A STORY must obey its own internal laws of probability.

There’s a certain step-by-step logic, inherent in human nature and the peculiarities of human psychology, which ensures that Man will always organize into the largest possible group. Civilization is inevitable, if you want a pat phrase.

Like Goethe and Spengler I’m convinced that history has an inner, organic logic which can’t be grasped purely in terms of causality.

The inner logic of ... Much of it is imposed by thermodynamics; some is facilitated by catalysts. Some is refined by genes. And part stems from the vicissitudes of life itself, which forced evolution down improbable paths, while transforming our geologically restless globe from a sterile, anoxic planet into the living, high-octane world of today.

Logic precedes every experience — that something is so.

Nature operates according to a law of logical sequence.

Stop it now! D’you think I can work miracles? What must be will be. Let everything take its inexorable course! There’s some kind of consolation even in this: that whatever is happening follows its own inevitability and its own law.

The mode by which the inevitable is reached is effort.

History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has happened before will perforce happen again.

The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.

Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.

We now apply these laws of mental processes, to which the explanation of our own inner consciousness leads, to explain the order and adaptation observed on the earth, i.e., to explain Being and historical development.

Those who invoke history will certainly be heard by history. And they will have to accept its verdict.

History, is a conscious, self-mediating process — Spirit emptied out into Time; but this externalization, this kenosis, is equally an externalization of itself; the negative is the negative of itself. ... Thus absorbed in itself, it is sunk in the night of its self-consciousness; but in that night its vanished outer existence is perserved, and this transformed existence — the former one, but now reborn of the Spirit's knowledge — is the new existence, a new world and a new shape of Spirit.