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When an event is taking place people express their opinions
and wishes about it, and as the event results from the collective
activity of many people, some one of the opinions or wishes expressed
is sure to be fulfilled if but approximately. When one of the
opinions expressed is fulfilled, that opinion gets connected with
the event as a command preceding it.
Men are hauling a log. Each of them expresses his opinion
as to how and where to haul it. They haul the log away, and it
happens that this is done as one of them said. He ordered it.
There we have command and power in their primary form. The man
who worked most with his hands could not think so much about what
he was doing, or reflect on or command what would result from
the common activity; while the man who commanded more would evidently
work less with his hands on account of his greater verbal activity.
When some larger concourse of men direct their activity to
a common aim there is a yet sharper division of those who, because
their activity is given to directing and commanding, take less
less part in the direct work.
When a man works alone he always has a certain set of reflections
which as it seems to him directed his past activity, justify his
present activity, and guide him in planning his future actions.
Just the same is done by a concourse of people, allowing those
who do not take a direct part in the activity to devise considerations,
justifications, and surmises concerning their collective activity.
For reasons known or unknown to us the French began to drown
and kill one another. And corresponding to the event its justification
appears in people's belief that this was necessary for the welfare
of France, for liberty, and for equality. People ceased to kill
one another, and this event was accompanied by its justification
in the necessity for a centralization of power, resistance to
Europe, and so on. Men went from the west to the east killing
their fellow men, and the event was accompanied by phrases about
the glory of France, the baseness of England, and so on. History
shows us that these justifications of the events have no common
sense and are all contradictory, as in the case of killing a man
as the result of recognizing his rights, and the killing of millions
in Russia for the humiliation of England. But these justifications
have a very necessary significance in their own day.
These justifications release those who produce the events
from moral responsibility. These temporary aims are like the broom
fixed in front of a locomotive to clear the snow from the rails
in front: they clear men's moral responsibilities from their path.
Without such justification there would be no reply to the
simplest question that presents itself when examining each historical
event. How is it that millions of men commit collective crimes-
make war, commit murder, and so on?
With the present complex forms of political and social life
in Europe can any event that is not prescribed, decreed, or ordered
by monarchs, ministers, parliaments, or newspapers be imagined?
Is there any collective action which cannot find its justification
in political unity, in patriotism, in the balance of power, or
in civilization? So that every event that occurs inevitably coincides
with some expressed wish and, receiving a justification, presents
itself as the result of the will of one man or of several men.
In whatever direction a ship moves, the flow of the waves
it cuts will always be noticeable ahead of it. To those on board
the ship the movement of those waves will be the only perceptible
motion.
Only by watching closely moment by moment the movement of
that flow and comparing it with the movement of the ship do we
convince ourselves that every bit of it is occasioned by the forward
movement of the ship, and that we were led into error by the fact
that we ourselves were imperceptibly moving.
We see the same if we watch moment by moment the movement
of historical characters (that is, re-establish the inevitable
condition of all that occurs- the continuity of movement in time)
and do not lose sight of the essential connection of historical
persons with the masses.
When the ship moves in one direction there is one and the
same wave ahead of it, when it turns frequently the wave ahead
of it also turns frequently. But wherever it may turn there always
will be the wave anticipating its movement.
Whatever happens it always appears that just that event was
foreseen and decreed. Wherever the ship may go, the rush of water
which neither directs nor increases its movement foams ahead of
it, and at a distance seems to us not merely to move of itself
but to govern the ship's movement also.
Examining only those expressions of the will of historical
persons which, as commands, were related to events, historians
have assumed that the events depended on those commands. But examining
the events themselves and the connection in which the historical
persons stood to the people, we have found that they and their
orders were dependent on events. The incontestable proof of this
deduction is that, however many commands were issued, the event
does not take place unless there are other causes for it, but
as soon as an event occurs- be it what it may- then out of all
the continually expressed wishes of different people some will
always be found which by their meaning and their time of utterance
are related as commands to the events.
Arriving at this conclusion we can reply directly and positively
to these two essential questions of history:
(1) What is power?
(2) What force produces the movement of the nations?
(1) Power is the relation of a given person to other individuals,
in which the more this person expresses opinions, predictions,
and justifications of the collective action that is performed,
the less is his participation in that action.
(2) The movement of nations is caused not by power, nor by
intellectual activity, nor even by a combination of the two as
historians have supposed, but by the activity of all the people
who participate in the events, and who always combine in such
a way that those taking the largest direct share in the event
take on themselves the least responsibility and vice versa.
Morally the wielder of power appears to cause the event; physically
it is those who submit to the power. But as the moral activity
is inconceivable without the physical, the cause of the event
is neither in the one nor in the other but in the union of the
two.
Or in other words, the conception of a cause is inapplicable
to the phenomena we are examining.
In the last analysis we reach the circle of infinity- that
final limit to which in every domain of thought man's reason arrives
if it is not playing with the subject. Electricity produces heat,
heat produces electricity. Atoms attract each other and atoms
repel one another.
Speaking of the interaction of heat and electricity and of
atoms, we cannot say why this occurs, and we say that it is so
because it is inconceivable otherwise, because it must be so and
that it is a law. The same applies to historical events. Why war
and revolution occur we do not know. We only know that to produce
the one or the other action, people combine in a certain formation
in which they all take part, and we say that this is so because
it is unthinkable otherwise, or in other words that it is a law.
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