“The totality of causes of phenomena is inaccessible to the human mind. But the need to seek causes has been put into the soul of man. And the human mind, without grasping in their countlessness and complexity the conditions of phenomena, of which each separately may appear as a cause, takes hold of the first, most comprehensible approximation and says: here is the cause. In historical events (where the subject of observation is the actions of people), the most primordial approximation appears as the will of the gods, then as the will of those people who stand in the most conspicuous historical place––the historical heroes. But we need only inquire into the essence of any historical event, that is, into the activity of the entire mass of people who took part in the event, to become convinced that the will of the historical hero not only does not guide the actions of the masses, but is itself constantly guided. . . . But there are laws that govern events, which are partly unknown, partly groped for by us. The discovery of these laws is possible only when we wholly give up looking for causes in the will of one man, just as discovering the laws of planetary movement become possible only when people gave up the notion that the earth stands still.”

–– Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. (New York: Alfred A. Knope, 2007), 987.