War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [781]
Having come to this conclusion, we can answer directly and positively those two essential questions of history:
(1) What is power?
(2) What force produces the movement of peoples?
(1) Power is that relation of a certain person to other persons in which the person takes the less part in the action the more he expresses opinions, suppositions, and justifications for the jointly accomplished action.
(2) The movement of peoples is produced, not by power, not by intellectual activity, not even by a combination of the two, as historians used to think, but by the activity of all the people taking part in the event and always joining together in such a way that those who take the greatest direct part in the event, take the least responsibility upon themselves, and vice versa.
In the moral respect, the cause of the event appears to be power; in the physical respect, those who submit to power. But since moral activity is unthinkable without physical activity, the cause of the event is neither the one nor the other, but a combination of the two.
Or, in other words, the concept of a cause is inapplicable to the phenomenon we are considering.
In the last analysis, we arrive at an eternal circle, at that utmost brink at which, in every domain of thought, the human mind always arrives, if it is not toying with its subject. Electricity produces heat, heat produces electricity. Atoms attract each other, atoms repel each other.
In speaking of the interaction of heat and electricity or of atoms, we cannot tell why it happens that way, and we say that it is that way because it is unthinkable otherwise, because it has to be that way, because it is a law. It is the same with respect to historical phenomena. Why does a war or a revolution take place? We do not know; we know only that for the accomplishment of the one action or the other, people form themselves into certain units and all participate; and we say that this is so because it is unthinkable otherwise, because it is a law.
VIII
If history had to do with no more than external phenomena, the positing of this simple and obvious law would be enough, and we would be done with our argument. But the law of history relates to man. A particle of matter cannot tell us that it feels no need at all to attract or repel and that it is not true; but man, who is the subject of history, says outright: I am free and therefore not subject to the law.
The presence of the question of man’s free will, though unspoken, is felt at every step of history.
All serious-minded historians have involuntarily arrived at this question. All the contradictions and obscurities of history, the wrong path that this science has taken, are based only on the non-solution of this question.
If the will of each man were free, that is, if each could act as he pleased, the whole of history would be a series of incoherent accidents.
If even one man out of millions in a thousand-year period of time has had the possibility of acting freely, that is, as he pleased, then it is obvious that one free act of this man, contrary to the laws, destroys the possibility of the existence of any laws whatever for the whole of mankind.
If there is just one law that governs the actions of men, then there can be no free will, for the will of men would have to submit to that law.
In this contradiction lies the question of freedom of the will, which from ancient times has occupied the best minds of mankind and since ancient times has been posed in all its enormous significance.
The question consists in the fact that, in looking at man as an object of observation from any point of view—theological, historical, ethical, philosophical—we find a general