War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [394]
Fatalism in history is inevitable for the explanation of senseless phenomena (that is, those whose sense we do not understand). The more we try to explain sensibly these phenomena of history, the more senseless and incomprehensible they become for us.
Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible and makes itself the property of history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance.
There are two sides to each man’s life: his personal life, which is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental, swarmlike life, where man inevitably fulfills the laws prescribed for him.
Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals. An action once committed is irrevocable, and its effect, coinciding in time with millions of actions of other people, acquires historical significance. The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the greater the number of people he is connected with, the more power he has over other people, the more obvious is the predestination and inevitability of his every action.
“The hearts of kings are in the hands of God.”4
Kings are the slaves of history.
History, that is, the unconscious, swarmlike life of mankind, uses every moment of a king’s life as an instrument for its purposes.
Napoleon, though now, in 1812, it seemed to him more than ever that it depended on him verser or not verser le sang de ses peuples*392 (as Alexander wrote in his last letter to him), had never been more subject than now to those inevitable laws which forced him (acting by his own free will, as it seemed to him, with respect to himself) to do for the common cause, for history, that which had to be accomplished.
Men of the west moved towards the east in order to kill each other. And by the law of the coincidence of causes, the thousands of minute causes of this movement and of the war fitted into and coincided with the event: reproaches for the non-observance of the Continental System, and the duke of Oldenburg, and the movement of troops into Prussia, undertaken (as it seemed to Napoleon) only to achieve an armed peace,5 and the French emperor’s love and habit of war, which coincided with his nation’s disposition, the enthusiasm for grandiose preparations, and the expense of the preparations, and the need to obtain advantages that would recover the expenses, and the intoxicating honors in Dresden,6 and diplomatic negotiations which, according to the views of contemporaries, were conducted with a sincere desire to achieve peace and which only wounded the vanity of both sides, and millions and millions of other causes which fitted into the event that was to be accomplished, coinciding with it.
When an apple ripens and falls—what makes it fall? Is it that it is attracted to the ground, is it that the stem withers, is it that the sun has dried it up, that it has grown heavier, that the wind shakes it, that the boy standing underneath wants to eat it?
No one thing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions under which every organic, elemental event of life is accomplished. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue degenerates, and so on, will be as right and as wrong as the child who stands underneath and says that the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it. As he who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexander wanted him to perish, will be both right and wrong, so he will be right and wrong who says that an undermined hill weighing a million pounds collapsed because the last worker struck it a last