illusion, this must, in the name of the truth, be ruthlessly demonstrated,
and the values and the explanations which derive from the illusion
exposed and discredited. And in a sense. Tolstoy does try to do this,
particularly when he is philosophising, as in the great public scenes
of the novel itself, the battle pieces, the descriptions of the movements
of peoples, the metaphysical disquisitions. But, on the other hand, he
also does the exact opposite of this when he contrasts with this panorama of public life the .superior value of personal experience, the
'thoughts, knowledge, poetry, music, love, friendship, hates, passions'
of which real life is compounded -when he contrasts the concrete
and multi-coloured reality of individual lives with the pale abstractions
of scientists or historians, particularly the latter, 'from Gibbon to
Buckle', whom he denounces so harshly for mistaking their own
empty categories for real facts. And yet the primacy of these private
experiences and relationships and virtues presupposes that vision of
life, with its sense of personal responsibility, and belief in freedom
and the possibility of spontaneous action, to which the best pages of
43
R U S S I AN T H IN K E R S
W or and Peact are devoted, and which i s the very illusion to be
exorcised, if the truth is to be faced.
This terrible dilemma is never finally resolved. Sometimes, as in
the explanation of his intentions which he published before the final
part of War and Peact had appeared,1 Tolstoy vacillates; the individual
is 'in some sense' free when he alone is involved: thus, in raising his
arm, he is free within physical limits. But once he is involved in
relationships with others, he is no longer free, he is part of the inexorable stream. Freedom is real, but it is confined to trivial acts. At other times even this feeble ray of hope is extinguished : Tolstoy
declares that he cannot admit even small exceptions to the universal
law; causal determinism is either wholly pervasive or it is nothing,
and chaos reigns. Men's acts may seem free of the social nexus, but
they are not free, they cannot be free, they are part of it. Science
cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is
no morality and no art, but it can refute it. 'Power' and 'accident' are
but names for ignorance of the causal chains, but the chains exist
whether we feel them or not; fortunately we do not; for if we felt
their weight, we could scarcely act at all; the loss of the illusion would
paralyse the life which is lived on the basis of our happy ignorance.
But all is well : for we never shall discover all the causal chains that
operate: the number of such causes is infinitely great, the causes
themselves infinitely small ; historians select an absurdly small portion
of them and attribute everything to this arbitrarily chosen tiny
section. How would an ideal historical science operate? By using a kind
of calculus whereby this 'differential', the infinitesimals-the infinitely
small human and non-human actions and events-would be integrated,
and in this way the continuum of history would no longer be distorted
by being broken up into arbitrary segments.2 Tolstoy expresses this
notion of calculation by infinitesimals with great lucidity, and with his
habitual simple, vivid, precise use of words. Henri Bergson, who made
his name with his theory of reality as a flux fragmented artificially by
the natural sciences, and thereby distorted and robbed of continuity
and life, developed a very similar point at infinitely greater length, less
clearly, less plausibly, and with an unnecessary parade of terminology.
It is not a mystical '>r an intuitionist view of life. Our ignorance of
1 'Neskol'ko slov po povodu knigi: "Voina i mir" ', Rrmltii arltnifl 6 (I 868),
columns 5 I 5-28.
1 War and Ptau, vol. 3• part 3, chapter I .
THE H E D G E HOG AND T H E FOX
how things happen is not due to some inherent inaccessibility of the
first causes, only to their multiplicity, the smallness of the ultimate
units, and our own inability to see and hear and remember and record
and coordinate enough of the available material. Omniscience is in
principle possible even to empirical beings, but, of course, in practice
unattainable. This alone, and nothing deeper or more interesting, is
the source of human megalomania, of all our absurd delusions. Since
we are not, in fact, free, but could not live without the conviction
that we are, what are we to do? Tolstoy arrives at no clear conclusion,
only at the view, in some respect like Burke's, that it is better to
realise that we understand what goes on as we do in fact understand it
- much as spontaneous, normal, simple people, uncorrupted by theories,
not blinded by the dust raised by the scientific authorities, do, in fact,
understand life-than to seek to subvert such commonsense beliefs,
which at least have the merit of having been tested by long experience,
in favour of pseudo-sciences, which, being founded on absurdly
inadequate data, are only a snare and a delusion. That is his case
against all forms of optimistic rationalism, the natural sciences, liberal
theories of progress, German military expertise, French sociology,
confident social engineering of all kinds. And this is his reason for
inventing a Kutuzov who followed his simple, Russian, untutored
instinct, and despised or ignored the German, French and Italian
experts; and for raising him to the status of a national hero which he
has, partly as a result of Tolstoy's portrait, retained ever since.
'His figures', said Akhsharumov in 1 868, immediately on the
appearance of the last part of War and Ptact, 'are real and not mere
pawns in the hands of an unintelligible destiny';1 the author's theory,
on the other hand, was ingenious but irrelevant. This remained the
general view of Russian and, for the most part, foreign literary critics
too. The Russian left-wing intellectuals attacked Tolstoy for 'social
indifferentism', for disparagement of all noble social impulses as a
compound of ignorance and foolish monomania, and an 'aristocratic'
cynicism about life as a marsh which cannot be reclaimed; Flaubert
and Turgenev, as we have seen, thought the tendency to philosophise
unfortunate in itself; the only critic who took the doctrine seriously
and tried to provide a rational refutation was the historian Kareev.1
1 op. cit. (p. 26, note 4 above).
1 N. I. Kareev, 'Istoricheskaya filosofiya v "Voine i mire" ', YtstTiiA: tflrrJPJ,
July t 887, pp. 227-69.
45
R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S
Patiently and mildly he pointed out that fascinating as the contrast
between the reality of personal life and the life of the social ant-hill
may be, Tolstoy's conclusions did not follow. True, man is at once
an atom living its own conscious life 'for itself', and at the same time