general historian looks for the cause of the event not in the power
of one man, but in the interaction of many persons connected with the
event.

According to this view the power of historical personages, represented
as the product of many forces, can no longer, it would seem, be regarded
as a force that itself produces events. Yet in most cases universal
historians still employ the conception of power as a force that itself
produces events, and treat it as their cause. In their exposition, an
historic character is first the product of his time, and his power only
the resultant of various forces, and then his power is itself a force
producing events. Gervinus, Schlosser, and others, for instance, at one
time prove Napoleon to be a product of the Revolution, of the ideas of
1789 and so forth, and at another plainly say that the campaign of 1812
and other things they do not like were simply the product of Napoleon's
misdirected will, and that the very ideas of 1789 were arrested in their
development by Napoleon's caprice. The ideas of the Revolution and the
general temper of the age produced Napoleon's power. But Napoleon's
power suppressed the ideas of the Revolution and the general temper of
the age.

This curious contradiction is not accidental. Not only does it occur at
every step, but the universal historians' accounts are all made up of
a chain of such contradictions. This contradiction occurs because after
entering the field of analysis the universal historians stop halfway.

To find component forces equal to the composite or resultant force, the
sum of the components must equal the resultant. This condition is never
observed by the universal historians, and so to explain the resultant
forces they are obliged to admit, in addition to the insufficient
components, another unexplained force affecting the resultant action.

Specialist historians describing the campaign of 1813 or the restoration
of the Bourbons plainly assert that these events were produced by the
will of Alexander. But the universal historian Gervinus, refuting this
opinion of the specialist historian, tries to prove that the campaign of
1813 and the restoration of the Bourbons were due to other things beside
Alexander's will--such as the activity of Stein, Metternich, Madame
de Stael, Talleyrand, Fichte Chateaubriand, and others. The historian
evidently decomposes Alexander's power into the components: Talleyrand,
Chateaubriand, and the rest--but