I get the sense that the ideas in this chapter (ch.1 of part two, vol. 3) were highly original at the time. Isaiah Berlin writes in The Hedgehog and the Fox:
“He grew up during the heyday of the Hegelian philosophy, which sought to explain all things in terms of historical development, but conceived this process as being ultimately not susceptible to the methods of empirical investigation.”
Tolstoy is saying that there isn’t any deep moving force that is sending history in a particular direction, instead a myriad of small factors which are too complex to be predicted or controlled — even though we might be able to observe them empirically as local events in isolation.
This is still a new and shocking idea for many people in the 21st century. Perhaps most of us still believe either in a set of eternal values, or progress, or both of these at once…
