War And Peace: Epilogue 2 - CHAPTER XI

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HISTORY examines the manifestations of man's free will in connection with the

external world in time and in dependence on cause, that is, defines that freedom

by the laws of reason; and so history is only a science in so far as that

freedom is defined by those laws.

To history the recognition of the free wills of men as forces able to

influence historical events, that is, not subject to laws, is the same as would

be to astronomy the recognition of free will in the movements of the heavenly

bodies.

This recognition destroys the possibility of the existence of laws, that is,

of any science whatever. If there is so much as one body moving at its free

will, the laws of Kepler and of Newton are annulled, and every conception of the

movement of the heavenly bodies is destroyed. If there is a single human action

due to free will, no historical law exists, and no conception of historical

events can be formed.

For history there exist lines of movement of human wills, one extremity of

which vanishes in the unknowable, and at the other extremity of which in space,

in time, and in dependence on cause, there moves men's consciousness of free

will in the present.

The more this curve of movement is analysed before our eyes, the clearer are

the laws of its movement. To discover and define those laws is the problem of

history.

From the point of view from which the science of history now approaches its

subject, by the method it now follows, seeking the causes of phenomena in the

free will of men, the expression of laws by science is impossible; since however

we limit the free will of men, so long as we recognise it as a force not subject

to law, the existence of law becomes impossible.

Only limiting this element of free will to infinity, that is, regarding it as

an infinitesimal minimum, we are convinced of the complete unattainability of

causes, and then, instead of seeking causes, history sees before itself the task

of seeking laws.

The seeking of those laws has been begun long ago, and the new lines of

thought which history must adopt are being worked out simultaneously with the

self-destruction towards which the old-fashioned history is going, forever

dissecting and dissecting the causes of phenomena.

All human sciences have followed the same course. Reaching infinitesimals,

mathematics, the most exact of the sciences, leaves the process of analysis and

enters on a new process of approximating to summing up the unknown

infinitesimals. Forsaking the conception of cause, mathematics seeks law, that

is, properties common to all unknown, infinitesimal quantities.

The other sciences, too, have followed the same course, though under another

form. When Newton formulated the law of gravity, he did not say that the sun or

the earth has the property of attraction. He said that all bodies—from the

greatest to the smallest—have the property of attracting one another; that is,

leaving on one side the question of the cause of the movements of bodies, he

expressed the property common to all bodies, from the infinitely great to the

infinitely small. The natural sciences do the same thing; leaving on one side

the question of cause, they seek for laws. History, too, is entered on the same

course. And if the subject of history is to be the study of the movements of

peoples and of humanity, and not episodes from the lives of individual men, it

too is bound to lay aside the idea of cause, and to seek the laws common to all

the equal and inseparably interconnected, infinitesimal elements of free

will.

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1. Ebooks list page : 85
2. War And Peace: Epilogue 2 - CHAPTER I
3. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER IV
4. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER V
5. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER VI
6. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER VII
7. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER XIV
8. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER IX
9. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER X
10. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER XI
11. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER XII
12. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER XVI
13. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER III
14. War And Peace: Epilogue 2 - CHAPTER IV
15. War And Peace: Epilogue 1 - CHAPTER I
16. War And Peace: Epilogue 2 - CHAPTER II