ere are
other causes for it, but as soon as an event occurs--be it what it
may--then out of all the continually expressed wishes of different
people some will always be found which by their meaning and their time
of utterance are related as commands to the events.

Arriving at this conclusion we can reply directly and positively to
these two essential questions of history:

(1) What is power?

(2) What force produces the movement of the nations?

(1) Power is the relation of a given person to other individuals,
in which the more this person expresses opinions, predictions, and
justifications of the collective action that is performed, the less is
his participation in that action.

(2) The movement of nations is caused not by power, nor by intellectual
activity, nor even by a combination of the two as historians have
supposed, but by the activity of all the people who participate in
the events, and who always combine in such a way that those taking
the largest direct share in the event take on themselves the least
responsibility and vice versa.

Morally the wielder of power appears to cause the event; physically
it is those who submit to the power. But as the moral activity is
inconceivable without the physical, the cause of the event is neither in
the one nor in the other but in the union of the two.

Or in other words, the conception of a cause is inapplicable to the
phenomena we are examining.

In the last analysis we reach the circle of infinity--that final limit
to which in every domain of thought man's reason arrives if it is not
playing with the subject. Electricity produces heat, heat produces
electricity. Atoms attract each other and atoms repel one another.

Speaking of the interaction of heat and electricity and of atoms, we
cannot say why this occurs, and we say that it is so because it is
inconceivable otherwise, because it must be so and that it is a law. The
same applies to historical events. Why war and revolution occur we do
not know. We only know that to produce the one or the other action,
people combine in a certain formation in which they all take part, and
we say that this is so because it is unthinkable otherwise, or in other
words that it is a law.

CHAPTER VIII

If history dealt only with external phenomena, the establishment of this
simple and obvious law would suffice and we should have finished our
argument. But the law of history relates to man. A particle of matter
c