GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

THEORY OF COMMUNISM 715
we find that it fits vary ill into the ready-made framework
of the dialectical and realist theories. What actually happens
in history is determined not merely by the working out of
fundamental principles and underlying trends, but by a
thousand and one irrelevant and incidental factors whose
genesis escapes detection and whose operations evade
analysis. A thousand cross-currents deflect the stream, a
thousand side-winds blow athwart the course of history;
personal intrigues, sexual jealousy and desire, love of power,
thwarted ambition, slighted vanities and injured prides,
religious enthusiasm, reforming zeal, party strife, even the
disinterested desire for the public good, all these on occa-
sion play a part in determining events. Nor is the influence
of the exceptionally gifted individual to be ignored; great
men may be the mouthpieces of movements, but the movements
are such as only they have made inevitable. To seek
to confine all these factors, as various as human nature
is various, within the Procrustean bed of a single formula,
to derive them all from the working out of a dialectical
process conceived in terms of material forces brought into
operation by techniques of production,
to the complexity effect in the interests of theory. Human
is to do violence
affairs are not cut and dried, as logic is cut and dried;
they are not painted in colours of black and white, but
deepen and fade through innumerable shades of intermediate
grey, and, as a result, their outcome is not pre-
of the
dictable in the sense in which, if the application
Dialectic were valid, it should be predictable. Human
history hangs upon the threads of a thousand chances;
let but one of these have been different, and the tale of
history would have to be retold. The force and appositeness
of illustration of the following quotation from Ber-
trand Russell's Freedom and Organization justify its inclu-
sion here as a better summary of the considerations just
mentioned, than I could hope to give.
"Admitting that the great forces are generated by
economic causes, it often/' says Russell, "depends upon
quite trivial and fortuitous events which of the great forces