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 aesthetic 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 cooeperative 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 cooerdinated 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, reenforce 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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic 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

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 cooerdinated 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

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 aesthetic 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 reenforced 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 aesthetic 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.