try to apply to it instruments-scientific, metaphysical etc. -adapted
solely to objects above the surface, i.e. the relatively conscious,
manipulable portion of our experience, and so achieve absurdities in
their theories and humiliating failures in practice. Wisdom is ability
to allow for the (at least by us) unalterable medium in which we actas we allow for the pervasiveness, say, of time or space, which characterises all our experience; and to discount, less or more consciously, the
'inevitable trends', the 'imponderables', the 'way things are going'. It
is not scientific knowledge, but a special sensitiveness to the contours
of the circumstances in which we happen to be placed; it is a capacity
for living without falling foul of some permanent condition or factor
which cannot be either altered, or even fully described or calculated;
an ability to be guided by rules of thumb-the 'immemorial wisdom'
said to reside in peasants and o�her 'simple folk' -where rules of
science do not, in principle, apply. This inexpressible sense of cosmic
orientation is the 'sense of reality', the 'knowledge' of how to live.
Sometimes Tolstoy does speak as if science could in principle, if not
in practice, penetrate and conquer everything; and if it did, then we
should know the causes of all there is, and know we were not free,
but wholly determined -which is all that the wisest can ever know.
So, too, Maistre talks as if the school men knew more than we, through
their superior techniques: but what they knew was still, in some sense,
'the -facts' : the subject-matter of the sciences; St Thomas knew
incomparably more than Newton, and with more precision and more
certainty, but what he knew was of the same kind. But despite this
lip-service to the truth-finding capacities of natural science or theology,
these avowals remain purely formal : and a very different belief finds
expression in the positive doctrines of both Maistre and Tolstoy.
Aquinas is praised by Maistre not for being a better mathematician
than d' Alembert or Monge; Kutuzov's virtue does not, according to
T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX
Tolstoy, consist in his being a better, more scientific theorist of war
than Pfuel or Paulucci. These great men are wiser, not more knowledgeable; it is not their deductive or inductive reasoning that makes them masters; their vision is 'profounder', they see something the
others fail to see; they see the way the world goes, what goes with
what, and what never will be brought together; they see what can be
and what cannot; how men live and to what ends, what they do and
suffer, and how and why they act, and should act, thus and not otherwise. This 'seeing' purveys, in a sense, no fresh information about the universe; it is an awareness of the interplay of the imponderable with
the ponderable, of the 'shape' of things in general or of a specific
situation, or of a particular character, which is precisely what cannot
be deduced from, or even formulated in terms of, the laws of nature
demanded by scientific determinism. Whatever can be subsumed under
such laws scientists can and do deal with; that needs no 'wisdom';
and to deny science its rights because of the existence of this superior
'wisdom' is a wanton invasion of scientific territory, and a confusion
of categories. Tolstoy, at least, does not go to the length of denying
the efficacy of physics in its own sphere; but he thinks this sphere
trivial in comparison with what is permanently out of the reach of
science-the social, moral, political, spiritual worlds, which cannot be
sorted out and described and predicted by any science, because the
proportion in them of 'submerged', uninspectable life is too high. The
insight that reveals the nature and structure of these worlds is not a
mere makeshift substitute, an empirical pis oller to which recourse is
had only so long as the relevant scientific techniques are insufficiently
refined; its business is altogether different: it does what no science
can claim to do; it distinguishes the real from the sham, the worth.!
while from the worthless, that which can be done or borne from
what cannot be; and does so without giving rational grounds for its
pronouncements, if only because 'rational' and 'irrational' are terms
that themselves acquire their meanings and uses in relation to-by
'growing out of' -it, and not vice versa. For what are the data of
such understanding if not the ultimate soil, the framework, the
atmosphere, the context, the medium (to use whatever metaphor is
most expressive) in which all our thoughts and acts are felt, valued,
judged, in the inevitable ways that they are? It is the ever present
sense of this framework-of this movement of events, or changing
pattern of characteristics-as something 'inexorable', universal, pervasive, not alterable by us, not in our power (in the sense of 'power'
·'
73
R U S S I AN T H I N K E R S
i n which the progress of scientific knowledge has given u s power
over nature), that is at the root of Tolstoy's determinism, and of his
realism, his pessimism, and his (and Maistre's) contempt for the faith
placed in reason alike by science and by worldly common sense. It is
'there' -the framework, the foundation of everything-and the wise
man alone has a sense of it; Pierre gropes for it; Kutuzov feels it in
his bones; Karataev is at one with it. All Tolstoy's heroes attain to
at least intermittent glimpses of it-and this it is that makes all the
conventional explanations, the scientific, the historical, those of unreRective 'good sense', seem so hollow and, at their most pretentious, so shamefully false. Tolstoy himself, too, knows that the truth is
there, and not 'here' - not in the regions susceptible to observation,
discrimination, constructive imagination, not in the power of microscopic perception and analysis of which he is so much the greatest master of our time; but he has not, himself, seen it face to face; for
he has not, do what he might, a vision of the whole; he is not, he is
remote from being, a hedgehog; and what he sees is not the one, but,
always with an ever growing minuteness, in all its teeming individuality,
with an obsessive, inescapable, incorruptible, all-penetrating lucidity
which maddens him, the many.
V I I
We are part of a larger scheme o f things than w e ca n understand. We
cannot describe it in the way in which external objects or the characters
of other people can be described, by isolating them somewhat from the
historical 'Row' in which they have their being, and from the 'submerged', unfathomed, portions of themselves to which professional historians have, according to Tolstoy, paid so little heed; for we ourselves live in this whole and by it, and are wise only in the measure to which we make our peace with it. For until and unless we do so (only
after much bitter suffering, if we are to trust Aeschylus and the Book
of Job), we shall protest and suffer in vain, and make sorry fools of