Essay: Is the cause of the 1812 French Invasion of Russia knowable?
Summary:
This chapter is a philosophical essay in which Tolstoy ponders what caused the French Invasion of Russia in 1812. He writes “Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms, and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.
What produced this extraordinary occurrence?” He says that any number of individuals could cite any number of causes, and everyone involved felt that their own reasons for their own part of the actions were reasonable. In the end, he concludes, nothing is the cause, that there is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur.
quote from the chapter:
Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it. Equally right or wrong is he who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, and he who says that an undermined hill weighing a million tons fell because the last navvy struck it for the last time with his mattock. In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.
Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.
Book 9, Chapter 1
Essay: Is the cause of the 1812 French Invasion of Russia knowable?
Summary:
This chapter is a philosophical essay in which Tolstoy ponders what caused the French Invasion of Russia in 1812. He writes “Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms, and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.
What produced this extraordinary occurrence?” He says that any number of individuals could cite any number of causes, and everyone involved felt that their own reasons for their own part of the actions were reasonable. In the end, he concludes, nothing is the cause, that there is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur.
quote from the chapter:
Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it. Equally right or wrong is he who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, and he who says that an undermined hill weighing a million tons fell because the last navvy struck it for the last time with his mattock. In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.
Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.
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