Bab Bab 360 · 第360章

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 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.