"History, only history, only the sum of the concrete events in time and space -- the sum of the actual experience of actual men and women in their relation to one another and to an actual three-dimensional, empirically experienced, physical environment -- this alone contained the truth, the material out of which genuine answers -- answers needing for their apprehension no special senses of faculties which normal human beings did not possess -- might be constructed."
"History alone -- the sum of empirically discoverable data -- held the key to the mystery of why what happened happened as it did and not otherwise; and only history, consequently, could throw light on the fundamental ethical problems which obsessed him as they did every Russian thinker in the nineteenth century. What is to be done? How should one live? Why are we here? What must we be and do? The study of historical connections and the demand for empirical answers to these proklyate voprosy became fused into one in Tolstoy's mind, as his early diaries and letters show very vividly."
"But side by side with this there is the beginning of an acute sense of disappointment, a feeling that history, as it is written by historians, makes claims which it cannot satisfy, because like metaphysical philosophy it pretends to be something it is not -- namely, a science capable of arriving at conclusions which are certain."
"History will never reveal to us what connections there are, and at what times, between science, art, and morality, between good and evil, religion and the civic virtues...What it will tell us (and that incorrectly) is where the Huns came from, when they lived, who laid the foundations of their power, etc."
"History is nothing but a collection of fables and useless trifles, cluttered up with a mass of unnecessary figures and proper names. The death of Igor, the snake which bit Oleg -- what is all this but old wives' tales? Who wants to know that Ivan's second marriage, to Temryuk's daughter, occured on 21 August 1562, whereas his fourth, to Anna Alekseevna Koltovskaya, occurred in 1572...?"
"History does not reveal cause; it presents only a blank succession of unexplained events."
"If we allow that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life [i.e as a spontaneous activity involving consciousness of free will] is destroyed."
"No matter how scrupulous the technique of historical research might be, no dependable laws could be discovered of the kind required even by the most undeveloped natural sciences. He further thought that he could not justify himself the apparently arbitrary selection of material, and the no less arbitrary selection of emphasis, to which all historical writing seemed to be doomed."
The Hedgehog and the Fox
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