When an apple is ripe and falls, what makes it fall ? Is it the attraction of gravitation ? or is it because its stem withers ? or because the sun dries it up ? or because it is heavy ? or because the wind shakes it ? or because the small boy standing underneath is hungry for it ? There is no such proximate cause.The whole thing is the result of all those conditions, in accordance with which every vital, organic, complex event occurs.And the botanist who argues that the apple fell from the effect of decomposing vegetable tissue, or the like, is just as much in the right as the boy who, standing below, declares that the apple fell because he wanted to eat it, and prayed for it.
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
