ourselves (as Napoleon did) into the bargain. This sense of the circumambient stream, defiance of whose nature through stupidity or overweening egotism will make our acts and thoughts self-defeating, is the vision of the unity of experience, the sense of history, the true
knowledge of reality, the belief in the incommunicable wisdom of
the sage (or the saint) which, mutatis mutandis, is common to Tolstoy
and Maistre. Their realism is of a similar sort: the natural enemy of
romanticism, sentimentalism and 'historicism' as much as of aggressive
THE H E D G E H O G AND THE FOX
'scientism'. Their purpose is not to distinguish the little that is known
or done from the limitless ocean of what, in principle, could or one
day would be known or done, whether by advance in the knowledge
of the natural sciences or of metaphysics or of the historical sciences,
or by a return to the past, or by some other method; what they seek
to establish are the eternal frontiers of our knowledge and power, to
demarcate them from what cannot in principle ever be known or
altered by men. According to Maistre our destiny lies in original sinin the fact that we are human- finite, fallible, vicious, vain-and that all our empirical knowledge (as opposed to the teachings of the Church)
is infected by error and monomania. According to Tolstoy all our
knowledge is necessarily empirical- there is no other-but it will never
conduct us to true understanding, but only to an accumulation of
arbitrarily abstracted bits and pieces of information; yet that seems to
him (as much as to any metaphysician of the Idealist school which he
despised) worthless beside, and unintelligible save in so far as it derives
from and points to, this inexpressible but very palpable kind of superior
understanding which alone is worth pursuing. Sometimes Tolstoy
comes near to saying what it is: the more we know, he tells us, about
a given human action, the more inevitable, determined it seems to us
to be; why?-because the more we know about all the relevant conditions and antecedents, the more difficult we find it to think away various circumstances, and conjecture what might have occurred
without them-and as we go on removing in our imagination what
we know to be true, fact by fact, this becomes not merely difficult
but impossible. Tolstoy's meaning is not obscure. We are what we
are, and live in a given situation which has the characteristicsphysical, psychological, social etc.- that it has; what we think, feel, do, is conditioned by it, including our capacity for conceiving possible
alternatives, whether in the present or future or past. Our imagination
and ability to calculate, our power of conceiving, let us say, what
might have been, if the past had, in this or that particular, been otherwise, soon reaches its natural limits-limits created both by the weakness of our capacity for calculating alternatives- 'might have beens'and (we may add by a logical extension of Tolstoy's argument) even more by the fact that our thoughts, the terms in which they occur,
the symbols themselves, are what they are, are themselves determined
by the actual structure of our world. Our images and powers of conception are limited by the fact that our world possesses certain characteristics and not others: a world too different is (empirically) not con-
"
75
R U SSIAN T H I NK E R S
ccivable at alclass="underline" some minds are more imaginative than others, but all
stop somewhere. The world is a system and a network: to conceive
of men as 'free' is to think of them as capable of having, at some
past juncture, acted in some fashion other than that in which they did
act; it is to think of what consequences would have come of such
unfulfilled possibilities and in what respects the world would have
been different, as a result, from the world as it now is. It is difficult
enough to do this in the case of artificial, purely deductive systems, as
for example in chess, where the permutations are finite in number,
and clear in type- having been arranged so by us, artificially-so that
the combinations are calculable. But if you apply this method to the
vague, rich texture of the real world, and try to work out the implications of this or that unrealised plan or unperformed action-the effect of it on the totality of later events-basing yourself on such knowledge
of causal laws, probabilities etc. as you have, you will find that the
greater the number of 'minute' causes you discriminate, the more
appalling becomes the task of 'deducing' any consequence of the
'unhinging' of each of these, one by one; for each of the consequences
affects the whole of the rest of the uncountable totality of events and
things; which unlike chess is not defined in terms of a finite, arbitrarily
chosen set of concepts and rules. And if, whether in real life or even
in chess, you begin to tamper with basic notions-continuity of space,
divisibility of time and the like-you will soon reach a stage in which
the symbols fail to function, your thoughts become confused and
paralysed. Consequendy the fuller our knowledge of facts and of their
connections the more difficult to conceive alternatives; the clearer
and more exact the terms-or the categories-in which we conceive
and describe the world, the more fixed our world structure, the less
'free' acts seem. To know dtese limits, both of imagination and,
ultimately, of thought itself, is to come &ce to face with the 'inexorable' unifying pattern of the world; to realise our identity with it, to submit to it, is to find truth and peace. This is not mere Oriental
fatalism, nor the mechanistic determinism of the celebrated German
materialists of the day, Buchner and Vogt, or Moleschott, admired
so deeply by the revolutionary 'nihilists' of Tolstoy's generation in
Russia; nor is it a yearning for mystical illumination or integration.
It is scrupulously empirical, rational, tough-minded and realistic. But
its emotional cause is a passionate desire for a m.>nistic vision of life
on the part of a fox bitterly intent upon seeing in the manner of a
hedgehog.
T H E H E D G E HO G AND T H E FOX
This is remarkably close to Maistre's dogmatic affirmations: we
must achieve an attitude of assent to the demands of history which are
the voice of God speaking through His servants and His divine
institutions, not made by human hands and not destructible by them.
We must attune ourselves to the true word of God, the inner 'go' of
things; but what it is in concrete cases, how we are to conduct our
private lives or public policies-of that we are told little by either critic
of optimistic liberalism. Nor can we expect to be told. For the positive
vision escapes them. Tolstoy's language-and Maistre's r.o less-is
adapted to the opposite activity. It is in analysing, identifying sharply,
marking differences, isolating concrete examples, piercing to the heart
of each individual entity pn- u, that Tolstoy rises to the full height
of his genius; and similarly Maistre achieves his brilliant effects by
pinning down and offering for public pillory-by a montage sur