to the laws of space and time and causation lies in the difficulty of surmounting the direct sensation of independence of one’s personality.

And that’s it! Thank you, Tolstoy. A wonderfully written, thoughtful, very real often modern and funny, and still relevant book.

It is only by the analysis of the two sources of knowledge, standing to one another in the relation of form and content, that the mutually exclusive, and separately inconceivable ideas of free will and necessity are formed.
Only by their synthesis is a clear conception of the life of a man gained.

expression to the reality of free will.
Freedom unlimited by anything is the essence of life in man’s consciousness. Necessity without content is man’s reason with its three forms of thought.
Free will is what is examined: Necessity is what examines. Free will is content: Necessity is form…

the word of command kills a defenceless man, all seem less guilty—that is, less free and more subject to the law of necessity to one who knows the circumstances in which they are placed, and more free to one who did not know that the man was himself drowning, that the mother was starving [etc.]

that is, a mob of ignoramuses—have accepted the result of the researches of natural science, which is occupied with one side only of the question, for the solution of the whole question.

Would Tolstoy have been a Trump supporter?

conceited age of the popularisation of knowledge, thanks to the most powerful weapon of ignorance—the diffusion of printed matter—the question of the freedom of the will has been put on a level, on which it can no longer be the same question. In our day the majority of so-called advanced people—

it is unthinkable otherwise; because it is a law.

I understand that, at the abstraction he is working at, this explanation works in all applicable cases. But I also understand that it is not enough to say, “I am content to accept reality as it is,” as Pierre does, as only he could, as a noble.

carrying out of that will by others.

Though dense, I’ve been really enjoying this section of the epilogue. Tolstoy is trying to define power as a necessary prerequisite for understanding past historical events and assessing our present reality. Though he wouldn’t like it, it’s very Marxist of him.

That is, power is power. That is, power is a word the meaning of which is beyond our comprehension…

(Me, Taylor:) Tolstoy later elaborates and solves this problem:

Power, from the point of view of experience, is only the dependence existing between the expression of the will of a person and the…

the activity of some dozen persons, who do not burn houses, never have tilled the soil, and do not kill their fellow-creatures.

(Me, Taylor:) What is power? Why do some things “attract our attention”?

combined will of the masses is always vested in these figures which attract our attention—the fact remains that the activity of the millions of men who move from place to place, burn houses, abandon tilling the soil, and butcher one another, never does find expression in descriptions of…

serve for some objects of their own as current coin at the universities and with that crowd of readers—find of serious reading, as they call it.

GODDAAMMMMMN

of describing the movement of humanity without a conception of a force impelling men to direct their activity to one end. And the only conception of this kind familiar to historians is power.

A great aside comes later:

[…] So do historians who do not answer the essential questions of humanity…