War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [777]
Not to mention the fact that, without the concept of power, no description of the sum total of human activity is possible, the existence of power is proved by history as well as by the observation of contemporary events.
Whenever an event takes place, a man or men always appear by whose will the event appears to take place. Napoleon III gives the command, and the French go to Mexico. The king of Prussia and Bismarck give the command, and troops go to Bohemia. Napoleon I gives the order, and troops go to Russia. Alexander I gives the order, and the French submit to the Bourbons.6 Experience shows us that, whenever an event takes place, it is always connected with the will of one or several persons who have ordered it.
Historians, from the old habit of acknowledging divine participation in human affairs, want to see the cause of an event in the expression of the will of the person invested with power; but that conclusion is confirmed neither by reasoning nor by experience.
On the one hand, reasoning shows that the expression of the will of man in words is only part of the general activity expressed in an event such as a war or a revolution; and therefore, without recognizing an incomprehensible supernatural force—a miracle—it is impossible to allow that words could be the immediate cause of the movement of millions; on the other hand, even if we allow that words can be the cause of an event, history shows that the expression of the will of historical figures in the majority of cases produces no effect at all, that is, that their orders often are not only not carried out, but that sometimes what takes place is even the opposite of what they ordered.
Unless we allow for divine participation in human affairs, we cannot take power as the cause of events.
Power, from the point of view of experience, is only the dependence that exists between the expression of a person’s will and the carrying out of that will by other people.
In order to explain the conditions of that dependence to ourselves, we must first of all restore the concept of the expression of will, referring it to man and not to a divinity.
If a divinity gives an order, expresses its will, as the history of the ancients shows us, the expression of that will does not depend on time and is not caused by anything, since the divinity is in no way connected with the event. But, speaking of orders as the expression of the will of people who act in time and are connected among themselves, we should restore, so as to explain to ourselves the connection of orders with events: (1) the condition of all that takes place—the continuity of the movement in time both of events and of the person who gives orders, and (2) the condition of the necessary connection of the person who gives orders to the people who carry out his orders.
VI
Only the expression of the will of a divinity not dependent on time can pertain to a whole series of events that are to take place over several years or centuries, and only a divinity, without cause, by its will alone, can determine the direction of mankind’s movement. Man acts in time and himself participates in events.
In restoring the first omitted condition—the condition of time—we will see that not a single order can be carried out without the existence of a previous order that makes possible the carrying out of the later one.
Never does a single order appear spontaneously and not include in itself a whole series of events; but each order follows from another and never pertains to a whole series of events, but always only to one moment of the event.
When we say, for instance, that Napoleon ordered the army to go to war, we unite into one simultaneously expressed order a series of consecutive orders dependent on each other. Napoleon could not order a campaign against Russia and never did. Today he ordered such-and-such