
tory this question does not refer to the essence of man’s free
will but its manifestation in the past and under certain con-
ditions.
In regard to this question, history stands to the other sci-
ences as experimental science stands to abstract science.
The subject for history is not man’s will itself but our pre-
sentation of it.
And so for history, the insoluble mystery presented by
the incompatibility of free will and inevitability does not
exist as it does for theology, ethics, and philosophy. History
surveys a presentation of man’s life in which the union of
these two contradictions has already taken place.
In actual life each historic event, each human action, is
very clearly and definitely understood without any sense of
contradiction, although each event presents itself as partly
free and partly compulsory.
To solve the question of how freedom and necessity are
combined and what constitutes the essence of these two
conceptions, the philosophy of history can and should fol-
low a path contrary to that taken by other sciences. Instead
of first defining the conceptions of freedom and inevitabil-

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