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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF
NATIONS

A CONTRIBUTION TO THE
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

BY

G.E. PARTRIDGE

NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1919

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1919
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Set up and electrotyped. Published, November, 1919

PREFACE

This book contains two closely related studies of the consciousness of nations. It has been written during the closing months of the war and in the days that have followed, and is completed while the Peace Conference is still in session, holding in the balance, as many believe, the fate of many hopes, and perhaps the whole future of the world. We see focussed there in Paris all the motives that have ever entered into human history and all the ideals that have influenced human affairs. The question must have arisen in all minds in, some form as to what the place of these motives and ideals and dramatic moments is in the progress of the world. Is the world governed after all by the laws of nature in all its progress? Do ideals and motives govern the world, but only as these ideals and motives are themselves produced according to biological or psychological principles? Or, again, does progress depend upon historical moments, upon conscious purposes which may divert the course of nature and in a real sense create the future? It is with the whole problem of history that we are confronted in these practical hours. At heart our problem is that of the place of man in nature as a conscious factor of progress. This is a problem, finally, of the philosophy of history, but it is rather in a more concrete way and upon a different level that it is to be considered here,—and somewhat incidentally to other more specific questions. But this is the problem that is always before us, and the one to which this study aims to make some contribution, however small.

The first part of the book is a study of the motives of war. It is an analysis of the motives of war in the light of the general principles of the development of society. We wish to see what the causes of past wars have been, but we wish also to know what these motives are as they may exist as forces in the present state of society. In such a study, practical questions can never be far away. We can no longer study war as an abstract psychological problem, since war has brought us to a horrifying and humiliating situation. We have discovered that our modern world, with all its boasted morality and civilization, is actuated, at least in its relations among nations, by very unsocial motives. We live in a world in which nations thus far have been for the most part dominated by a theory of States as absolutely sovereign and independent of one another. Now it becomes evident that a logical consequence of that theory of States is absolute war. A prospect of a future of absolute war in a world in which industrial advances have placed in the hands of men such terrible forces of destruction, an absolute warfare that can now be carried into the air and under the sea is what makes any investigation of the motives of war now a very practical problem.

If the urgency of our situation drives us to such studies and makes us hasten to apply even an immature sociology and psychology, it ought not to prejudice our minds and make us, for example, fall into the error of wanting peace at any price—an ideal which, as a practical national philosophy, might be even worse than a spirit of militarism. What we need to know, finally, in order to avoid these errors which at least we may imagine, is what, in the most fundamental way, progress may be conceived to be. If we could discover that, and set our minds to the task of making the social life progressive, we might be willing to let wars take care of themselves, so to speak, without any radical philosophy of good and evil. We ought at least to examine war fairly, and to see what, in the waging of war, man has really desired. A study of war ought to help us to decide whether we must accept our future, with its possibility of wars, as a kind of fate, or whether we must now begin, with a new idea of conscious evolution, to apply our science and our philosophy and our practical wisdom seriously for the first time to the work of creating history, and no longer be content merely to live it.

As to the details of the study of war—we first of all consider the origin and the biological aspects of war; then war as related to the development, in the social life and in the life of the individual, of the motive of power. The instincts that are most concerned in the development of this motive of power are then considered, and also the relations of war to the æsthetic impulses and to art. Nationalism, national honor and patriotism are studied as causes of war. The various "causes" that are brought forward as the principles fought for are examined; also the philosophical influences, the moral and religious motives and the institutional factors among the motives of war. Finally the economic and political motives and the historical causes are considered. The conclusion is reached that the motive of power, as the fundamental principle of behavior at the higher levels, is the principle of war, but that in so general a form it goes but a little way toward being an explanation of war. We find the real causes of war by tracing out the development of this motive of power as it appears in what we call the "intoxication impulse," and in the idea of national honor and in the political motives of war. It is in these aspects of national life that we find the motives of war as they may be considered as a practical problem. But we find no separate causes, and we do not find a chain of causes that might be broken somewhere and thus war be once for all eliminated. Wars are products of the whole character of nations, so to speak, and it is national character that must be considered in any practical study of war. It is by the development of the character of nations in a natural process, or by the education of national character, that war will be made to give way to perpetual peace, if such a state ever comes, rather than by a political readjustment or by legal enactments, however necessary as beginnings or makeshifts these legal and political changes may be.

The second part of the book is a study of our present situation as an educational problem, in which we have for the first time a problem of educating national consciousness as a whole, or the individuals of a nation with reference to a world-consciousness. The study has reference especially to the conditions in our own country, but it also has general significance. The war has brought many changes, and in every phase of life we see new problems. These may seem at the moment to be separate and detached conditions which must be dealt with, each by itself, but this is not so; they are all aspects of fundamental changes and new conditions, the main feature of which is the new world-consciousness of which we speak. Whatever one's occupation, one cannot remain unaffected by these changes, or escape entirely the stress that the need of adjustment to new ideas and new conditions compels. What we may think about the future—about what can be done and what ought to be done, is in part, and perhaps largely, a matter of temperament. At least we see men, presumably having access to the same facts, drawing from them very different conclusions. Some are keyed to high expectations; they look for revolutions, mutations, a new era in politics and everywhere in the social life. For them, after the war, the world is to be a new world. Fate will make a new deal. Others appear to believe that after the flurry is over we shall settle down to something very much like the old order. These are conservative people, who neither desire nor expect great changes. Others take a more moderate course. While improvement is their great word, they are inclined to believe that the new order will grow step by step out of the old, and that good will come out of the evil only in so far as we strive to make it. We shall advance along the old lines of progress, but faster, perhaps, and with life attuned to a higher note.

The writer of this book must confess that he belongs in a general way to the third species of these prophets. There is a natural order of progress, but the good must, we may suppose, also be worked for step by step. The war will have placed in our hands no golden gift of a new society; both the ways and the direction of progress must be sought and determined by ideals. The point of view in regard to progress, at least as a working hypothesis, becomes an educational one, in a broad sense. Our future we must make. We shall not make it by politics. The institutions with which politics deals are dangerous cards to play. There is too much convention clinging to them, and they are too closely related to all the supports of the social order. The industrial system, the laws, the institutions of property and rights, the form of government, we change at our own risk. Naturally many radical minds look to the abrupt alteration of these fundamental institutions for the cure of existing evils, and others look there furtively for the signs of coming revolution, and the destruction of all we have gained thus far by civilization. But at a different level, where life is more plastic—in the lives of the young, and in the vast unshaped forms of the common life everywhere, all this is different. We do not expect abrupt changes here nor quick and visible results. Experimentation is still possible and comparatively safe. There is no one institution of this common and unformed life, not even the school itself, that supports the existing structures, so that if we move it in the wrong way, everything else will fall. When we see we are wrong, there is still time to correct our mistakes.

Our task, then, is to see what the forces are that have brought us to where we stand now, and to what influences they are to be subjected, if they are to carry us onward and upward in our course. Precisely what the changes in government or anywhere in the social order should be is not the chief interest, from this point of view. The details of the constitution of an international league, the practical adjustments to be made in the fields of labor, and in the commerce of nations, belong to a different order of problems. We wish rather to see what the main currents of life, especially in our own national life, are, and what in the most general way we are to think and do, if the present generation is to make the most of its opportunities as a factor in the work of conscious evolution.

The bibliography shows the main sources of the facts and the theories that have been drawn upon in writing the book. Some of the chapters have been read in a little different form as lectures before President G. Stanley Hall's seminar at Clark University. More or less of repetition, made necessary in order to make these papers, which were read at considerable intervals, independent of one another, has been allowed to remain. Perhaps in the printed form this reiteration will help to emphasize the general psychological basis of the study.

CONTENTS

PART I

NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE MOTIVES OF WAR

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF NATIONS

A CONTRIBUTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

CHAPTER I[ToC]

ORIGINS AND BIOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

The simplest possible interpretation of the causes of war that might be offered is that war is a natural relation between original herds or groups of men, inspired by the predatory instinct or by some other instinct of the herd. To explain war, then, one need only refer to this instinct as final, or at most account for the origin and genesis of the instinct in question in the animal world. Some writers express this very view, calling war an expression of an instinct or of several instincts; others find different or more complex beginnings of war.

Nusbaum (86) says that both offense and defense are based upon an expansion impulse. Nicolai (79) sees the beginning of war in individual predatory acts, involving violence and the need of defense. Again we find the migratory instinct, the instinct that has led groups of men to move and thus to interfere with one another, regarded as the cause of war, or as an important factor in the causes. Sometimes a purely physiological or growth impulse is invoked, or vaguely the inability of primitive groups to adapt themselves to conditions, or to gain access to the necessities of life. Le Bon (42) speaks of the hunger and the desire that led Germanic forces as ancient hordes to turn themselves loose upon the world.

Leaving aside for the moment the question of the nature of the impulses or instincts which actuated the conduct of men originally and brought them into opposition, as groups, to one another, we do find at least some suggestion of a working hypothesis in these simple explanations of war. Granted the existence of groups formed by the accident of birth and based upon the most primitive protective and economic associations, and assuming the presence of the emotions of anger and fear or any instinct which is expressed as an impulse or habit of the group, we might say that the conditions and factors for the beginning of warfare are all present. When groups have desires that can best and most simply be satisfied by the exertion of force upon other groups, something equivalent to war has begun.

If we take the group (as herd or pack) and the instinct as the original factors or data of society, however, we probably simplify the situation too much. The question arises whether the motives are not more complex, even from the beginning, and whether both the tendencies or impulses by which the group was formed or held together and the motives behind aggressive conduct against other groups have not been produced or developed in the course of social relations, rather than have been brought up from animal life, or at any point introduced as instincts. We notice at least that animals living in groups do not in general become aggressive within the species. Possibly it was by some peculiarity of man's social existence, or his superior endowment of intelligence or some unusual quality of his instincts, perhaps very far back in animal life, that has in the end made him a warlike creature. Man does seem to be a creature of feelings rather than of instincts as far back as we find much account of him, and to be characterized rather by the weakness and variability of his instincts than by their definiteness. It is quite likely, too, that man never was at any stage a herd animal; in fact it seems certain that he was not, and that his instincts were formed long before he began to live in large groups at all. So he never acquired the mechanisms either for aggression or defense that some creatures have. Apparently he inherited neither the physical powers nor the warlike spirit nor the aggressive and predatory instincts that would have been necessary to make of him a natural fighting animal; but rather, perhaps, he has acquired his warlike habits, so to speak, since arriving at man's estate. Endowed with certain tendencies which express themselves with considerable variability in the processes by which the functions of sex and nutrition are carried out, man never acquired the definiteness of character and conduct that some animals have. He learned more from animals, it may be, than he inherited from them, and it is quite likely that far back in his animal ancestry he had greater flexibility or adaptability than other animals. The aggressive instinct, the herd instinct, the predatory instinct, the social instinct, the migratory instinct, may never have been carried very far in the stock from which man came. All this, however, at this point is only a suggestion of two somewhat divergent points of view in regarding the primitive activities of man from which his long history of war-making has taken rise.

The view is widely held and continually referred to by many writers on war and politics, that the most fundamental of all causes of war, or the most general principle of it, is the principle of selection—that war is a natural struggle between groups, especially between races, the fittest in this struggle tending to survive. This view needs to be examined sharply, as indeed it has been by several writers, in connection with the present war. This biological theory or apology of war appears in several forms, as applied to-day. They say that racial stocks contend with one another for existence, and with this goes the belief that nations fight for life, and that defeat in war tends towards the extermination of nations. The Germans, we often hear, were fighting for national existence, and the issue was to be a judgment upon the fitness of their race to survive. This view is very often expressed. O'Ryan and Anderson (5), military writers, for example, say that the same aggressive motives prevail as always in warfare: nations struggle for survival, and this struggle for survival must now and again break out into war. Powers (75) says that nations seldom fight for anything less than existence. Again (15) we read that conflicts have their roots in history, in the lives of peoples, and the sounder, and better, emerge as victors. There is a selective process on the part of nature that applies to nations; they say that especially increase of population forces upon groups an endless conflict, so that absolute hostility is a law of nature in the world.

These views contain at least two very doubtful assumptions. One is that nations do actually fight for existence,—that warfare is thus selective to the point of eliminating races. The other is that in warlike conflicts the victors are the superior peoples, the better fitted for survival. Confusion arises and the discussion is complicated by the fact that conflicts of men as groups of individuals within the same species are somewhat anomalous among biological forms of struggle. Commonly, struggle takes place among individuals, organisms having definite characteristics and but slightly variable each from its own kind contending with one another, by direct competition or through adaptation, in the first case individuals striving to obtain actually the same objects. Or, again, species having the same relations to one another that individuals have, contend in a similar manner.

Primitive groups of men, however, are not so definite; they are not biological entities in any such sense as individuals and species are. They are not definitely brought into conflict with one another, in general, as contending for the same objects, and it is difficult to see how, in the beginning, at least, economic pressure has been a factor at all in their relations. Whatever may have been the motive that for the most part was at work in primitive warfare, it is not at all evident that superior groups had any survival value. The groups that contended with one another presumably differed most conspicuously in the size of the group, and this was determined largely by chance conditions. Other differences must have been quite subordinate to this, and have had little selective value. The conclusion is that the struggle of these groups with one another is not essentially a biological phenomenon.

The fact is that peace rather than war, taking the history of the human race as a whole, is the condition in which selection of the fittest is most active, for it is the power of adaptation to the conditions of stable life, which are fairly uniform for different groups over wide areas, that tests vitality and survival values, so far as these values are biological. It may be claimed that war is very often, if not generally, a means of interrupting favorable selective processes, the unfit tending to prevail temporarily by force of numbers, or even because of qualities that antagonize biological progress. Viewing war in its later aspects, we can see that it is often when nations are failing in natural competition that they resort to the expedient of war to compensate for this loss, although they do not usually succeed thereby in improving their economic condition as they hope, or increase their chance of survival, or even demonstrate their survival value. It is notorious that nations that conquer tend to spend their vitality in conquest and introduce various factors of deterioration into their lives. The inference is that a much more complex relation exists among groups than the biological hypothesis allows. Survival value indeed, as applied to men in groups, is not a very clear concept. There may be several different criteria of survival value, not comparable in any quantitative way among themselves.

Scheler (77) says that we cannot account for war as a purely biological phenomenon. Its roots lie deep in organic life, but there is no direct development or exclusive development from animal behavior to human. War is peculiarly human. That, in a way, may be accepted as the truth. Warfare as we know it among human groups, as conflict within the species is due in some way to, or is made possible by, the secondary differentiations within species which give to groups, so to speak, a pseudo-specific character. And these differences depend largely upon the conditions that enter into the formation of groups,—upon desires, impulses and needs arising in the social life rather than in instinct as such. These characteristic differences are not variations having selective value, but are traits that merely differentiate the groups as historical entities. These secondary variations have not resulted in the elimination of those having inferior qualities, but have shared the fortunes of the groups that possessed them,—the fortunes both of war and of peace. War, from this point of view, belongs to history rather than to biology. It belongs to the realm of the particular rather than to the general in human life. War has favored the survival of this or that group in a particular place, but has probably not been instrumental in producing any particular type of character in the world, either physical or mental.

Very early in the history of mankind, in fact as far back as we can trace history, we find these psychic differentiations, as factors in the production of war. There are significant extensions and also restrictions of the consciousness of kind pertaining to the life of man, as distinguished from animals. Animals have not sufficient intelligence to establish such perfect group identities as man does, and they lack the affective motives for carrying on hostilities among groups. They remain more clearly subjected to the simple laws of biological selection, and are guided by instincts which do not impel them to act aggressively as groups toward their own kind. Man proceeds almost from the beginning to antagonize these laws, so that it is very likely that the best, in the biological sense, has always had some disadvantage, in human life, and may still have. The real value that has thus been conserved by this human mode of life consists in preserving a relatively large number of secondary types or individual groups, rather than in insuring the predominance of any one biologically superior type. Man's work in the world is to make history. Even though war were a means of making a biologically superior type of man prevail we should not be justified in saying that it is thus vindicated as a method of selection.

Many writers whom we do not need to review in great detail have contributed to the objections to the biological principle as an explanation of war. Trotter (82) examines the doctrine that war is a biological necessity, and says that there is no parallel in biology for progress being accomplished as a result of a racial impoverishment so extreme as is caused by war, that among gregarious animals other than man direct conflict between major groups such as can lead to the suppression of the less powerful is an inconspicuous phenomenon, and that there is very little fighting within species, for species have usually been too busy fighting their external enemies. Mitchell (10) says that war is not an aspect of the natural struggle for existence, among individuals; that there is nothing in Darwinism that explains or justifies wars; that the argument from race is worthless since there are no pure races. M'Cabe (76) maintains that war is not a struggle between inferior and superior national types. Dide (20) also discusses the question of differences of race as causes of war, and the use that has been made of this dogma. Chapman (39) says that no race question is involved in the present war as has been supposed. There is no conflict of economic forces, no nations compelled to seek expansion.

Precisely how warfare originated (assuming that it arose in one way) we shall probably never know, since we cannot now reconstruct the actual history of man. We think of men as living at first in groups containing a few individuals, and presumably for a long time these small and isolated groups of men prevailed as the type of human society. We can already detect the elements of conflict in these groups, but whether warfare in the sense of deadly conflict originated there we cannot know; or whether it was only in the experience of men as large migrating hordes which had been formed by the amalgamation of smaller groups under the influence of hunger or climatic change, that warfare in any real sense came into the world. We do not know to what extent the small groups of men we find in conditions of savagery now represent primitive conditions. Fortunately, however, some of these problems of origin are of but little practical importance and their interest is chiefly antiquarian or historical.

The assumption that in the behavior of original groups of men war arose as a natural result of the life of the group seems to be an allowable hypothesis. Whether warlike conduct came by some modification of the habits brought up from animal life as instinctive reactions, or whether man invented warfare from some strong motive peculiar to human life, and produced it intelligently, so to speak, under stress of circumstances may have to remain an open question so far as conclusive evidence is concerned. What we lack is a knowledge of the type and form of the instincts of man in his first stages, and the degree and kind of intelligence he had. But the reconstructed pre-human history of man so far as we can make it seems to show, as we have already suggested, that early man could have had no definite herd instincts or pack instincts such as some of the animals have, that his habits were plastic and guided by intelligence rather than by impulse. His social life, his predaceous habits, the habit of killing large game, his warfare must have been a gradual acquisition, and from the beginning have been very different as regards motive and development from animal behavior which judged externally may seem to be like it in character and to have the same ends.

There are already inherent in any group of human individuals that fits into such knowledge of man past and present as we have, all the necessary motives of warfare in some form. There are the reactions of anger made to any threat or injury, fear, the predaceous impulse and habit, originating in hunger, the motives arising in sexual rivalry. These motives are the source of behavior toward both members of the group and outsiders. There is no absolute distinction between these objects. It is of the nature of man to be both aggressive and social. One instinct or motive did not come from the other, since there are emotions and desires at every stage that tend, some of them to unite and some to disrupt, the group. The sense of difference of kind and the fear of the strange on the one hand, and the effect of propinquity and practical necessity in the conduct in regard to the familiar on the other make the reactions different in degree in the two spheres but not different in kind. There is no aggressive instinct or war motive that is directed exclusively toward the outsider. Certain tendencies toward violence and strife, modified and controlled within the group, become unrestrained when directed toward the stranger. Among these motives are those of sexual rivalry, fear, anger, desire, and the play motive as an expression of any instinctive habits of aggression that may have been phyletically established.

Since every individual creature has his needs that can be satisfied only by preying in some way upon other animals of his own species or others, the motives for strife are original in organic life. Every animal lives in a world of which he is suspicious, and rightly so. He is suspicious toward the members of his own kind and group, and toward all strangers he shows watchfulness and fear. There are two motives, therefore, of a highly practical nature that contribute to a general state of unfriendliness in animal life. Both the motives of conflict within the group, the habit of aggression and its complement, fear, and the jealousy and display motive (the display itself probably having originated as a show of ferocity on the part of males) must have been transferred to relations between groups as a natural result of the proximity of groups to one another, although this process is not quite so simple as this would imply, since in part the outside groups are produced by these very same antagonistic motives in the group, for example the driving out of young males because of sexual jealousy. The presence of other groups must have excited all the motives of warfare at a very early stage, and this contrast had the effect of stimulating the social feeling of the group and developing control of impulses on the part of individuals within the group toward one another. So the motives of combat, as shown within the group and toward outsiders, developed, so to speak, by a dialectic process.

Fear and the predatory impulse, the sexual and display motive, play or the hunting activity as a pleasure for its own sake, with a desire perhaps to practice deception and to exercise intelligence, presumably introduced some kind and degree of definite warfare among primitive groups of men at a very early stage of human life, although of course such a conclusion can be only speculative. Increasing intelligence, the power of discriminating and of reacting to secondary likenesses and differences, and especially the recognition of the nature of death, and the advantages of killing rather than merely overcoming an enemy, the discovery of the use of weapons, introduced warfare into the world. Warfare is, then, not simply the negation of some original principle of mutual aid, nor yet an expression of instinctive aggressiveness or cruelty, but it is a product of original endowment, of conditions of life, and of intelligence all together. It is practical, but at no stage can it be said to be wholly practical. Changes must have taken place in warfare as in other social reactions as men passed through a number of stages from primitive wandering or a relatively unstable life to a stable life, but the motives of conflict cannot have been added to in any essential way. Through all the course of history all the motives that originally made individuals of a group or the groups as wholes antagonistic have remained, although the mental processes have become generalized, fused and transformed. If Gumplowicz is right we can still detect in any great society to-day all the primitive individual and group animosities, tempered down and held in check by laws and customs, but still existent and by no means overcome and made innocuous.

These motives of warfare might best be traced out in four more or less definite principles of conduct, or four purposes of war that appear throughout primitive life. These are: 1) thievery, including wife capture; 2) the fear motive; 3) cannibalism; 4) the display motive, with the desire to intimidate and to display power (more or less closely associated with the play motive, the love of hunting, gaming and the dramatic motive).

Cannibalism, of course, is a special expression of the predatory motive in general, or it is mainly that. Cannibalism was certainly established early in primitive life, at least early enough to antedate all religion, and although its origin and history are shrouded in mystery, the motive was quite certainly practical. Evidently it was widespread if not universal. Whether it was introduced as a result of a failure of animal food, as some think, or has a still more simple explanation as a part of the original impulse which led men at a certain stage of their development to become hunters, cannot be determined. We know, however, that the alien human being was to some extent included under the same concepts as the animal enemy and prey, and presumably some of the strongest motives that led men to attack animals also included man as an object, since the alien group was regarded as in some degree different in kind from the in-group. It may have been in the great migrations when all the aggressive motives were increased that cannibalism became fixed as a habit.

Cannibalism may well have been the primitive motive of warfare as serious deadly combat, but all predatory habits must have contributed to establishing a more or less habitual state of warfare among all groups of men. The predatory raid, with the reaction of defense, when carried on as a group activity in any form, is in fact war, so far as attack and defense were serious and deadly, and intelligence and weapons were sufficiently developed to make man a dangerous opponent. This predatory motive, of course, extended to all desired objects, and these objects must have included all objects that could most simply be acquired by stealing. They included food, women, and all other possessions. The custom of driving out young males from the group, by the jealousy of the old males, and of preventing males from obtaining females within the group must have been one of the earliest and one of the strongest incentives to predatory warfare. At first all property of the group, for so long as groups were wandering, was to some extent common, and attack and defense must have been common. The objects of predatory raids which produced group combat must have changed with the social life. When habitation became fixed and property therefore more individual, probably the predatory impulse itself became relatively a less important factor in combat.

Two motives grow out of the practical motives of combat, which we may assume to have been the original motives. These are both emotional rather than instinctive. Fear and anger, that is to say, become more or less detached motives for attack. Fear is increased with the increase of intelligence up to a certain point at least—with the increase of the capacity for understanding danger, and of the powers of man to become dangerous. All the experience of combat engenders anger and hatred, and these moods of hatred toward enemies are cumulative, absorb all the detached motives and feelings of antagonism between groups, preserve and give continuity to the memories of conflict, and so produce among groups the fear and hate motive. The feeling of fear arouses the motive of aggression, and the feeling of anger; and these in turn generate more fear, until both the moods of anger and fear and a perpetual state of animosity and warfare are induced among contending groups. Thus out of primitive motives of combat the feud as a more generalized and psychical antagonism is produced, and these states are possible because of the powers of generalization in man which extend to the emotions and make possible the formation of deep moods.

In another direction, also, the practical motives tend to be superseded by more abstract and more subjective motives. Both in the fear and anger reactions and in the motive that originates in the sexual impulse—display of males, and combat with reference to females—consciousness of prowess for its own sake, and the display of it in order to intimidate the enemy, arise. Into this motive of war there enter all the antagonisms that come from self-consciousness, the whole force of the diathesis of developing sexuality, with its jealousy and cruelty, and tendencies to perversion. The force of this motive of prowess must at some period of development have become very great. It extends out into a love of combat for its own sake, reënforces other motives, and issues in the more abstract motives of honor and power that we see playing such a great part in modern warfare.

These primitive motives of war are not merely numerous. They fuse, reënforce one another, and almost from the beginning, we must suppose, create complex states of consciousness, and form moods. War very early, we say, must contain all the motives that ever enter into it. The predatory impulse, the love of deception, of conquest, the love of combat for its own sake, the hunting impulse, the motive of power, of fear and anger, the impulse of display and the more primitive sexual motives, the motives of courage and jealousy, even a beginning of the aesthetic motive, are all there. They become the warlike mood or produce war, in the sense in which we now understand it, only when the intelligence gives to the relations between groups definite intentions and directions, and out of the many impulses that lead to combat, a distinctive motive and mood are derived. So we may say with all certainty that the making of war is not a mere perpetuation of some alleged instinct of murder, surreptitiously retained by man in his rise from an animal state, but it is quite as much a product of his whole social nature. It becomes established as life grows more complex, as specific desires increase in number. Man is not, as thus seen in these genetic views of him, a self-tamed animal. He has not arrived at a precarious and unstable social condition out of a primitive individualism which is the essence of his warlike nature. On the other hand, he has not degenerated from some ideal pacific state. Ages ago he was already divinely human, and possessed those capacities both for coöperation and antagonism out of which war is created.

CHAPTER II[ToC]

UNCONSCIOUS MOTIVES, THE REVERSION THEORIES OF WAR, AND THE INTOXICATION MOTIVE

There are several interesting theories of the causes of war, now in the field, most of them inspired by our recent great conflict, all of which (but no one perhaps completely or quite justly) may be described as based upon the view that war is an outbreak of, or reversion to, instincts and modes of activity which as primitive tendencies remain in the individual or in the social life and which, from time to time, with or without social cause, may break loose, so to speak, and hurl man back into savagery. These theories of war show us, in some cases, human character in the form of double personality, or liken civilization to a thin and insecure incrustation upon the surface of life, beneath which all that is animal-like and barbaric still remains smoldering. Some of these theories we need to review briefly here.

Bertrand Russell, in answer to the question, "Why do men fight?" which is the title of his book dealing with the causes of war, says, in substance, that men fight because they are controlled by instinct (and also by authority), rather than by reason. Men will cease fighting when reason controls instinct, and men think for themselves rather than allow their thinking to be done for them. This view does not explicitly state that war is a reversion, for man may be at no point better or more advanced than a creature of instinct, but it lays the blame for war upon the original nature of man. Man has instincts which presumably he has brought with him from his pre-human stage, and some of these instincts are, on their motor side, the reactions of fighting.

Le Bon (42) speaks of a conscious and an unconscious will in nations, and says that the motives behind great national movements may be beneath all conscious intentions, and may anticipate them. The Englishman in particular lives, in a sense, a divided life, since there is a manifest inconsistency between what he really is and what he thinks. What these instincts are, Le Bon does not specify; presumably they may be either better or worse than the conscious motives.

Trotter (82) and also Murray (90) consider war from a biological standpoint, regarding it as a herd phenomenon. Trotter's view, especially his interpretation of Germany, which we are not to consider here, is original and important. War is a result of the action of a herd instinct, a specific instinct which is peculiar in one respect, in that it acts upon other instincts but has no definite motor reactions of its own. War is the result of the action of the herd instinct in man upon the old instinct of aggression. At least aggressive war is. Men in all their social relations show the play of these instincts; in war it is the old aggressive instinct, the old passion of the pack, that dominates them; and it is the ancestral herd-fears that overcome them in their panics. It is the herd instinct that makes men in groups so highly sensitive to the leader, whose relations to the herd or pack are always dependent upon their recognizing him as one of the group; that is, as acting in accordance with the desires of the herd.

It is by the union of the herd, Murray says, or through the herd instinct, that suppressed unconscious impulses are given an opportunity to operate; when the human herd is excited by any external stimulus, the old types of reaction are brought into play. Curiously, in such times, leadership may be assumed by eccentric and even abnormal members of the group—by those who are governed by perverted instincts; by men who are touched with the mania of suspicion, or who even suffer from homicidal mania.

The essential point of these biological views is that, when the human herd is subjected to any influences that tend to arouse the herd instinct—that is, to unite the herd in any common emotion or action, the old instinctive forms of response are likely to be brought to the front. Whatever the stimulus, the tendency is for the herd to fixate its attention upon some external object, which at once is reacted to with deep emotion. Plainly, if this be true, if herd instinct does throw human society from time to time and from various causes into attitudes of defense and offense with the appropriate emotional reactions, and if in such times leaders are likely to appear, having exaggerated instinctive tendencies, there is always close at hand and ready a mechanism by which war can be produced, war being precisely of the type of mass action, under strong emotion, of a group closely united under spectacular leadership, with attention cramped upon some external object hated or feared.

Nicolai (79), who believes strongly that war is wholly useless, compares it to the play we turn to when the actions performed in the play are no longer in themselves practical. War is a great debauch, perhaps now the last the race will experience. War is like wine: in it nations renew their youth. It is not the war itself, but the mood it produces that we crave, and this mood is longed for because in it old and sacred feelings of patriotism are aroused, and these feelings are themselves survivals, something romantic, archaic, no longer needed in the present stage of social life.

Novicow (83) says something very similar to this. War is a survival, like the classical languages, for example. Men begin to find beauty and glory in these things only after the activities they represent are useless. The principle of their survival is nothing more or less than that of habit. It is habit that keeps war alive; wars are a concession to our forebears, a following in the footsteps of a dead past.

We are presenting these views in a somewhat loose and illogical order, but let us look at still a few more of them. Patrick thinks of war as precisely a plunge into the primeval. War is a reaction, a regression, but still it is something more than a mere slipping of the machinery of life. It is craved; and it is craved because it offers relief from the tension of modern life. It is not quite clear whether it is because we are tired and want rest for our over-worked functions, or are merely dull and need renewed life, but in any case, when the desire has accumulated enough, back we fall into the primeval. Then all the tensions and inhibitions of civilized society disappear. Society, relieved of its cross-tensions, is resolved and organized into an harmonious and freely acting whole, seeking a definite object. Life is simplified, and becomes again primitive. Old and vigorous movements take the place of the cramped thinking of our civilized life. All that keeps us modern and evolved is relaxed.

Naturally the Freudians have their own explanation of war in terms of subconscious wishes, repressed feelings and instincts. Freud (78) himself says that war is a recrudescence (and a mastery over us) of a more primitive life than our own. The child and the primitive man, as we have long known them in the Freudian theories, live still in us and are indestructible. We have supposed ourselves to have overcome these primitive impulses, but we are far from being so civilized as we thought. The evil impulses, as we call them, which we supposed had at least been transformed are changed only in the sense that they have been influenced by the erotic motive, or have been repressed by an outer restraint, an educational factor, the demands of what we call civilized environment. But let us not deceive ourselves; the old impulses are still alive; the number of people who have been transformed by civilization is less than we supposed. All society is at heart barbaric. Judged by our unconscious wishes, we are a band of murderers, for the primitive wish is to kill all who oppose our self-interests, and war is precisely a reversion to the method of free expression of our desires in action. Society and the authority of government have suppressed these primitive reactions in the individual, but instead of eliminating them altogether from human nature (which, of course, no legislation can do in any case), government and society as a whole have appropriated all these primitive actions to their own use.

Jones (37), the Freudian, distinguishes two quite different groups of causes of war: the conscious causes, all expressed in the feeling of patriotism; and the unconscious causes, which grow out of the desire to release certain original passions—the passions of cruelty, destruction, loot and lust.

The central thought of all these views, it is plain, is that war belongs to the past. It is a return to something that, in a significant sense, is the natural man—is his instinctive and unguarded self. It is also plainly implied in these views, here and there, that modern man, by thus lapsing into war, is renewing his stock of primitive nature. The modern man is in unstable equilibrium, and whatever upsets that equilibrium sends him back through the ages. MacCurdy (37), having Jones and Freud in mind, protests against these views to this extent: he says that the present state of man, rather than the past, is the natural state, and that at least in reverting to the primitive state man becomes unnatural.

The question upon which our discussion of this aspect of war is going to hinge is whether, or in what sense, the activities and the feelings aroused in war are reversions. Wars, beyond a doubt, do involve to a greater extent than peaceful life certain instinctive reactions. Wars are so impulsive and so persistent that we must suppose very deep motives to be engaged in war; and the fact that in all wars, and on both sides of every war, the feelings and the reactions are fundamentally the same, indicates that war is something less differentiated than the peaceful life. But that war can be explained in terms of instinct as such, or that war can be disposed of as a mere recrudescence of old impulses and types of conduct buried beneath civilization, is very much to be doubted. War, in the first place, in its moods and passions, appears to be too complex, too synthetic a process to be quite what this view would imply. It is too intimately related to everything that occurs and exists in present day society. It means too much, concretely and with reference to objects specifically desired for the future. War is related to the past, but to a great extent, it may be, wars represent and contain the present and look toward the future. The distinctions and differences in the interpretation of war thus implied, and the conflicting understanding of facts about society and individual life cannot be very clear at this point, but that there are involved fundamental problems of psychology, and perhaps divergent ways of thinking of history and society, and of such principles of philosophy at least as are implicated in æsthetics, and finally of the practical questions that are of most interest in these fields to-day, may begin to be evident.

There is one aspect of war, or one question about war, that seems to suggest that its problems are more subtle and less simple than the instinct-theories imply. War has been, and still is, the great story of the world, the center of all that is dramatic and heroic in life. Its mood—and that is the essential thing in it, whatever else war may have been, and in spite of all its horrors—is ecstatic. War produces, or is produced by, states of mind that affiliate it with all the other ecstasies—of love, religion, intoxication, art. We may well doubt whether any explanation of war can ever be satisfactory that does not take this quality of it fully into account. One may say, of course, that war is ecstatic just because it does satisfy instincts, that the satisfaction of all instincts is pleasant, or that pleasure is the satisfaction of instincts. But there is more in the problem than that. Love, the source of the other great romance of the world, is not exhausted by calling it a gratification of the sexual instinct, or a primitive tendency of all organic life. It is at the other end of the process of development of it, so to speak, its place as a present motive in life, that it is most significant, and it is by no means explained by calling it a product of sexuality.

So with war. Made out of instincts, it may be, but it is not explained as the sum of instinctive reactions. That, at least, is our thesis. It is the fact that war is a great ecstasy of the social life, that it holds a high place in art, that history—our selective way of reacting upon human experience—is in a large measure the story of war, that its representations in dramatic forms are almost endless in variety; it is such facts that give us our clew to the nature of the problems of war, and also to the practical questions of its future.

Hirschfeld (98), in a short study of war, has enumerated and briefly described some of the forms in which the ecstasy of war appears, or some of the ecstasies that appear in war. He speaks of the ecstasy of heroism, and the ecstatic sense that accompanies the taking part in great events, the consciousness of making history. On a little lower plane there is the excitement of adventure and of travel that gives allurement to the idea of war in the mind of the soldier, and which also glorifies the soldier; the sensation hunger; the cupidus rerum novarum; the ecstasies of nature and freedom, suggested by the very term "in the field." Add to these the ecstasies of battle and of victory, the Kampfsrausch and the Siegestrunkenheit, and the mood of war in which acts unlawful for the individual become not only lawful but highly honorable when done collectively. There is also in the mood of war the social intoxication, the feeling on the part of the individual of being a part of a body and the sense of being lost in a greater whole. The lusts of conquest, and of looting, and of combat, all contribute to this spirit of war. And finally, summing up all the other ecstasies, the strong inner movement of the soul expressing itself in strong external movements, and in the sense of living and dying in the midst of vivid and real life.

Hirschfeld's analysis of the ecstasy of war discloses deep and powerful motives in the individual mind and the social life. We can find this ecstasy everywhere in the history of war, sometimes as a national exaltation, sometimes as a more restricted phenomenon. Villard (54), speaking of the first days of the war, says that in Germany then one could see "the psychology of the crowd at its noblest height." The exaltation of a people, whatever its content, or its purpose, is an awe-inspiring spectacle. There can be no greater display of the sources of human power. In this particular time of exaltation we can see in action religious ecstasy, the cult of valor, and the stirring of more fundamental and more primitive feelings. This exaltation has its imaginative side. There is a dream of empire in it. There is an exhibition of the forms of royalty, its display, its color and its dramatic moments. There is the spirit of militarism and of great adventure, the excitement of chance, of throwing all into the hands of fate, the æsthetic and the play motives which are never separated from the practical passions in times of great exaltation.

This mood of war differs, of course, at different times under different circumstances. The French people certainly went into the great war with no such exaltation. We should have to look elsewhere in French history for the ecstatic war spirit, when the French are moved by the motives of glory and prestige, or by the vanity and eroticism which Reuthe thinks are the essential qualities of the spirit of France. But taking history as a whole there is no lack of ecstasy in the spirit of war. We find in this ecstasy exalted social feeling, joy of overcoming the pain of death, the exultation of sacrifice, love of display, feeling of tragedy, the ecstasy of exerting the utmost of power, love of danger, the gambling motive, the love of battle, love of all the dramatic elements of military life. These separate ecstasies, taken all together, make up the exalted mood of war. They represent war in its most significant moments.

In this mood of war instincts are exhibited, but they seem to be in some way transformed, so that the whole has a meaning different from the parts. The mood of war is not a mere effect, a reaction to events. It is a longing—plastic and indefinite it may be—but looking toward the future. It is a craving, not for the release of definite instincts, but is rather a force or a desire which, however misguided the expression of this mood or this energy may be, is the essence of what individuals and society to-day are. We may find in this mood, upon superficial examination, mere emotions, but in a final and deeper analysis, we may suppose, its content and its meaning will be found to be specific—purposes which constitute what is deepest and most continuous in the individual and in society, but which at the same time give to this mood its generality of direction and of form.

It is the war-mood, then, that must be explained, if we wish to understand the motives and causes of war. And this war mood, so it appears, is related to all the other great ecstasies—of art, religion, intoxication, love. It is, of course, then, a psychological problem, and one having many radiations and deep roots. The view that we are going to take is that in the mood of war we have to do essentially with what, relying upon previous studies of the principles of art and of the motives that are at work in society that produce the phenomena of intemperance we may call the intoxication motive. That this intoxication motive is a plastic force, a mood containing desires and impulses that may be satisfied in a variety of ways, since as a sum of desires it is no longer specific and instinctive, is the main implication of this view. It is this generic quality and compositeness of the purpose of the individual and of the spirit of society that obscures the meaning of history and often makes individual lives so enigmatical, and which also makes these purposes of individuals and nations so persistent, sometimes so terribly forceful and insatiable.

As contrasted with instincts, the motive of intoxication we say, is plastic, and its object—and this is one of its most significant characteristics—is to produce exalted states of consciousness mainly for their own sake. At least this experience of exaltation is the main or central thing sought. It is a tendency to seek exalted states, but at the same time, we should say, specific instincts gain some kind of satisfaction, although not at all necessarily by the performance of the external movements appropriate to them. They may obtain a certain vicarious satisfaction. The mood gives conduct a general direction, it provides a motive and the power, it is the source of interest and of desire, but its objects may be indefinite and variable.

Some general aspects of the moods that we have to consider have already come to light, and these may prove to be valuable clews to a psychological analysis of their content. There is the ecstatic state, and the craving to experience it, the love of excitement, the desire to have a sense of reality, the impulse to seek an abundant life, the love of power and of the feeling of power. These are all related, and at least they have something in common, but it is the last mentioned, the motive of power, that seems to be the most definite and to have the clearest biological meaning and implications. Indeed this motive of power (and we must here again depend upon previous studies of the æsthetic motives and other aspects of ecstasy), appears to be fundamental in art, in religion, and in history. It is a concept that gives us a vantage ground for the interpretation of some of the most significant parts of life. The idea of power and the craving for power as a general motive, but also containing and exploiting specific purposes and desires, runs through all the history of art and religion and also through history itself. Religion is based upon the desire to exert and to feel power, and it is the manifest and indeed the expressly acknowledged purpose of all primitive art, and is concealed and implied in all later art. Art is practical, an effort to realize a sense of power, to become a god (just as in his motive of play the child desires more than anything else to realize himself as a man), to influence people, or objects, or gods, to exert magic somewhere in the world. In the feeling of power which the ecstatic state produces, the belief in the power of art is established, and at the same time deep and hidden impulses are exploited. On the feeling side, and indeed in every way, this ought to explain how art, religion, and all states of intoxication have a common element, if they are not primitively the same.

A psychology of the war moods must undertake to trace the history of the motive of power, considering its beginnings as the desire and sense of satisfaction connected with the performance of definite instinctive acts, and with their physiological results, with the exertion of power and the production of effects upon objects. It is in the performance of instinctive acts, in which superiority is inborn, that animal and man obtain their original sense of power or superiority. As capacities are differentiated and multiplied, the experiences of achievement generate a mood and a more general impulse, a desire to exert power for its own sake. The sensory or organic elements tend to predominate in this generalized motive, simply because the specific actions in which the sense of power is obtained cannot so readily, or cannot at all, be generalized. Such an organization of actions and states in consciousness demands nothing new in principle, implies nothing different from that found on the intellectual side when concepts are formed from concrete experiences. The associative processes and the selective principles everywhere present in mental action are all that are necessary to be assumed here. We may take advantage, however, of the special investigations of affective logic, and the like, as giving evidence in support of such a conception of the formation of moods as is here being worked out. We are likely to make the mistake of thinking the specific instincts and the impulses and pleasure states that we find in human experiences, such as ecstasy, as the whole of these experiences, and to overlook the constant process of generalization that goes on in all the mental activity of the individual. For example, we may think of various plays which involve instinctive actions as being wholly explained by, or to be made up of, these instinctive acts alone, whereas in most plays that take the form of excitement, abandon or ecstasy, there are being employed processes which are general in the sense of reënforcing all the specific acts alike, and are yet specific in the sense that they are themselves, or have been, practical: that is, they are in reality processes that belong to the fundamental strata of consciousness—to the nutritional and reproductive tendencies. Out of these tendencies the more complex processes of which we speak are made, but they are no mere repetition of old forms. That, at least, is the way these ecstatic moods appear from our point of view.

It is precisely because ecstatic moods are presumably thus general and composite, and involve fundamental instincts (but in such a way that they are transformed, and no longer present in body, so to speak, but are represented by their organic processes rather than appearing as specific concatenated chains of motor events), with their purposes changed and their whole meaning determined by the present states to which they belong, that we should be inclined to say that to explain any great and powerful movement in the lives of individuals or nations as merely reversions is very inadequate and indeed wrong. They are emotional forces that are at work, composite feelings and moods rather than instincts. They are aspects of the continuity of the life of the present, rather than of the fragmentary past that lives in the individual. These forces are plastic, complex and organized, rather than haphazard and suppressed. They are directive, creative, but incidentally they make amends for and satisfy and exploit the past.

If these principles be valid, their application to the psychology of war seems plain. The central purpose or motive of war to-day is a craving for the realization of the sense of power. This is the subjective side of it, the unconscious, instinctive, mystical motive so often observed. The question of the actual power exerted or displayed is not the most essential point of this war mood. It is the manipulation and the satisfaction of inner factors that make the most significant aspect of these moods. History, we should hold, is in great part an unfoldment of this motive. Nations crave, as collective or group consciousness, the feeling of power. Just as we say the child in his plays wants to be a man, and the individual in his art feels himself a god, so nations in their wars and in their thoughts of wars, feel themselves more real, realize themselves as world powers, and as supreme and divine. To be first and all is indeed the purpose that runs in these moods, and this we believe is true, in its way, of the most insignificant and hopelessly decrepit of peoples. This must be taken account of in the interpretation of history, and in that larger pedagogy, the pedagogy of nations to which we just now look forward.

These moods which, slumbering, become the ecstasies of war are vague, even secretive. They contain aggressive thoughts that are disavowed, vanities that are concealed, fears that present a quiet front. But we must not think that the war mood always intends war. Nations have their subjective lives and inner history, and their vicarious satisfactions. A nation in arms already feels itself victor by reason of its sense of power. Otherwise few wars would be entered upon. Dreams and talk of war may incite to war, but they may also satisfy the desire and need of war. There is a certain narcissism in nations, and this is due precisely to the fact that patriotism as a feeling and impulse necessarily lacks in the group consciousness the mechanisms for externalization, except indeed in war. War is an escape, for a people, from a kind of subjectivism, from the evils of a self-love to perhaps the greater evils of self-assertion.

Nations in war, and even in the thought of war realize their own potentiality, take account of stock of their powers, and create an ideal, romantic and dream world. They make castles-in-air, and these castles-in-air always take the form of empires. War, precisely like art, is at first more and then less practical, and sought for practical purposes. More and more there is a craving for glory, for prestige, for subjective satisfaction and symbols of power. Nations take lands that they cannot use for any good purpose, inflict indemnities that may ruin themselves rather than their enemies, exploit economic relations that are dangerous to the nations' very existence. It is power that they seek, and it is power they thus create, but it is often different in form and in value from what the conscious purpose holds. They are really seeking general and subjective states in part for their own sake. Psychologically it is all one and the same whether we realize this power by actually killing an enemy, or believe we overpower him by the performance of some mystic and ecstatic act, or in some more modern way become confident in our own power and prestige. National life, in order to maintain its integrity, must move upon a plane of intense feeling. It must have objectives, but these objectives are not necessarily of value in themselves. This is the delusion and enigma of history. Peoples enact dramas in their own subjective lives, and these things they do have reference to the desires for inner experiences. We may say that nations, like individuals, crave for luxuries of the emotional life, but to think of these experiences as merely static pleasure-states, after the fashion of a certain conception of the emotions, would be wholly to misunderstand this view which we have been trying to present. These subjective states are full of meaning and of purpose. They are not reactions, but rather, in so far as these collective lives are normal and progressive, these moods and ecstasies are more of the nature of crucibles in which old reactions and feelings are fused, given new direction, new forms and in a certain way a new nature. History is made in these moods of war. They are subjective forces, but they are also objectively creative.

What is it that nations really desire? What is it, we might ask, that an individual desires? On the side of experience it is an abundant life, a life full of the feeling of power. This craving for an abundant life is a craving for the satisfaction of many desires, instinctive and acquired, but it is also a craving, in some sense, for more desire. It is not merely to satisfy desires, but to realize more life by creating more desires that experience is sought. That is the philosophy of the life of the superior individual; it is also the principle of the larger individual—the nation. The creation and the satisfaction of desire are the motives of art. They are also the motives of life.

In history, it is the intangible value, the unconscious purpose, the desire to realize empires that are only in part material, the desire for glory and prestige and opportunity that seem to be the guiding motives. There is a general and plastic purpose beneath all the special tendencies and desires directing interest toward specific objects, and also sometimes making the objectives sought indefinite and the purposes in seeking them seem mystical. It is the desire to be a power in the world, or rather to have power over the world, and to experience all the inner exaltation these desires inspire that appears to be the creative force in history. These things, moreover, are not the desires and impulses of the geniuses among nations alone; they seem to be inherent in all national life.

Study of the intoxication motive in the individual and as a social phenomenon shows that it is not an expression of the need of relaxation from strain, or a reversion, or something that occurs by a mere release of primitive instincts. It occurs in the great periods of history, and in the strong years of the life of the individual, rather than in times of weakness. It is always a spirit of the times rather than of some past reverted to. It may occur in times of disorder or of repression, but it is an experience in which energy and power are expressed. We see it most dominant when life is most abundant, when there is also a craving to make life more abundant still, when there is already power and more power is longed for. It is true, however, that two opposite conditions may produce the strongest manifestations of this intoxication motive. Something analogous to these conditions we see in the lives of individuals, in the phenomena of intemperance, which belong in general to the virile years. Social ecstasy is produced in times when there is already a free expression of energy, but also under conditions that cause pain, disorder and repression. Under the latter conditions we think of it not as desire for relief from strain but desire to be released from obstacles that impede the expression of the growth force. If all this be true, we see war in a somewhat different light from that in which it is ordinarily regarded. It is not, in its typical forms, a reversion to barbarism, and it is not a political mishap. It is rather a readjustment of tendencies or forces and an expression and product of the living and progressive forces of society—not necessarily a good or even a normal expression of them, but an awakening and a realization of such desires as are to-day at work in everything we do—forces which for the moment are raised to a white heat, so to speak, in which purposes are for the moment fused and it may be confused—but still an expression of what, for better or for worse we are, not of what in some remote past time we were. We cannot explain war or excuse ourselves for waging wars by saying that we lapse for a time into barbarism, but on the other hand the heroism we suddenly find in ourselves as nations or as individuals, is not so different from that of ordinary life as we may have supposed. We have perhaps no right to say that all war is thus to be characterized. War is a very complex and a widely variable phenomenon, but this is the explanation of that aspect of the motive of history which in general produces war. War may have its abnormalities, if we may speak of a worse in that which is already bad enough. War may satisfy the desperate mind; it may, on occasion, be a narcotic to cover up worse pain, or an evidence of decadence; or even be what those who think of it as a reversion believe. But all these aspects of war, if our view be sound, are the eccentricities rather than the essence of war.

The conditions preceding our recent great war will doubtless in the course of future historical and sociological research, be minutely scrutinized, in the effort to find the causes of the war—factors deeper than and different from the political and economic causes and the personal intrigues that are now most emphasized. If we believe that the war was made in Germany rather than elsewhere, we might look there, especially for these psychological factors of war—for our intoxication motives and unconscious impulses and our causes of reversion, but we should probably not find anything different in kind there from what we should discover in other great countries. Those who have seen in modern industrialism dangers of coming disaster, or who now look back upon it as a genuine cause of the war were probably not mistaken. Industrialism has been producing rapidly, and in an intense form, what we may call the mood of the city, and this mood of the city contains all the conditions and all the emotions that tend to bring to the surface the deep-lying motives of the social life that we are trying to point out. There are both the joy of the abundant life, the craving for new experiences, and the sense of reality, and also the disorganization of interests and motives, the stress and fatigue and monotony which prepare the mind for culmination in dramatic events. There is, in a word, a deep stirring of all the forces that make for progress and expansion, and also conditions that disorganize the individual and the social life. Lamprecht (59) of all German writers seems to have appreciated this. He has written before the war, describing a condition in Germany which he says began in the seventies of the preceding century—a change of German life in which there is a great increase of the activities of the cities, with haste and anxiety, unscrupulous individual energy, general nervous excitement, a condition of neuro-muscular weakness (and he might have added as another sign, over-stimulation of the mind by a great flood of morbid literature).

In Lamprecht's opinion, this period of excitement, this strong tendency to the enjoyment of excitation in general, is a form of socio-psychic dissociation. It is a period of relative disorganization, when the individual is subjected to a great variety of new experiences, when outside influences prevail over the inner impulses of the individual, in which the individual is unsettled and there is a tendency toward pessimism and melancholia. Lamprecht thinks of this state as something transitory, and already as he writes (in 1905) nearing an end. This state of continuous excitement, with its shallow pathos of the individual and its constant and superficial happiness, its worship of the novel and the extraordinary, the suggestibility and the receptivity of the masses, automatic action of the will and the emotions—all this Lamprecht thinks will pass. It is a stage in the process of a new formation. The very elements of dissociation are positively charged, so to speak, and contain creative power. A new system of morals, a new philosophy, new religion begin to emerge. There is a strong effort to reach a new dominant.

This is Lamprecht's psychological interpretation of recent German history. This view and the various aspects of the condition which Lamprecht describes, the relation of the materialism, the pessimism and the melancholy of such a time to the optimistic trends and the deep forward movement need a closer study than we can here give it, but may we not see in it the truth that such conditions as these are prone to cause wars as a phase of the process of the inner adjustment of national life? Wars occur as forms of expression of those impulses which appear in the individual life in times of rapid growth and relative dissociation as outbreaks of intemperance and passion—a culmination, according to our view and terminology, of the intoxication motive. Industrialism itself is perhaps but one manifestation of deep impulses in the life of nations; it is at once an intensification and a formalizing of life. Hence perhaps its paradoxical appearance as an increase of both joy and distress. There is nothing in it that is wholly satisfying.

Germany, says Lamprecht, was seeking, in this transition period, a new dominant, a new religion and a new philosophy. But Germany, let us help Lamprecht to say, since he does not himself draw this conclusion, has failed to emerge upon the level of an exalted ecstasy, failed to produce the philosophical, the moral and religious fruit of its new impulses, failed, in a word, to find its dominant on a high level, precisely as often the promising individual fails and has expressed his truly great nature in low forms of activity. So Germany, and the world, dominated by industrialism and all the desires and forces that the rapid development of industrialism has brought into action, has come to a culmination of its efforts in an outbreak unparalleled in history. On the side of Germany we see a nation governed by a mood of war in which the chief modes of thought and action represented are the pseudo-mystical and religious longings for new empire, romantic love of the past, militarism, and all the motives of the new industrialism and the new science. The best motives of the old feudalism and the new industrialism tried to unite, as we might say, into a new and very great civilization—and they failed. What has happened is that the material powers and the cynical moods of industrialism have combined with the mystical elements and the superficial æstheticism of the old feudalistic régime to create a philosophy of life, a temporary stage it may be, in which force and fanaticism and the uncompromising ideals of national honor and brute strength prevail over those of a wider efficiency and a broader devotion which might have inspired a greater and a better Germany. Convention and political motives have done the rest.

Bergson says that in the war spirit of Germany one sees matter arrayed against spirit. One can see some truth in this, but spirit and matter are not two armies pitted against one another. In Germany, as we may believe elsewhere, the spiritual in the sense of creative forces in the subconscious life of nations does try to organize the practical life, with its routine and convention, into an onward moving progress, in which, necessarily, exalted moods (if energies are to get themselves expressed at all) must prevail, and must be full of possibilities, both of great good and of great evil. Life in its collective form will be abundant, because that is its most fundamental craving. It may be terribly and destructively abundant, or benignly, but progress, as history seems to show us—if reason and psychology do not—can never be orderly and complacent. Order and convention must break down to introduce new spirit and new desires which are continually being created in the inner life. These forces may be old instincts which are continually upsetting civilized life, but the desires they produce and the mechanism of their operation seem to be different from what our customary psychology and interpretation of history imply. Just as these moods make the child play and be wholly unpractical when one might suppose he could be useful, and the individual, as man, live a certain life of adventure rather than in security and routine, so this spirit or mood that dominates nations makes them imperialistic, and causes them to crave those things which lead toward war, if they do not crave war itself, when we might think they ought to be most concerned about the economic welfare of the world as a whole.

Whether this spirit of nations be an evil to be overcome, and to suppress, or an untamed force to direct to right objects, or a good that by some logic of events which we do not understand works out the right course of history, we do not know. But here, of course, we come to problems, which, if they are problems at all in any real sense, are philosophical and ultimate.

CHAPTER III[ToC]

INSTINCTS IN WAR: FEAR, HATE, THE AGGRESSIVE IMPULSE, MOTIVES OF
COMBAT AND DESTRUCTION, THE SOCIAL INSTINCT

We have found that the essential, and we might say, primary psychological datum of war is a war-mood, that the central motive of this war-mood is a general impulse which we called the intoxication motive, and that this intoxication motive, considered generically, and in regard to its specific meaning is a craving for power and for the experience of exerting and feeling power. The war-mood is not a mere collection of instincts; it is a new product, in which instincts and emotions have a place. There are several reasons, practical and theoretical, for regarding it as a highly important problem to discover what the actual content of this war-mood is. This mood, being one of the greatest of all powers of good and evil, and one most in need to-day of education and re-direction, it may be, it will probably be controlled, if ever, upon the basis of a knowledge of what it means as a whole, and of what its elements are which appear in the form of fused, transformed, truncated, generalized and aborted instincts and feelings.

Primitive Tendencies

First of all, the highly complex emotions, moods and impulses we find in the social consciousness as expressed in the moods of war, do contain and revert to instincts and feelings that are part of the primitive equipment of organic life, and are usually identified as nutritional and reproductive tendencies. The part played in war by the migratory impulse, the predatory impulse and the like indicates the connection of the war-moods with the nutritional tendencies; and the display elements found already in primitive warfare and, as we have already inferred, in all forms of ecstasy contain factors that are at bottom sexual. We no longer eat our enemies, and we do not bring home their heads to our women or practice wife stealing, but it is easy to observe the remnants of these old feelings and instincts in war. Trophy hunting continues, and we may suppose that even the moods of primitive cannibalism have not entirely been lost. The ready habituation of soldiers to some of the scenes of the recent war seems to suggest a lingering trace of this motive, while the looting impulse which plays such a part in war, and some aspects of the destructive impulses and the like that are displayed, are, with a high degree of probability, closely related to instincts that were once specifically practical and belong to the fundamental nutritional motives. Nor is it a mere euphemism, perhaps, when we speak of the greed of nations, nor solely analogical when we compare the ambitions of peoples with certain adolescent phenomena in the life of the individual. Plainly the social consciousness, as a collective mood, does not command the specific reactions connected with sexuality and nutrition, but we may observe the presence of these instinctive reactions in two phases of war. We see them in the tendencies of various individuals, who under the excitements of the war moods are controlled more or less specifically by instinctive reactions. We see also fragments of instinctive reactions and primitive feeling woven into the total states of social consciousness. The hunger motive may, and probably does, supply some of the elements of the fear and the aggressive moods of war; just as the sex motive provides some of the elements of anger and hatred, and some of the qualities of combat itself.

The Aggressive Instinct

A natural, but somewhat naïve explanation of war is that it is a survival of the aggressive instinct that man has brought up with him from animal life, in which he originated, and that very early in his career was directed toward his fellow men. This aggressive instinct as expressed in the modern spirit of war does not need, on this view, to be thought of as something reverted to. It is still active throughout the social life. Both the purposes and the methods of it remain. We have referred to one aspect of this before, and to the objection that can be made that the ancestry of man does not show us such an aggressive instinct. The nearest relatives of man are mainly social rather than aggressive in their habits. Even the habits of hunting other animals and eating animal food appear to have been acquired during man's career as man, and he never has had the aggressive temper that some creatures have had. Man has acquired a very effectual and very complex adjustment to his environment by piecing together, so to speak, fragments of his original conduct, and developing mechanisms that have been produced in the race as a means of satisfying fundamental needs. Modes of reaction produced originally for one purpose have apparently been utilized by other motives. Of course the more specific animal instincts are not wholly lacking, but it is also true that man through his social life has produced habits that resemble or are substitutes for primitive instincts. The love of combat, especially as it is shown in play indicates the presence of instinctive roots, but it does not show the existence of a definite instinct of aggression. This play is in part an off-shoot of the reproductive motive. These fighting plays of children are in part sexual plays, and we see them clearly in their true light in some of the higher mammals most closely related to man.

One aspect of the aggressive habit of man has been too much neglected. It is highly probable that aggression in man has been far more closely related to the emotion of fear than to any assumed predatory instinct. It is a question whether the predatory habit of man, ending in cannibalism and the hunting of animals for food, did not originate in the time of the long battle man must have had with animals in which the animals themselves for the most part played the part of aggressors. It was not for nothing, at any rate, that our animal ancestors took to the trees, and it is certain that the fear element in human nature is very strong and very deeply ingrained. We see throughout animal life fear expressed by aggressive movements, by the show of anger, as well as by flight. This is seen especially clearly in the birds. With all their equipment for the defensive strategy of flight they express fear instinctively by attacking, and this is apparently not a result merely of the habit of defending the young. The great carnivora also attack from fear, and seem normally never to attack such animals as they do not hunt for prey unless they are frightened. The charge of the rhinoceros and other great ungulates is probably always a fear reaction. They appear to have no other aggressive impulses, certainly none connected with the nutritional motives since they are herbivorous in habit.

The fear motive is probably much deeper in human nature, both in the lower and the higher social reactions than is commonly supposed, the concealment of fear being precisely a part of the strategy of defense. Fear has created more history than it is usually given credit for. The aggressive motive alone, in all probability, would never have made history such a story of battles as it has been. Nations usually attribute more aggressive intentions and motives to their neighbors than their neighbors possess, and war is certainly often precipitated by an accumulation of mutual distrust and suspicion. Nations are always watching one another for the least signs of aggression on the part of their supposed enemies, an attitude which of course is inspired only by apprehension.

Moods of fear and pessimism we say are deeply implanted in the consciousness of man, and we must interpret both his optimism, and all its expressions in philosophy and in religion, and also his aggressive behavior as in large part the result of a conscious or an unconscious effort to overcome his fear. The social consciousness is full of marks of age-long dread and suspicion. Fear of fate, fear of losing identity as a nation, fear of being overrun by an enemy, fear of internal disruption, are strong motives in national life. Fear runs like a dark thread through all the life of nations, and gives to it a quality of mysticism, and a touch of sadness which is so characteristic of much of the deepest patriotism of the world.

Fear is one of the most powerful motives of all aggressive warfare in the world. We find it in every nation, even those which are naturally most aggressive, and in them perhaps most of all. In the history and in the war moods of Germany the fear motive is unmistakable. America is not without it. Nations conceal their fears, presenting a bold front to the foreigner; but beneath the display one can always detect suspicion, dread and intense watchfulness. America has in the past feared Germany, and America fears the Far East; we look furtively toward Asia, the primeval home of all evils and pestilence, for something that may arise and engulf us. Small countries fear; large countries with their sense of distances, have their own characteristic forms of apprehension. Fear is the motive of preventive wars. It makes all nations desire to kill their enemies in the egg. It creates the death wish toward all who thwart our interests or who may in the future do so.

This fear motive runs through all history. Parsons says that men fight not because they are warlike, but because they are fearful. Rohrbach thinks that if Germany and England could each be sure the other would not be aggressive there would be no war between them. It is this aspect of the foreign as the unknown that especially plays upon the motive of fear. This fear is like the child's dread of the dark; it is not what is seen, but what is not seen that causes apprehension. It is the stranger whose psychic nature we cannot penetrate, who causes fear. In small countries having only land borders, this attitude of suspicion and fear must become an integral part of the whole psychic structure of the national consciousness. Fear becomes morbid; nations have illusions and delusions based upon fear. There are reasons for believing that all aggression contains a pessimistic motive, or background, and that this pessimistic background is based upon the emotion of fear. Countries that are most positively aggressive have such a pessimistic strain. Pessimism is a shadow that lies across the path of progress of modern Germany. This fear motive, the quality of the animal that charges when at bay, is to be seen throughout all German history. Germany's fear of Russia must certainly be blamed for a great part of the pessimistic strain in the temperament of Germany, and therefore as an important factor among the causes of the great war. Every war appears to the people who conduct it as defensive, precisely because every war is to some extent based upon fear, and fear in national consciousness is a persistent sense of living by a defensive strategy. It is existence that nations always think and talk of fighting for; it is existence about which they have apprehensions. Beneath all group life there is this sense of fear, since fear itself was a large factor in creating that life. When people live together, repress individual desires and participate in a common life we may know that one of the strongest bonds of this social life is fear. The need of defense is a more fundamental motive in national life than is aggression. A "shudder runs through a nation about to go to battle." The lusts of war are aroused later by the overcoming of fear.

Germany's inclination to preventive wars, her incessant plea of being about to be attacked, can by no means be interpreted as pure deception, or as an effort to make political capital. Germany's army was primarily for defense, because a defensive strategy is the only strategy that Germany with her position and her temperament can adopt. Germany's great army was Germany's compensation, in consciousness, for the insignificance of her territory. It was for defense. It was also a compensation for a feeling of inferiority, in Adler's sense. Fanaticism, envy, depreciation of others, aggression, morbid and excessive ambition were all fruits from the same stem. The gloom which many have found in German life, and the pessimism in German philosophy, we may explain in part by the experiences of Germany as the scene of so many devastating wars. Upon the background of fear, in our interpretation of aggressive motives, is erected German autocracy, German ambition and the conception of the absolute State, which may be interpreted as almost a specific fear reaction. It comes in time to have other meanings, and like many instinctive reactions, it may be put to uses for which it was not originally produced, but there is fear concealed in the heart of it. How action can be both defensive and strongly aggressive, then, is no mystery if we see that aggression may be a fear reaction, that even the most ardent imperialism is based in part upon fear, upon the consciousness at some time of being weak and inferior.

Fear and suspicion cause aggressive wars even when the fear may be, in all reason, groundless. There is no more dangerous individual in the community than the one having delusions of persecution, for his mania is naturally homicidal. So with nations. Fear is a treacherous and deceptive passion. We may see this fear, if we choose to look for it, even in the ecstatic mood of war and the spiritual exaltation of Germany during the first few weeks or months of the war. This exaltation was in part a reaction of fear—or a reaction from fear. Germany was afraid, feared for her existence, and the exaltation was in part a sense of taking a terrible plunge into the depths of fate. Germany was afraid of Russia and afraid of England, and that fear had to be overcome, because the presence of the fear itself was a matter of life or death. But the exaltation did not merely succeed the fear. It contained it. And why should Germany, even with all her preparedness and her resources not be afraid? An inherited fear is not so easily exorcised. Germany arrayed against all Russia and all the British Empire, Germany no larger than our Texas experienced a state of exaltation, overcoming fear. But it required something more than courage to overcome the fear; and that other element was mysticism. To the sense of throwing all into the hands of fate which, by all physical signs must be adverse, was added, as a compensating element, Germany's mystical belief in her security as a chosen nation. Fear, by its intensity and depth may, like physical pain, become ecstatic and thus be overcome.

Hatred

Hatred must be considered both as a cause of war, and as an element in the war moods. Many authors have called hatred one of the deepest roots of war. This hatred between nations even Freud says is mysterious. But Pfister, referring to Adler's theory, says that war must be understood precisely as we understand enmity among individuals. A sense of inferiority is insulted, and thus aggressive feelings are aroused. The nation, like the individual, is spurred on to make good its claim to greatness. It is a feeling of jealousy based upon a sense of inferiority that causes hatred. O'Ryan and Anderson (5), military writers, say there are two causes of war: those based upon an assumed necessity, and those based upon hatred. Nusbaum (86) also finds two causes of war, the expansion impulse and the egoism of species, which leads to long enmities.

History shows that we must accept hatred as an underlying cause of war. The reaction of deep anger which may be aroused by a variety of situations that arise among nations, especially when it is, so to speak, an outbreak of a long continued hatred, is a proximate cause of wars. Hatred, the reaction of anger prolonged into a mood, differs as national or group emotion from the anger of the individual in part by being subject strongly to group suggestion, and in part because in the group consciousness there is only rarely a means of expression, on the part of the individuals of the group, of the feelings of hatred. Enemies are far away and inaccessible. Therefore hatred may become deep and chronic.

Hatred between nations is usually based upon a long series of reprisals and a history of invasions. These invasions are primarily physical invasions, but later invasions in the sphere of invisible values, offenses to honor and the like are added. These ideal values come to be regarded as more vital than material values. Hatred between groups becomes chronic and often seems to be groundless because the values concerned have thus become intangible. The chronic moods of hatred and dislike become explosive forces, ready to be excited to action whenever any difference arises. Veblen (97) says wars never occur except when questions of honor are involved, which is of course equivalent to saying that the reaction of anger is always required as an immediate cause of war. Veblen maintains also that emulation is always involved in the patriotic spirit, that patriotism always contains the idea of the defeat of an opponent, and is based upon collective malevolence. The range of these occasions of crisis is so great, and the feelings of hatred so persistent and volatile, that the mechanism for the production of war is always present. These causes range all the way from violation of property to offense to the most abstract ideas of national etiquette. Violation of international law, of moral principles, we see now, may have very far-reaching effects as infringing the sphere of honor of nations not directly concerned, since the prestige of all nations as participants in creating law and becoming upholders of it is affected.

If hatred and its crises are causes of war, they do not fit into the moods in which warfare is generally conducted. Hatred belongs to the periods of peace and of strained relations, when the cause of war is present, but the means of retaliation are not at hand or not in action. The prevalence and persistence of hatred in war is a sign of imperfect morale. Hatred cannot remain in the war mood of a nation acting with full confidence in its powers. Hatred always implies inferiority or impotent superiority. Dide (20) says that the spirit of hatred does not fit into the soldier's life. It goes with the desire for revenge and is strongest among those who stay at home and can do nothing. Hatred is a phase of apprehension. Hatred is a product of the fear that cannot be taken up into the optimistic moods, and thus be transformed. It remains as a foreign body and an inhibition. It arises when obstacles appear to be too great, when there are reverses, and the enemy shows signs of being able to maintain a long and stubborn resistance, or flaunts again the original cause of the disagreement. Scheler (77) says that revenge, which is a form of hate, is not a justifiable war motive. We should say also that it is not a normal war mood, that it has no sustaining force, but causes a rapid expenditure of energy which may be effectual in brief actions, but is even there wasteful and interferes with judgment and efficiency. Morale based upon hatred is insecure.

Hatred must have been a very early factor in the relations of groups to one another, and presumably we should need to go back to animal life and study antipathies there in order fully to understand the nature of racial and national antagonisms, some of which may be based upon physiological traits and primitive æsthetic qualities. The very fact of the existence of groups, segregated and well bound together for the purposes of offense and defense implies already a strong contrast of feeling between that of individuals of the group toward one another and that directed toward the outsider. This contrast developed not merely as a reaction, but as a necessity, for groups in the beginning must have had to contend against their own feeble social cohesion, and existed only by reason of strong emotions of fear and anger felt toward the stranger. Hatred toward all outside the group must at one stage have been highly useful as a means of cementing the bonds of the group and maintaining the necessary attitude of defense, at a time when all outsiders were likely to be dangerous. Feelings of friendliness toward strangers were dangerous to the life of the group, and so hatred possessed survival value.

The main root of group antipathy is in all probability fear. Hatred is an aspect of the aggressive defensive toward the stranger. Hatred is a part of the aggressive reaction. As an expression of ferocity toward all who are not known to be friendly, it belongs to the first line of defense. Hatred is likely to be strong in the female because the attitude of the female is universally defensive.

In the beginning, as MacCurdy (37) says, the contrasts between groups were sharp, and these definitely separated groups must have felt toward one another not only antagonism but a sense of being different in kind. Intensity of feelings of opposition tends to magnify small differences into specific differences. This sense of specific difference is never lost, not even in the consciousness of enlightened nations in regard to one another, and we may see it to-day displayed as a mystic belief, on the part of many peoples, in their own superiority. Nations are always outsiders to one another, and the sense of strangeness perennially sustains defensive attitudes and moods of hatred. The friendship of nations can never be very secure, because the old idea of difference of kind is never quite abandoned. Some degree of enmity seems always to be felt toward the foreigner; that is, toward all who are not interested in the protective functions of the group. MacCurdy thinks the intensity of suspicion and hatred of peoples toward one another belongs to the pathological field, and that one expression of this is the peculiarity of the mental processes by which nations always justify their own cause in war. This, however, is perhaps an exaggeration, since we can trace these states of mind in all the history of the race.

How deep-seated the enmities and the sense of strangeness among nations may be is seen in the fact that national groups living in close proximity to one another tend to become less friendly rather than to become affiliated. These feelings gradually produce conceptual entities, which stand for the reality of the foreign. These concepts are deposits, so to speak, from a great number of affective reactions, and they always contain imaginative content based upon enmity and suspicion. This underlying enmity between neighboring peoples is not something rare in the world. All foreigners, even in the minds of the most intelligent of peoples, are reconstructions, caricatures. These feelings and attitudes are strong and deep and they prevent genuine friendship among nations. We tend to think of all foreigners as in some degree malicious, as designing, and lacking in the good qualities and right habits which we ourselves possess.

Many authors have commented upon the entire inability of nations to understand one another. There is a deep reason for this, which we have already suggested. They do not wish to understand one another. It is a part of the archaic system of defense to maintain an attitude of distrust and misunderstanding and even fear. The fear of the enemy is a protection—against invasion from without and disruption within. Nations do not dare to relinquish their fear of one another, and we see something of this voluntary cherishing of fear and enmity in the present hesitation about entering into leagues on the part of many nations. Nations really wish to hate one another, it would seem. Other evidence of this we have observed in the cult of hate that has been promulgated to keep up morale in the recent war. We see enmity maintained when the differences among the peoples holding it are superficial and must indeed be exaggerated and caricatured in order to make them support feelings of dislike. Small differences in the customs of closely related peoples are sufficient sometimes to maintain intense antagonism. As Collier (68) says, it is precisely the bad manners of a people that cause conflict. These bad manners are of course manners that are different from our own.

Germany's outburst of hatred and its frequent exhibition during the war and its promulgation as a cult and a religion appear to have excited the interest of many writers on the war. As a chapter in the psychology of war it has suggested new problems and points of view, and it has also appealed to many as an interesting problem of national psychology. If our explanation of hatred as especially related to fear and to the sense of inferiority is correct Germany of all nations must have been affected with a disorder of morale, or some perversion of national consciousness.

The hatred of Germany for England is not the only example of international enmity in the world, but its expression in the war has made it peculiarly interesting. The grievance against England is first of all that England is great and prosperous, and lives in comfort upon the unearned fruits of empire, while the German has toiled hard through the centuries and has caught nothing. England is hated because in many ways she has stood squarely in the path of Germany's progress and because in the history of European diplomacy, doors leading to wider empire have been again and again slammed in Germany's face, usually by the hand of England. Germany hates England, according to German writers, because England, a kindred race, tried to betray western civilization into the hands of barbarism. Germany hates England because, to the German mind, England is hypocritical. The Englishman criticizes in others precisely what he does himself; Puritanical talk covers a sinful heart. Germany hates England because in her sea-policy England has been high handed and arrogant. The Germans often call England a robber nation, with the morals of a burglar who, having enriched himself by his trade, and having retired from business, now preaches honesty.

It is not merely the hatred of England on the part of Germany that is of interest for a psychology of war but the fact that Germany has taken her hate for England with a peculiar seriousness, believed it unique, has been to the pains of justifying it morally, has covered it with religious exaltation, made it a cult and even expressed it in a formula, and made it an educational program. There are many German writings justifying the hatred of England and encouraging hate as a weapon of righteousness. Smith (47) (64) has given us the titles of forty-four German publications in his own possession, having for subject Germany's hatred of England, and says that there are sixty-five more known to him. Some of these expressions of hatred are extreme. There is, or was, a pastor in Hamburg who declared from his pulpit that his people were doing God a service in hating England and in taking every step possible to wipe so pestiferous a nation from the face of the earth. Frau Reuter says that it is impossible now more than ever to love our enemies, that England who professed love for Germany and then betrayed her love must be hated. Stern, in his studies of hate in children found that hate may be strong without any clear content, in the minds of German children. That some of this hatred of England is a direct effect of the teachings of Treitschke can hardly be doubted, when we recall the great influence his teachings have had, and the peculiar bitterness of that dramatic personage for England, for England's pretentiousness, her middle class satisfaction, her insular conceit.

The further details of the cult of hatred in Germany need not detain us, since the purpose is only to suggest here the connection of hatred with the national pessimism, the fear and the inferiority motive of Germany. We see a similar attitude in Austria, where there is a violent race hatred toward the Serbians, which Le Bon has regarded as the motive from which Austria went to war. Ferrero comments upon the fact that hatred is conspicuously absent in America, and says that the greater hatred in Europe is due not only to the obvious result of nations being crowded together, but also to the caste system which limits the freedom of the individual and tends to engender deep passions. Dide (20) says that in Germany preoccupation with the idea of injustice is a cause of war, and Chapman (39) also remarks that Germany had gone mad thinking of her wrongs. That jealousy and fear are in general the substratum of national hatred is deeply impressed upon one in studying the psychology of Germany. All the hate motive of the late war might well be found in Germany's prayer "Gott strafe England." Germany appealed to God to punish England, of course, because Germany herself could not. Both the appeal and the hatred are reactions of fear and a sense of impotence. Germany hated England because England was secure behind her navy, upon her island, beyond the reach of the war machine which is Germany's symbol of power and the compensation for her sense of inferiority and weakness.

The Instinct of Combat

We may distinguish in the motives of war between the aggressive tendency, which we have already discussed as a reaction of fear or of anger, and a more specific instinct of combat as a possession of the individual, less subject to suggestion, less closely related to the phenomena of the herd. The aggressive reaction we associate, or some writers do associate it, with the predatory instinct, practical in its motive, having in part an economic basis. The love of combat which appears especially as a play motive in the child and the youth is expressed as a desire for conquest and in the pleasure of overcoming an enemy.

Some see in war a recrudescence of the instinct of combat, and indeed think of war as mainly such a return to primitive instinct. The life of peace represses this motive too much, they think. Life is too organized and coöperative and the individual craves release from it. The general objections to such an interpretation of war we have already stated. We think rather of certain specific movements as avenues of approach to highly complex states of ecstasy, and of these states of ecstasy as representing or containing the real craving for war, so far as there is one. The war mood exploits these movements and gives room for instincts to display themselves, and these instincts, in their expression, are pleasure-toned because they are archaic and have once been well organized and habitual forms of activity having practical objects. But to say that men have a profound but concealed desire to kill one another, that the fighting impulse remains intact in some original animal form, is a travesty upon human nature. It is precisely because in war killing is depersonalized, so to speak, that it is a moral duty and is performed under conditions in which there is a summation of many strong motives leading to the act that, as we see it, men find joy in battle. The instinct of attack, or the hunting instinct that is involved in this activity, can become pleasure-toned only because of the presence of other motives, and because the object is dehumanized for the time. Otherwise we should expect all soldiers, once having their aggressive instincts aroused in battle, to become dangerous to the community.

That there is, however, a residue of pure love of physical combat and a survival of the instinctive movements of combat is shown in play, although here too the motives are mixed. The desire to fight, to kill, to hunt are still present but for the most part are sublimated in adult life into desire for competition in general, love of danger, and the hunting and gambling impulse. But we can here and there in human conduct see certain roots of pure instincts having definite coördinated reactions. These undoubtedly do play a part, but probably a very small part in the present moods of war. So far as they remain purely instinctive their place as a general motive of war seems negligible. It is a question, in fact, whether even in the state of savagery any pure instinct for killing ever played a considerable part. There were already practical motives, motives of fear and anger, and presumably also complex states of pleasure connected with beliefs, customs and ceremonies as well as with battle, so that even then men cannot be said to have acted upon anything like purely instinctive impulses.

Numerous accounts have come from the scenes of the great war about men who appear for a time to be dominated by irresistible instincts. Gibbs (80) says there are some men in every army who like slaughter for its own sake. They find an intoxication in it. They love the hunting spirit of it all. We have the story of a French soldier of peaceable disposition who appeared to experience an ecstasy of delight as he lay concealed in a shell hole and was able to pick off many of the enemy. This was not the exhilaration and abandon experienced by men while making attack, when violent muscular exertion produces an intoxication of mind, but a dominance of the mind by something which seems very much like the hunting spirit, under circumstances in which, we may suppose, the enemy had undergone some process of dehumanization in the mind of the hunter. We may suppose also that there are individuals in every army who have pathological impulses or perversions, which show themselves in instinctive reactions of a specific nature and in excess of the normal.

Both the Germans and the French are accused by French and German writers respectively with being the real lovers of battle. German writers say that the Germans are peculiarly peace-loving and by nature lacking in the battle spirit, but that the French love battle for its own sake, and that this is shown clearly by their history. Others see love of conflict, aggressiveness and cruelty in the German disposition. Boutroux (13) wishes to place among the causes of the great war the native brutality of the German disposition, a trait existing from long ago, and now become a disciplined cruelty—a zuchtmaessige Grausamkeit, regarded as right and meritorious. Many think they find this love of fighting, bloodthirst and love of destruction in the German soul. Many attribute pure aggressiveness of a pronounced type or an exaggerated predatory instinct to the Germans. Chapman (39) says that the war is a flaming forth of passions that have covertly been burning in the soul of Germany for several decades. He adds that with the Germans war is instinctive; there is no casus belli at all. War 'is for war's sake, and is a need of nature with the German. Smith (64) declares that the German is innately brutal, and as one proof of this he shows the statistics of brutal crimes in Germany. He writes of the truculent aggressiveness of the Teutonic race, of the hatred and love of destruction displayed by the robber knights of the Middle Ages, and regards quarrelsome aggressiveness as innate in German character. Dide (20) thinks that such aggressive warfare as is practiced by the Germans always goes with a pessimistic disposition. Thayer (58) connects bloodthirstiness with the paganism of Germany, and says that bloodthirstiness crops out again and again in German history. Nicolai (79) also refers to the craving for blood in the German character, and says that it has been shown throughout the history of the Germans. The old sacrifices which grew out of cannibalism and are due to the persistence of the craving for blood show an instinctive desire for slaughter, or at least a confirmed habit of killing that dies hard. But in all these characterizations of national temperament there is no clear distinction among various motives of conduct. Anger and fear reactions, love of combat itself, the motives of display are all intermingled.

There can of course be no precise way of estimating the place of a pure instinct of combat among the causes of war, or in the war moods. We have seen reason for believing that although these instincts remain as fragments in the individual and especially are utilized in higher processes of the social life, they are less influential in determining motives and conduct than is sometimes believed. We cannot at least explain war as a sudden release of these instincts. That primitive passions for violence, as MacCurdy (37) maintains, reënforce the herd antagonism, and in the midst of the apprehension at the threat of war, give rise to a desire for war, may be true, but such primitive passions are not all of the forces that are at work in causing modern wars. To say that in the individual of modern society a savage still lives is an exaggeration, and does not properly express what social consciousness is or has done. The social life is not a balance in which primitive instincts are held in leash by other instincts or feelings, but a new product in which there is a synthesis of impulses in which the original form of the impulses may be greatly transformed. We live in composite situations to which there correspond composite moods. Often motives which clearly reveal to analysis their instinctive character have no tendency to express themselves in the definite instinctive movements corresponding to this instinct-feeling, having permanently become dissociated from the primitive reactions, either by a process of generalization and fusion of states and processes in the individual, or by the inheritance of structural changes. There are, it is true, all degrees of amalgamation of old and new elements or of transformation of old elements, but to think of instincts as remaining intact and unchanged in modern life seems wholly wrong.

After all man is no longer an animal, and even the distance between man as a member of the present complex organized society and man as primitive or savage is considerable. The difference is not entirely in the associations themselves but in all that the associations have done, or that they represent, in modifying instincts, which no longer exist in their original form and distinctness. Man is a creature of feeling, but not of instinct we say, and this distinction is important in many ways. All analogies between animal and human life have an element of danger in them. To explain human conduct in terms of herd instincts—instincts of aggression and the like—is misleading, since the instincts that are assumed do not exist as such, and perhaps never did. The psychology of the crowd, and the psychology of war, cannot be contained in the psychology of the herd, however attractive the simplicity of these concepts may be. That primitive instincts may remain as remnants, that the crowd shows some of the characteristics of the herd and the pack cannot be denied, and that in the spirit of war these fragments and traits play a certain part may well be believed. But the synthetic and highly complex mood we call the war spirit, and the causes of war, however archaic some of their elements may be, are very different from any mere sum of instincts. There is no specific craving for combat that we can call a cause of war, or that, in our view, plays any considerable part in the causes of war—combat as apart from practical motives and the complex moods into which, in its modern form, it enters. Some writers appear to be deceived because they assume that war is itself primitive, and do not see that in spite of its conventions and its old forms, it is not far behind civilization, not because civilization has made no progress, or is so insecure, but because war, chaos though it be, in some respects contains all our modern feelings. Kerr says that war is due to a superfluity of animal force that must vent itself, but such explanations of war seem certainly to be very far from the truth. That theory is far from being adequate as an explanation of play. It is much less so as an explanation of war. The other theory of play that is most prevalent and which is offered as a theory of war—that play and war are reversions to primitive instincts, is also insufficient. War is neither an overflow of energy nor a reversion to primitive states. Rather it is caused by and involves all the present and active motives of man and all his essential human qualities.

Social Instincts

Whatever the specific causes of war may be, war is of course possible only because there exists a mechanism or instinct or feeling, because of which great groups of people act as a unit in the common interests of all. We usually speak of this collective action as the result of social instincts or a general social instinct. It is the place of this "instinct" in the causes and moods of war that we must consider. War is a social phenomenon: it is a movement directed toward an object, but the force that drives the movement is of course social.

Several writers, among them MacCurdy (37), Murray (90), and Trotter (82), have dealt with this social aspect of war, and have interpreted war as a herd reaction. All these theories are simple. Trotter maintains that in man there are four instincts and no more: self-preservative, reproductive nutritional, and herd instincts. The peculiarity of the herd instinct is that it does not itself have definite motor expression, but serves to intensify and direct the other instincts. This herd instinct is a tendency, so to speak, which can confer instinctive sanction upon any other part of the field of action or belief. The herd instinct, for example, gives instinctive quality to the social organization and social proclivities of three different types of society, which appear as national characters. These are the wolf, the sheep, and the bee types. The aggressive type of social organization is represented by the Roman and now by the German civilization. This is a declining type, but it was because moral equality could not be tolerated in Germany that the rulers were obliged to cause Germany to revert to the primitive aggressive form of gregariousness. China would be a good example of Trotter's herd of the sheep type, for here the defensive instinct seems to be the dominating social reaction. War becomes, in such a herd, a great stimulus when, and only when, it is a threat to the whole nation, and when, therefore, the individual fears for the whole herd rather than for himself.

The third type is the bee type, well represented by England, although still imperfectly. This is the type toward which the world as a whole tends, but as yet there is no complete form of it. At present the capacity for individual reactions to the same stimulus has far outstripped the capacity for intercommunication. Intercommunication in the biological sense has been allowed to run at haphazard. When once a great gregarious unit of this type shall have been thoroughly organized, and be subject to conscious direction as a whole, there will appear in the world a new kind of social mechanism and a new biological form. The interest in war will give way to a larger and more dramatic field of interest and of conquest than the mere taking and re-taking of land. But there is as yet no such society. Even in times of a great war, there is an internal differentiation that cannot be overcome, an individualism that creates antagonism, and a type of leadership which is conservative and static rather than progressive.

If we may safely apply Trotter's generalization to the present antagonism among groups (within nations, and also national groups) we might say that the rapid differentiation of the human species has had an effect of creating within the species man a large number of types of sub-specific value, and in this respect man differs greatly from any other species. Differences recognized by groups of the same species of animals are generally not sufficient to create antagonism among the groups, but in the case of man these differences have had precisely the effect of marking off groups with antagonistic interests. The animal society dominated by a few instincts directed for the most part toward external objects preserves a state of peace within the species. Man by reason of his intelligence and his capacities for specialization and the great number of his desires tends to prey upon his own kind. This segregation is in part artificial, becomes conventional and is subject to the effects of leadership that tends to fixate artificial distinctions, but it is also in part an effect of the exigencies of the wider life of man, of his superiority of which variability of conduct is an essential aspect. This differentiation is one of the conditions of a firmer organization in the society of man than any animal society can attain, but at the present time the two processes of differentiation and organization are to some extent antagonistic to one another.

Trotter maintains that the tendency of nature is to increase and maintain the homogeneity of the species, but we should say rather that the whole process of differentiation and organization is upon a level in which the biological processes that make for or against homogeneity have but little effect. The task before man is social. It is not so much a consciousness of his destiny as a species that man requires, but of his work as an organized group. It is due to a rapid differentiation and increase in man's desires that he has become a species in which there is internal warfare. It must be by the control of these desires in a conscious process of organization that he will become, if ever, a well-ordered and homogeneous group. Trotter thinks of such a change as a biological phenomenon, as being one of those momentous steps which a very few times have been taken in the development of organic life in the world.

We cannot discuss fully here these biological views, as they relate to the future organization of the world. That the explanation of wars within the human species this view affords is correct so far as it goes one would admit. Men fight among themselves as animals do not, because of their differences. We should prefer to think of these differences, however, neither as a phase of biological differentiation as structural change nor as functional adaptation by differentiation of reactions to the same stimuli, but as the effect of the new consciousness of desires that came with the rise of man from the animal stage, and the conditions under which these desires could and must be realized. It is the complexity of interests that has given to man his antagonisms and his differences, and these secondary differences have been utilized as a means of still further developing the desires and satisfying them, or justifying their satisfaction. It is man's intelligence and his capacity for being governed in his conduct by many desires that teaches him to make war upon his own kind, and the very same qualities make his associations firm and lasting. But just in this way the human group ceases to be a herd and to be dominated by herd instincts. To interpret war, therefore, as an effect of social instinct or herd instinct upon the instincts of aggression or of self-protection, or as the effect of aroused instincts of aggression and self-protection exciting the herd instinct, is unsatisfactory because it is too simple, and erroneously undertakes to explain human life in terms of instinct and also carries biological analogies too far. These views, if we understand them, seem to have the characteristic faults of all purely biological sociology.

That, however, the "herd instinct," or the social feeling or the cohesive force in groups, whatever it may be, is exceedingly strong and persistent is shown by the recent war. We see a world highly differentiated, and with wide associations which seemed to have become permanent becoming at once a world in which the lines of cleavage are based upon propinquity and political organization. All ties, except national ties, were broken up. The nation, conscious of itself, becomes a unit or personality, and the sense of personality of a nation becomes greatly intensified in time of war. The individual becomes unimportant, both in his own estimation and in the eye of the law. It is the life of the nation as a whole that is felt to be threatened and under this threat the group as a whole becomes an object of devotion and solicitude. Nicolai (79) comments upon this Massengefuehl and says that, when not counterbalanced by higher elements of social consciousness, it may be a low and dangerous element in the consciousness of groups. Sumner (70) also speaks of the extraordinary power of gregariousness, and says that when the movement is upon a vast scale, the numbers engaged being very large, there is always an exhilaration connected with the movement, and that if the causes involved are believed to be deep and holy, the force of this gregarious mood may become demoniacal.

There are two especially remarkable changes that take place in the social life in war or in the act of going to war, and which represent the social instinct or feeling at its highest point. These phenomena are types of social reaction, but the question may be raised whether they do not represent something more than reactions in the ordinary sense. We see in times of war, first, a greatly increased sensitiveness to leadership, a craving for devotion to a leader, indeed, which is sometimes pathetic in its effort to transform really commonplace men into religious objects. The leader as a concept and an ideal is a product of the social mood itself, which does for him precisely what romantic love does for its object, exerts a creative effect upon him. The leader is magnified to heroic size and held up before the enemy as a threat. It is plain to be seen that this devotion to leader and imaginative treatment of him is in part a defensive reaction. The individual hides behind this colossal figure, and thus feels himself safe. But this protective impulse that creates the invincible leader is not the only motive; at least it is probably not the only one. The leader represents the ideals and the ambitions of the people, and his prestige and the forms that surround him, especially everything that is aesthetic or suggests the heroic, symbolize the craving for power in a people. The strength and the peculiar abandon and perversity, one may say, of the affections of a nation toward the leader in time of war make the rise of such a leader dreaded by the political powers in every country. Newspapers, in every war, find some heroic figure whom they exploit as a coming dictator, and changes of leadership in the field apparently sometimes have reference to these popular currents. But a nation in love with its leader is strong in defense, and readily becomes aggressive, and this relation of mass to leader is of course one of the main foundations of military morale.

The second universal social phenomenon of war is the greatly intensified feeling of solidarity as shown in comradeship and united feelings on the part of the people. This too is in part, and only in part, a protective reaction. The individual becomes safe by becoming a part of a whole which then alone seems to have real existence and true value. The individual loses himself in the whole, but the whole group also becomes absorbed and taken into the sphere of protection and interest of the individual. The individual becomes highly sensitive to everything that happens to the group, and peculiarly affected by the social mood of comradeship. This spirit of comradeship becomes one of the most conspicuous qualities of the social life in time of war. Comradeship in arms is of course the highest point of this social solidarity. The mass action, the close physical relationship, subjection to the same narrow routine and the common experiences of danger, induce social states that represent the most complete expression of pure social feeling, and excite moods which, upon occasion may reach the highest degree of ecstasy or intoxication and lead to acts of the most exalted heroism.

These changes in the social life in time of war are striking and fundamental. To explain them would mean to explain social feeling itself. We may say that these phenomena of the social life are precisely the herd reactions the biological writers speak of, but to do so would mean, from our point of view, to ignore some very significant aspects of human social life. It would ignore first of all the ecstatic quality of the higher social life, which is indeed the essential quality of the social spirit of war. Instead of saying that this intensity of feeling is merely a reflex of an instinctive reaction, we should say that it is the expression of, and in part the satisfaction of, desires that are fulfilled in the social experience of war. The intense social life is craved, not as an instinctive reaction, but as a complex state expressing explicit desires. The craving for this social solidarity and ecstasy of social feeling is a factor in the causes of war. What we experience socially in times of peace is a society in which social feeling is narrow and provincial, in which we are conscious of many antagonistic motives. This social life fails to satisfy the desires which are seeking expression in the social life. That war is in part a creation of the social impulse seeking expression may be assumed from the nature of the social feelings that are excited in war. That such social feeling is a creation in the sense that it is desired, we see if in no other way in the fact that social ecstasy is the most universal form of satisfaction of all those impulses which fuse in the intoxication impulse, where we recognize it as the craving for an abundant or real life. Life is most real in its intensely dramatic social forms. Social ecstasy is in part a conscious adaptation. It is something that is desired and induced, and artificially cultivated in various ways, especially by a variety of aesthetic social experiences, and in the cults of intoxication. Alcohol has been used specifically throughout the world and from the beginning at least of the historical period for the purpose of creating social feeling. Patriotism is in part, we may say, a cultivated, social emotion, and in the art of manners we see the social life given forms which will increase its susceptibility to suggestion, its persuasive force and its organized expression. Such facts show us social emotion which is something more than the feeling side of an instinctive reaction.

This is hardly the place to try to elucidate the fundamental principles of the psychology of the social feelings or instincts, but it may be helpful to suggest in outline certain divergences in the theory of the social life that seem to be in point. We see on one side many writers who tend to regard social phenomena as mainly the result of instinct, as the expression either of a single instinct or of a combination of several specific instinctive tendencies. Contrasted with these views are the theories according to which social life is something that is mainly created by reason, based, so to speak, upon the observation that in union there is strength. Neither of these views seems to be satisfactory. That social feeling is based upon instinct is clear, but that it is also something created, synthetic, and subjected to selective processes seems also evident. Precisely what the instinctive basis of the social life is, perhaps one cannot with any certainty determine, nor can we say how many specific instincts enter into it. But that social feeling in its higher levels is a very complex mood, in which, although there are several instinctive reactions or feelings, there is to be discovered no social instinct as such, is the conclusion which we reach.

Social behavior is a development of all the fundamental tendencies of the organism. It has its roots both in the reproductive and the nutritional motives. These fundamental tendencies have issued phylogenetically in specific reactions that enter into the social life at all its levels, and in the life of the individual these reactions, expressing needs and desires, issue in highly complex moods, in which fundamental feelings are present but do not constitute the whole of the social moods. The individual does various specific things with reference to his fellows which are of the nature of instinctive reactions, but both in the phyletic development and the development in the individual, elements that enter into the modern social life as instincts have tended to lose their specific character, have become general or merely organic, have been transformed and have to some extent lost their original significance.

The motives of hunger, the reactions of the reproductive mechanisms, reactions to visual impressions and to sounds, warmth reactions, the huddling of fear, the influences of suggestion, susceptibility to all the stimuli of the social object enter into social feelings, and remain to some extent as instinctive reactions in the higher social processes. But we do not seem to find any general social instinct, or any specific herd instinct or any definite and broadly acting protective and aggressive instincts. As compared with some other views of the social feelings ours assumes in one way more and in another less of instinct in the social life. There is more instinct in the sense that more specific instinctive reactions are recognized in it, but less in assuming that these reactions are derivatives of primitive reactions of the organism, and also because they become transformed and fused and lose their original forms. They have come from common sources in organic life, we might say, and they meet again in the general moods which they help to create.

Conclusions

It is an important point to observe that most if not all of the specific instinctive reactions and feelings engendered in war, or occurring as an incitement to war, are capable of inducing ecstatic states. There are several of these movements and states, each of which can become, so to speak, a foundation for the development of ecstasy. Combat may and must do this, and probably war could never be carried on at all unless danger and death had qualities which arouse ecstatic moods. There is a joy in fighting, in killing, and in the tumult of battle that becomes one of the most important of military assets, and is one of the main elements of morale in the field. This capacity of human nature to make over that which is intrinsically painful into the pleasurable is one of the paradoxes of human life to be explained and taken into account in the study of the psychology of war. Fear itself may induce an ecstasy, both in the individual, as we know from many reported cases from the late war, and as a social mood in which the fear contributes a quality of intensity and ferocity to patriotism. The gambling mood, which is in part a play with fear, is another ecstatic reaction seen in war, and it is often the means of clearing the way, so to speak, for free and uninhibited action.

Of course all the purely æsthetic elements in the social life have this effect of arousing exalted moods, and indeed that is precisely their function. All social impulses tend in this same direction, and there is induced in all intense social states an intoxication mood. In these social states, the reproductive motive is often clearly discernible, but partly by common consent and convention, and partly because of the composite and fused form of impulses in the social mood, robbed of its specific reactions and converted into a new product, regarded both as conduct and as feeling.

All religious states aroused in war tend to become ecstatic. Their work is to overcome the sense of tragedy of war, and it is only by becoming intense and voluminous, so to speak, that they can accomplish their work at all. Either they must end in a mysticism which includes or takes the form of exalted moods, or they must, as can be accomplished in some temperaments, become dynamic states by inspiring a fatalistic attitude, which is at bottom a sense of throwing oneself unreservedly into the hands of fate.

We may best think of these complex war moods as the forces out of which wars are made, and the spirit in which they are conducted, but not as by their own initiative creating wars. These intoxication moods or ecstasies are forces which contain desires that are general, we say; they are mental processes that act as a means of greatly increasing the volume of all social actions. When we analyze them we find specific desires in them, and evidences of instinct and primitive feeling, but they are not in themselves tendencies toward specific reactions and in fact the motor tendencies they contain more or less inhibit one another.

In general, these war moods of which we speak are precipitated by definite and incisive reactions of fear and anger. These emotions of fear or anger seem to be the necessary positive stimuli to induce the moods of war. Fear and anger, no one can maintain, are the sole causes of war, and they are far from being the sole factors of the war moods, but they are the usual precipitants of war.

Fear and anger as social emotions cannot sustain organized and effectual social activity upon a large scale; we see them always, in war, taken up, transformed, absorbed in moods which are at once more practical, and more exalted and which, as complex processes, can be sustained over long periods of time. But these primitive reactions of anger and fear enter into the ecstatic moods, become associated with or induce æsthetic and religious states of consciousness, gain moral justification or religious exploitation, become aspects of directive and dynamic moods and so give force and efficiency to morale and strategy.

War appears as a breakdown of certain modes of volition. Certain types of conflict are abandoned, and aggressive activities become more simple and powerful, but war is no reversion to primitive instinct, or to any number of instincts. The resulting states of mind are too rational as means, and too exalted and ideal to be thus primitive. New content is introduced into social consciousness and new purposes come to light in these ecstasies, even though the consciously sought objectives may be archaic and conventional and the mental states traceable to more elementary states, and the conduct be similar in purpose and type to the simpler forms of conduct we find in the animal world What we are trying to impress here is the well known truth that the whole of a thing is not necessarily contained in its parts. It is the meaning of the war-mood as a whole, as a summation of many factors of the mental life, and as a direction of social consciousness as a whole that is its most important characteristic.

CHAPTER IV[ToC]

AESTHETIC ELEMENTS IN THE MOODS AND IMPULSES OF WAR

That experiences and motives which belong to the field of the aesthetic play an important part in war can hardly be doubted. The whole history of war shows this, and even in the beginning war seems to be an activity carried on in part for its own sake, and not entirely for its practical results, and thus has qualities which later are explicitly aesthetic. We cannot of course separate sharply the aesthetic motive from everything else in studying so highly complex an object as war, but that war does partake of the nature of what we call the beautiful, and that the craving for the beautiful is a factor in the causes of war seem to be certain. The relation of art to war is of course no new theme. War has often been praised because of its aesthetic nature, and its dramatic features. It is called a beautiful adventure. It is reproduced in pictorial art, represented in music, and thus glorified and adorned, showing at least that it can readily be made to appear beautiful if it does not in itself possess beauty. Those who think of war as related to play also connect it with art. Nicolai (79), who condemns war, says that it is when war as an instinctive action is no longer useful, but is performed for its own sake that it becomes beautiful.

We cannot undertake to enumerate all the aesthetic qualities of war, or to show all the relations of the aesthetic aspects to other motives of war in detail, since to do so would mean to work out some of the fundamental principles of aesthetics. We may begin, however, by saying that war as a whole, as a movement in which there is complete organization of social forces shows already the marks of aesthetic experience and of art. As such a unification of interest in a strong and uninhibited movement, as a coördinated expression of deep desires, a multiplicity of action with a unity of purpose, so to speak, war is aesthetic in form although to mention such very general qualities does not go very far toward characterizing an object.

In its meaning as tragedy war contains and exerts a strong aesthetic appeal. With all its horrors, war fascinates the mind. As fate, death, history it inspires awe, and creates a sense of the inevitableness of events and of the play of transcendental and inexorable forces in human life. When, under any influence, these feelings appear as an accepting and willing of evil, we have the tragic movement as we find it in art. The death motif in war is the center of a variety of states which are ecstatic and have aesthetic quality. The religion of valor, the passion that is aroused by abandoning oneself to fate, the absolute devotion of service are aesthetic in form as experience, whatever else they may be. The relation of these motives to love and to the reproductive impulses has often been noticed. Devotion and death appear as beautiful; their representation in art is in part a recognition of this fact; in part it is an effort to transform them into the forms of the aesthetic. Art celebrates, but also creates, this luxury of feeling, and war also in its own dramatic movement transforms ugly and plain facts of life by including them in ecstatic states, and surrounding them with glory.

The ideal of glorified death plays a large part in the spirit of war. In war the fear of death is not only in great part stilled, but there is a longing to tempt fate and also to experience death itself, and this desire may become ecstatic. Here we see in effect one of the most important functions of the aesthetic, which is to carry on a drama of the will in which something that is in itself painful becomes pleasant and desired. The desire for war is to some extent a desire for death, a longing for a form of euthanasia in which the individual dies but in a sense lives—lives as glorified in death, and also in the continuance of the life of the group and of the country into which he has been absorbed. It is of course its relation to death that more than anything else has made it necessary that war should appeal to art, and take an aesthetic form, and without the aid of the aesthetic, war could not maintain itself in the world. As a sheer fulfillment of duty war could not survive. By the strength of its aesthetic appeal war must control and overcome the instinct of self-preservation.

War appeals to the human mind as the great adventure of life. To the healthy normal man this appeal, under certain circumstances, may be compelling in its power. Man feels the call of adventure in his blood. War may seem at times the natural expression of what is most real and most essentially masculine in human nature. War is the essence of all the dramatic and heroic story of the world. The past lives most vividly in this theme of war, and the sense of remoteness in time lends an aesthetic coloring to all the story of war, and is in part its fascination. The dead heroes of to-day are glorified by linking their names with the great heroes of the past.

To the glory of the individual, which is an aesthetic appeal, is added the still stronger appeal of the ideal of national glory. The image created in the mind which sustains the devotion of the individual is also an aesthetic form. It is the idea of a nation transformed by story, symbol and eloquence that is established. The dimness and mysticism of the long ago, all dramatic scenes of the national life, the forms of royalty are used in transforming reality into an ideal. The consciousness of a nation is indeed an artist which creates an ideal nation, glorifying and transforming the past, and painting a vivid picture of the empire that is to be. No little part in the German idea of the fatherland has been taken by the revived image of the old German Empire, and the story of Charlemagne, the Ottonides, the Hohenstaufen and the Hohenzollern which has been woven into the life of the present and has become an aesthetic setting for the idea of future greatness.

In the religion of valor, also, we may find aesthetic elements. Valor represents in this cult the spirit of the superior man. It is an aristocratic idea. Military life is full of this theme. The ideals of noblesse oblige, honor, the spirit of sportsmanship, enter into it, and all these concepts are in part aesthetic in nature. It is neither as moral nor as practical ideas that they have so deeply influenced society, but because of their appeal to the sense of the beautiful. All this aspect of war and military life, both in its motives and in its forms, is closely related to the pure beauty of art. The play spirit also, which in some of its developments at least is aesthetic, enters into the motives of war. War, we say, is the great adventure. It is the realization of power. It is an expression of the love of the sense of freedom. It is the great game, in which everything is staked. The love of danger and the love of gambling with life that it contains have roots that are also roots of various forms of art.

Another element, aesthetic in motive and form, obviously related to the reproductive functions of the individual, is the display motive. This motive of display is concerned especially with the idea of courage. It is of course a deep desire of the male to display courage before the female. This display motive must be the main motive of the uniform and all the other ornamental aspects of military life. Rank, titles and decorations belong to the same movement. They are indications of the advancement of the man in those essential qualities of the soldier, the chief of which is courage. The aesthetic forms in which courage is represented help to sustain it, and are an important element in morale, and they also serve a purpose in creating or adding to the allurement of the service and the fascination of war. It is the craving for the display of courage, the desire of the man "to show the stuff that is in him," that gives to war some of its most persistent aesthetic forms, and these aesthetic forms help both to make the display of courage effective and to create courage.

Among these aesthetic elements of war must be considered of course the rhythms, the forms, all the concerted action, the marching (which may be regarded as one of the forms of the dance), the parade, the maneuvering and drill that enter into military life. Already in primitive warfare these aesthetic forms begin to appear and indicate clearly both their practical significance as means of affecting the will, and their relations to the religious and to the reproductive motives. The warrior tries to create in his person the appearance of power, and also by the aesthetic forms he introduces into his warfare, the feeling of power. He believes indeed that through these aesthetic forms he actually creates or exerts power. This is the motive of the war dance, which as an aesthetic form produces this ecstasy of the feeling of power. This power is often conceived to be magical; the women dancing at home are supposed to exert an influence upon the men in the field or upon the enemy, and the savage believes that in his own displays he actually overcomes the spirit of his enemy. Art is here plainly serving a purpose. Display is a means of creating an impression in the minds of the enemy. It also has the purpose of creating an effect in the mind of the soldier himself. The art in military life is, indeed, to give the impression of power to all who must be affected by the exhibition of force.

All social life contains elements that appeal to the aesthetic sense, and these aesthetic elements are by no means solely ornamental. The universal development of etiquette and manners has reference to very practical aspects of the social life. Their function is to influence the will. The highly developed etiquette of military life is not merely to facilitate the military functions, and it is no explanation of the formalism of the military life to say that this is a sign of its archaic nature. Formalism in this life is one of the means taken to cover up all the details of militarism that are repugnant: the hardship, the lack of freedom and the like. Etiquette acts persuasively upon the will, it helps to make military life desired, and to make men submissive under control of absolute leaders. All formalism in social life, considered in one aspect of it, is a symbol of the resignation of the will of the individual. As thus a symbol it may either convey or mediate social feeling, and when social feeling is absent the art of manners may become a substitute for this social feeling, and in both these ways it is a means of giving to society cohesion, order and form.

Such considerations as these help to explain the longing for war or its equivalent which persists in the human heart. It helps us to realize the truth of Cramb's (66) assertion that the whole history of the world shows that man has lacked not only the power but the will to end war and establish perpetual peace. There are still motives in the mind of man that make him approve of war. War is perpetuated because of its heroic form, as a form of experience in which the meaning of life is felt to be exploited, in which life is transformed and glorified, in which the tragedy of life, which in any case is inevitable, becomes a tragedy which, because it bears the form of art, is acceptable and even longed for. This is the allurement of war, its persistent illusion, perhaps. The aesthetic forms of war take war out of the field of reason, and on occasion make it transcend or pervert reason. So we may understand why it is true that sometimes those who but little understand why they are to die on the field of battle may display the greatest courage and the greatest enthusiasm for war, and we must not say that these causes are fatuous because they exist in the realm of aesthetic values.

If we take war too realistically, with reference to its practical motives, its mere killing and looting, which we may suspect are related to the nutritional motive that we always find running through human conduct, and leave out of account those aspects of war which seem to belong mainly to the reproductive motive, to the enthusiasm and intoxication and art of the world, we shall to that extent misunderstand it. These motives cannot, of course, be separated definitely from one another in analyzing conduct, but we cannot be very wrong in differentiating phases of war which belong predominantly to the reproductive motive. It is because, at least, all deep tendencies of life are involved in war that it is so hard to eliminate it from experience. If war were an instinctive reaction it might be controlled by reason. If it were an atavism or a rudimentary organ some social surgery or other might relieve us of it. But war is a product of man's idealism, misdirected and impracticable idealism though it may be, but still something very expressive of what man is. It is this idealism of nations, leading them to the larger life, that makes them cling to war, whether for good or for evil. It will avail little to prove to the world that war is an evil, so long as war is desired, or so long as something which war so readily yields is desired. Statistics of eugenics and proofs that war ruins business will not yet cure us of our habit of war, and not at all so long as there is a vacancy in life which only the dramatic experiences of war can fill. When war is abandoned, it will be given up probably not because economists and sociologists vote against k, and we see that peace is good, but by the consent of a world which, once for all, is willing to renounce something that is dear to it and held to be good, if for no other reason, because it symbolizes what life and reality are. The world appears to have two minds about war, or at least it does not hold consistently to any one attitude toward it. Beneath all judgments about the evils of war, there is the allurement of these aesthetic motives which must be reckoned with in any psychology of war, or in any practical plan for eliminating war from the future experience of the race.

CHAPTER V[ToC]

PATRIOTISM, NATIONALISM AND NATIONAL HONOR

Many authors find in patriotism or in national honor the chief or the sole cause of war. Jones (37), the Freudian, for example, says that patriotism is the sum of those causes of war which are conscious as distinguished from the repressed motives. Nicolai (79) says that patriotism and chauvinism would have no meaning and no interest without reference to war, and that for the arts of peace one needs no patriotism at all. Hoesch-Ernst (32), another German writer, says that patriotism has made history a story of wars. It has developed the highest virtues (and the worst vices), but it creates artificial boundaries among peoples, and gives to every fighter the belief that he is contending against brute force. Veblen (97) says that patriotism is the only obstacle to peace among the nations. MacCurdy (37) speaks of the paradox of human nature seen in the fact that the loyalty we call patriotism, which may make a man a benefactor to the whole race, may become a menace to mankind when it is narrowly focussed. Novicow says that what shall be foreign is a purely conventional matter. Another writer remarks that patriotism is the guise under which the instincts of tiger and wolf run riot.

Several writers, Powers (75), and especially Veblen, place questions of national honor among the main causes of war. Veblen would hold that wars never occur unless the questions involved are first converted into questions of national honor—and are then, but only then, supported as moral issues. Other writers are to be found who make the same claims for honor, saying that wars are always over questions of national honor—honor always meaning here, let us observe, not moral principle but prestige, dignity, analogous to what we call personal pride in the individual.

Broadly speaking, we may say that such views of war base it upon the fact that nations are individuals, having personality and self-consciousness, and are moved by emotions such as dominate the individual, although such analogies between individual and group are never free from objection. But that the consciousness of the group as an individual may be exceedingly intense, full of aggressiveness, intolerance and pride, of great sensitiveness to all outside the group, is, of course, obvious from the history of nations. Groups thus endowed with a sense of solidarity and sensitiveness become highly vitalized and persistent personalities which stalk through the pages of history with tremendous power and tenacity of purpose. Nations thus live intensely, and in their intense feelings and personal attributes there are expressed purposes and ideals, conscious and unconscious, analogous to those which make the individual also an historical entity.

There seem to be two aspects of group personality that need to be investigated in detail in any study of war, and which must be distinguished from one another, as they may be by referring to the primitive or central emotional quality which each has. These are patriotism and the sense of honor, the former, for our purposes, to be regarded as the sum of the affections a people has for that which is its own; the second a sum of those feelings and attitudes, the emotional root of which is pride. These feelings are the affective basis of the idea of nationalism.

Patriotism, or love of country or feeling of loyalty toward country, is a highly complex emotion or mood, and its object, an ideal construction, is formed by a process of abstraction in which certain qualities of home, environment, social objects selected by those feelings are made over into a composite whole. Patriotism is immediately connected with the fact that men, by some biological or other necessity are formed into groups, in which the consciousness of the individual in regard to the group and its members and its habitat is different from the consciousness in regard to everything outside. Patriotism is devotion to all that pertains to the group as a separate unit, and its form and intensity are dependent upon what the group as a unit does. The size and organization of the group to which the patriotic feeling may go out may, it is obvious, differ widely.

There appear to be five more or less distinct and different factors in patriotism; or, we might say, five or more objects of attachment, the love of which all together constitutes patriotism. These objects are: home, as physical country; the group as collection of individuals; mores, the sum of the customs of a people; country as personality or historical object, and its various symbols; leaders or organized government or state, its conventions and representations.

The deepest of all strata in the very complex feeling of patriotism, one which is concerned in every relation among nations, is the devotion to, or habituation to—or we might say identity with—the great complex of ideals, feelings, and the like which make up the customs, folkways, mores or ethos of a group. The individual as a conscious person is to such an extent created by these conscious factors that we find that the reality sense is in part produced by them. We have already referred to the belief on the part of many peoples that they alone are real. Foreigners with different mores probably always seem less real than our own people: they may even be looked upon as automata, as not being moved by the feelings and purposes that we ourselves have. The language of the foreigner, the uneducated man is inclined to think of as having no meaning. Every group has its own ways, and whatever else war may be, it is in every case an argument for the superiority of the ways of the group. Each group in war feels that its own most intimate possessions, its morality and its genius are attacked. It guards these instinctively, and a part of the purpose of aggression is the desire to make these things prevail in the world, because they are felt to be the only right, true and sensible ways. This preference for our own ways, and participation in them, is the basic fact of nationality.

The feeling of patriotism is thus primarily an æsthetic appreciation (or at least an immediate and intuitive one) of the totality of the life of the group. Just as standards of normality and artistic form in regard to the human person and its adornment vary from group to group, and are produced in the consciousness of the group, so there is a reaction of pleasure to, and attachment for, the whole of the life that surrounds the individual. This appreciation is wider than moral feeling, which indeed is in part based upon it, and is a sense of the fitness of any act to belong to the whole of the conduct that promotes the welfare of the group.

Patriotism is best known, or at least it is most celebrated, as an attachment to the native land as place. This is the poet's patriotism. It is, however, something more than a mere love of the homeland as landscape, and we cannot, indeed, separate out any pure love of physical country. The love of country seems to be an expansion of the attachment to home, as the place in which the family relations are experienced. The sense of place is the core of the love of home, but it is supplemented and reënforced by the personal affections. The attachment to place has also its biological roots, the sense of familiarity of place being, of course, as the basis of orientation, a deep element in consciousness. Fear of the unknown increases the attachment to the known. The land as the source of livelihood is loved, and there are also older elements in the love of the land as is shown by myths and folklore. There is in it the idea of ownership but also the idea of belonging to the land. So there is both the filial and the parental attitude in patriotism. As fatherland or motherland country is superior to and antecedent to us; as possession it is something to hold and to transmit, to improve and to leave the impress of our work upon. As historic land there is the idea of sacred soil, of land which persists through all time. Ancestor worship enters; the soil as the resting place of forefathers acquires not only a religious meaning, but there is attached to it such feeling of an æsthetic nature as is attached to everything that is full of tradition. The protective attitude is prominent in this patriotic love of land. There is in it the fear of invasion, a sense of the sacredness and inviolability of the body of a country when it has once been established as an historical entity. A study of the psychology of invasion and of homesickness would no doubt throw further light upon the still unknown aspects of the intricate moods of home love.

A third element in patriotism is social feeling. This is primitive, but whether it is a herd consciousness or a radiation of the social feelings connected with blood relationship and community of immediate practical interests it is not especially important to decide in this connection, except that the assumption of a specific herd instinct as distinguished from social feeling or instinct appears to be unnecessary. Loyalty of the individual to the group, which is accompanied by or is based upon intensified or ecstatic feeling is one of the strongest elements of patriotism. Social feeling as an attachment to the widest group, the nation, is in general a latent feeling or an undeveloped one. We see it becoming active and intense only under circumstances in which the whole group is threatened or for some other reason is compelled to act as a unit. The recent psychology of the soldier shows us that absolute devotion to or absorption in the whole may be produced automatically by the proper stimuli, and may be controlled as the mechanism of morale, and that elementary sensations enter into it. The wider social consciousness as devotion to the whole group, the nation, is based upon such reactions, and can probably not be fully, developed without them.

This transformation of the individual is something desired and sought by the individual. It comes as a fulfillment of impulses that are latent in the social life, and these impulses are tendencies to seek exalted states of social feeling, rather than to perform specific social functions. War is seized upon by the social consciousness, so to speak, as an opportunity to extend itself and become more intense, and indeed in war we see the social consciousness performing a work of genius, overcoming apparently insurmountable obstacles and aversions. Under such circumstances, social feeling becomes strongly fortified against many suggestions that tend to break it down. An intense ferocity is directed toward any disloyal member of the group, a fictitious character may be attributed to the enemy, and there is an imaginative interpretation of all his acts in a manner favorable to uniting the sentiment of the group. This does not appear to be merely a defensive reaction or a result of fear, but an awareness of the precarious condition of the social feeling itself, when it is widely extended. In its moments of most extreme and fanatical intensity it is likely to be most unstable. It has been said that the surest way to break down social feeling is to make it include too much. The conditions of war always create that danger. Patriotism is greatly intensified, but it is in danger of collapse. The mild patriotism and yet secure cohesion of peace is replaced by a social consciousness increased in breadth and depth, but which is liable also to sudden contraction. All nations when at war appear to be quite as much afraid of themselves as they are of the enemy. It is in part this susceptibility of social feeling to rapid and extreme variation that makes patriotism so mysterious a force. It may be extended in a moment to unite supposed incompatibles, or again apparently strongly cemented groups may fall into disunion. This seems to be due to the fact that social feeling is plastic and is subject to control and is a force and not merely an instinctive reaction.

The fourth element of patriotism is devotion to leader, to government, or to the idea of state. Devotion to leader must have been one of the earliest forms of loyalty. The prestige of the leader is acquired as the result of any action of the group under stimuli that produce either fear or anger. Just as the necessity for strong action creates the leader out of average humanity, so continuation of this necessity, that is the whole historical movement of the life of the group such as a nation continues to add elements of prestige to leadership. The exaltation and typically to some extent the deification of the leader is a natural consequence or aspect of the dramatic life of the group. The leader becomes symbolic of the group, and of its purposes and meaning, so that in devoting itself to a leader the people do more than sustain an emotional relation to a superior person. They transfer their own individual nature, so to speak, to the leader so that he becomes the essence or the spirit of the people.

The dynasty is the connecting link between the leader as the object of devotion of a people and the abstract idea of the state as an entity. The prestige and all the supernaturalism contained in the ideas of divine rights and divine descent that have become attached to the idea of kings are transferred to the government, or extended to the government or state. The illusion of superiority and remoteness is kept up by various forms and ceremonials. Becoming an abstract form, the organization or the office remaining while its personnel changes, the state acquires the character of a religious object. It takes on the character of the eternal, while still it retains all the persuasive and suggestive qualities that belong to individuals. The idea of state thus commands a very high degree of loyalty, and is in a sense itself a product of the feeling of loyalty. Once established the state becomes a medium through which patriotism may be subjected to control and also be manipulated for political ends. It can be extended, transferred, contracted according to what at any time may be subsumed under the government that has thus come to be the central and coordinating factor in the object of patriotism.

Another element of patriotism appears in the form of a deep reaction of the mind of the individual, usually under the influence of social stimuli that take the form of artistic or dramatic situations, to the idea of country as a historical personage. This stimulus may be symbolic—the flag or any other emblem signifying the life or the spirit of a country; or it may be concrete, historic, a story, and this story, which is the content of the idea of country, is in general a narrative assuming a certain artistic form in which facts are treated at least selectively, and usually imaginatively. This work of portrayal of the life of a nation by its story is consciously or unconsciously an appeal to the will; it is given artistic rather than scientific form for this reason. Its purpose is to present a national spirit, or ideal, or principle, and also to persuade the mind to become loyal to this spirit of country.

All countries, as the object of the feeling of patriotism, tend to be personified, and it is thus as a person that country commands the deepest loyalty of the individual. Hence the personified representation of country whenever the will of the individual is appealed to most strongly. Redier (30), a French writer, illustrates this very clearly when he pleads that the interest of the motherland must be placed first. It is not for liberty, or for the civilization of the world that the French are fighting, he says, but for France, "that most saintly, animated and tragic of figures." It is by this process of personification of country that the patriotism of the individual becomes most complete. He thus becomes loyal to a living reality representing an idea, a spirit. To defend the honor and the integrity of this person, one is willing to sacrifice everything that is individually possessed, in causes that can affect one materially in no important way. The desire for personal identity and immortality may be transferred to country as thus idealized, and the individual is satisfied to lose himself that country may live. The common man realizes in a simple and concrete way, in regard to country, the Hegelian conception of state as the reality of mind in the world. About this idea of country held by the truly patriotic mind, as we find it expressed in history and in literature, there grows up a religious sentiment, which protects from criticism the qualities of the ideal personage. A certain pathos of country attaches itself to all who as great individuals represent country, and to all its portrayals and symbols. All these symbols acquire a high degree of suggestive force because of the depth of sentiment and the richness of the content of the ideas that have produced them.

Patriotism, then, is a very complex idea and feeling which we realize as love of country—or, as we might better say, it is an animation by the idea of a very complex object which is country. It is a profound attachment, rooted in the most original and essential relations, and appears to be natural and necessary to every normal mind. The individual consciousness is complete only by including the attachments, in narrower and broader relations, to precisely the elements that enter into patriotism—to place, to the fundamental ways and appreciations of the social surroundings, to persons, to authority, to traditions. The composite effects of these attachments may be greater or smaller, as determined by a totality of conditions, but the foundations of patriotism, whatever its object, are deep in consciousness.

The presence and persistence of patriotism in the world as a deep and intense feeling raises questions that are of both theoretical and practical importance. Here we are interested mainly in the relation of patriotism to war. There is a widespread view that may be expressed somewhat as follows. Patriotism and internationalism or cosmopolitanism are two opposites. Patriotism delimits groups, whether rightly or wrongly, and therefore produces antagonism in the world, and either causes wars directly or maintains a continual threat of wars. On the other hand there is cosmopolitanism, a very little too much of which might destroy civilization by removing the inspiration that country gives. Patriotism, standing for the integrity of historic entities, makes the world a world of nations having separate and conflicting wills. Thus we have a choice of evils—between a world of ardent, quarrelsome, but efficient groups and a world in which the chief motive of progress, the vital principle of national growth, is left out.

What is the truth about this? What is the relation of patriotism to war? Confusion and difference of views are likely to arise from a failure to distinguish in the idea of nationalism as a whole, between two very different emotions and purposes. Psychologically, patriotism is a sum of affections. As such, it has a distinct character, constitutes a mood, the possession of which may characterize an individual, and dominance by which may be the main fact in life. As a devotion to certain objects, this motive of patriotism enters into the sphere of motives of war, but it does so mainly, in our view, as a powerful and highly suggestible energy which becomes aggressive only under the stimulus of threat to its objects. Patriotism is indeed tolerant by nature, and one may well doubt whether a genuine love of country is possible without a profound realization of the value of other countries as objects of devotion, and of the validity of the patriotism of every group. True patriotism must always be to some extent devotion to patriotism itself as a progressive force in the world, and it is, therefore, by the very fact of becoming intense and pure, a motive of internationalism.

Such patriotism seems to be free from most of the delusions of greatness that affect national consciousness. Its mood is optimistic and its spirit tolerant and just. We should say that, instead of causing wars, by any initiative of its own, it is itself caused by wars. It grows in a medium of defensive attitudes. It may, of course, play into the hands of all the aggressive motives of war; there are always circumstances creating the illusion of danger, and it is possible, even, that there would be little war if there were no patriotism as love of country to support it. But on the other hand patriotism itself does not seem to be a cause of war. We should say, indeed, that patriotism, to the extent that it becomes intelligent and is a devotion to an ideal of country, and so is not dominated and influenced by other motives is a factor of peace in the world, and is moral in its principles and its nature. This is not the place in which to speak of internationalism as an ideal, but we may at least observe how, conceivably, patriotism may be cultivated, be greatly deepened and intensified, while at the same time and indeed because of this deepening of patriotism all international causes are also served. Such patriotism may leave us with the danger of wars, since it leaves us with a world of individuals having wills and self-interests. But this world, with such a danger of wars, would be better after all than a certain kind of cosmopolitanism in a world such as, for example, might be arranged by an unintelligent socialism.

National Honor

There is another aspect of nationalism, which is psychologically distinct from patriotism as love of country, because primitively it is based upon a different motive. Emotionally it is expressed finally as national pride, as we use the word mainly with a derogatory implication. Just as patriotic feeling is intensified and crystallized by fear, and is in a sense an overcoming of fear, by devotion, so this motive of pride rests upon a basis of jealousy and of hatred, and is essentially a movement in which display is used to obtain prestige, to overcome opposition and to defend consciousness against a sense of inferiority. As a display motive it contains the feeling of anger, and the impulses of combat, and its relation to the reproductive motive is obvious. It is as an aspect of a deeply pessimistic strain in national life, as a process in which an original and naïve sense of reality and superiority, challenged and attacked and brought into the field of opposition and criticism and thus negated by a feeling of inferiority, that this motive becomes of special interest to the psychology of nations and of war.

The roots of this pride and honor process we can find in the impulses which lead groups to demonstrate power and prowess to one another, and in the original feeling of reality which is accompanied by the belief on the part of the group that its own ways are normal and right. We might mention as significant the widespread belief on the part of very primitive peoples that they alone are real people, or are the superior people of the world. The Lapps, Sumner (70) says, regard themselves as "men" as distinguished from all other peoples, a form of self-consciousness which lingers in all such antitheses as Jew and Gentile, Greek and barbarian, and the like. This basic idea of difference in reality is not confined to a few peoples, but there is a tendency for every group to divide the world into two parties: selves and outsiders, and this feeling of difference readily develops into the moods in which there is a mystic sense on the part of a people of being the chosen people, and into those specific theories of superiority that run through the history of most if not of all nations. It belongs to the psychology of Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Chinese, Japanese, and also to Americans as well as Germans; and we learn that Russian books and newspapers sometimes discuss the civilizing mission of Russia.

That the motives of display and pride have been peculiarly active in Germany in the last few decades has been maintained by many writers. German writers are inclined to believe that the motive for the "attack upon Germany" was jealousy on the part of her enemies, that Germany was supreme in everything and other countries could tolerate this no longer. Germany has talked about her virtues, her rank, her coming place in the world. Bergson says that Germany's energy comes from pride. Some see the source of this alleged conceit of Germany and her excessive self-consciousness in Germany's hard experiences—the recent slavery, Germany's position as the battle ground of Europe, her late arrival among the great nations. Germany still lacks, they say, the quiet assurance that an old culture gives. Some call Germany morbid and quarrelsome. Again we hear the pride of Germany called an adolescent phenomenon, and they say that Germany is fighting not for principle but to see who is superior. Bosanquet (91) thinks that the lack of political liberty in Germany has had the effect of producing self-consciousness, and a morbid interest in small distinctions of title and rank, and that it is thwarted national ambition that has expressed itself in such writers as Treitschke and Bernhardi. Bourdon (67) thinks Germany is jealous of the culture and the glory and the political and literary prestige of France. Collier (68) says that Germany is forever looking into a mirror rather than out the open window and even sees herself a little out of focus. The seriousness of the Germans, others think, is an indication that Germany takes herself too seriously.

But national vanity, we see, is certainly not confined to Germany. The Germans at least think France is highly self-conscious, always thinking of her dignity, glory, prestige and of revenge. Wundt (85) feels much the same about the English. He says they always want to be first in everything, and to dominate the earth. We know that the Confederacy of the United States, at the outbreak of the Civil War, appealed to the world on the ground that it had reached the most noble civilization the world had ever seen. The Japanese (73), we have heard, believe that they are of divine descent, and that they are supreme in manliness, loyalty and virtue. Every nation presumably has somewhere in the back of its mind a belief in its own supremacy in something, and has a sense of being or having something that makes it unique in the world.

We can now see in part how the idea of national honor arises out of the pride of nations. Certain fundamental feelings issue in the form of claims of superiority or supremacy, which may be either vague and unclear or very definite and self-conscious. This claim to superiority is precisely what we mean by national vanity. With this consciousness there goes a knowledge that these claims are in general not recognized by other nations, or that the prestige which the recognition of this superiority presupposes is at least insecure. Since, of course, these claims to supremacy cannot all be valid, there must be a great amount of inferiority parading in the world as superiority, many fictitious and presumably half-hearted assumptions that must not only be defended against outsiders, but must also be internally fortified. The pride and the conceit must be justified by the creation of a fictitious past, and of an impossible future. The motive of these falsifications on the part of race consciousness is clear. A nation is defending its claim to superiority by first establishing the claim in its own mind. These claims being really unfounded must be placed beyond criticism. They must be given a religious form. But also external forms and relations of an artificial nature must be established. Nations always hide behind barriers of formality. They make displays to one another. In this way the feeling and the appearance of superiority are kept up. Everything external to the group and not participating in its illusion of supremacy must be kept external to it. The belief which the nation itself assumes in regard to its virtue must be demanded from all outsiders with whom the nation has relations of any kind. At least the forms of the recognition of the claim must be insisted upon. This is the principle of national honor. It is a defense of certain ideal or fictitious values in which nations insist that others should recognize these claims and values. National honor is an artifice for defending a claim to superiority and concealing an actual inferiority, and it relates to values which, in general, do not exist. Its work is concerned with the maintenance of prestige.

These ideal values and the integrity of the appearance of supremacy, are sustained by the assumption of the forms of empire or the imperialistic attitude. Empire is indeed what is dramatized in the forms which nations assume, and this dramatization of imperial form is the background of all the ideas of honor. The maintenance of the integrity of the imperial form, as an ideal realization of the supremacy a nation assumes, becomes more important than even the securing of material possessions, for the imperial form is the very reality and existence of the nation. It is at bottom merely the assertion that its own mores are supreme and entitled to be universal. To admit that this is not so would be to become to some extent unreal, and to lose something essential to a sense of personality. Therefore, there can be thus far no intimate relations among nations. They must present to one another symbolic representations of themselves. It is their flag, the symbol of their place in the world and of their military prowess and courage; their ambassadors, the representatives of their dignity and the symbol of their pretended friendliness; their display of royal forms, which is the sign of their prestige and their imperial nature, about which they are most sensitive. Offenses to these symbols of what a nation assumes itself to be and demands that others should think it, tend to be mortal offenses, because they invade the sphere of what nations hold to be their reality. So the relations of nations to one another must, as we say, always be formal. Nations can allow no intimacy. Why they cannot one can readily see, for it is not difficult to detect the fear, the jealousy, and the inferiority motive behind all this assumption and display. Treitschke shows us what national honor may mean when it is carried out into a philosophy of state. Here is the idea of national self-consciousness at its greatest height. The state must not tolerate equals, or at least it must reduce the number of equals as much as possible. The state must be absolutely independent. The state, furthermore, cannot have too keen a sense of its dignity and position. A state must declare war if its flag is insulted, however slight the circumstances may be.

National honor, its codes and standards and its justification and vindication by combat, present so many resemblances to the practice of dueling and the idea of personal honor once so generally held by the upper class, and still existent where the military spirit prevails, that we ought to study the dueling code with reference to the psychology of war. There are psychological features that appear to be identical. The idea of personal honor is associated with a feeling of superiority that must be defended. Any offense or affront to the individual was a mortal offense. The superiority in question was first of all superiority of ancestry; it was this that constituted the value of the individual and set the standards that he must maintain. This superiority was to be judged not so much by conduct as by an assertion of it represented by certain external forms. The individual by his manners declared himself a gentleman, and laid claim to forms and considerations that must not be omitted in relations with him. The virtues he defended so rigorously did not exist as a rule in calculable or practical form, since they did nothing objective. They might be ornamental or purely fictitious. They existed in the form of claims, and the values assigned to them were arbitrary. The man declared himself possessed of superiority, and was ready uniformly to prove this claim by acts purporting to indicate willingness to die.

This code and belief belonged to a day when relations among individuals were simple and, so to speak, external. They were relations that were readily codified and made invariable, since they had no essential practical content or function. Manners were significant as substitutes for friendly relations, since the system was lacking in moral and social sentiments. Manners were a means of fitting together individuals who really belonged to no functioning whole, except when, for example, they might be united in military exploits. Everything was unitary and independent of everything else in this society.

Now this code and this philosophy of life have declined precisely to the extent that the conception of ideal human life has changed, from that of something ornamental and personal to that of something useful and moral. Life has become organized, and relations have become more practical, so that the values of conduct may now be estimated, and one no longer may maintain a claim to virtue based upon forms expressing intangible or subjective or unreal virtues. The virtues of a man in a democratic society are, indeed, more or less obvious and open. Pride of family, an ornamental mode of life, and a scorn of death are no longer necessary and sufficient guarantees of worth. Evidence of value is both possible and required; before value is admitted it must be shown. Self-defense in a legal and moral society are in the main superfluous, and the values of individuals are so changed that to justify them by the duel would seem out of place. Its service being to defend artificial or arbitrary claims to distinction, it ceases or it falls into disuse when the individual's reality and value come to depend upon his functional place in society. It would be highly illogical to put to test social values by a process that appears to have nothing but anti-social elements in it.

That nations exhibit the same type of relation toward one another that we find in dueling and its code seems to be clear, although we must always avoid pressing any analogy between individual and nation too far. A claim to superiority that is deep and irrational, and which appears on the surface as sensitiveness in regard to honor and vanity, keeps nations always in defensive attitudes, quite apart from the actual fear of aggression. This superficiality or at least externality of relations is the source of actual conflict. The forms employed to maintain these relations are obviously ornamental, are elaborations of the forms of courtesy among individuals, are little dramas of friendship, so to speak, little plays representing friendliness, while the diplomatic motives are simply to obtain everything possible, each nation for itself, without war, and to maintain prestige. These relations are substitutes for social feelings that do not exist. Generally speaking, nations are never friends. They never really share in anything. They are all highly conscious of their own prestige and dignity, and they always communicate with one another in a formal way. In it all, we see the signs of emotions and habits that extend far back to the beginnings of social life and indeed into animal life. The display which takes the form of social relations among nations, represented well by uniformed diplomats, is so plainly archaic and its real meaning so obvious that we can hardly fail to understand what it is all about. That the attitude is really defensive, and the purpose to keep up appearances before strangers, so to speak, can hardly be doubted.

The fact that these questions of national honor are in some respects detached from the main realities of political relations, and are, indeed, fictitious and exist in the region of the imagination, that they pertain to the conventional and ornamental sides of national life, might be supposed to indicate that they could easily be done away with, and all these fertile causes of war be eliminated. That must not be assumed. Vanity has deep roots. The ornamental in life symbolizes the real. It is the point of entrance to the deepest motives. Conventional and archaic forms do not die out, just because we discover that they are irrational and harmful, and the causes they serve seem to us to be unreal. This kind of unreality in the consciousness of nations is in fact the ideal for which nations live. Nations play at being great, and fight to defend their prestige—but this play, as we know, is oftentimes terribly real.

CHAPTER VI[ToC]

"CAUSES" AS PRINCIPLES AND ISSUES IN WAR

The causes for which wars are fought, or which are asserted to be the causes, make one of the important psychological problems of war. Sometimes these causes are elusive, sometimes they may give occasion for cynicism and a pessimistic view of national morals; again we see self-deception, again ideals seeking for light, peoples trying to find something to live for or to die for. We see in the recent great war as in other wars, a great variety of causes for which men are said to be fighting. Some would say that the war was entirely a war of principles; some take a purely political point of view and say that principles are not involved at all, and others that nothing was displayed at all of motives except primitive passions which are equally devoid of moral issues or any principles.

It would be interesting from the psychological point of view to make, if possible, a complete collection and classification of the causes that have been brought forward as the fundamental things fought for in the late war. Many widely different and divergent views are held. The forms in which the issues of the war have been stated are almost innumerable. New definitions and new statements of old conventional ideas appear continuously. Every writer seems to see the war from a different point of view from all others. Eventually, we may suppose, all this will be clear, since these "causes" of the war will be one of the great themes of future philosophical history. At present we can only formulate such a view as may be suggestive with reference to general interpretations of the place of principles and causes in war.

Let us examine a few of the opinions about the issues fought for in the recent war. MacFall (56) says that the whole strategy of the civilized world is bent upon creating permanent peace. Many speak of the war as a war to overcome war; we are told that one of the most conscious motives of the soldiers in the field has been to make the great war the last war the world should ever see. Something of the same idea is involved in the view each nation has that it was attacked, and that the purpose of the war was to defeat and punish aggressors. Apparently every nation and every army engaged in the war has had the feeling that it was fighting in the interests of world peace.

The German explanations of the war and of its issues have been very numerous and widely varied. The German has had his own interpretation of the "white man's burden," Tower (57) calls attention to the German hybrid word "Sahibthum," expressing the mission of a people. Each nation has its essence, which becomes a deep impulse. The German's impulse is translatable in the words "Be organized." The German has been eager to organize the world. He-believed in all seriousness that he was fighting the fight of order against chaos. It was the fight of the spirit against that which is dead and inefficient. The German believed that the systematic exploitation of the world was his peculiar mission. Ostwald is the great apostle of this view. He said that the war was a battle of the higher life against the lower instincts. Germany represents European civilization. The German emperor said that Germany should do for Europe what Prussia had done for Germany—organize it. In the German philosophy of life this principle of order had become a serious principle. An inefficient and disorderly world had need of Germany. Everywhere there was waste and stupidity, and a want of reason in the world. System was to be the cure. The fundamental fault in all this disorder the German mind recognized as an excessive individualism. Individual instinct and the social order were in eternal conflict, as Dietzel expressed the issue, and Germany stood for the social order, for reason, since reason is precisely the denial of the instincts and the desires of the individual in the interest of a foreseen result.

Shortly after the beginning of the war, we remember, a manifesto appeared signed by three thousand German university professors and other teachers, saying that they, the signers, firmly believed that the salvation of the whole of European civilization depended upon the victory of German militarism. Hintze (49) said that Germany was fighting for the freedom of everybody, meaning presumably according to the German principle that freedom consists in voluntarily submitting to order. This freedom is also in Hintze's view a principle of freedom and equal rights for all nations, in so far as these nations have reached the necessary stage of civilization. The mission of the coming central management of mankind (Menschheitzentralverwaltung) implied in the most ideal theory of Germany's mission is the true German burden. Haeckel says that the work of the German people to assure and develop civilization gives Germany the right to occupy the Balkans, Asia Minor, Syria, and Mesopotamia, and to exclude from those countries the races that occupy them. Schellendorf says that Germany must not forget her civilizing task, which is to become the nucleus of a future empire of the west. Koenig says that the spiritual life of Europe is at stake, Germany's fight is the fight of civilization against barbarism—against Russian barbarism he means. This ought to be the cause of all Western Europe, but England and France have betrayed the western civilization into the hands of the East. This belief gave to Germany's cause a deep impulsion (12).

Another way in which Germany's cause was frequently stated was that Germany was a pure, virile and young race which was fighting the older civilizations of the world. Vigor was assured of victory in any case, but young life had a duty to perform—that of clearing the way for new growth. This has found numerous forms of expression among German writers, some of them highly dramatic and exaggerated; as, for example, that the human race is divided into two species or kinds, the male and the female, assuming that the German is the male among the national spirits.

With these views of the nature of the German ideal or cause there have gone, of course, interpretations of the conscious motives and principles of other nations. In general other nations had no principle. German writers have tended to believe that both England and America were hypocritical and that their pretended democratic cause was at heart only party and political aspiration. These nations, they said, claimed to desire the world to enjoy the rights of democracy, but each country assumed that it itself must be the controller of that democratic principle. Another frequently expressed view of the purposes of England and America is that they have purely sordid interests, that they are capable of fighting only for advantage and material gain.

Many of these German views of the war imply a principle that runs through many fields of German thought—that values are something to be determined objectively. It is a scientific principle. Its conclusions rest upon proof, rather than upon subjective principles of valuation. There is another argument which is in part based upon an interpretation of scientific principles, but is in part also a fatalistic doctrine—confidence in the issues of battle as a means of testing the right and the validity of culture. The right will prevail, on this theory, because the right is the stronger or because in some sense strength is the right, and because the method of selection of the best by struggle is a basic principle, and may be applied to everything that is living or is a product of life.

If the German interpretation of the German cause has been dominated by an ideal of objective proof, we hear on the other side much about subjective rights and subjective evaluations—the right, for example, of every people to determine its own life, to have its own culture, to decide upon its own nationality. The Allies have believed that they were fighting to establish this principle throughout the world, and that this principle is diametrically opposed to the German principle. The thought of centralization, of a hierarchy of nations and the like, is wholly foreign to this democratic principle. Bergson (17) finds in the idea of industry the cause of the war and the principle of opposition in it. The Allies, he says, have been fighting against materialism with the forces of the spirit. Germany's forces are material. A mechanism is fighting against a self-renewing spirit. The ideal of force is met by the force of the ideal.

Boutroux (13) says that France, in the war, has had before her eyes the idea of humanity; France was fighting for the recognition of the rights of personality—rights of each nation to its own existence. France is a champion of freedom; she wants all the legitimate aspirations of peoples to be realized. Germanism, with its ideal of force, is contrasted with the ideal of Greek and Christian culture and philosophy. A cult of justice and modesty is contrasted with the cult of power; in the former, sentiment and feeling have a place as criteria of values; in the latter the appeal is to science and to reason.

Hobhouse (34) says that the war is a conflict of the spirit of the West against the spirit of the East (precisely the same as the German view, we see, but with a very different identification of the champions). Germany has never felt the spirit of the West. The war is for something far deeper than national freedom; it is a war to justify the primary rules of right. Burnet (18) thinks that the great conflict was a conflict between Kultur as nationalistic, and humanism as something international—that Germany, in recent years, had abandoned an ideal of culture for that of specialization in the service of the State. England's answer to the call was not to the specific need and appeal of Belgium, but because England felt that there was something in Germany incompatible with Western civilization.

Le Bon (42) says that we must always remember that the Teuton is the irreconcilable enemy of the civilization of the French and of all it stands for, and that he must always be kept at a distance. Durkheim's view is that Germany's ambition and energy and will antagonize the freedom of the rest of the world, and the rest of the world felt this and the war was the consequence. Dillon (55) says that the future for which Germany has been striving is a future incompatible with those ideals which our race cherishes and reveres, and that we must make a definite choice between our philosophy and religion and our code on one side and those of the German on the other. Drawbridge (19) says that the war has been a conflict between the ideals of gentleness and tact, on one side, and of brutality and ruthlessness on the other. It is the Christian spirit against the Nietzschean.

Again we have been told that the war was simply a war of autocracy against democracy, of mediævalism against modern life, of progress against stagnation, of militarism and war against peace, of the Napoleonic against the Christian spirit. Occasionally we hear more personal and subjective notes. Redier (30) says that France was fighting solely to retain mastery of her own genius, in order to draw from it noble joys and just profits.

The American point of view has been expressed in several forms by the President of the United States. For example, he has said that we are one of the champions of the rights of mankind. The world must be made safe for democracy. And again, that America is fighting for no selfish purpose, but for the liberation of peoples everywhere from the aggression of autocratic powers. This view that the war was remedial, that it was in the interest of progress, to prevent that which is belated in civilization from gaining the upper hand, and that it is on the part of America a war of participation and aid in a cause which though supremely good might otherwise be lost, is the prevailing idea. That this spirit of the championship of causes and of justice to other nations is a stronger motive in the Anglo-Saxon peoples than in others appears to be an opinion that history on the whole can confirm.

It is relatively easy to obtain the opinion of philosophers about the "causes" represented in the war; it would be of interest also to know what the millions of men in the field think. Data are not altogether wanting, but there appear to be no general studies. That many men, in more than one army, have no clear knowledge of any cause for which they have fought, except as these causes are nationalistic is certain. That there is ignorance even among the men of our own army in regard to the causes and purposes of the war has been made evident. Knowledge and enlightenment can hardly have been greater elsewhere. German soldiers are credited with believing that they are defending Germany from attack. The French soldier was fighting for France. The invasion of his country left him no doubt and no choice. The English soldier has often said that he was doing it for the women and the children, and one writer says that the deepest motive of two thirds of the British army was to make this war the last. The American soldier, from the nature of the circumstances under which he himself entered the war has been more conscious of a motive of helpfulness and of comradeship with other peoples who are in distress and danger. Probably the idea of America's honor, and the more abstract idea still of the cause of freedom, even though this idea has been, so to speak, our watchword, have not been the most influential motives in the mind of the individual. Germany was attacking people who were in distress, and the American soldier went over to make the scales turn in the direction of victory for the oppressed.

There is, of course, a literature of the war produced by the soldier in the field, in which there are expressed high ideals, abstract conceptions and firm principles. The French soldier has written about liberty, the German soldier has had considerable to say about a Kultur war. An American volunteer in the British army has written, "I find myself among the millions of others in the great allied armies fighting for all I believe right and civilized and humane against a power which is evil and which threatens the existence of all the right we prize and the freedom we enjoy" (24). But in general the consciousness of the soldier, from all the evidence we have, was concerned, as presumably was that of most of us, mainly with the most obvious qualities of opposing forces, their concrete actions, and the personal motives of rulers.

Leaving aside so far as one can one's own partisanship and mores (which is not a very easy task), what causes can we say, with a considerable degree of certainty, have actually been issues in the present war? To some extent what one thinks these causes are will remain matters of personal opinion and preference. Are there also principles which, when once observed, will be accepted as the fundamental "causes" of the war? There seem to be three at least which characterize wide differences in the ideals and the civilization of the opposing forces.

There is, first of all, an issue between the ideals of a relatively autocratic form of government and a relatively more democratic form of government. This was a cause of the intellectuals, but it was also a popular cause. Men in general like the form of government under which they live. From the standpoint of those who hold that a democratic form of government is right, the war seemed to be a conflict between a modern and progressive régime and an old and vicious one. So far as this autocratic principle aimed to suppress the rights of individuals, or to menace the liberties of small nations, so far as it was aggressively militaristic and had imperial ambitions, which could be achieved only by force, it stood clearly opposed to democracy. Democracy and autocracy were plainly at war with one another, and yet if we look closely we shall see that neither one can offer any actual demonstration of its validity as the most superior or the final form of government. In part they may appeal to the observable course of history for their justification, but the final source of judgment seems to rest in the mass of opinion in the world. Questions of form and taste are not wholly absent. But the believer in democracy and the believer in autocracy will both assert that deep differences in principle are involved. They will not admit that democracy and autocracy are superficial forms, and are questions of taste, and they will not agree with Munsterberg, who says that the two forms tend inevitably toward a compromise, by a process of alternation in which first one and-then the other is the dominant form in the world.

The war, in another aspect of it, has been a conflict between the idea of nationalism and that of internationalism. It is a conflict between an ideal of state, represented in the German philosophy of state by the principle of complete autonomy of the individual nation, and one which assumes that states, while retaining their rights of sovereignty are to be governed by laws which regulate their conduct as functioning members of a society of nations. The difference is that, relatively, between a state of anarchy among nations and a state of order. To some extent there has been a conflict between the idea of rights and the idea of duties of nations. This internationalism is not merely a sociological principle, something academic and scientific, as a theory of state or society; it is an ethical principle, which contains some recognition of justice as a subjective principle. It has some roots in theory, but it is also based upon the immediate recognition of the rights of peoples to their own individual lives. Its ideal is a world containing many nations, coördinated by natural processes and not a world in which a single nation or a few may hold the supreme place, except as this supremacy might come by a process of natural development.

The third conflict of the war was one which we may call a psychological conflict. It was a conflict between two ideas of life, one based upon a belief in the supremacy of reason, the other implying that the final test of values in life remains in the sphere of the feelings, or is a matter of appreciation. Germany, in her recent history, has stood conspicuously for the belief that human society may and indeed must be controlled and regulated by definite principles—principles that must be determined according to the methods of science. These principles take the place, in this philosophy of life, of certain typical human reactions that are believed to be demonstrably irrational. In its visible and most practical form the application of this principle is through organization.

This characterization of German life reveals something very much like a paradox in the principles of the war. We see a conflict in one direction between a certain mediævalism in government and social forms and a more modern and progressive type; we see also a conflict of a modernism of an extreme form, represented by a scientific civilization, united with this mediævalism, and in opposition to a conception of life which is in some respects more naïve and more primitive. The explanation of this paradox is that Germany offers an illustration of a phenomenon of development that has been seen before in history, of an excess of development and specialization in a direction that appears to be off the main line of progress, or at least is an anachronism. Germany has shown us the effects of rationalism, some would say a morbid and hypertrophied reason. This rationalism is certainly in part a product of systematic education and propaganda, a conscious exploitation of science, and it is in part temperamental. Such a result is always possible in a small state with a highly centralized form of government. It is a notorious fact that Germany's type of civilization can be spread neither by persuasion nor by force. If we may apply a biological analogy we may say that German Kultur in its modern form cannot survive. That this German civilization has been felt by the world at large to be abnormal and of the nature of a monstrosity we can hardly doubt, and that therefore to some extent there has been a sense, on the part of the enemies of Germany, of fighting to root out a dangerous and rank growth. Germany, seeing in her own civilization only the appearance of modernism, has been inclined to regard all other civilizations as decadent.

Germany, governed by the ideals of rationalism, has assumed that history can be made, wars conducted, life regulated in accordance with a program. On the other side we see a very general acceptance of a philosophy of life in which many evils of disorder and waste and the necessity of an experimental attitude toward life are accepted as necessary consequences of the life of freedom. We see implied in this philosophy of life a belief in a morality and a religion that are based upon feeling rather than upon objective evidences, and a way of judging conduct more or less naively and simply or according to methods of appreciation that are essentially æsthetic, using the term in a wide sense. This mode of life is accepted in the belief that order in due season will come out of relative disorder, by a natural process or by a gradually increasing organization and voluntary adjustment. If we accept the validity of this attitude in life we shall be inclined to regard rationalism as it is manifested to-day in German life as an evil. We may believe that in the end the cure for this rationalism will not be less reason but rather more, but we shall see also that it is possible for reason to outstrip and pervert life, and indeed involve life in an absurdity, simply because as a method of dealing with the whole of life it cannot be sufficiently comprehensive.

Are these and all such issues that we find in war, causes of war? Do nations fight for principles? Opinions certainly differ on this point. Some think of wars, we say, as essentially conflicts of principles; some interpret wars wholly in terms of political issues. We should say that the truth lies between these assertions or is the sum of their half-truths. Wars are not in their origin wars of principle. The political, the personal, the concrete aspects of the relations of nations are always in the foreground in causing wars. Wars become wars of principle after they have been begun for other reasons. Sanctions and motives appear after the fact. Fundamental differences of mores which include the raw material, so to speak, of principles and causes are factors in wars in so far as they create misunderstanding and antipathy, but in so far as these differences of nature and of principle do not enter into the sphere of politics and of national honor, they do not as such cause wars Those deep moods which accumulate in the minds of peoples and enter into the causes of war are not convictions about principles. They are more generic and natural. History does not seem to show us wars caused by pure principles. We sometimes say that the Civil War in our own country was fought over a principle, but that is something less than the truth. The fundamental question at issue was plainly that of the rights of certain states at a particular time to be independent and free.

Principles emerge in war, we say, and then they become secondary causes. And it is precisely this emergence of principles from fields of battle that perhaps constitutes the greatest contribution of wars to the civilization of the world. We need to reflect upon this deeply, since the whole philosophy of history is concerned in it. The virtues that nations discover in themselves in war they elaborate in peace. Nations at war become conscious of their spiritual possessions. Since their existence, they believe, is at stake, it is a part of their self-defense to justify their value in the world. They discover in themselves that which is most characteristic of them, and this becomes their principle. The principle of a nation is that which the national consciousness fixates itself upon as the title of the nation to continued existence. Nations do not go to war over their causes, or about their distinctive virtues and missions in the world. Rather it is their likenesses that precipitate wars,—their resemblances and identities in being the same in ambition, and having the same conceptions of national honor and the same motives for war and desiring the same objects. Nations in general do not go to war over principles because they are not motivated by principles in their historical course. The principles of nations are aspects of their inner development. The "causes" of nations at war, according to our view, are these inner qualities of which they have become conscious. Nations discover them in the stress of war, and it is quite natural also that in such times they should not always judge them fairly, and that they should often make for themselves a fictitious character.

CHAPTER VII[ToC]

PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCES

Philosophy, in the minds of many writers, must be given a high place among the causes of war, and a considerable fraction of the literature of the late war is devoted to the problem of discovering, in the field of abstract thought, the influences that led to the great conflict. Nietzsche, especially, seems to have been held responsible for the European conflagration. As the philosopher of the New Germany, as the chief expositor of the doctrine of force, the inventor of the super-man and of the idea of the beyond-good, Nietzsche seems to stand convicted of furnishing precisely the concepts that have become the German's gospel of war; and since the German is prone to be guided by abstractions, the evidence, even though circumstantial, seems to many to be convincing.

Schopenhauer, also, as the great pessimist; Hegel, with his doctrine of the supremacy of the State as the representative of the Idea on earth; Kant, as the discoverer of the subjective moral principle; English utilitarianism as the doctrine of the main chance; empiricism, as the philosophy of inconsistency and dual principles of thought and conduct; even the whole spirit of the English philosophy, which Wundt says is nothing but an attempt to reconcile thought with the ideas of peace and comfort—all these have been charged with being instigators of the war.

Bergson (17) takes a different view. He says that the desire comes first, the doctrine afterwards. Germany, determined upon war, invokes Nietzsche or Hegel. Germany in a moral temper would appeal to Kant, or in still a different mood to the Romanticists. Le Bon (42) says that nations are pushed forward by forces which they cannot understand, and that rational thoughts and desires play but a little part in war. That appears to be true. We cannot say that philosophies do not enter at all into the causes of war, but among these causes they must be insignificant as compared with other causes that neither arise from abstract thought nor are greatly modified by reason in any way. Consider the influence of Napoleon (himself so little a product of any philosophical influence), as compared with Hegel; or of Bismarck as compared with Nietzsche, and this will be apparent. There are in the course of the centuries books and men that, as rational forces, do exert profound effect upon the practical life, but they must be rarer than is sometimes supposed. It is all too easy to assume a relation of cause and effect when there is only a similarity between thought and subsequent conduct. Rousseau may or may not have inspired the French Revolution. Probably he did not. The recent great war, we might say, has occurred in spite of philosophy, and if Nietzsche's influence gravitated toward war, it can hardly be thought to have had any deciding force in turning the scales already so overloaded by fate. Philosophy failed to prevent war. Nietzsche's philosophy did not cause it. His philosophy affords a convenient phraseology in which to express a philosophy of war, granting sufficient misinterpretation of his philosophy. Probably what influence he has had has been due rather to his literary impressiveness than to his thought as a contribution to philosophy.

Darwin, as the great force behind a new and varied development of science, has had the fate to be, in some sense, a factor in the moods and the new habits of life that led toward the final issue in the great war. It is not so much that his principle, misapplied, or applied uncritically may become a justification of war or even its basic principle that has made him so great an influence, but precisely because his thought, by becoming one of the great coordinating principles of all the natural sciences has given power to a movement which has had various practical consequences, not all of them good, or at least not all yielding fruit for our own age. Darwin's great influence as a force turning scholarly interest toward naturalism and away from classicism, as a factor in modern materialism and even pessimism, as a background, if no more, for the Haeckels and Ostwalds of science is no inconsiderable factor in the scientific and objective spirit of the day.

Facts must be faced. It is not such influences as that of Schopenhauer, who expresses a logical or at least an abstract and we might add literary form of pessimism, that in the generations just past have transformed most of the conceptions of religion, with all the effects upon the practical life that have followed, but the force of our modern science combining with tendencies which it fosters but perhaps does not create, giving momentum to industrialism and specialization,—it is this change in the ideas of men that we must suspect of being implicated in the present catastrophe of the world, if any influence from the rational life is to be counted at all. Hegel and Kant hover in the background. The author of the plan for universal peace provides us with a subjective principle of morality which can be distorted into a philosophy of moral independence and even of independence from morality, and Hegel must have helped to establish the German theory of the State, although with Treitschke and with the practical state-makers like Frederick the Great and his followers, we can hardly believe Hegel indispensable. The causes of war are too general, too old and too fundamental to be greatly added to or detracted from as yet by philosophy. Philosophy is the hope of the world, it may be, and by no means a forlorn hope, but it is not yet one of the great powers. When philosophy is a mere endorsement by reason of some motive that has arisen in the practical life, or is a literary expression of views about life, it may give the appearance of being a profound force in the world. But this is not real philosophy, in any case. Philosophy has not as yet shown itself highly creative even in the calm fields of education and the moral life.

No! Philosophy is a factor in the motives of war rather by reason of what it has not done, than because of its positive teachings. To-day we ought no longer to be under illusions on that point. Neither Christianity nor philosophy can make or prevent wars as yet. They have not been able to cope with the practical forces of the world which make for nationalism, partisanship and personal interests. It would require a greater amount both of religion and of philosophy than we now can bring to bear upon the world to offset the influence of Napoleon alone in the practical life of nations. It is the Napoleonic spirit that still governs Europe. Philosophy has been thus far a science of being an explanation of the world after the fact, and not even to any great extent a science of its progress, except in so far as, we may say, beginning with Hegel and with Spencer, there has been some development of the methods and the most formal conceptions of such a science. It is asking too much of philosophy, in its present stage, to expect it to preach the gospel, or to teach school, or to direct politics, and for the same reason it is unjust to charge philosophy with having created the greatest catastrophe of history. If philosophy cannot wield any great power now in those parts of life that are by their nature presumably most amenable to reason, its effect upon those events that express the supreme force of human passions and the totality of life will not be very important. The influences of philosophy are academic, and presumably any doctrine of life that preaches achievement, virility and unmorality will include in some degree war among the interests that it will affect, within the limits of its academic nature. But youth is inherently warlike, because above everything else it seeks to realize life in its fullness, and war at least does symbolize this reality and abundance of life. A philosophy which preached peace would hardly become a great influence with youth. A philosophy advocating the cause of war would form a natural background for the essential motives of youth. If the scales were evenly balanced, it might turn them. It is hard at least to see the relations of philosophy to the practical life in any other light to-day. Philosophies are tenuous and adaptable things. We see them used to support opposite causes, and they change color under the influence of strong desires. Bosanquet (91) shows us how Hegel's noble conception of the State, if we but substitute for its central thought of welfare of the State, that of selfish interest, may be made to change before our eyes into the meanest of maxims. This process is, however, not unique in the history of the relations of thought and life.

A detailed study of the relations of intellectual factors to war would need to consider the effects of a great number of more or less philosophical ideas which throw their weight on the side of war. So far as these ideas are simple and clear, and especially if they can be conveyed in the form of the phrase, their influence cannot wholly be ignored. Some we have already referred to. The doctrine that might makes right, the conception of state as supreme, the belief in the divine right of kings, the belief in the ordained rights of aristocracy, belief in militarism as a social institution, the doctrine that life may be controlled by reason, all intellectual pessimism, skepticism, any form of concept-worship, whether Hegelian or other, acceptance of the methods of science and the results of science as applicable to all the problems of life—all such principles which inhabit the region, so to speak, between philosophy and the practical life manifestly have some relation to the spirit of war. In a very general way they may be counted as philosophical factors in war. For the most part, however, those ideas that have been accused of abetting war are exaggerations and perversions of philosophical ideas. Nietzsche, Darwin and Hegel have all been exploited and made to stand sponsor for specific philosophies of war. In the new philosophy of life which Patten thinks has greatly influenced German conduct, and which may be expressed in the words Dienst, Ordnung, and Kraft, we can see both the effects of impulses that have grown out of the new life itself, and the influences of formal philosophy. That such ideas have had relatively a greater influence in Germany than elsewhere must be admitted, but that either this devotion to ideas or the ideas themselves have been derived from philosophical interests and from philosophies that have played any important part in the history of thought we may well doubt. We should suspect that the same practical interest that works unceasingly to distort and popularize philosophy would help to create such pseudo-philosophy.

Von Bülow (65) says that the German people have a passion for logic, and that this passion amounts to fanaticism:—that when an intellectual form or system has been found for anything, they insist with obstinate perseverance on fitting realities into the system. Durkheim (16) says that the Germans' organized system of ideas is a cause of war. It is also true, we should say, that the tendency to organize ideas and even the fundamental ideas by which the Germans have been guided are deeply rooted in temperament, in history and in the social order of the past. Boutroux (13) says that the Germans themselves regard the war as the culmination of their philosophy. We should say on the contrary that the whole war philosophy of Europe is almost wholly a product of strife and comes from impulses that arise irresistibly in the practical life. Into these movements philosophy fits or may be made to fit, and the presence of ideas in a society in which the academic life has great prestige, ideas which coincide with beliefs readily gives an illusion of an order governed by the higher reason. The fact that Germany's recent wars had all been highly successful, the fact that Germany had learned to depend upon her good sword in time of need are the chief sources of Germany's doctrines of war: the Hegelian background in the light of what we have learned in recent times about the psychology of nations, must seem to be rather of the nature of the ornamental. The ideal of the Prussian State to be a power directed by intelligence suggests Hegel, but it seems highly improbable, to say the least, that Hegelian philosophy has had much to do with shaping this ideal. Behind all this is the necessity of shaping German life in the form which it has taken—necessity if we accept, at least, Germany's national temperament itself as a necessity. That other belief, widely held by German intellectuals and officers that war is the testing of the validity of national cultures would also probably never have appeared on the scene had not Germany been secure in the belief that she herself had both the right and the might on her side. It is possible, of course, that the war has distorted our vision so that the relations of the practical life and the life of reason have all been thrown out of focus, but when we see what forces have been at work, and what they have done, it is difficult to escape the conviction that we have been inclined to believe too much in the power of mere ideas. This may be the great lesson of the war. We may learn from it how to make ideas become the power that hitherto they have failed to be.

CHAPTER VIII[ToC]

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL INFLUENCES

That war and religion have always been closely associated with one another is one of the outstanding facts of history. This is true both of primitive warfare and of warfare to-day. Yet we cannot say that religion as such has been a cause of war. Religious wars are almost invariably also political wars, and as soon as religion and politics are separated, religion no longer appears to be a war motive. When religion becomes associated with worldly ideas which it supports and makes dynamic it may become a strong factor in the spirit of war, but as a means of segregating men, and giving them unity of action religion can no longer be regarded as a power, if it ever was. Any motive that will not so segregate men and break up all other bonds cannot be said to be a very fertile cause of war. Religion as a cause of war belongs to a day in which the spirit of nationalism was weak, and when religious empire had a visible and political position in the world. Nationalism, growing stronger, became the supreme force dominating the motives and interests of men and governing the formation of groups, or at least the actions of groups as interrelated units. In the recent war we have seen how the sense of national unity has been able to hold in check all other motives. Neither religion nor any class or clan or guild interests could trace the faintest line of cleavage so long as the motive of war remained.

The mood of war always contains a religious element. Not only is this shown in primitive wars, where the relations of religion, war and art are indicated in such phenomena as the war dance, which is of the nature of a magic weapon, but we see it also in the complex moods of the present war spirit of the world. The idea and mood of valor have a religious significance. Cramb says that we can trace in Germany before the war, showing through the transient mists of industrialism and socialism, the vision of the religion of valor which runs through all German history. The craving for a valorous life, for reality, the desire to lose one's own individuality—these moods of war are religious or mystic whatever else they may be or contain. The inseparable relation of war and death necessarily inspires a religious consciousness. Without exalted moods which in some way contain religious faith—faith on the part of the individual in the eternal values which he represents and in his own security in the hands of fate, and in the immortality of the country which he serves, war could not exist.

The mood of war always contains a religious sanction, and every important religion sanctions war. This explicit relation between religion and war is seen very early. Wherever there is ghost worship, and the warriors justify war and fortify themselves for it by believing that their ancestors still participate in the combats of their children, and that in waging war they are doing a duty in keeping up the traditional feuds of their race there is found the root of the relation between war and religion. Every war is a holy war; it is but a change in degree from these primitive wars in which the ideas of ghosts must have had almost the clearness of reality to our modern wars with their deeper but more indefinite religious sanctions. Since war always creates the need of moral justification, the war mood at all times tends to seek religious sanctions. Christianity, the doctrine of peace and good will, very readily lends its support to war, since wars are almost invariably regarded as defensive by all who participate in them. War in the service of the weak and endangered can always invoke the spirit of Christianity. The logical ground for this has been laid for us by many writers; Drawbridge (19), one of the most recent, finds no support in Christianity for the doctrines of pacifism. All nations, when they fight, fight for God, for liberty and the right, with the implied belief that their own country has a mission in the world, supported by divine authority.

All governments have in them a strain of theocracy. We see this in many degrees and forms, from the original totemistic belief in descent from animals that are also gods to the vaguest remnants of the habit of interpreting national interests as guarded by divine powers that we often see in the language of practical statesmen. The doctrine of the divine rights of kings of course had its origin in that of divine descent. The most striking revelation of the place such theories may have, even in modern times and in enlightened nations, is to be seen in the revival and deliberate use of the doctrine of divine descent as a fundamental principle of the government and theory of State in the New Japan. All nations hold something of this philosophy; God and State are always related and all wars, whatever else they may be, are waged in the service of religion and with the sanction of it. This spirit is not wanting even in the most modern democracy. The historians of Germany have shown us to what an extent the theory of the divinity of state and its divine mission may be intermingled with practical politics and have helped to bring to light the psychology of this movement in history.

Several writers, but especially Le Bon (42), have written about the relation of mysticism to war. Le Bon said indeed that the main causes of war, including the most recent one, are mystical causes. By mysticism he means unconscious factors which are religious in quality and which contain a race ideal which is both powerful and irrational. German mysticism appears to have attracted much attention during the years of the war. Germany has presented the picture, we are told, of a people becoming dangerous by couching national ambition and honor in terms of religion. This mysticism of the German contains a powerful belief in race superiority, and in the supremacy of the culture of their own nation, beliefs which have the clear marks of mysticism about them. The traces of the theory of divine origin still cling to them. Boutroux (13) says the Prussian State is a synthesis of the divine and the human. Another writer observes that the Germans believe in the altogether unique and quasi-divine excellence of the German race, and of Germanism, and that the Germans have a new religion which they believe in spreading by the sword. Some see in Germany a serious demand for the revival of the religion of Odin and Thor, the religion of conflict of primeval forces, and of the triumph of might. Literary expressions of this religion are certainly to be found, and it may fairly be maintained that Germany has never become Christianized to the extent that most modern nations have.

That mysticism has been a large factor in the war spirit of the Germans in the late war can hardly be doubted, or at least that a religious element of some kind has played a great part in it. The war began as Germany's holy war. A cult of State and of self-worship are involved in it. If not, innumerable expressions of Germany's cause among German writers are simply literary exaggerations. The Germans have believed that they are God's chosen people, that they represent God, and since the German civilization grew up in antagonism to the Graeco-Roman civilization, God must have adopted the one and discarded the other. One German writer says that we must eliminate from our belief the last drop of faith in the idea of a progressive movement of humanity as a whole. Reality is represented in one nation at a time, and the chosen nation is the leader of all the rest.

While such mysticism as this (if it be mysticism) is most conspicuous in aristocratic and imperialistic nations, we find it elsewhere. It is a powerful force in imperialistic Japan and in Russia. We find it everywhere in history in some form. In France it is still the "saintly figure" of France that inspires the soldier and induces a religious mood. There is no longer a vision of an empire of the future, perhaps, and this mysticism of France has not in recent history shown itself in the form of aggression, but French mysticism clings to the ideal and the hope of a glorious future for a deathless France soon to be renewed. All peoples that have declined or suffered an adverse fate, even the pathetic remnants of the American Indians, expect the return of their lost power. Such mysticism is, we may think, the only condition under which national life in many cases can continue. The religious or the mystical mood of nations is created by the need of making belief dynamic, of overcoming doubts and fears. Hence the exaggerated and irrational claims peoples make in regard to the value of their culture and about their mission on earth. By their mysticism nations justify their aggressive wars and fortify themselves in their defensive wars. Thus nations acquire a feeling of security. They believe in their star of destiny. They feel that their life which is of supreme value to the world cannot perish. It is this spirit that nations take with them into battle. It is a mystic force, and this mystic force is, in great part, we may believe, one of the by-products of the tragedy of history. Faith and hope have one of their roots at least in fear and pessimism.

Moral Motives and War

That the attitude of nations toward one another is not, generally speaking, an ethical attitude and that moral principles do not motivate the conduct of peoples we have already suggested. Sumner (70) says that the whole history of mankind is a series of acts open to doubt, dispute and criticism as to their right and justice. Differences end in force, and the defeated side always protests that the results are unjust. And yet wars are always conducted with moral justification and in the belief that moral principles are involved. These moral principles, however, are not the points of difference upon which the beginning of wars depends. Nations never go to war for purely moral reasons. Moral feeling may coincide with the interests of state, and a defensive war may of course be conducted in the spirit of deep moral right and duty, but plainly it is never the sense of right and duty alone that is the motive of defense. Perhaps after all this question of the moral element in the causes of war is a futile one, and leads to casuistry. There are always political and other practical questions involved, whenever strain occurs between nations, so that wholly moral issues can never arise.

If wars are not moral in the making they are always justified morally, whatever the motives may have been that caused them. Without this moral sanction it is doubtful whether wars could be conducted at all, although this moral sanction may be based upon very superficial grounds. The higher patriotic feeling runs, says Veblen (97), the thinner may be the moral sanction that satisfies the public conscience. On the other hand moral sentiment may often be strong and deep in the minds of the masses of people in a nation, and the public feeling of obligation to enter a war may be strong, but in general such moral feeling does not lead to war. Righteous indignation lacks initiative. Honor as moral obligation requires the aid of honor as national pride and dignity. The relations among allies may at first thought seem to be moral relations, but when we observe closely we see that usually nations go to war together because their common interests are endangered. When their common interests are not involved they usually break treaties and so do not stay together. Actions directed offensively against one member of a coalition are usually directed against the others, so that in most cases the allies of a nation have no choice, but must defend themselves.

The relative importance of moral principles in the motives of war may be observed by comparing the motives assigned by the nations that participated in the late war with the motives which a study of the history and political situations of these countries reveals. There are wide disparities between these historical causes and the assigned causes. These need not, however, lead us to take a cynical view of history as many sociologists and students of politics do. We have as yet no organized world in which moral principle can operate. The world, we might say, is still infantile or immature. The world is still unmoral. We cannot say that nationalism as the principle of the conduct of nations is a wholly selfish principle as contrasted with a moral or altruistic motive, since such an analogy with individual morality fails to take into account the complex nature of nationalism, and overlooks the social qualities of patriotism.

England's purpose in entering the war has been freely discussed in England. The popular impression is that England declared war upon Germany in order to defend Belgium and to keep her treaty obligations. If we consider conduct in a certain abstraction from the practical setting in which it is performed such a conclusion can be drawn. There was a moral stirring in England, and several writers have commented upon the fact that England subverted her own conscious purposes by her unconscious and instinctive morality. There was a strong feeling against war, even a widespread moral sense that England had become too civilized to wage war. There was a shrinking from the economic hardships that war would entail. Against these strong tendencies there prevailed, at least in popular sentiment, a profound feeling that in some way Germany's civilization was incompatible with England's, and this feeling was in part of the nature of moral aversion. Dillion (55), at least, sees a profound ethical motive in Italy in the late war. After a pro-German party had won out in favor of war, he says, a deus ex machina in the shape of an indignant nation descended upon the scene. But after making allowance for all moral feeling and the unusual and dramatic manner in which moral issues, to a greater degree than ever before in modern history, were brought to the front, we must admit that the political and diplomatic interests and manners of nations have taken their usual course in the war. Nations have been governed by the motives that have always dominated the relations of groups to one another.

Germany presents the most glaring example of the contrast between public opinion and expressed motives and political facts. Such expressions as these: that Germany's ideal is one that does violence to no one; that humanity and all human blessings stand under the protection of German arms; that, where the German spirit obtains supremacy, there freedom reigns; that in regard to England's downfall, there can be but one opinion—it is the very highest mission of German culture; that Germany's war is a holy war—such expressions as these, which are psychologically explicable without questioning their sincerity, seem out of harmony, to say the least, with what we know of Germany's political aspirations. Germany's desire for England's downfall does not appear to us to be based upon a moral motive; Germany's war seems far from being a holy war, and it is hard to see in it a means of spreading culture abroad in the world. We cannot give any place in the causes of this war to a moral desire to make the world better. However much Germany may have been convinced that Germany was destined to be a civilizing force in the world, the moral obligation thus aroused, we may be sure, did not become the real motive of the war.

The moral justifications of war are very numerous, and that this belief in war has some effect upon the spirit of war and helps to perpetuate it, and is not a mere reflection of the warlike spirit itself, may of course be admitted. Many believe that war accomplishes work in the world; war is a great organizing force. There is also a view that war is good as a moral stimulant, or as a creative moral force. War is often regarded as the means of moral revival of a people that has become sordid and dull. Schmitz (29) says that war gives reality to a country. War strengthens national character, some think. It purges nations. In war people grow hard but pure. Irwin (25) says that such war philosophy as this is to be heard broadly in Europe, chiefly in Germany, but also in France and in England. Mach (95) says that disintegration takes place in times of peace. Schoonmaker says that war has taught men socialization. Again we hear that wars are just and right because they are necessary. Redier (30) says that war is a way of giving back courage to the men of our times. This praise of war which comes from the depths of feelings, we must suppose helps to give continuity and force to these feelings.

Institutional Factors

If the spirit of war is to any extent educable, and is created in national life and is not merely something instinctive, it is presumably modified in one way and another by all those institutions that are educational in their effect. Perhaps one of the most pressing problems of education in the near future will be that of the relation of education to war. We shall need to know what the school has done to cause wars, what changes should be made in the future with reference to this influence of education upon the fundamental motives of national life. The schoolmaster has been indicted among other instigators of war. We must see how much truth there is in this allegation. We must understand also how the whole educational process, as we may see it now after the war, may be made if possible to become a greater factor in life than it has been in the past, if it is at all an important element in the development and the control of the psychic powers of nations.

Schmitz (29) says that the eighteenth century and the French Revolution were dominated by the phrase, the nineteenth by money, and that there was a danger that the twentieth century would be dominated by the schoolmaster and by the concept, but that this danger is past because life has become so full of realities. Russell says, we know, that men fight because they have been governed in their beliefs and in their conduct by authority. If this be true the authority exercised upon the mind of the child by all his teachers may be suspected of having been in one way or another an influence in creating the moral attitudes that prevail in regard to war and peace. We have heard the question raised as to whether in the past the teaching of history as the story of wars, and the presentation of the facts of history from the nationalistic point of view, have not been morally wrong.

German schools, and the method of public education the sinister effects of which we have abundantly felt—that is, the propaganda, show us educational phenomena that are psychologically of great interest and which are also unique from the educational point of view. The influence of schools seems in general so negative, and there is so little connection between what is learned as fact and conduct in the practical life that, even in the case of the German teaching of war philosophy we must suspect that this teaching has been successful only because it has gone with the strong tide of feeling in the popular mind. That the German schools have directly and indirectly fostered the development of ideas that lead in the direction of war there is no doubt. Even more influential than the specific ideas that have been implanted, is the spirit of these schools: it is their militaristic and routine life, the great authority assumed by the teacher, the specialization, that has helped to nourish the warlike spirit of Germany, quite as much as the fact, for example, that Daniel's Geography teaches that Germany is the heart of Europe, surrounded by countries that were once a part of Germany and will be again.

German education, we say, seems to be unique in the extent to which it influences public sentiment and national conduct. In general, education has appeared among the influences that lead to war rather by default of positive teaching than by anything positive it has done. Even in Germany, we should say, the spirit of war has been made to flourish less by the teaching of a narrow nationalism, by inculcating hatred, and implanting wrong conceptions of German history than by failing to provide youth with means of deep satisfaction, by failing to coordinate deep desires of the individual, and to organize individuals in a normal social life. This is true everywhere. Education has not affected life as a whole, and it has not thus far been an influence which, to any appreciable extent, has accelerated the development of peoples in their especially national aspects and relations. It has nowhere fostered any conception of the whole world as an object of social feeling. It has everywhere accepted a certain provincialism as natural and necessary, and has tacitly assumed that national boundaries are the horizon of the practical life of the child. The school has in fact failed to take advantage of its unmatched opportunity to use the imagination of the child to develop his social powers. Sociologists say that if sociologists had been more diligent in spreading abroad information about the social life, the great war would perhaps never have happened. That we may certainly doubt; something more profound must be done by education than to disseminate knowledge, if it would undertake to be a power in the world and to do anything more than add its influence to the tendencies of the day, or perhaps temporarily change the direction of these tendencies.

CHAPTER IX[ToC]

ECONOMIC FACTORS AND MOTIVES

Thus far we have considered the motives of war mainly from the psychological point of view, discovering its main movement and development in the world to be a product of the psychic forces in the social order. This method, however, did not exclude the objective facts, and did not ignore the practical motives. We found that war is a manifestation of many tendencies, and in fact is related to all the deep movements in the life of society and of the individual. War comes out of the whole of life in a way to preclude the interpretation of it in terms of any single principle, or at least to prevent our finding a single cause of war. We ought to try to see now how such a psychological view of war stands in relation to certain more objective views of it, which in a very general way may be said to be centered in two closely related views. One is that war is almost exclusively an economic phenomenon, and the other that war is the work of individuals. One is the economic interpretation of history, and the other is the great man view of history.

We still see a lingering theory that war is a result of the ancient migratory or expansion impulse—that over-population and the pressure of various economic conditions are the source of the impulses that lead to war. We have seen reasons for believing, however, that war, even in the beginning, has not been a wholly practical matter. Hunger, pressure of population, migratory movements because of economic conditions, will not explain the origin and the persistence of wars. Wars are not simple as these views would imply, at any stage. That at the present time economic advantage, whether or not it be the motive of war, is in general not gained seems to be very clearly indicated. The taking of colonies and other lands may be a detriment rather than a gain to the conquering nation. The industry and the finance, of all concerned in war, are likely to suffer disaster. Peace is the great producer of wealth. War is a terrible destroyer of it. Ross says that as industry progresses, wars become continually more expensive and less profitable, that the drain is not upon man power so much as upon economic power; nations bleed the treasure of one another until some one of them is exhausted and must yield.

The theory that war is caused by the pressure of population, especially as applied to the recent war, now appears to have been very naïve. It was maintained that Germany needed more room for her growing population, that Germany must have more land at home and more colonies. Claes (46), among several writers, shows that this is not true. Germany had no pressing need of more land, except for political purposes, or such land as provided the raw materials for her military industries. Bourdon (67) maintains that it is not true that Germany's population was becoming excessive. Le Bon (42) says that this theory of over-population is a myth. Still others have shown that in a country that is rapidly becoming industrial, as was Germany, where population is becoming massed in the great cities, emigration ceases; and that actually, in Germany's case, labor was imported every year, and that there are great tracts of arable land in Germany still but sparsely populated. Nicolai (79) also attacks the theory that war is sought for economic gain and says that an economic war among the European states is an absurdity.

The need of colonies is often put forward as a real and also a legitimate motive for war. Colonies must be provided, they say, for the overflow of population from the homeland; colonies are the foundation of the trade of nations—trade follows the flag. They think of colonies as the offspring of nations, and nations without colonies seem sterile and destined to extinction. We know that Germany's desire for colonies is one of the causes of the European crisis, and that the colonial question has been a fertile cause of trouble in Europe for many years. And yet we have evidence that in the present economic stage of the world, colonies do not perform to any great extent either of the functions that are claimed for them. Trade does not in general follow the flag; industrial nations do not need colonies either to provide for over-population or for commercial reasons. The acquisition of colonies does not as such benefit the great industrial and financial interests. Why, then, do nations so ardently desire colonies; and why, without colonies, do they feel themselves inferior and at a disadvantage? Why, in a stage of industry, in which it is presumably more to their advantage to conduct aggressive campaigns in countries already densely populated, are nations so willing even to fight to obtain colonies? Powers (75) says that the desire for colonies comes from the idealistic tendencies of nations. This appears to be true. Correspondingly we find that colonies are of more interest to general staffs and admiralties than to captains of industry. Colonies are wanted for military reasons, more than for trade reasons. Colonies are desired as bases of operation in the game of empire building by conquest. There is still another reason. The race for colonies perpetuates an ideal which has grown out of an earlier stage of the life of nations. Colonies were once actually the means of the greatness of nations. The longing for colonial possessions, for the extension of commerce, the great jealousy and apprehension of peoples in regard to their trade routes, and the fear nations have for their commerce, quite out of relation to present needs and conditions, hark back to an old romance of the sea. The waterways of the world, the islands and new continents have a traditional appeal, which comes down to us from the days when the small countries of Europe, one after another—Portugal, Holland, Spain, England—became great in wealth, and grew to be world powers, by their commerce and their colonial possessions. In those days the expansion of nations was not at all due to economic pressure at home. The landowners, the rules, the privileged class in general were interested in colonies, because in that direction stretched the path to fabulous wealth, and because over the seas were the lands of adventure. The seeking of colonies was both the business and the pleasure of the nations. To-day the gaining of colonies may be only a loss to nations economically, but they satisfy the craving for visible empire, and also a longing that is deep and intense because tradition and romance are deeply embedded in it.

Probably no one now believes that war among modern nations is due to a pure predatory instinct or to a migratory instinct which is supposed to have led primitive hordes to seek new habitats and to prey upon other peoples. Hunger does not now drive people in companies from their homes and pour them into other lands, although it is true that any threat which excites the old hunger-fear tends to arouse the war spirit and to stir the migratory impulse; and a deep sensitiveness to climatic conditions and a claustrophobia of peoples have remained long after the need of land urged as the main cause of war, and we hear war justified on the ground that crowded peoples require more land. This land hunger is an old motive and it still remains deep in the consciousness of peoples long after its economic significance has ceased. Just as we say the threat of hunger is often imagined, and the fear of hunger and a deep and persistent fear of peoples and the sense of danger of being engulfed and destroyed by other peoples linger in consciousness, so the consciousness of the old struggle for land remains as one of the most powerful of traditions, and any threat, near or remote, to a nation's land arouses all the forces of the war spirit, and the thought of aggression as a means of conquest of land is always alluring.

Land was once the main possession and the main need. To-day it is the chief symbol of the power of a nation. The possession of it is desired when it gives nothing in return, certainly when there are no valid economic reasons for taking it. This land hunger becomes the excuse of nations for their sins of aggression. A differentiated society, so organized that only the few, if any at all, can by any possibility profit by the taking of lands still hungers for this primitive possession. To a great extent land as a national possession has an ideal rather than a practical value. It was one of the original sources of prestige and distinction, having become the main material interest of man as soon as he came to have fixed abode. The whole historic period of the world has been a story of a struggle for land. It is the memory of this land struggle, which is one of the deep motives of war, which often determines the strategy of war, and the policies of nations.

Precisely how the system of great land ownership originated is obscure. Sumner (70) says that the belief that nobles have always held lands, and are noble by reason of this possession, is false. Nobles have in one way and another enriched themselves and bought land; or rather having acquired land they have succeeded in acquiring titles of nobility, and establishing their lines. In all nations which have retained any traces of the feudalistic form, and to some extent everywhere, land continues to be the basis of wealth, and also of power, and the land-owning classes are still mainly the ruling classes. This land-owning class is still dominated by the old traditions of the landed aristocracy. It is the fighting class, and supplies great numbers of officers for the armies. It upholds the idea of national honor in its ancient forms as related to private honor; it provides the great number of diplomatic and decorative officers. Japan, Russia, Germany and to some extent England, at least up to the time of the war, have retained feudalistic institutions, and the land interest still remains as a motive of war. In all these nations, certainly in those which have remained feudalistic in fact, it is the aristocratic and owning class that usually represents the war interest. It both rules and owns. It sends out the peasant and the worker to extend the state. It is the protected class. Laws and constitutions favor it. Taxes fall lightly upon it. Originally this was the class that received all the benefits of war. To-day it suffers less from war than do other classes. Even when it does not gain by war in a material way, it is likely to gain in power (100).

We have seen this system of class rule at work in very recent times, and it is a question whether the old ideal of land possession did not work to the ruin of Germany economically, and indirectly antagonize the industrial interests of the nation. German politics had been trying to serve two masters, who were not entirely in agreement. Germany was still a country of landed proprietors, and these proprietors always have thrown their weight to the side of war. They were by no means dominated by a motive of pure greed, and they did not seek war entirely for their own advantage, but because, we might say, they are ruled through and through by motives that can be satisfied only in a militaristic state of society. Their gain from a successful war is mainly a gain in prestige and distinction. An unsuccessful war, as we have seen, threatens their extinction as a class. All democratic movements tend toward land division, or is indeed in part precisely this process. Aristocracy without land cannot maintain itself.

The economic theory of war comes to its own in the view that industry now controls the world, that industry is the power behind politics, and that industrial needs are the real energies that make wars. We live in an industrial age, they say, and industry rules. Plainly to find the whole truth about this relation of industry to war is no simple matter. There are at least three more or less separate questions involved in it. We need to know whether an industrial state of society, or the industrial stage of economic development, is especially prone to cause wars, as distinguished from more general political and economic interests. We need to know whether wars, in an industrial stage, do really serve either the interests of industry or countries as a whole. Finally, there is the question whether those who control industry and finance do actually create wars.