class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[21]"/>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