Emma Watson Pussy
Books:
Anna Karenina
War And Peace
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with the event.
According to this view the power of historical personages,
represented as the product of many forces, can no longer, it would
seem, be regarded as a force that itself produces events. Yet in
most cases universal historians still employ the conception of power
as a force that itself produces events, and treat it as their cause.
In their exposition, an historic character is first the product of his
time, and his power only the resultant of various forces, and then his
power is itself a force producing events. Gervinus, Schlosser, and
others, for instance, at one time prove Napoleon to be a product of
the Revolution, of the ideas of 1789 and so forth, and at another
plainly say that the campaign of 1812 and other things they do not
like were simply the product of Napoleons misdirected will, and
that the very ideas of 1789 were arrested in their development by
Napoleons caprice. The ideas of the Revolution and the general temper
of the age produced Napoleons power. But Napoleons power
suppressed the ideas of the Revolution and the general temper of the
age.
This curious contradiction is not accidental. Not only does it occur
at every step, but the universal historians accounts are all made
up of a chain of such contradictions. This contradiction occurs
because after entering the field of analysis the universal
historians stop halfway.
To find component forces equal to the composite or resultant
force, the sum of the components must equal the resultant. This
condition is never observed by the universal historians, and so to
explain the resultant forces they are obliged to admit, in addition to
the insufficient components, another unexplained force affecting the
resultant action.
Specialist historians describing the campaign of 1813 or the
restoration of the Bourbons plainly assert that these events were
produced by the will of Alexander. But the universal historian
Gervinus, refuting this opinion of the specialist historian, tries to
prove that the campaign of 1813 and the restoration of the Bourbons
were due to other things beside Alexanders will--such as the activity
of Stein, Metternich, Madame de Stael, Talleyrand, Fichte
Chateaubriand, and others. The historian evidently decomposes
Alexanders power into the components: Talleyrand, Chateaubriand, and
the rest--but the sum of the components, that is, the interactions of
Chateaubriand, Talleyrand, Madame de Stael, and the others, evidently
does not equal the resultant, namely the phenomenon of millions of
Frenchmen submitting to the Bourbons. That Chateaubriand, Madame de
Stael, and others spoke certain words to one another only affected
their mutual relations but does not account for the submission of
millions. And therefore to explain how from these relations of theirs
the submission of millions of people resulted--that is, how component
forces equal to one A gave a resultant equal to a thousand times
A--the historian is again obliged to fall back on power--the force he
had denied--and to recognize it as the resultant of the forces, that
is, he has to admit an unexplained force acting on the resultant. And
that is just what the universal historians do, and consequently they
not only contradict the specialist historians but contradict
themselves.
Peasants having no clear idea of the cause of rain, say, according to
whether they want rain or fine weather: "The wind has blown the clouds
away," or, "The wind has brought up the clouds." And in the same way
the universal historians sometimes, when it pleases them and fits in
with their theory, say that power is the result of events, and
sometimes, when they want to prove something else, say that power
produces events.
A third class of historians--the so-called historians of
culture--following the path laid down by the universal historians who
sometimes accept writers and ladies as forces producing events--again
take that force to be something quite different. They see it in what
is called culture--in mental activity.
The historians of culture are quite consistent in regard to their
progenitors, the writers of universal histories, for if historical
events may be explained by the fact that certain persons treated one
another in such and such ways, why not explain them by the fact that
such and such people wrote such and such books? Of the immense
number of indications accompanying every vital phenomenon, these
historians select the indication of intellectual activity and say that
this indication is the cause. But despite their endeavors to prove
that the cause of events lies in intellectual activity, only by a
great stretch can one admit that there is any connection between
intellectual activity and the movement of peoples, and in no case
can one admit that intellectual activity controls peoples actions,
for
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