War and Peace - Book Ten

Man's min mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find those cau­ses is implanted in man's soul. And without conside­ring the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions any one of which taken separately may seem to be the cause, he snatches at the first approximation to a cau­se that seems to him intelligible and says: "This is the cause!" In historical events (where the actions of men are the subject of observation) the first and most pri­mitive approximation to present itself was the will of the gods and, after that, the will of those who stood in the most prominent position the heroes of history.