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.
FROM THE TIME the law of Copernicus was discovered and proved, the mere recognition of the fact that it was not the sun but the earth that moves sufficed to destroy the whole cosmography of the ancients. By disproving that law it might have been possible to retain the old conception of the movements of the bodies, but without disproving it, it would seem impossible to continue studying the Ptolemaic worlds. But even after the discovery of the law of Copernicus the Ptolemaic worlds were still studied for a long time.
From the time the first person said and proved that the number of births or of crimes is subject to mathematical laws, and that this or that mode of government is determined by certain geographical and economic conditions, and that certain relations of population to soil produce migrations of peoples, the foundations on which history had been built were destroyed in their essence.
By refuting these new laws the former view of history might have been retained; but without refuting them it would seem impossible to continue studying historic events as the results of man’s free will. For if a certain mode of government was established or certain migrations of peoples took place in consequence of such and such geographic, ethnographic, or economic conditions, then the free will of those individuals who appear to us to have established that mode of government or occasioned the migrations can no longer be regarded as the cause.
And yet the former history continues to be studied side by side with the laws of statistics, geography, political economy, comparative philology, and geology, which directly contradict its assumptions.
The struggle between the old views and the new was long and stubbornly fought out in physical philosophy. Theology stood on guard for the old views and accused the new of violating revelation. But when truth conquered, theology established itself just as firmly on the new foundation.
Just as prolonged and stubborn is the struggle now proceeding between the old and the new conception of history, and theology in the same way stands on guard for the old view, and accuses the new view of subverting revelation.
In the one case as in the other, on both sides the struggle provokes passion and stifles truth. On the one hand there is fear and regret for the loss of the whole edifice constructed through the ages, on the other is the passion for destruction.
To the men who fought against the rising truths of physical philosophy, it seemed that if they admitted that truth it would destroy faith in God, in the creation of the firmament, and in the miracle of Joshua the son of Nun. To the defenders of the laws of Copernicus and Newton, to Voltaire for example, it seemed that the laws of astronomy destroyed religion, and he utilized the law of gravitation as a weapon against religion.
Just so it now seems as if we have only to admit the law of inevitability, to destroy the conception of the soul, of good and evil, and all the institutions of state and church that have been built up on those conceptions.
So too, like Voltaire in his time, uninvited defenders of the law of inevitability today use that law as a weapon against religion, though the law of inevitability in history, like the law of Copernicus in astronomy, far from destroying, even strengthens the foundation on which the institutions of state and church are erected.
As in the question of astronomy then, so in the question of history now, the whole difference of opinion is based on the recognition or nonrecognition of something absolute, serving as the measure of visible phenomena. In astronomy it was the immovability of the earth, in history it is the independence of personality—free will.
As with astronomy the difficulty of recognizing the motion of the earth lay in abandoning the immediate sensation of the earth’s fixity and of the motion of the planets, so in history the difficulty of recognizing the subjection of personality to the laws of space, time, and cause lies in renouncing the direct feeling of the independence of one’s own personality. But as in astronomy the new view said: “It is true that we do not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting its motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at laws,” so also in history the new view says: “It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws.”
In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.
- Pierre Lanfrey (1828-77). His Histoire de Napoléon Ier began to appear when Tolstóy was finishing War and Peace.—A.M.
- Dr. G. G. Gervinus (1805-yi) was a German historian and Shakespearian commentator with whom Tolstóy disagreed on both counts.—A.M.
- F. C. Schlosser (1776-1861). Professor of history at Heidelberg. Author of a 19-volume work, Weltgeschichte.—A.M.
- Napoleon III, who reigned from 1852 to 1871, made two unsuccessful attempts to seize the throne before he succeeded: first in 1836 at Strasbourg, after which he was deported to America, and again in 1840 at Boulogne, where he was arrested and sentenced to imprisonment for life. Six years later he escaped to England, and he was reigning as Emperor when War and Peace was being written.—A.M.
- Prince Andréy Kúrbski was one of Ivan the Terrible’s principal boyars. He escaped into Lithuania to make a political protest, and from there wrote harsh letters to Ivan reproaching him for his cruelty, untruthfulness, and despotism. Ivan replied with equal harshness, developing a theory of autocratic power and the duty of slavish submission to it “according to the law of God.”—A.M.
- Godfrey of Bouillon was a leader of the First Crusade at the end of the eleventh century.
Peter the Hermit was an ascetic French monk who, tradition says, inspired the First Crusade.
The Minnesingers were wandering minstrels often of knightly rank, who in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries went about singing love lyrics as well as the crusading song, chiefly in Swabia and Austria.—A.M. - In 1864 by the aid of a French army Maximilian secured the throne of Mexico, but after the conclusion of the American Civil War that army had to leave Mexico as the United States would not tolerate European interference on American soil. Maximilian was shot by the Mexicans in i86y, when Tolstóy was writing the last part of War and Peace.—A.M.
- This refers to the Austro-Prussian war of 1866.—A.M.
- The Austro-Prussian war of 1866 occurred while Tolstóy was writing this novel. —A.M.
SOME WORDS ABOUT WAR AND PEACE
(Published in Russian Archive, 1868)
ON PUBLISHING THIS WORK, on which I have spent five years of uninterrupted and exceptionally strenuous labor under the best conditions of life, I wish to express my own view of it and thus counteract misunderstandings which might arise in the reader’s mind. I do not want readers of this book to see in it, or look for, what I did not wish, or was unable, to express, and I should like to direct their attention to what I wished to say but owing to the conditions of the work could not enlarge on. Neither my time nor capacity allowed me fully to accomplish what I intended, and I now avail myself of the hospitality of a specialist periodical to state, though but briefly and incompletely, the author’s view of his work for those whom it may interest.
(1) What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less an historical chronicle. War
