We, their descendants – those of us who are not historians seduced by the pleasures of research and can therefore review events with unclouded common sense – find ourselves faced with an incalculable multiplicity of causes. The more deeply we go into the causes, the more of them there are, and each individual cause, or group of causes, seems as justifiable as all the rest, and as false as all the rest in its worthlessness compared with the enormity of the actual events, and its further worthlessness (unless you combine it with all the other associated causes) in validating the events that followed. For instance, Napoleon’s refusal to withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula and restore the Duchy of Oldenburg seems to us no more valid as a cause than the willingness or unwillingness of any old French corporal to serve a second term, for had he refused to serve, and a second and a third and a thousand corporals and soldiers along with him, Napoleon’s army would have been reduced by that number and there could have been no war.
If Napoleon had not taken umbrage at the demand for him to withdraw beyond the Vistula and had not given the order to advance, there would have been no war. But if every last sergeant had refused to go back into the army there could have been no war either. And war would also have been impossible if there had been no deviousness from England, no Duke of Oldenburg, no offence taken by Alexander, no autocracy in Russia, no French Revolution with its consequent dictatorship and empire, nor any of those things that led up to the French Revolution, and so on and so forth. If any one of these causes had been missing, nothing could have happened. It follows therefore that all of these causes, billions of them, came together to bring about subsequent events, and these events had no single cause, being bound to happen simply because they were bound to happen. Millions of men, abandoning all human feelings and common sense, were bound to march from west to east and slay their fellows, just as a few centuries ago hordes of men had marched from east to west, slaying their fellows.
The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, whose word seems to have dictated whether anything should or should not happen, were no more self-determined than the actions of any common soldier drafted in by lot or conscription. This has to be so, for one good reason: in order for the will of Napoleon or Alexander (who appear to have dictated events) to prevail, it would have been necessary for a countless number of disparate circumstances to coincide, and without any one of them those events could never have occurred. It was necessary for those millions of men who wielded the real power – soldiers shooting or bringing up supplies and guns – to do what they were told by one or two feeble individuals, and to have been brought to this point by an infinite number of complex and disparate causes.
Historical fatalism is the only possible explanation of irrational phenomena like these (phenomena with a rationale beyond our comprehension). The more we try to explain away such phenomena in rational terms, the more irrational and incomprehensible they become for us.
Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to get what he wants, and he feels with every fibre of his being that at any particular time he is free to perform an action or refrain from doing so, but the moment any action is taken it becomes an irrevocable piece of history, with a significance which has more to do with predetermination than freedom.
There are two sides to life for every individual: a personal life, in which his freedom exists in proportion to the abstract nature of his interests, and an elemental life within the swarm of humanity, in which a man inevitably follows laws laid down for him.
Although on a conscious level a man lives for himself, he is actually being used as an unconscious instrument for the attainment of humanity’s historical aims. A deed once done becomes irrevocable, and any action comes together over time with millions of actions performed by other people to create historical significance. The higher a man stands on the social scale, the more contact he has with other men and the greater his impact on them, the more obvious are the inevitability and the element of predestination involved in everything he does.
‘The hearts of kings are in the hands of God.’
Kings are the slaves of history.
History – the amorphous, unconscious life within the swarm of humanity – exploits every minute in the lives of kings as an instrument for the attainment of its own ends.
