n the past and
under certain conditions.

In regard to this question, history stands to the other sciences as
experimental science stands to abstract science.

The subject for history is not man's will itself but our presentation 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 follow a path contrary to that taken by other
sciences. Instead of first defining the conceptions of freedom and
inevitability in themselves, and then ranging the phenomena of life
under those definitions, history should deduce a definition of the
conception of freedom and inevitability themselves from the immense
quantity of phenomena of which it is cognizant and that always appear
dependent on these two elements.

Whatever presentation of the activity of many men or of an individual
we may consider, we always regard it as the result partly of man's free
will and partly of the law of inevitability.

Whether we speak of the migration of the peoples and the incursions
of the barbarians, or of the decrees of Napoleon III, or of someone's
action an hour ago in choosing one direction out of several for his
walk, we are unconscious of any contradiction. The degree of freedom and
inevitability governing the actions of these people is clearly defined
for us.

Our conception of the degree of freedom often varies according to
differences in the point of view from which we regard the event, but
every human action appears to us as a certain combination of freedom and
inevitability. In every action we examine we see a certain measure of
freedom and a certain measure of inevitability. And always the more
freedom we see in any action the less inevitability do we perceive, and
the more inevitability the less freedom.

The proportion of freedom to inevitability decreases and increases
according to the point of view from which the action is reg