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 expressed is sure to be fulfilled if but approximately. When one is fulfilled, that opinion gets connected with the event as a command preceding it. Men are hauling a log. Each 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 would result; the man who commanded more would work less with his hands on account of his greater verbal activity. When a larger concourse directs activity to a common aim, the division is sharper. A man working alone always has reflections which seem to him to have directed his past, to justify his present, and to guide his future. A concourse of people allows those who do not take a direct part to devise considerations, justifications, and surmises concerning the collective activity.
For reasons known or unknown the French began to drown and kill one another. Corresponding to the event, justification appears in the belief that this was necessary for the welfare of France, for liberty, and for equality. People ceased to kill one another, and this was accompanied by justification in the necessity for a centralization of power, resistance to Europe. Men went from west to east killing their fellow men, accompanied by phrases about the glory of France and the baseness of England. History shows these justifications have no common sense and are all contradictory, as in killing a man as the result of recognizing his rights, and killing millions in Russia for the humiliation of England. But they have a very necessary significance in their own day. They release those who produce the events from moral responsibility. These temporary aims are like the broom fixed in front of a locomotive to clear snow from the rails: they clear men's moral responsibilities from their path. Without such justification there would be no reply to the simplest question: how is it that millions of men commit collective crimes? With present complex forms of political life, can any event that is not prescribed by monarchs, ministers, parliaments, or newspapers be imagined? Every event inevitably coincides with some expressed wish and, receiving a justification, presents itself as the result of the will of one man or of several.
In whatever direction a ship moves, the flow of the waves it cuts will always be noticeable ahead of it. To those on board, that movement will be the only perceptible motion. Only by watching moment by moment and comparing it with the ship do we convince ourselves that every bit of it is occasioned by the ship's forward movement. When the ship turns, the wave ahead turns. Wherever it may go, the rush of water which neither directs nor increases its movement foams ahead, and at a distance seems not merely to move of itself but to govern the ship. Historians, examining only those expressions of will related to events as commands, have assumed that the events depended on those commands. Examining the events themselves, we find that the persons and their orders were dependent on events. However many commands are issued, the event does not take place unless there are other causes; but as soon as an event occurs, some of the continually expressed wishes will always be found which by meaning and time of utterance are related as commands. Power is the relation of a given person to others in which the more this person expresses opinions, predictions, and justifications of the collective action, the less is his participation in that action. The movement of nations is caused not by power, nor by intellectual activity, nor by a combination of the two, but by the activity of all who participate, combined so that those taking the largest direct share 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. The cause is neither in the one nor in the other but in the union of the two. Or the conception of a cause is inapplicable. We reach the circle of infinity. Electricity produces heat, heat produces electricity. Why war and revolution occur we do not know. We only know that people combine in a certain formation, and we say that this is so because it is unthinkable otherwise, or in other words that it is a law.
Coming Up in Chapter 361
If history dealt only with external phenomena, this simple law would suffice. But the law of history relates to man. A particle of matter cannot tell us that it does not feel attraction or repulsion, but man, the subject of history, says plainly: I am free and am therefore not subject to the law.
