The proposition that everything that we do and suffer is part of a fixed pattern; that Laplace's observer (supplied with adequate knowledge of facts and laws) could at any moment of historical of the `inner' life, that is, human thoughts, feelings, acts, &c.-- has often been entertained, and very different implications have been drawn from it; belief in its truth has dismayed some and inspired others. But whether or not determinism is true or even coherent, it seems clear that acceptance of it does not in fact colour the ordinary thoughts of the majority of human beings, including historians, nor even those of natural scientists outside the laboratory. For if it did, the language of the believers would reflect this fact, and be different from that of the rest of us. There is a class of expressions which we constantly use (and can scarcely do without) like `you should not (or need not) have done this'; `need you have made this terrible mistake?'; `I could do it, but I would rather not' ; `why did the King of Ruritarna abdicate? Because, unlike the King of Abyssinia, he lacked the strength of will to resist'; `must the Commander-in-Chief be quite so stupid?' Expressions of this type plainly involve the notion of more than the merely logical possibility of the realization of alternatives other than those which were m fact realized, namely of differences between situations in which individuals can be reasonably regarded as being responsible for their acts, and those in which they can not. For no one will wish to deny that we do often argue about the best among the possible courses of action open to human beings in the present and past and future, in fiction and in dreams; that historians (and detectives and judges and juries) do attempt to establish, as well as they are able, what these possibilities are; that the ways in which these lines are drawn mark the frontiers between reliable and unreliable history; that what is called realism (as opposed to fancy or ignorance of life or utopian dreams) consists precisely in the placing of what occurred (or might occur) in the context of what could have happened (or could happen) and in the demarcation of this from what could not; that this is what (as I think Sir Lewis Namier once suggested) the sense of history, in the end, comes to; that upon this capacity historical (as well as legal) justice depends; that it alone makes it possible to speak of criticism, or praise and blame, as just or deserved or absurd or unfair; and `that this is the sole and obvious reason why accidents, force majeure--being unavoidable --are necessarily outside the category of responsibility and consequently beyond the bounds of criticism, of the attribution of praise and blame. The difference between the expected and the exceptional, the difficult and the easy, the normal and the perverse, rests upon the drawing of these same lines. All this seems too self-evident to argue. It seems superfluous to add that all the discussions of historians about whether a given policy could or could not have been prevented, and what view should therefore be taken of the acts and characters of the actors, are intelligible only on the assumption of the reality of human choices. If determinism were a valid theory of human behaviour, these distinctions would be as inappropriate as the attribution of moral responsibility to the planetary system or the tissues of a living cell. These categories permeate all that we think and feel so pervasively and universally that to think them away, and conceive what and how we should be thinking, feeling, and talking without them, or in the framework of their opposites, psychologically greatly strains our capacity--is nearly, if not quite, as impracticable as, let us say, to pretend that. we live in a world in which space, time, or number in the normal sense no longer exist. We may indeed always argue about specific situations, about whether a given occurrence is best explained as the inevitable effect of. antecedent events beyond human control, or on the contrary as due to free human choice; free not merely in the sense that the case would have been altered if we had chosen--tried to act-- differently; but that nothing prevented us from so choosing. It may well be that the growth of science and historical knowledge does in fact tend to show--make probable--that much of what was hitherto attributed to the acts of the unfettered wills of individuals can be satisfactorily explained only by the working of other, `natural', impersonal factors; that we have, in our ignorance or vanity, extended the realm of human freedom much too far. Yet, the very meaning of such terms as `cause' and `in evitable' depends on the possibility of contrasting them with at least their imaginary opposites. These alternatives may be improbable; but they must at least be conceivable, if only for the purpose of contrasting them with causal necessities and law observing uniformities; unless we attach some meaning to the notion of free acts, i.e. acts not wholly determined by antecedent events or by the nature and 'dispositional characteristics' of either persons or things, it is difficult to see why we come to distinguish acts to which responsibility is attached from mere segments in a physical, or psychical, or psychophysical causal chain of events --a distinction signified (even if all particular applications of it are mistaken) by the cluster of expressions which deal with open alternatives and free choices. Yet it is this distinction that underlies our normal attribution of values, in particular the notion that praise and blame can ever be justly (not merely usefully or effectively) given. If the determinist hypothesis were true, and adequately accounted for the actual world, there is a clear sense in which, despite all the extraordinary casuistry which has been brought to avoid this conclusion, the notion of human responsibility, as ordinarily understood; would no longer apply to any actual, but only to imaginary or conceivable, states of affairs. I do not here wish to say that determinism is necessarily false, only that we neither speak nor think as if it could be true, and that it is difficult, and perhaps beyond our normal powers, to conceive what our picture of the world would be if we seriously believed it; so that to speak, as some theorists of history (and scientists with a philosophical bent) tend to do, as if one might (in life and not only in the study) accept the determinist hypothesis, and yet to continue to think and speak much as we do at present, is to breed intellectual confusion. If the belief in freedom--which rests on the assumption that human beings do occasionally choose, and that their choices are not wholly accounted for by the kind of causal explanations which are accepted in, say, physics or biology--if this is a necessary illusion, it is so deep and so pervasive that it is not felt as such.2.9 No doubt we can try to convince ourselves that we are systematically deluded; 2.10 but unless we attempt to think out the implications of this possibility, and alter our modes of thoughts and speech to allow for it accordingly, this hypothesis remains hollow; that is, we find it impracticable even to entertain it seriously, if our behaviour is to be taken as evidence of what we can and what we cannot bring ourselves to believe or suppose not merely in theory, but in practice. My submission is that to make a serious attempt to adapt our thoughts and words to the hypothesis of determinism is a fearful task, as things are now, and have been within recorded history. The changes involved are very radical; our moral and psychological categories are, in the end, more flexible than our physical ones, but not much more so; it is not much easier to begin to think out in real terms, to which behaviour and speech would correspond, what the universe of the genuine determinist would be like, than to think out, with the minimum of indispensable concrete detail (i.e. begin to imagine) what it would be like to be in a timeless world, or one with a seventeen dimensional space. Let those who doubt this try for themselves; the symbols with which we think will hardly lend themselves to the experiment; they, in their turn, are too deeply involved in our normal view of the world, allowing for every difference of period and clime and culture, to be capable of so violent a break. We can, of course, work out the logical implications of any set of internally consistent premisses--logic and mathematics will do any work that is required of them--but this is a very different thing from knowing how the result would look `in practice', what the concrete innovations are; and, since history is not a deductive science (and even sociology becomes progressively less intelligible as it loses touch with its empirical foundations), such hypotheses, being abstract models, pure and unapplied, will be of little use to students ot human life. Hence the ancient controversy between free will and determinism, while it remains a genuine problem for theologians and philosophers, need not trouble the thoughts of those whose concern is with empirical matters--the actual lives of human beings in the space and time of normal experience. For practising historians determinism is not, and need not be, a serious issue.
Yet, inapplicable as it may be as a theory of human action, specific forms of the deterministic hypothesis have played an arresting, if muted, role in altering our views of human responsibility. The irrelevance of the general hypothesis to historical studies must not blind us to its importance as a specific corrective --to ignorance, prejudice, dogmatism, and fantasy on the part of those who judge the behaviour of others.2.11 For it is plainly a good thing that we should be reminded by social scientists that the scope of human choice is a good deal more limited than we used to suppose; that the.evidence at our disposal shows that many of the acts too often assumed to be within the individual's control are not so--that man is an object in (scientifically predictable) nature to a larger degree than has at times been supposed, that human beings more often than not act as they do because of characteristics due to heredity or physical or social enviroment or education, or biological or physical characteristics or the interplay of these factors with each other and with the obscurer factors loosely called psychical characteristics; and that the resultant habits of thought, feeling, and expression are2.12 as capable of being classified and made subject to hypotheses and systematic laws as the behaviour of material objects. And this certainly alters our ideas about the limits of freedom and responsibility. If we are told that a given case of stealing is due to kleptomania, we protest that the appropriate treatment is not punishment but a remedy for a disease; and similarly, if a destructive act or a vicious character is ascribed to a specific psychological or social cause, we decide, if we are convinced that the explanation is valid, that the agent is not responsible for his acts and consequently deserves therapeutic rather than penal treatment. It is salutary to be reminded of the narrowness of the field within which we can begin to claim to be free; and some would claim that such knowledge is still increasing, and. the field still contracting. Where the frontier between freedom and causal laws is to be determined is a crucial practical issue; knowledge of it is a powerful and indispensable antidote to ignorance and irrationality, and offers us new types of explanation--historical, psychological, sociological, biological--which previous generations have lacked. What we cannot alter, or cannot alter as much as we had supposed, cannot be used as evidence for or against us as free moral agents; it can cause us to feel pride, shame, regret, interest, but not remorse; it can be admired, envied, deplored, enjoyed, feared, wondered at, but not (save in some quasi-aesthetic sense) praised or condemned; our tendency to indignation is curbed, we desist from passing judgment. `Je ne propose rien, je ne suppose rien, je n'impose rien ...j'expose, ' said a French writer proudly, and such exposition meant for him the treatment of all events as causal or statistical phenomena, as scientific material to the exclusion of moral judgment. Historians of this persuasion, anxious to avoid all personal, above all, all moral, judgments, tend to emphasize the immense predominance of impersonal factors in history, of the physical media in which life is lived, the power of geographical, psychological, social factors which are not, at any rate consciously, man-made, and often beyond human control. This does tend to check our arrogance, to induce humility by forcing us to admit that our own outlook and scales of value are neither permanent nor universally accepted, that the overconfident, too complacent, moral classifications of past historians and of their societies sprang till too obviously from specific historical conditions, specific forms of ignorance or vainglory, or from particular temperamental traits in the historian (or moralist), or from other causes and circumstances which, from our vantage point, we perceive to belong to their own place and time, and to have given rise to interpretations which later seem idiosyncratic, smug, shallow, unjust, and often grotesque in the light of our own standards of accuracy or objectivity. And, what is even more important, such a line of approach throws doubt upon all attempts to establish a definitive line between the individual's free choice and his natural or socjal necessitation, and does this by bringing to light the egregious blunders of some of those who tried to solve this or that problem in the past, and made mistakes of fact which now, all too plainly, seem due to their (unalterable) milieu, or character, or interests. And this tends to make us ask whether the same might not be equally true of us and our own historical judgments; and so, by suggesting that every generation is `subjectively' conditioned by its own and psychological peculiarities, leads us to wonder whether it might not be best to avoid all moral judgment, all ascription of responsibility, might not be safest to confine our selves to impersonal terms, and leave whatever cannot be said in such terms altogether unsaid. Have we learned nothing from the intolerable moral dogmatism and the mechanical classifications of those historians and moralists and politicians .whose views are now so dated, so obsolete, and so justly discredited? And, indeed, who are we to make such a parade of our personal opinions, to give such importance to what are no more than symptoms of our own ephemeral outlook? And what right, in any case; have we to sit in judgment on our fellows whose moral codes are the pro ducts of their specific historical environments, as our own are of ours? Is it not better to analyse, to describe; to present the events, and then withdraw and let `them `speak for themselves'; refraining from the intolerable presumption of awarding marks, meting out justice; dividing the sheep front the goats according to our own personal criteria, as if these' were eternal and `not, as in fact they are, neither more nor less valid than those of others with other interests, in other conditions?
Such advice to us (in itself salutary enough) to retain a certain scepticism about our own powers of judgment, especially to beware of ascribing too much authority to our own moral views, comes to us, as you may recollect, from at least two quarters'; from those who think that we know too much, and from those who think that we know too little. We know now, say the former, that we are as we are, and our moral and intellectual criteria are what they are, in virtue of `the evolving historical `situation. Let me once more remind you of their varieties. Some among them, who feel sure that the natural sciences will in the end account for everything, explain our behaviour in terms of natural causes. Others, who accept a more metaphysical interpretation of the world, explain it by speaking of invisible powers and dominions, nations, races, cultures; the spirit of the age, the `workings', overt and occult, of `the Classical Spirit', `the Renaissance', `the Medieval Mind', `the French Revolution', `the Twentieth Century', conceived as impersonal entities, at once patterns and realities, in terms of whose `structure' or `purpose' their elements and expressions--men and institutions--must behave as they do. Yet still others speak in terms of some teleological procession, or hierarchy, whereby each man, country, institution, culture, age, fulfil their part in some cosmic drama, and are what they are in virtue of the part cast for them, but not by them, by the divine Dramatist Himself. From this it is not far to the views of those who say that History is wiser than we, that its purposes are unfathomable to us, that we, or some amongst us, are but the means, the instruments, the manifestations, worthy or unworthy, of some vast all embracing schema of eternal human progress, or of the German Spirit, or of the Proletariat, or of post Christian civilization, or of Faustian man, or of Manifest Destiny, or of the American Century, or of some other myth or mystery or abstraction. To know all is to understand all; it is to know why things are and must be as they are; therefore the more we know the more absurd we must think those who suppose that things could have been otherwise, and so fall into the irrational temptation to praise or blame. Tout comprendre, . c'est tout pardonner is transformed into a mere truism. Any form of moral censure--the accusing finger of historians or publicists or politicians, and indeed the agonies of thee private conscience, too--tends, so far as possible, to be explained away as one or other sophisticated version of primitive taboos or psychical tensions or conflicts, now appearing as moral consciousness, now as some other sanction, growing out of, and battening upon, that ignorance which alone generates fallacious beliefs in free will and uncaused choice, doomed to disappear in the growing light of scientific or metaphysical truth. Or, again, we find that the adherents of a sociological or historical or anthropological metaphysics tend to interpret the sense of mission and dedication, the voice of duty, all forms of inner compulsion of this type, as being an expression within each individual's conscious life of the `vast impersonal forces' which control it, and which speak `in us', ' `through us', `to us', for their own inscrutable purposes. To hear is then literally to obey--to be drawn towards the true goal of our `real' self, or its `natural' or `rational' development--that to which we are called in virtue of belonging to this or that class, or nation, or race, or church, or station in society, or tradition, or age, or character. The explanation, and in some sense the weight of responsibility, for all human action is (at times with ill-concealed relief) transferred to the broad backs of these vast impersonal forces--institutions or historic trends--better made to bear such burdens than a feeble thinking reed like man--a creature that, with a megalomania scarcely appropriate to his physical and moral frailty, claims, as he too' often does, to be responsible for the workings of Nature or of the Spirit; and flown with his importance, praises and blames, worships and tortures, murders and immortalizes other creatures like himself for conceiving, willing, or executing policies for which neither he nor they can be remotely responsible; as if flies were to sit in solemn judgment upon each other for causing the revolutions of the sun or the changes of the seasons which affect their lives. But no sooner do we acquire adequate insight into the `inexorable' and `inevitable ' parts played by all things animate and inanimate in the cosmic process, than we are freed from the sense of personal endeavour. Our sense of guilt and of sin, our pangs of remorse and self-condemnation, are automatically dissolved; the tension, the fear of failure and frustration, disappear as we become aware of the elements of a larger `organic whole' of which we are variously described as limbs or members, or reflections, or emanations, or finite expressions; our sense of freedom and independence, our belief in an area; however circumscribed, in which we can choose to act as we please, falls from us; in its place we are provided with a sense of a membership in an ordered system, each with a unique position sacred to oneself alone. We are soldiers in an army, and no longer suffer the pains and penalties of solitude; the army is on the march, our goals are set for us, not chosen by us; doubts are stilled by authority. The growth of knowledge brings with it relief from moral burdens, for if powers beyond and above us are at work, it is wild presumption to claim responsibility for their activity or blame ourselves for failing in it. Original sin is thus transferred to an impersonal plane, and acts hitherto regarded as wicked or unjustifiable are seen in a more `objective' fashion-- in a larger context--as part of the process of history which, being responsible for providing us with our scale of values, must not therefore itself be judged in terms of it; and viewed in this new light they turn out no longer wicked but right and good because necessitated by the whole. This is a doctrine which lies at the heart equally of scientific attempts to explain moral sentiments as psychological or sociological `residues' or the like, and of the metaphysical vision for which whatever is--'truly' is--is good. To understand all is to see that nothing could be otherwise than as it is; that all blame, indignation, protest is mere complaint about what seems discordant, about elements which do not seem to fit, about the absence of an intellectually or spiritually satisfying pattern. But this is always only evidence of failure on the part of the observer, of his blindness and ignorance; it can never be an objective assessment of reality, for in reality everything necessarily fits, nothing is superfluous, nothing amiss, every ingredient is `justified' in being where it is by the demands of the transcendent whole; and all sense of guilt, injustice, ugliness, all resistance. or condemnation, is mere proof of (at times unavoidable). lack of vision, misunderstanding, subjective aberration. vice, pain, folly, maladjustment, all come from failure to understand, from failure, in Mr. E. M. Forster's celebrated phase, `to connect'. This is the sermon preached to us by great and noble thinkers of very different outlooks, by Spinoza and Godwin, by Tolstoy and Comte, by mystics and rationalists, theologians and scientific materialists, metaphysicians and dogmatic empiricists, American sociologists, Russian Marxists, and German historicists alike. Thus Godwin (and he speaks for many humane and civilized persons) tells us that to understand a human act we must always avoid applying general principles but examine each case in its full individual detail. When we scrupulously examine the texture and pattern of this or that life, we shall not, in our haste and blindness seek to condemn or to punish; for we shall see why this or that man was caused to.act in this or that manner by ignorance or poverty or some other moral or intellectual or physical defect, as (Godwin optimistically supposes) we can always see, if we arm ourselves with sufficient patience, knowledge, and sympathy, and we shall then blame him no more than we should an object in nature; and since it is axiomatic that we cannot both act upon our knowledge, and yet regret the result, we can and shall in the end succeed in making men good, just, happy, and wise. So, too, Condorcet and Henri de Saint-Simon, and their disciple, Auguste Comte, starting from the opposite conviction, namely that men are not unique and in need, each one of them, of individual treatment, but, no less than inhabitants of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdom, belong to types and obey general laws, maintain no less stoutly that once these laws have been discovered (and therefore applied) this will by itself lead to universal felicity. And this conviction has since been echoed by many idealistic liberals and rationalists, technocrats, positivists, and believers in the scientific organization of society; and in very different keys by theocrats, neo-medieval romantics, authoritarians, and political mystics of various kinds. This, too, is in substance the morality preached. if not by Marx, then by most of the disciples of Engels and Plekhanov, by Prussian nationalist historians, by Spengler, and by many another thinker who believes that there is a pattern which he has seen but others have not seen, or at least not so. clearly seen, and that by this vision men may be saved. Know and you will not be lost. What it is that we must know differs from thinker to thinker, differs as.views of the nature of the world differ. Know the laws of the universe, animate and inanimate, or the principles of growth, or of evolution, or of the rise and fall of civilizations, or the goals towards which all creation tends, or the stages of the Idea, or something less tangible still. Know, in the sense of identifying yourself with it, realizing your oneness with it, for, do what you may, you cannot escape from the laws to which you are subject, of whatever kind they may be, `mechanistic', `vitalistic', causal, purposive, imposed, transcendent, immanent, or the `myriad' impalpable strands which bind you to the past--to your land and to the dead, as Barrès declared; to the milieu, the race, and the moment, as Tame asserted; to Burke's great society of the dead and living, who have made you what you are; so that the truth in which you believe, the values in terms of which you judge, from the profoundest principles to the most trivial whims, are part and parcel of the historical continuum to which you belong. Tradition or blood or class or human nature or progress or humanity; the Zeitgeist or the social structure or the laws of history: or the true ends of life; know these--be true to them--and you will be free. From Zeno to Spinoza, from the Gnostics to Leibniz, from Thomas Hobbes to Lenin and Freud, the baffle-cry has been essentially the same; the object of knowledge and the methods of discovery have often been violently opposed, but that reality is knowable, and that knowledge and only knowledge liberates, and absolute knowledge liberates, absolutely--that is common to many doctrines which are so large and valuable a part of Western civilization. To understand is to explain and to explain is to justify. The notion of individual freedom is a delusion. The further we are from omniscience, the wider our notion of our freedom and responsibility and guilt, products of ignorance and fear which populate the unknown with terrifying fictions. Personal freedom is a noble delusion and has had its social value; society might have crumbled without it; it is a necessary instrument--one of the greatest devices of `the cunning' of Reason or of History, or of whatever other cosmic force we may be invited to worship. But a delusion however noble, useful, metaphysically justified, historically indispensable, is still a delusion. And so individual responsibility and the perception of the difference between right and wrong choices, between avoidable evil and misfortune, are mere symptoms, evidences of vanity, of our imperfect adjustment, of human inability to face the truth. The more we know, the greater the relief from the burden of choice; we forgive others for what they cannot avoid being, and by the same token we forgive ourselves. In ages in which the choices seem peculiarly agonizing, when strongly held ideals cannot be reconciled and collisions cannot be averted, such doctrines seem peculiarly comforting. We escape moral dilemmas by denying their reality; and, by directing our gaze towards the greater wholes, we make them responsible in our place. All we lose is an illusion, and with it the painful and superfluous emotions of guilt and remorse. Freedom notoriously involves responsibility, and it is for many spirits a source of welcome relief to lost the burden of both, not by some ignoble act of surrender; but by daring to contemplate in a calm spirit things as they must be; for this is to be truly philosophical. Thereby we reduce history to a kind of physics; as well blame the galaxy or gamma-rays as Genghis Khan or Hitler. `To know all is to forgive all' turns out to be, in Professor Ayer's striking phrase (used in another context) nothing but a dramatized tautology.