es of events in
man's freewill, a scientific enunciation of those laws is impossible,
for however man's free will may be restricted, as soon as we recognize
it as a force not subject to law, the existence of law becomes
impossible.

Only by reducing this element of free will to the infinitesimal, that
is, by regarding it as an infinitely small quantity, can we convince
ourselves of the absolute inaccessibility of the causes, and then
instead of seeking causes, history will take the discovery of laws as
its problem.

The search for these laws has long been begun and the new methods of
thought which history must adopt are being worked out simultaneously
with the self-destruction toward which--ever dissecting and dissecting
the causes of phenomena--the old method of history is moving.

All human sciences have traveled along that path. Arriving at
infinitesimals, mathematics, the most exact of sciences, abandons the
process of analysis and enters on the new process of the integration
of unknown, infinitely small, quantities. Abandoning the conception
of cause, mathematics seeks law, that is, the property common to all
unknown, infinitely small, elements.

In another form but along the same path of reflection the other sciences
have proceeded. When Newton enunciated the law of gravity he did not say
that the sun or the earth had a property of attraction; he said that all
bodies from the largest to the smallest have the property of attracting
one another, that is, leaving aside the question of the cause of the
movement of the bodies, he expressed the property common to all bodies
from the infinitely large to the infinitely small. The same is done by
the natural sciences: leaving aside the question of cause, they seek for
laws. History stands on the same path. And if history has for its object
the study of the movement of the nations and of humanity and not the
narration of episodes in the lives of individuals, it too, setting
aside the conception of cause, should seek the laws common to all the
inseparably interconnected infinitesimal elements of free will.

CHAPTER XII

From the time the law of Copernicus was discovered and proved, the mere
recognition of the fact that it was not the sun but the earth that moves
sufficed to destroy the whole cosmography of the ancients. By disproving
that law it might have been possible to retain the old conception of
the movements of the bodies, but without disproving it, i