Second Epilogue: 1813-20 - Chapter XI

by Leo Tolstoy

　　History examines the manifestations of man's free will in connectionwith 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 ascience only in so far as this free will is defined by those laws.

　　The recognition of man's free will as something capable ofinfluencing historical events, that is, as not subject to laws, is thesame for history as the recognition of a free force moving theheavenly bodies would be for astronomy.

　　That assumption would destroy the possibility of the existence oflaws, that is, of any science whatever. If there is even a single bodymoving freely, then the laws of Kepler and Newton are negatived and noconception of the movement of the heavenly bodies any longer exists.If any single action is due to free will, then not a single historicallaw can exist, nor any conception of historical events.

　　For history, lines exist of the movement of human wills, one endof which is hidden in the unknown but at the other end of which aconsciousness of man's will in the present moves in space, time, anddependence on cause.

　　The more this field of motion spreads out before our eyes, themore evident are the laws of that movement. To discover and definethose laws is the problem of history.

　　From the standpoint from which the science of history now regardsits subject on the path it now follows, seeking the causes of eventsin man's freewill, a scientific enunciation of those laws isimpossible, for however man's free will may be restricted, as soonas we recognize it as a force not subject to law, the existence of lawbecomes impossible.

　　Only by reducing this element of free will to the infinitesimal,that is, by regarding it as an infinitely small quantity, can weconvince ourselves of the absolute inaccessibility of the causes,and then instead of seeking causes, history will take the discovery oflaws as its problem.

　　The search for these laws has long been begun and the new methods ofthought which history must adopt are being worked out simultaneouslywith the self-destruction toward which- ever dissecting and dissectingthe causes of phenomena- the old method of history is moving.

　　All human sciences have traveled along that path. Arriving atinfinitesimals, mathematics, the most exact of sciences, abandonsthe process of analysis and enters on the new process of theintegration of unknown, infinitely small, quantities. Abandoning theconception of cause, mathematics seeks law, that is, the propertycommon to all unknown, infinitely small, elements.

　　In another form but along the same path of reflection the othersciences have proceeded. When Newton enunciated the law of gravityhe 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 theproperty of attracting one another, that is, leaving aside thequestion of the cause of the movement of the bodies, he expressedthe property common to all bodies from the infinitely large to theinfinitely small. The same is done by the natural sciences: leavingaside the question of cause, they seek for laws. History stands on thesame path. And if history has for its object the study of the movementof the nations and of humanity and not the narration of episodes inthe lives of individuals, it too, setting aside the conception ofcause, should seek the laws common to all the inseparablyinterconnected infinitesimal elements of free will.