Beyond Chance and Genius — War and Peace

If we assume, as the historians do, that great men lead humanity toward certain ends, the greatness of Russia or of France, the balance of power in Europe, the diffusion of Revolutionary ideas, general progress, then the facts of history cannot be explained without chance and genius. If the aim of the European wars had been the aggrandizement of Russia, that might have been accomplished without the invasion. If the aim was the aggrandizement of France, that might have been attained without the Revolution and the Empire. If the aim was the dissemination of ideas, the printing press could have done it better than warfare. If the aim was the progress of civilization, there are ways of spreading it more expedient than the destruction of wealth and of human lives. Why did it happen in this way and not another? Because it happened so. Chance created the situation; genius used it, says history.

But chance and genius do not denote any really existing thing. They denote a stage of understanding. I do not know why a certain event occurs; I think I cannot know it; so I talk about chance. I see a force producing effects beyond ordinary human agencies; I do not understand why; so I talk of genius. To a flock of rams, the ram the herdsman drives each evening into a special enclosure, who becomes twice as fat as the others, must seem a genius. It must appear an astonishing conjunction of genius with chances that this very ram, swelling with fat, is killed for meat. The rams need only cease to suppose that all that happens to them happens solely for their sheepish aims. They need only admit purposes beyond their ken, and they will perceive a unity in what happened to the ram that was fattened. Even if they do not know for what purpose they are fattened, they will know it did not happen accidentally.

Only by renouncing a claim to discern a purpose immediately intelligible, and admitting the ultimate purpose to be beyond our ken, may we discern the sequence in the lives of historic characters. Then chance and genius become superfluous. We need only confess that we do not know the purpose of the European convulsions, that we know only the facts, the murders first in France, then in Italy, Africa, Prussia, Austria, Spain, and Russia, and that the movements from west to east and east to west form the essence of these events. Then we shall be unable to consider Napoleon and Alexander anything but like other men, and the small events that made them what they were will look inevitable. Just as one cannot imagine a blossom better suited to a plant than the one it produces, so it is impossible to imagine any two people more completely adapted, down to the smallest detail, for the purpose they had to fulfil, than Napoleon and Alexander with all their antecedents.