The war that is so vividly in mind now furnishes us with an illustration of the complexity of the causes of war, and allows us to see clearly contrasting views of the causal factors in great wars in general. We see here a closely fitting series of events, each in itself having but little reference to the great crisis, all fitting together, and for want of any one of which, if one takes the purely historical view, we might suppose the war would never have happened, or might have been postponed indefinitely. If Venezelos, to go back no further than that, had remained in Crete and had been content to be an island politician, would not the course of events in the Balkans have been very different? Out of his course came events which no one could have foreseen, but which, without similar actions on the part of individuals producing other links in the chain, would not have taken place. If some diplomat or some foreign office had made a decision slightly different from what was actually decided; if the three emperors had had a little more reliable information about one another; if the statisticians of the German service had computed a little better England's resources, and had put the moral factor into the sum--would the war have happened at all? In this direction, of course, lies the chaos of history and its madness--and also its philosophy. We may be driven on the one hand to think of all history as a matter of the chance relations of individuals and of detached particular events, having significance as a series but never planned or controlled as a whole, or we may resort to the opposite way of thinking, and say that all of history, in every particular and detail, is divinely planned and prearranged, and each event fits into a rational whole. This, of course, is our final problem of history, we say, as it is the final problem of every question that considers life as concrete events having value precisely as the particular sequence that it is--when we view life historically, in a word, rather than by the methods of the quantitative sciences, or by the genetic methods such as are used mainly in the psychological sciences, and which we may say stand between history and the sciences of matter. CHAPTER XI THE SYNTHESIS OF CAUSES