Chapter 3 third chapter

A locomotive is moving.If you want to ask: why does it move?A farmer said: It is the ghost pushing it.Another said: A locomotive moves because its wheels turn.A third said with confidence that the locomotive moved because the wind had blown the smoke away. The farmer is irrefutable.He had come up with a satisfactory explanation.To refute him, someone had to prove to him that there were no ghosts, or another farmer explain to him that it was not a ghost, but a German who was driving the locomotive.They didn't know that both of them were wrong until they found that they were full of contradictions.But the man who takes the turning of the wheel as the cause can refute himself, because as soon as he analyzes it, he thinks deeper and deeper: he has to explain why the wheel turns.He had no right to stop searching for a cause until he had not found that the steam pressure in the boiler was the ultimate cause of the movement of the locomotive.The man who explained the movement of the locomotive by the smoke blowing to the rear evidently did so: he saw that the turning of the wheels could not be the cause, and took the first sign he saw of it as the cause.

The only concept that can explain the motion of a locomotive is that of force equal to the motion seen. The only concept that can explain the movements of nations is a concept of equal force to the movements of nations as a whole. However, different historians have different understandings of this concept, and the power they understand is completely different from the power of the movement they see.Some see it as a natural power of heroes, as the farmer thought there was a ghost in the locomotive; Think of it as intellectual influence, like smoke blown away by the wind. So long as history is written of individual persons, whether these individual men are Caesars, Alexanders, Luthers, or Voltaire, and not the history of all the men who took part in the event--all men without exception, It is impossible not to attribute to individual people the power to compel others to act toward certain goals.Power is the only concept of this kind known to historians.

This concept is the only grip on the historical material now being recorded, and anyone who breaks this grip, like Pauker, and who does not know other methods of researching historical data, can only deprive himself of the only grip on historical data. method.The inevitability of using the concept of power to explain historical phenomena is most clearly expressed by the general historians of the world and cultural historians themselves, because although they superficially give up the concept of power, they have to resort to it every step of the way. The science of history is still to this day analogous to currency in circulation—notes and coins—in its treatment of human problems.Biographical and thematic national histories are issued like banknotes.This banknote can be used, it can be circulated, and in fulfilling its mission, it does no harm to anyone, and it is also beneficial, as long as the question of what it is guaranteed by does not arise.As long as the question of how the will of heroes produces events is left behind, the histories of Thiers and others are interesting, instructive, and perhaps a little poetic.But just as the true value of banknotes is questionable because paper money is too easy to make and issued in excess, or because everyone wants to exchange it for gold, so too much history of this kind has been written, or because the question has been naively asked: "What power did Napoleon rely on to do this?" That is, when you want to exchange the current paper money for pure gold that you actually understand, the true value of this kind of history will also raise questions.

The general historian of the world and the historian of culture is just that kind of person - he recognizes the shortcomings of paper money and decides to replace money with coins made of a metal lighter than gold.Those coins did jingle, but only jingle.Paper money can still fool ignorant people; but a coin that jingles and has no value fools anyone.The reason why gold is gold is that it can be used not only for exchange, but also for use. The same is true for world historians. If they can answer the main question of history, "What is power?", they are considered real gold.General historians of the world give contradictory answers to this question, while cultural historians avoid this question, looking around and talking about him.Just like a chip that looks like gold, it can only be used among some people who agree to use it instead of gold.Or it is used among people who do not know the nature of gold, and the general historians and cultural historians who do not answer the main questions of mankind are like this. They are just coins that are circulated among universities and readers who love to read serious books for a certain purpose.