Page 2273 - war-and-peace

approaches for the thousandth time the action that always
ends in the same way, he feels as certainly convinced as
before the experiment that he can act as he pleases. Every
man, savage or sage, however incontestably reason and ex-
periment may prove to him that it is impossible to imagine
two different courses of action in precisely the same condi-
tions, feels that without this irrational conception (which
constitutes the essence of freedom) he cannot imagine life.
He feels that however impossible it may be, it is so, for with-
out this conception of freedom not only would he be unable
to understand life, but he would be unable to live for a single
moment.
He could not live, because all man’s efforts, all his im-
pulses to life, are only efforts to increase freedom. Wealth
and poverty, fame and obscurity, power and subordination,
strength and weakness, health and disease, culture and ig-
norance, work and leisure, repletion and hunger, 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.
If the conception of freedom appears to reason to be a
senseless contradiction like the possibility of performing
two actions at one and the same instant of time, or of an ef-
fect without a cause, that only proves that consciousness is
not subject to reason.
This unshakable, irrefutable consciousness of freedom,
uncontrolled by experiment or argument, recognized by all
thinkers and felt by everyone without exception, this con-
sciousness without which no conception of man is possible

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