enouncing their human
feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows,
just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east
to the west, slaying their fellows.

The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, on whose words the event seemed
to hang, were as little voluntary as the actions of any soldier who was
drawn into the campaign by lot or by conscription. This could not be
otherwise, for in order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander (on whom
the event seemed to depend) should be carried out, the concurrence of
innumerable circumstances was needed without any one of which the event
could not have taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in
whose hands lay the real power--the soldiers who fired, or transported
provisions and guns--should consent to carry out the will of these weak
individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number
of diverse and complex causes.

We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational
events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do
not understand). The more we try to explain such events in history
reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to
us.

Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal
aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from
doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action
performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to
history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance.

There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life, which
is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental hive
life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him.

Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in
the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity. A deed done
is irrevocable, and its result coinciding in time with the actions of
millions of other men assumes an historic significance. The higher a man
stands on the social ladder, the more people he is connected with
and the more power he has over others, the more evident is the
predestination and inevitability of his every action.

"The king's heart is in the hands of the Lord."

A king is history's slave.

History, that is, the unconscious, general, hive life of mankind, uses
every moment of the life of kings as a tool for it