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By Root 3535 0

Chateaubriand, and others. The historian has obviously broken down the power of Alexander into its components: Talleyrand, Chateaubriand, and so on; the sum of these components, that is, the mutual influence on each other of Chateaubriand, Talleyrand, Mme de Staël, and others, obviously does not equal the whole resultant, that is, the phenomenon that millions of Frenchmen submitted to the Bourbons. From the fact that Chateaubriand, Mme de Staël, and others said such-and-such words to each other, there follows only their relations among themselves, not the submission of millions. And therefore, in order to explain in what way the submission of millions followed from their relations, that is, how from components equal to one A there followed a resultant equal to a thousand times A, the historian must necessarily allow again for the same force of the power which he denies, recognizing it as the result of forces, that is, he must allow for the unexplained force acting upon the composite. This is what general historians do. And consequently they contradict not only the specialized historians, but also themselves.

Country dwellers, having no clear concept of what causes rain, say, depending on whether they would like to have rain or fair weather: the wind has scattered the clouds, the wind has gathered the clouds. It is the same with general historians: sometimes, when they want to, when it suits their theory, they say that power is the result of events; and sometimes, when they need to prove something else, they say that power produces events.

The third sort of historians, known as historians of culture, following the path laid down by the general historians, who sometimes recognize writers and ladies as forces productive of events, understand this force quite differently still. They see it in so-called culture, in intellectual activity.

Historians of culture are perfectly consistent in relation to their progenitors, the general historians, for if historical events can be explained by the fact that certain people had such-and-such relations with each other, then why not explain them by the fact that such-and-such people wrote such-and-such books? These historians select, from among the enormous number of symptoms that accompany any living phenomenon, the symptom of intellectual activity, and say that this symptom is the cause. But, despite all their attempts to show that the cause of an event lay in intellectual activity, only with great flexibility can one agree that there is something in common between intellectual activity and the movement of peoples, but in no case is it possible to allow that intellectual activity guides the activity of people, for such phenomena as the cruelest murders of the French revolution resulting from the preaching of the equality of man, and the wickedest wars and executions resulting from the preaching of love, do not confirm this supposition.

But, even allowing that all the cleverly woven arguments which fill these histories are correct, allowing that peoples are governed by some indefinable force known as an idea—the essential question of history either remains unanswered, or, to the former power of monarchs and to the influence of advisers and other persons introduced by the general historians, there is joined yet another new force, the idea, the connection of which with the masses calls for explanation. It is possible to understand that Napoleon had power, and therefore an event took place; with some flexibility it is possible to understand that Napoleon, along with other forces, was the cause of an event; but in what way the book Le contrat social*758 brought it about that the French started drowning each other cannot be understood without explaining the causal connection of this new force with the event.

Undoubtedly there exists a connection among all that is alive at the same time, and therefore it is possible to find a certain connection between the intellectual activity of a people and their historical movement, just as this connection can be found between the movement of mankind