الفصل الفصل 364 · 第364章

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 free will, 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.