War and Peace Epilogue, Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary

  • How does free will fit into all of this?
  • Well, there’s not really such a thing as free will. If we all had total free will and could just do whatever whenever, there wouldn’t be any history, just a bunch of disconnected events.
  • But of course, our will depends on our personality, on our relationships with other people, and all that other external stuff.
  • When each person thinks about himself, he imagines himself to be free – but this is an illusion.