War and Peace

by Leo Tolstoy

To a man who does not understand the workings of a machine, it naturally seems, when he sees it in operation, that the most important part of the machine is the chip of wood that accidentally got into it and is tossed about in it, interfering with its working. A man who does not know the construction of the machine cannot understand that it is not this harmful and interfering chip of wood, but that little transmission gear turning noiselessly that is one of the most essential parts of the machine.

he knew what weight should be ascribed to rumors, knew how capable people who desire something are of grouping all the information in such a way that it seems to confirm what they desire, and knew how willingly on such occasions they omit all that contradicts it.

Confirmation bias!

And however much Kutuzov tried to hold the troops back, our troops attacked, trying to block the way. Infantry regiments, as it was told, went into the attack with music and beating drums, and destroyed and lost thousands of men.

In military action, the force of an army is also a product of mass times something, some unknown x. Military science, seeing from a countless number of examples in history that the mass of an army does not coincide with its force, that small detachments defeat large ones, vaguely recognizes the existence of this unknown multiplier and tries to find it either in geometric disposition, or in armaments, or—most commonly—in the genius of the commander. But the substitution of all these values for the multiplier does not produce results that agree with the historical facts.

The spirit of an army is the multiplier of the mass that yields the product of force. To determine and express the value of that unknown multiplier, the spirit of an army, is the task of science.

In captivity, in the shed, Pierre had learned, not with his mind, but with his whole being, his life, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfying of natural human needs, and that all unhappiness comes not from lack, but from superfluity; but now, in these last three weeks of the march, he had learned a new and more comforting truth—he had learned that there is nothing frightening in the world. He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree. He had learned that there is a limit to suffering and a limit to freedom, and that those limits are very close; that the man who suffers because one leaf is askew in his bed of roses, suffers as much as he now suffered falling asleep on the bare, damp ground, one side getting cold as the other warmed up; that when he used to put on his tight ballroom shoes, he suffered just as much as now, when he walked quite barefoot (his shoes had long since worn out) and his feet were covered with sores. He learned that when, by his own will, as it had seemed to him, he had married his wife, he had been no more free than now, when he was locked in a stable for the night. Of all that he, too, later called suffering, but which at the time he hardly felt, the main thing was his bare feet, covered with sores and scabs.

It would seem, in this campaign of the flight of the French, when they did everything they could to destroy themselves, when not a single movement of this crowd, from the turn onto the Kaluga road to the flight of the leader from his army, made the least sense—it would seem finally impossible, in this period of the campaign, for historians who ascribe the actions of the masses to the will of one man to describe this retreat in their sense. But no. Mountains of books have been written by historians about this campaign, and they all describe Napoleon’s orders and his profound plans—the maneuvers that guided the troops, and the brilliant orders of his marshals.

Then, when it is no longer possible to stretch the so-elastic threads of historical discourse any further, when an action clearly contradicts all that mankind calls good and even just, historians resort to the saving notion of greatness. It is as if greatness excludes the possibility of the measure of good and bad. For the great man there is no bad. There is no horror that can be laid to the blame of someone who is great.

Besides a general feeling of alienation from all people, Natasha experienced at that time a particular feeling of alienation from the persons of her own family. All of them—her father, her mother, Sonya—were so close, so habitual, so humdrum, that all their words and feelings seemed to her an insult to that world in which she had been living recently, and she was not only indifferent, but looked at them with hostility. She heard Dunyasha’s words about Pyotr Ilyich, about the misfortune, but she did not understand them. “What sort of misfortune is there for them, what sort of misfortune could there be? With them it’s all their old, habitual, and peaceful thing,” Natasha said to herself.

Self involved jerk

And this very absence of purpose gave him that full, joyful awareness of freedom which at that time constituted his happiness. He could have no purpose, because he now had faith—not faith in some rules, or words, or thoughts, but faith in a living, ever-sensed God. Before he had sought for Him in the purposes he set for himself. This seeking for a purpose had only been a seeking for God; and suddenly he had learned in his captivity, not through words, not through arguments, but through immediate sensation, what his nanny had told him long ago: that God is here, right here, everywhere. In captivity he had learned that God in Karataev was much greater, more infinite and unfathomable, than in the Arkhitekton of the universe recognized by the Masons. He experienced the feeling of a man who has found what he was seeking under his own feet, while he had been straining his eyes looking far away from himself. All his life he had looked off somewhere, over the heads of the people around him, yet there was no need to strain his eyes, but only to look right in front of him.

Now, as he told it all to Natasha, he experienced that rare pleasure which is granted by women when they listen to a man—not intelligent women, who, when they listen, try either to memorize what they are told in order to enrich their minds and on occasion retell the same thing, or else to adjust what is being told to themselves and quickly say something intelligent of their own, worked out in their small intellectual domain; but the pleasure granted by real women, endowed with the ability to select and absorb all the best of what a man has to show.

Hmm

Pierre’s insanity consisted in the fact that he did not wait, as before, for personal reasons, which he called people’s merits, in order to love them, but love overflowed his heart, and, loving people without reason, he discovered the unquestionable reasons for which it was worth loving them.

If we allow that human life can be governed by reason, the possibility of life is annihilated.

That ideal of glory and greatness which consists not only in considering nothing that one does as bad, but in being proud of one’s every crime, ascribing some incomprehensible supernatural meaning to it—that ideal, which was to guide this man and the people connected with him, is freely developed in Africa. Everything he does succeeds.

He has no plan at all; he is afraid of everything; but the parties seize upon him and demand his participation. He alone, with his ideal of glory and greatness worked out in Italy and Egypt, with his insane self-adoration, with his boldness in crime, with his sincerity in lying—he alone can justify what is to be performed. He is needed for the place that awaits him, and therefore, almost independently of his will, and despite his irresolution, his lack of a plan, all the mistakes he makes, he is drawn into a conspiracy the purpose of which is the seizure of power, and the conspiracy is crowned with success.

The stage manager, having finished the drama and undressed the actor, shows him to us. “Look at what you believed in! Here he is! Do you see now that it was not he but I who moved you?” But, blinded by the force of the movement, people long fail to understand that.

the sun and every atom of the ether is a sphere complete in itself and at the same time only an atom of a whole that is inaccessible to man in its enormity—so, too, every person bears his own purposes within himself and yet bears them in order to serve general purposes that are inaccessible to man. A bee sitting on a flower stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and says that a bee’s purpose consists in stinging people. A poet admires a bee sucking from the cup of a flower and says that a bee’s purpose consists in sucking up the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, noting how a bee gathers flower pollen and brings it to the hive, says that a bee’s purpose consists in gathering honey. Another beekeeper, who has studied the life of a hive more closely, says that a bee collects pollen in order to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that its purpose consists in reproducing its kind. A botanist notes that, as a bee lands with pollen on the pistil of a dioecious flower, it fertilizes it, and in that the botanist sees the bee’s purpose. Another, observing the migration of plants, sees that the bee contributes to that migration, and this new observer may say it is in this that the bee’s purpose consists. But the final purpose of the bee is exhausted neither by the one, nor the other, nor the third purpose that human reason is able to discover. The higher human reason rises in the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious for it is the inaccessibility of the final p...

Having borrowed money from his brother-in-law, Nikolai tried to conceal his disastrous situation from him. His situation was especially bad because he not only had to support himself, Sonya, and his mother on his twelve-hundred-rouble salary, but had to support his mother in such a way that she did not notice they were poor. The countess could not understand the possibility of life without the conditions of luxury she had been accustomed to since childhood, and, not realizing how difficult it was for her son, she demanded now a carriage they did not have to send for a lady acquaintance, now some expensive food for herself and wine for her son, now money so as to make a surprise gift to Natasha, Sonya, or Nikolai himself.

Natasha did not follow that golden rule preached by intelligent people, especially the French, according to which a girl, once married, should not let herself go, should not abandon her talents, should be still more concerned with her appearance than when unmarried, should entice her husband just as she had enticed him before he was her husband. Natasha, on the contrary, at once abandoned all her charms, among which one was extraordinarily strong—her singing. She abandoned it precisely because it was a strong charm. She, as they put it, let herself go.

Power is the sum total of the wills of the masses, transferred by express or tacit agreement to rulers chosen by the masses.

The life of peoples cannot be contained in the lives of several men, for the connection between these several men and the peoples has not been found. The theory that this connection is based on the transfer of the sum total of wills to historical figures is a hypothesis not confirmed by the experience of history.

What is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the sum total of wills transferred to one person. On what condition are the wills of the masses transferred to one person? On condition that the person express the will of the whole people. That is, power is power. That is, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.

Having restored the conditions of time under which all events occur, we found that an order is executed only when it refers to a corresponding series of events. Restoring the necessary condition of the connection between the one who orders and the one who carries out, we have found that it is an inherent property of those who order to take the least part in the event itself and that their activity is aimed exclusively at giving orders.

Wherever a moving ship may be heading, at its bow will always be seen the swirl of the wave it cuts through. For people on the ship, the movement of that swirl will be the only noticeable movement. Only by following closely, moment by moment, the movement of that swirl and comparing that movement with the movement of the ship, will we realize that at every moment the movement of the swirl is determined by the movement of the ship, and that we were misled by the fact that we ourselves were imperceptibly moving.

Having come to this conclusion, we can answer directly and positively those two essential questions of history: (1) What is power? (2) What force produces the movement of peoples? (1) Power is that relation of a certain person to other persons in which the person takes the less part in the action the more he expresses opinions, suppositions, and justifications for the jointly accomplished action. (2) The movement of peoples is produced, not by power, not by intellectual activity, not even by a combination of the two, as historians used to think, but by the activity of all the people taking part in the event and always joining together in such a way that those who take the greatest direct part in the event, take the least responsibility upon themselves, and vice versa.

If the will of each man were free, that is, if each could act as he pleased, the whole of history would be a series of incoherent accidents.

The ratio of freedom to necessity decreases or increases depending on the point of view from which the action is examined; but this ratio always remains inversely proportional.

All occasions without exception in which our notion of freedom and necessity increases and decreases have only three bases: (1) The relation of the man committing the act to the external world, (2) to time, and (3) to the causes producing the act.

The further back in history we transport the object of our observation, the more questionable becomes the freedom of the men producing events, and the more obvious the law of necessity.

Reason says: (1) Space, with all the forms which its visibility—matter—gives it, is infinite and cannot be conceived otherwise. (2) Time is infinite movement without a moment’s rest, and cannot be conceived otherwise. (3) The linking of causes and effects has no beginning and can have no end. Consciousness says: (1) I am alone, and all that exists is only I; consequently, I include space; (2) I measure fleeting time by the unmoving moment of the present, in which alone I am conscious of myself as living; consequently, I am outside time; and (3) I am outside cause, for I feel myself to be the cause of every manifestation of my life. Reason expresses the laws of necessity. Consciousness expresses the essence of freedom.

For a historian, considering the contribution rendered by some person towards a certain goal, there are heroes; for the artist, considering the correspondence of this person to all sides of life, there cannot and should not be any heroes, but there should be people.

The most strong, indissoluble, burdensome, and constant connection with other people is the so-called power over other people, which in its true meaning is only the greatest dependence on them.