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History examines the manifestations of man's free will in
connection with the external world in time and in dependence on
cause, that is, it defines this freedom by the laws of reason,
and so history is a science only in so far as this free will is
defined by those laws.
The recognition of man's free will as something capable of
influencing historical events, that is, as not subject to laws,
is the same for history as the recognition of a free force moving
the heavenly bodies would be for astronomy.
That assumption would destroy the possibility of the existence
of laws, that is, of any science whatever. If there is even a
single body moving freely, then the laws of Kepler and Newton
are negatived and no conception of the movement of the heavenly
bodies any longer exists. If any single action is due to free
will, then not a single historical law can exist, nor any conception
of historical events.
For history, lines exist of the movement of human wills, one
end of which is hidden in the unknown but at the other end of
which a consciousness of man's will in the present moves in space,
time, and dependence on cause.
The more this field of motion spreads out before our eyes,
the more evident are the laws of that movement. To discover and
define those laws is the problem of history.
From the standpoint from which the science of history now
regards its subject on the path it now follows, seeking the causes
of events in man's freewill, a scientific enunciation of those
laws is impossible, for however man's free will may be restricted,
as soon as we recognize it as a force not subject to law, the
existence of law becomes impossible.
Only by reducing this element of free will to the infinitesimal,
that is, by regarding it as an infinitely small quantity, can
we convince ourselves of the absolute inaccessibility of the causes,
and then instead of seeking causes, history will take the discovery
of laws as its problem.
The search for these laws has long been begun and the new
methods of thought which history must adopt are being worked out
simultaneously with the self-destruction toward which- ever dissecting
and dissecting the causes of phenomena- the old method of history
is moving.
All human sciences have traveled along that path. Arriving
at infinitesimals, mathematics, the most exact of sciences, abandons
the process of analysis and enters on the new process of the integration
of unknown, infinitely small, quantities. Abandoning the conception
of cause, mathematics seeks law, that is, the property common
to all unknown, infinitely small, elements.
In another form but along the same path of reflection the
other sciences have proceeded. When Newton enunciated the law
of gravity he did not say that the sun or the earth had a property
of attraction; he said that all bodies from the largest to the
smallest have the property of attracting one another, that is,
leaving aside the question of the cause of the movement of the
bodies, he expressed the property common to all bodies from the
infinitely large to the infinitely small. The same is done by
the natural sciences: leaving aside the question of cause, they
seek for laws. History stands on the same path. And if history
has for its object the study of the movement of the nations and
of humanity and not the narration of episodes in the lives of
individuals, it too, setting aside the conception of cause, should
seek the laws common to all the inseparably interconnected infinitesimal
elements of free will.
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