War And Peace

And just as the indefinable essence of the force that moves the heavenly bodies, the indefinable essence that drives heat, electricity, chemical affinity or the life force, forms the content of astronomy, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology and so on, the essence of the force of free will forms the subject matter of history. But just as the content of all science is the manifestation of this unknown essence of life, even though the essence itself can only be the subject of metaphysics, so too the manifestation of the force of man’s free will in space, in time and in dependence on cause, forms the subject of history, while free will itself remains the subject of metaphysics.

In the biological sciences, what we know, we call the laws of necessity; what we don’t know, we call the life force. The life force is simply an expression for an unexplainable leftover from what we know about the essence of life.

It is the same with history: what we know, we call the laws of necessity; what we don’t know, we call free will. In the eyes of history free will is simply an expression for an unexplainable leftover from what we know about the laws of human life.

CHAPTER 11

History examines manifestations of human free will in relation to the external world existing in time and dependent on cause; in other words, it defines free will by the laws of reason, which means that history can be considered a science only to the extent that free will can be defined by those laws.

In the eyes of history the acknowledgement of human free will as a force capable of influencing historical events and therefore not subject to any laws is what the acknowledgement of free will in the movements of the heavenly bodies would be to astronomy.

Such an acknowledgement negates any possibility of the existence of laws, or indeed any kind of science. If there is even one freely moving body, the laws of Kepler and Newton go out of existence, along with any representation of the movement of the heavenly bodies. If there is a single human action determined by free will, all historical laws go out of existence, along with any representation of historical events.

For history the free will of human beings consists in lines of movement with one end disappearing into the unknown and the other belonging to the present time as man’s consciousness of free will moves along in space and time, fully dependent on cause.

The more this field of movement unfolds before our eyes, the clearer its laws become. The discovery and definition of these laws is the purpose of history.

From the attitude now adopted by the science of history towards its subject matter, from the way it is going at present in looking for ultimate causes in man’s free will, no scientific delineation of laws is possible, since, whatever limits we place on human freedom of action, the moment we recognize it as a force not subject to law, the existence of any law becomes impossible.

Only by infinitely limiting this freedom of action, reducing it to an infinitesimal minimum, shall we come to know the absolute impossibility of finding any causes, and then, instead of looking for them, history can set itself the task of looking for laws.

The search for these laws began a long time ago, and the new thinking methods which history has to adopt are being developed today even as the old way of looking at history marches towards self-destruction, still breaking everything down into ever tinier pieces in a vain search for the causes that lie behind things.

All branches of human science have gone the same way. Confronted by infinite smallness, mathematics, the most exact of all the sciences, drops the habit of continual sub-division and enters on a new process of integration of the infinitesimal unknown. Abandoning the concept of causation, mathematics now seeks a new law, a set of properties common to all infinitely small unknown elements.

The other sciences in their different ways have taken the same route. When Newton promulgated the law of gravity, he did not say that either the sun or the earth has the property of attraction. What he said was that all bodies, large and small, seem to have the property of attracting one another; in other words, putting to one side questions about the cause of the movements of bodies, he expressed one property common to all bodies, from the infinitely large to the infinitely small. The natural sciences are doing the same thing as they abandon the question of cause and search for laws. History is beginning to go the same way. And if the subject matter of history really is the study of the movements of peoples and humanity, rather than descriptions of episodes in the lives of individual people, it too is bound to abandon the concept of cause and look for laws that apply to all the equal and inseparably interconnected, infinitesimal elements of free will.

CHAPTER 12