War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [790]
Only by limiting this freedom infinitely, that is, by looking upon it as an infinitely small quantity, will we be convinced of the total inaccessibility of causes, and then, instead of searching for causes, history will set itself the task of searching for laws.
The search for these laws has long since begun, and the new methods of thinking which history should adopt for itself are being worked out simultaneously with the self-destruction towards which, ever subdividing and subdividing the causes of phenomena, the old history is moving.
All of mankind’s sciences have followed this path. Having arrived at the infinitely small, mathematics, the most exact of sciences, abandons the process of subdividing and starts on a new process of summing up the unknown infinitesimals. Renouncing the concept of cause, mathematics seeks laws, that is, properties common to all unknown infinitely small elements.
Other sciences, though in a different form, have followed this same path of thinking. When Newton formulated the law of gravity, he did not say that the sun or the earth has the property of attraction; he said that all bodies, from the largest to the smallest, have this property of attracting each other, as it were; that is, leaving aside the question of the cause of the movement of the bodies, he formulated the property common to all bodies, from the infinitely large to the infinitely small. The natural sciences do the same: leaving aside the question of cause, they seek for laws. History stands on the same path. And if history has for its subject of study the movements of peoples and of mankind, and not the description of episodes from people’s lives, it should set aside the notion of causes and seek for the laws common to all the equal and inseparably bound together infinitely small elements of freedom.
XII
Ever since Copernicus’s law was found and proved, the mere recognition of the fact that what moves is not the sun but the earth has destroyed the whole cosmology of the ancients. It might have been possible, by refuting the law, to retain the old view of the movement of bodies, but without refuting it, it would have been impossible, it seems, to go on studying the Ptolemaic worlds. Yet even after the discovery of Copernicus’s law, the Ptolemaic worlds long went on being studied.
Ever since the first man said and proved that the number of births or crimes obeys mathematical laws, that certain geographic and politico-economic conditions determine one or another form of government, and that certain relations of the inhabitants to the land produce movements of peoples—ever since then the foundations on which history had been built were essentially destroyed.
It might have been possible, by refuting the new laws, to retain the former view of history, but without refuting them, it would have been impossible, it seems, to go on studying historical events as if they proceeded from men’s free will. For, if a certain form of government has been established, or a certain movement of peoples has taken place owing to such-and-such geographic, ethnographic, or economic conditions, then the will of those men who appear to us as establishing a form of government or provoking a movement of peoples can no longer be considered the cause.
And yet the former history goes on being studied on a par with the laws of statistics, geography, political economy, comparative philology, and geology, which directly contradict its postulates.
A long and stubborn struggle went on in physical philosophy between the old and new views. Theology stood guard over the old view and accused the new of destroying revelation. But when the truth triumphed, theology established itself as firmly on the new soil.
Just as long and stubborn a struggle has gone on in our time between the old and new views of history, and in the same way theology stands guard over the old view and accuses the new of destroying revelation.
In the one case as in the other, the struggle on both sides arouses passions and stifles the truth.