SECOND EPILOGUE
4. CHAPTER IV
(continued)
Historians of the third class assume that the will of the people
is transferred to historic personages conditionally, but that the
conditions are unknown to us. They say that historical personages have
power only because they fulfill the will of the people which has
been delegated to them.
But in that case, if the force that moves nations lies not in the
historic leaders but in the nations themselves, what significance have
those leaders?
The leaders, these historians tell us, express the will of the
people: the activity of the leaders represents the activity of the
people.
But in that case the question arises whether all the activity of the
leaders serves as an expression of the people's will or only some part
of it. If the whole activity of the leaders serves as the expression
of the people's will, as some historians suppose, then all the details
of the court scandals contained in the biographies of a Napoleon or
a Catherine serve to express the life of the nation, which is
evident nonsense; but if it is only some particular side of the
activity of an historical leader which serves to express the
people's life, as other so-called "philosophical" historians
believe, then to determine which side of the activity of a leader
expresses the nation's life, we have first of all to know in what
the nation's life consists.
Met by this difficulty historians of that class devise some most
obscure, impalpable, and general abstraction which can cover all
conceivable occurrences, and declare this abstraction to be the aim of
humanity's movement. The most usual generalizations adopted by
almost all the historians are: freedom, equality, enlightenment,
progress, civilization, and culture. Postulating some generalization
as the goal of the movement of humanity, the historians study the
men of whom the greatest number of monuments have remained: kings,
ministers, generals, authors, reformers, popes, and journalists, to
the extent to which in their opinion these persons have promoted or
hindered that abstraction. But as it is in no way proved that the
aim of humanity does consist in freedom, equality, enlightenment, or
civilization, and as the connection of the people with the rulers
and enlighteners of humanity is only based on the arbitrary assumption
that the collective will of the people is always transferred to the
men whom we have noticed, it happens that the activity of the millions
who migrate, burn houses, abandon agriculture, and destroy one another
never is expressed in the account of the activity of some dozen people
who did not burn houses, practice agriculture, or slay their fellow
creatures.
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