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_ When an event is taking place people express their opinions and
wishes about it, and as the event results from the collective activity
of many people, some one of the opinions or wishes expressed is sure
to be fulfilled if but approximately. When one of the opinions
expressed is fulfilled, that opinion gets connected with the event
as a command preceding it.
Men are hauling a log. Each of them expresses his opinion as to
how and where to haul it. They haul the log away, and it happens
that this is done as one of them said. He ordered it. There we have
command and power in their primary form. The man who worked most
with his hands could not think so much about what he was doing, or
reflect on or command what would result from the common activity;
while the man who commanded more would evidently work less with his
hands on account of his greater verbal activity.
When some larger concourse of men direct their activity to a
common aim there is a yet sharper division of those who, because their
activity is given to directing and commanding, take less less part
in the direct work.
When a man works alone he always has a certain set of reflections
which as it seems to him directed his past activity, justify his
present activity, and guide him in planning his future actions. Just
the same is done by a concourse of people, allowing those who do not
take a direct part in the activity to devise considerations,
justifications, and surmises concerning their collective activity.
For reasons known or unknown to us the French began to drown and
kill one another. And corresponding to the event its justification
appears in people's belief that this was necessary for the welfare
of France, for liberty, and for equality. People ceased to kill one
another, and this event was accompanied by its justification in the
necessity for a centralization of power, resistance to Europe, and
so on. Men went from the west to the east killing their fellow men,
and the event was accompanied by phrases about the glory of France,
the baseness of England, and so on. History shows us that these
justifications of the events have no common sense and are all
contradictory, as in the case of killing a man as the result of
recognizing his rights, and the killing of millions in Russia for
the humiliation of England. But these justifications have a very
necessary significance in their own day.
These justifications release those who produce the events from moral
responsibility. These temporary aims are like the broom fixed in front
of a locomotive to clear the snow from the rails in front: they
clear men's moral responsibilities from their path.
Without such justification there would be no reply to the simplest
question that presents itself when examining each historical event.
How is it that millions of men commit collective crimes- make war,
commit murder, and so on?
With the present complex forms of political and social life in
Europe can any event that is not prescribed, decreed, or ordered by
monarchs, ministers, parliaments, or newspapers be imagined? Is
there any collective action which cannot find its justification in
political unity, in patriotism, in the balance of power, or in
civilization? So that every event that occurs inevitably coincides
with some expressed wish and, receiving a justification, presents
itself as the result of the will of one man or of several men.
In whatever direction a ship moves, the flow of the waves it cuts
will always be noticeable ahead of it. To those on board the ship
the movement of those waves will be the only perceptible motion.
Only by watching closely moment by moment the movement of that
flow and comparing it with the movement of the ship do we convince
ourselves that every bit of it is occasioned by the forward movement
of the ship, and that we were led into error by the fact that we
ourselves were imperceptibly moving.
We see the same if we watch moment by moment the movement of
historical characters (that is, re-establish the inevitable
condition of all that occurs- the continuity of movement in time)
and do not lose sight of the essential connection of historical
persons with the masses.
When the ship moves in one direction there is one and the same
wave ahead of it, when it turns frequently the wave ahead of it also
turns frequently. But wherever it may turn there always will be the
wave anticipating its movement.
Whatever happens it always appears that just that event was foreseen
and decreed. Wherever the ship may go, the rush of water which neither
directs nor increases its movement foams ahead of it, and at a
distance seems to us not merely to move of itself but to govern the
ship's movement also.
Examining only those expressions of the will of historical persons
which, as commands, were related to events, historians have assumed
that the events depended on those commands. But examining the events
themselves and the connection in which the historical persons stood to
the people, we have found that they and their orders were dependent on
events. The incontestable proof of this deduction is that, however
many commands were issued, the event does not take place unless
there are other causes for it, but as soon as an event occurs- be it
what it may- then out of all the continually expressed wishes of
different people some will always be found which by their meaning
and their time of utterance are related as commands to the events.
Arriving at this conclusion we can reply directly and positively
to these two essential questions of history:
(1) What is power?
(2) What force produces the movement of the nations?
(1) Power is the relation of a given person to other individuals, in
which the more this person expresses opinions, predictions, and
justifications of the collective action that is performed, the less is
his participation in that action.
(2) The movement of nations is caused not by power, nor by
intellectual activity, nor even by a combination of the two as
historians have supposed, but by the activity of all the people who
participate in the events, and who always combine in such a way that
those taking the largest direct share in the event take on
themselves the least responsibility and vice versa.
Morally the wielder of power appears to cause the event;
physically it is those who submit to the power. But as the moral
activity is inconceivable without the physical, the cause of the event
is neither in the one nor in the other but in the union of the two.
Or in other words, the conception of a cause is inapplicable to
the phenomena we are examining.
In the last analysis we reach the circle of infinity- that final
limit to which in every domain of thought man's reason arrives if it
is not playing with the subject. Electricity produces heat, heat
produces electricity. Atoms attract each other and atoms repel one
another.
Speaking of the interaction of heat and electricity and of atoms, we
cannot say why this occurs, and we say that it is so because it is
inconceivable otherwise, because it must be so and that it is a law.
The same applies to historical events. Why war and revolution occur we
do not know. We only know that to produce the one or the other action,
people combine in a certain formation in which they all take part, and
we say that this is so because it is unthinkable otherwise, or in
other words that it is a law. _
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