sound and some wounded, and of different arms, were making their weary way in terror towards Mojaïsk or Valouïew; others, hungry and worn out with fatigue, mechanically formed in line and followed their officers; while others again stayed on where they had been posted and went on firing. Over the field where, a few hours since, all had looked bright and smiling, where bayonets had glittered and the iridescent mists of morning had veiled the scene, there now hung a dense fog made heavy by smoke and exhaling a strange reek of powder and blood. Black clouds had gathered overhead, a fine drizzle was bedewing the dead, the wounded and the utterly weary. It seemed to be saying to them: "Enough, enough, hapless wretches! Bethink yourselves. What are you doing?" Then a thought seemed to dawn in the minds of the poor creatures, and they began to ask themselves whether they were to go on with this butchery. The idea did not, however, gain ground till the evening; till then, though the struggle was drawing to a close, and the men felt all the horror of their position, a mysterious and inexplicable impulse had guided the hand of the gunner who had survived of the three told off to serve each cannon; and who stood faithful, though covered with sweat, powder and blood. He alone carried the cartridges, loaded the gun, aimed it, and lighted the slow match! The balls met and crossed, carried death to numberless victims, and still the fearful work went on, the outcome, not of any human will, but of the Will which governs men and worlds.

Any one looking on at the fast dispersing French and Russian armies, might have thought that a very slight effort on the part of one or the other would have sufficed to annihilate the foe. But neither side made that last effort, and the battle died away by degrees. The Russians did not take up the offensive because, having been collected on the road to Moscow, from the first, and charged to defend it, they stayed there till the end. Indeed, if they had decided on attacking the French the disorder of their ranks would not have admitted of it, for even without quitting their position they had lost half their numbers. The effort could only have been possible or perhaps indeed easy to the French, who were kept up by the traditions of fifteen years of success under Napoleon, by their confidence of victory, the comparative smallness of their loss-not more than a quarter of the whole efficient force - the knowledge that behind them lay a reserve of more than 20,000 fresh troops, besides the guards who had not charged, and their wrath at having failed to dislodge the enemy from his positions. Historians have said that Napoleon might have decided the day in his favor if only he had brought up the "Vieille Garde;" but to say this is to assume that winter may suddenly become spring. The failure cannot be imputed to Napoleon. Every man, from the commander-in-chief to the humblest private, knew that such an effort was out of the question; in point of fact the spirit of the French army was thoroughly quelled by this formidable foe, who, after losing half his force, was as resolute at last as at first.

The victory, won by the Russians was not indeed one of those which are bedizened with those rags nailed to a pole which are dignified as flags, or which derive their splendor from extent of conquest; but it was one of those triumphs which carry home to the soul of the aggressor a two-fold conviction of his adversary's moral superiority and of his own weakness. The invading army, like some wild beast broken loose, had been mortally wounded; it was consciously rushing on to ruin; but the first impetus had been given, and now, come what might it must reach Moscow. The Russian army, on the other hand, though twice as weak, was no less inexorably impelled to resist. At Moscow, still bleeding from the wounds inflicted at Borodino, these efforts were to lead inevitably to Napoleon's flight-to his retreat by the way by which he had come, to the almost total destruction of the 500,000 men who had followed him, and to the annihilation of his personal influence, overpowered as it was, even at Borodino, by an adversary whose moral force was so far superior.

CHAPTER IX.

THE human intellect is incapable of understanding à priori the idea of unceasing movement in a body; it can only apprehend it when it is at leisure to analyze the component factors and study them separately; at the same time, it is this subdivision into definite units

which gives rise to many errors. For instance, a wellknown sophism of the ancients tended to prove that Achilles could never overtake a tortoise crawling in front of him even though he walked ten times as fast as the animal; for, every time Achilles should have picked up the distance between them, the tortoise would have got ahead by a tenth of the space; and when Achilles had covered that tenth the tortoise would again have gained a hundredth, and so on, ad infinitum. The ancients regarded this as an unanswerable dilemma; its absurdity lies in the fact that the progress of Achilles and the tortoise is calculated on units with stoppage between, while it is in fact continuous.

By assuming the minutest units of any given motion as a basis of calculation we may constantly approach a solution without ever reaching it; it is only by admitting infinitesimal quantities and their progression up to a tenth, and adopting the total of this geometrical progression that we can attain the desired result. The modern science of the value of the infinitesimal solves questions which of old were regarded as insoluble. By admitting these infinitesimals it restores motion to its primary condition of inherent perpetuity, and so corrects the errors which the human mind is led to commit by regarding the separate units of motion instead of motion as a whole.

In our search for the laws of history the same rule must be observed. The onward march of humanity, while it is the sum total of an infinite multitude of in

dividual wills, is nevertheless uninterrupted; the study of these laws is the object of history, and in order to account for those which govern the sum of the wills causing that uninterrupted movement, the human mind admits the theory of independent and separate wills. The first process in history is to take at random a series of successive events, and then to examine them apart from all others; but, in fact, there can be no beginning to them and no end, since each event is the necessary outcome of that which preceded it. In the second place, history studies the actions of a single man -a king or a general — and accepts them as the result of the wills of all men, while this result is never summed up in the actions of a single man, however lofty his position. However minute the units may be which the historian takes into account with a view to getting as near as possible to the truth, we cannot but feel that by isolating them, by assuming an independent cause for each phenomenon, and by supposing that human wills can find their expression in the acts of one single historic personage, he remains in

error.

No such historical conclusion can bear the scalpel of criticism, because criticism selects a more or less extensive general view of facts as it has a perfect right to do. It is only by studying the differential quantities in history, together with the homogeneous currents that carry men onwards, and then finding the integer, that we can ever hope to master its laws.

The first fifteen years of the present century exhibit