itioned 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
observation, 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 theories--that 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 consciousness of freedom is to be reconciled with the law of
necessity to which he is subject cannot be solved by comparative
physiology and zoology, for in a frog, a rabbit, or an ape, we can
observe only the muscular nervous activity, but in man we observe
consciousness as well as the muscular and nervous activity.

The naturalists and their followers, thinking they can solve this
question, are like plasterers set to plaster one side of the walls of
a church who, availing themselves of the absence of the chief
superintendent of the work, should in an access of zeal plaster over the
windows, icons, woodwork, and still unbuttressed walls, and should be
delighted that from their point of view as plasterers, everything is now
so smooth and regular.

CHAPTER IX

For the solution of the question of free will or inevitability, history
has this advantage over other branches of knowledge in which the
question is dealt with, that for history this question does not refer
to the essence of man's free will but its manifestation i