There are several interesting theories of the causes of war, now in the field, most of them inspired by our recent great conflict, all of which (but no one perhaps completely or quite justly) may be described as based upon the view that war is an outbreak of, or reversion to, instincts and modes of activity which as primitive tendencies remain in the individual or in the social life and which, from time to time, with or without social cause, may break loose, so to speak, and hurl man back into savagery. These theories of war show us, in some cases, human character in the form of double personality, or liken civilization to a thin and insecure incrustation upon the surface of life, beneath which all that is animal-like and barbaric still remains smoldering. Some of these theories we need to review briefly here.
Bertrand Russell, in answer to the question, "Why do men fight?" which is the title of his book dealing with the causes of war, says, in substance, that men fight because they are controlled by instinct (and also by authority), rather than by reason. Men will cease fighting when reason controls instinct, and men think for themselves rather than allow their thinking to be done for them. This view does not explicitly state that war is a reversion, for man may be at no point better or more advanced than a creature of instinct, but it lays the blame for war upon the original nature of man. Man has instincts which presumably he has brought with him from his pre-human stage, and some ofthese instincts are, on their motor side, the reactions of fighting.
Le Bon (42) speaks of a conscious and an unconscious will in nations, and says that the motives behind great national movements may be beneath all conscious intentions, and may anticipate them. The Englishman in particular lives, in a sense, a divided life, since there is a manifest inconsistency between what he really is and what he thinks. What these instincts are, Le Bon does not specify; presumably they may be either better or worse than the conscious motives.
Trotter (82) and also Murray (90) consider war from a biological standpoint, regarding it as a herd phenomenon. Trotter's view, especially his interpretation of Germany, which we are not to consider here, is original and important. War is a result of the action of aherd instinct, a specific instinct which is peculiar in one respect, in that it acts upon other instincts but has no definite motor reactions of its own. War is the result of the action of the herd instinct in man upon the old instinct of aggression. At least aggressive war is. Men in all their social relations show the play of these instincts; in war it is the old aggressive instinct, the old passion of the pack, that dominates them; and it is the ancestral herd-fears that overcome them in their panics. It is the herd instinct that makes men in groups so highly sensitive to the leader, whose relations to the herd or pack are always dependent upon their recognizing him as one of the group; that is, as acting in accordance with the desires of the herd.
It is by the union of the herd, Murray says, or through the herd instinct, that suppressed unconscious impulses are given an opportunity to operate; when the human herd is excited by any external stimulus, the old types of reaction are brought into play. Curiously, in such times, leadership may be assumed by eccentric and even abnormal members of the group—by those who are governed by pervertedinstincts; by men who are touched with the mania of suspicion, or who even suffer from homicidal mania.
The essential point of these biological views is that, when the human herd is subjected to any influences that tend to arouse the herd instinct—that is, to unite the herd in any common emotion or action, the old instinctive forms of response are likely to be brought to the front. Whatever the stimulus, the tendency is for the herd to fixate its attention upon some external object, which at once is reacted to with deep emotion. Plainly, if this be true, if herd instinct does throw human society from time to time and from various causes into attitudes of defense and offense with the appropriate emotional reactions, and if in such times leaders are likely to appear, having exaggerated instinctive tendencies, there is always close at hand and ready a mechanism by which war can be produced, war being precisely of the type of mass action, under strong emotion, of a group closely united under spectacular leadership, with attention cramped upon some external object hated or feared.
Nicolai (79), who believes strongly that war is wholly useless, compares it to the play we turn to when the actions performed in the play are no longer in themselves practical. War is a great debauch, perhaps now the last the race will experience. War is like wine: in it nations renew their youth. It is not the war itself, but the mood it produces that we crave, and this mood is longed for because in it old and sacred feelings of patriotism are aroused, and these feelings are themselves survivals, something romantic, archaic, no longer needed in the present stage of social life.
Novicow (83) says something very similar to this. War is a survival, like the classical languages, for example. Men begin to find beauty and glory in these things only after the activities they represent are useless. The principle of their survival is nothing more or less than that of habit. It is habit that keeps war alive; wars are a concession to our forebears, a following in the footsteps of a dead past.
We are presenting these views in a somewhat loose and illogical order, but let us look at still a few more of them. Patrick thinks of war as precisely a plunge into the primeval. War is a reaction, a regression, but still it is something more than a mere slipping of the machinery of life. It iscraved; and it is craved because it offers relief from the tension of modern life. It is not quite clear whether it is because we are tired and want rest for our over-worked functions, or are merely dull and need renewed life, but in any case, when the desire has accumulated enough, back we fall into the primeval. Then all the tensions and inhibitions of civilized society disappear. Society, relieved of its cross-tensions, is resolved and organized into an harmonious and freely acting whole, seeking a definite object. Life is simplified, and becomes again primitive. Old and vigorous movements take the place of the cramped thinking of our civilized life. All that keeps us modern and evolved is relaxed.
Naturally the Freudians have their own explanation of war in terms of subconscious wishes, repressed feelings and instincts. Freud (78) himself says that war is a recrudescence (and a mastery over us) of a more primitive life than our own. The child and the primitive man, as we have long known them in the Freudian theories, live still in us and are indestructible. We have supposed ourselves to have overcome these primitive impulses, but we are far from being so civilized as we thought. The evil impulses, as we call them, which we supposed had at least been transformed are changed only in the sense that they have been influenced by the erotic motive, or have been repressed by an outer restraint, an educational factor, the demands of what we call civilized environment. But let us not deceive ourselves; the old impulses are still alive; the number of people who have been transformed by civilization is less than we supposed. All society is at heart barbaric. Judged by our unconscious wishes, we are a band of murderers, for theprimitive 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 issomething 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—isecstatic. 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 pleasureisthe 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; thecupidus 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, theKampfsrauschand theSiegestrunkenheit, 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 thisspirit of war. And finally, summing up all the other ecstasies, the strong inner movement of the soul expressing itself in strong external movements, and in the sense of living and dying in the midst of vivid and real life.
Hirschfeld's analysis of the ecstasy of war discloses deep and powerful motives in the individual mind and the social life. We can find this ecstasy everywhere in the history of war, sometimes as a national exaltation, sometimes as a more restricted phenomenon. Villard (54), speaking of the first days of the war, says that in Germany then one could see "the psychology of the crowd at its noblest height." The exaltation of a people, whatever its content, or its purpose, is an awe-inspiring spectacle. There can be no greater display of the sources of human power. In this particular time of exaltation we can see in action religious ecstasy, the cult of valor, and the stirring of more fundamental and more primitive feelings. This exaltation has its imaginative side. There is a dream of empire in it. There is an exhibition of the forms of royalty, its display, its color and its dramatic moments. There is the spirit of militarism and of great adventure, the excitement of chance, of throwing all into the hands of fate, the æsthetic and the play motives which are never separated from the practical passions in times of great exaltation.
This mood of war differs, of course, at different times under different circumstances. The French people certainly went into the great war with no such exaltation. We should have to look elsewhere in French history for the ecstatic war spirit, when the French are moved by the motives of glory and prestige, or by the vanity and eroticism which Reuthe thinks are the essential qualities of the spirit of France. But taking history as a whole there is no lack of ecstasy in the spirit of war. We find in this ecstasy exalted social feeling, joy of overcoming the pain of death, the exultation of sacrifice, love of display, feeling of tragedy, the ecstasy of exerting the utmost of power, love ofdanger, the gambling motive, the love of battle, love of all the dramatic elements of military life. These separate ecstasies, taken all together, make up the exalted mood of war. They represent war in its most significant moments.
In this mood of war instincts are exhibited, but they seem to be in some way transformed, so that the whole has a meaning different from the parts. The mood of war is not a mere effect, a reaction to events. It is a longing—plastic and indefinite it may be—but looking toward the future. It is a craving, not for the release of definite instincts, but is rather a force or a desire which, however misguided the expression of this mood or this energy may be, is the essence of what individuals and society to-dayare. We may find in this mood, upon superficial examination, mere emotions, but in a final and deeper analysis, we may suppose, its content and its meaning will be found to be specific—purposes which constitute what is deepest and most continuous in the individual and in society, but which at the same time give to this mood its generality of direction and of form.
It is the war-mood, then, that must be explained, if we wish to understand the motives and causes of war. And this war mood, so it appears, is related to all the other great ecstasies—of art, religion, intoxication, love. It is, of course, then, a psychological problem, and one having many radiations and deep roots. The view that we are going to take is that in the mood of war we have to do essentially with what, relying upon previous studies of the principles of art and of the motives that are at work in society that produce the phenomena of intemperance we may call theintoxication motive. That this intoxication motive is a plastic force, a mood containing desires and impulses that may be satisfied in a variety of ways, since as a sum of desires it is no longer specific and instinctive, is the main implication of this view. It is this generic quality and compositeness of the purpose of the individual and of the spiritof society that obscures the meaning of history and often makes individual lives so enigmatical, and which also makes these purposes of individuals and nations so persistent, sometimes so terribly forceful and insatiable.
As contrasted with instincts, the motive of intoxication we say, is plastic, and its object—and this is one of its most significant characteristics—is to produce exalted states of consciousness mainly for their own sake. At least this experience of exaltation is the main or central thing sought. It is a tendency to seek exalted states, but at the same time, we should say, specific instincts gain some kind of satisfaction, although not at all necessarily by the performance of the external movements appropriate to them. They may obtain a certain vicarious satisfaction. The mood gives conduct a general direction, it provides a motive and the power, it is the source of interest and of desire, but its objects may be indefinite and variable.
Some general aspects of the moods that we have to consider have already come to light, and these may prove to be valuable clews to a psychological analysis of their content. There is the ecstatic state, and the craving to experience it, the love of excitement, the desire to have a sense of reality, the impulse to seek an abundant life, the love of power and of the feeling of power. These are all related, and at least they have something in common, but it is the last mentioned, the motive of power, that seems to be the most definite and to have the clearest biological meaning and implications. Indeed this motive of power (and we must here again depend upon previous studies of the æsthetic motives and other aspects of ecstasy), appears to be fundamental in art, in religion, and in history. It is a concept that gives us a vantage ground for the interpretation of some of the most significant parts of life. The idea of power and the craving for power as a general motive, but also containing and exploiting specific purposes and desires, runs through all the history of art and religion and also through history itself.Religion is based upon the desire to exert and to feel power, and it is the manifest and indeed the expressly acknowledged purpose of all primitive art, and is concealed and implied in all later art. Art is practical, an effort to realize a sense of power, to become a god (just as in his motive of play the child desires more than anything else to realize himself as a man), to influence people, or objects, or gods, to exert magic somewhere in the world. In the feeling of power which the ecstatic state produces, the belief in the power of art is established, and at the same time deep and hidden impulses are exploited. On the feeling side, and indeed in every way, this ought to explain how art, religion, and all states of intoxication have a common element, if they are not primitively the same.
A psychology of the war moods must undertake to trace the history of the motive of power, considering its beginnings as the desire and sense of satisfaction connected with the performance of definite instinctive acts, and with their physiological results, with the exertion of power and the production of effects upon objects. It is in the performance of instinctive acts, in which superiority is inborn, that animal and man obtain their original sense of power or superiority. As capacities are differentiated and multiplied, the experiences of achievement generate a mood and a more general impulse, a desire to exert power for its own sake. The sensory or organic elements tend to predominate in this generalized motive, simply because the specific actions in which the sense of power is obtained cannot so readily, or cannot at all, be generalized. Such an organization of actions and states in consciousness demands nothing new in principle, implies nothing different from that found on the intellectual side when concepts are formed from concrete experiences. The associative processes and the selective principles everywhere present in mental action are all that are necessary to be assumed here. We may take advantage, however, of the special investigations of affective logic, andthe like, as giving evidence in support of such a conception of the formation of moods as is here being worked out. We are likely to make the mistake of thinking the specific instincts and the impulses and pleasure states that we find in human experiences, such as ecstasy, as the whole of these experiences, and to overlook the constant process of generalization that goes on in all the mental activity of the individual. For example, we may think of various plays which involve instinctive actions as being wholly explained by, or to be made up of, these instinctive acts alone, whereas in most plays that take the form of excitement, abandon or ecstasy, there are being employed processes which are general in the sense of reënforcing all the specific acts alike, and are yet specific in the sense that they are themselves, or have been, practical: that is, they are in reality processes that belong to the fundamental strata of consciousness—to the nutritional and reproductive tendencies. Out of these tendencies the more complex processes of which we speak are made, but they are no mere repetition of old forms. That, at least, is the way these ecstatic moods appear from our point of view.
It is precisely because ecstatic moods are presumably thus general and composite, and involve fundamental instincts (but in such a way that they are transformed, and no longer present in body, so to speak, but are represented by their organic processes rather than appearing as specific concatenated chains of motor events), with their purposes changed and their whole meaning determined by the present states to which they belong, that we should be inclined to say that to explain any great and powerful movement in the lives of individuals or nations as merely reversions is very inadequate and indeed wrong. They are emotional forces that are at work, composite feelings and moods rather than instincts. They are aspects of the continuity of the life of the present, rather than of the fragmentary past that lives in the individual. These forces are plastic, complexand organized, rather than haphazard and suppressed. They are directive, creative, but incidentally they make amends for and satisfy and exploit the past.
If these principles be valid, their application to the psychology of war seems plain. The central purpose or motive of war to-day is a craving for the realization of the sense of power. This is the subjective side of it, the unconscious, instinctive, mystical motive so often observed. The question of the actual power exerted or displayed is not the most essential point of this war mood. It is the manipulation and the satisfaction of inner factors that make the most significant aspect of these moods. History, we should hold, is in great part an unfoldment of this motive. Nations crave, as collective or group consciousness, the feeling of power. Just as we say the child in his plays wants to be a man, and the individual in his art feels himself a god, so nations in their wars and in their thoughts of wars, feel themselves more real, realize themselves as world powers, and as supreme and divine. To be first and all is indeed the purpose that runs in these moods, and this we believe is true, in its way, of the most insignificant and hopelessly decrepit of peoples. This must be taken account of in the interpretation of history, and in that larger pedagogy, the pedagogy of nations to which we just now look forward.
These moods which, slumbering, become the ecstasies of war are vague, even secretive. They contain aggressive thoughts that are disavowed, vanities that are concealed, fears that present a quiet front. But we must not think that the war mood always intends war. Nations have their subjective lives and inner history, and their vicarious satisfactions. A nation in arms already feels itself victor by reason of its sense of power. Otherwise few wars would be entered upon. Dreams and talk of war may incite to war, but they may also satisfy the desire and need of war. There is a certain narcissism in nations, and this is due precisely to the fact that patriotism as a feeling and impulsenecessarily lacks in the group consciousness the mechanisms for externalization, except indeed in war. War is an escape, for a people, from a kind of subjectivism, from the evils of a self-love to perhaps the greater evils of self-assertion.
Nations in war, and even in the thought of war realize their own potentiality, take account of stock of their powers, and create an ideal, romantic and dream world. They make castles-in-air, and these castles-in-air always take the form of empires. War, precisely like art, is at first more and then less practical, and sought for practical purposes. More and more there is a craving for glory, for prestige, for subjective satisfaction and symbols of power. Nations take lands that they cannot use for any good purpose, inflict indemnities that may ruin themselves rather than their enemies, exploit economic relations that are dangerous to the nations' very existence. It is power that they seek, and it is power they thus create, but it is often different in form and in value from what the conscious purpose holds. They are really seeking general and subjective states in part for their own sake. Psychologically it is all one and the same whether we realize this power by actually killing an enemy, or believe we overpower him by the performance of some mystic and ecstatic act, or in some more modern way become confident in our own power and prestige. National life, in order to maintain its integrity, must move upon a plane of intense feeling. It must have objectives, but these objectives are not necessarily of value in themselves. This is the delusion and enigma of history. Peoples enact dramas in their own subjective lives, and these things they do have reference to the desires for inner experiences. We may say that nations, like individuals, crave for luxuries of the emotional life, but to think of these experiences as merely static pleasure-states, after the fashion of a certain conception of the emotions, would be wholly to misunderstand this view which we have been trying to present.These subjective states are full of meaning and of purpose. They are not reactions, but rather, in so far as these collective lives are normal and progressive, these moods and ecstasies are more of the nature of crucibles in which old reactions and feelings are fused, given new direction, new forms and in a certain way a new nature. History is made in these moods of war. They are subjective forces, but they are also objectively creative.
What is it that nations really desire? What is it, we might ask, that an individual desires? On the side of experience it is anabundant life, a life full of the feeling of power. This craving for an abundant life is a craving for the satisfaction of many desires, instinctive and acquired, but it is also a craving, in some sense, for more desire. It is not merely to satisfy desires, but to realize more life by creating more desires that experience is sought. That is the philosophy of the life of the superior individual; it is also the principle of the larger individual—the nation. The creation and the satisfaction of desire are the motives of art. They are also the motives of life.
In history, it is the intangible value, the unconscious purpose, the desire to realize empires that are only in part material, the desire for glory and prestige and opportunity that seem to be the guiding motives. There is a general and plastic purpose beneath all the special tendencies and desires directing interest toward specific objects, and also sometimes making the objectives sought indefinite and the purposes in seeking them seem mystical. It is the desire to be a power in the world, or rather to have power over the world, and to experience all the inner exaltation these desires inspire that appears to be the creative force in history. These things, moreover, are not the desires and impulses of the geniuses among nations alone; they seem to be inherent in all national life.
Study of theintoxication motivein the individual and as a social phenomenon shows that it is not an expressionof the need of relaxation from strain, or a reversion, or something that occurs by a mere release of primitive instincts. It occurs in the great periods of history, and in the strong years of the life of the individual, rather than in times of weakness. It is always a spirit of the times rather than of some past reverted to. It may occur in times of disorder or of repression, but it is an experience in which energy and power are expressed. We see it most dominant when life is most abundant, when there is also a craving to make life more abundant still, when there is already power and more power is longed for. It is true, however, that two opposite conditions may produce the strongest manifestations of this intoxication motive. Something analogous to these conditions we see in the lives of individuals, in the phenomena of intemperance, which belong in general to the virile years. Social ecstasy is produced in times when there is already a free expression of energy, but also under conditions that cause pain, disorder and repression. Under the latter conditions we think of it not as desire for relief from strain but desire to be released from obstacles that impede the expression of the growth force. If all this be true, we see war in a somewhat different light from that in which it is ordinarily regarded. It is not, in its typical forms, a reversion to barbarism, and it is not a political mishap. It is rather a readjustment of tendencies or forces and an expression and product of the living and progressive forces of society—not necessarily a good or even a normal expression of them, but an awakening and a realization of such desires as are to-day at work in everything we do—forces which for the moment are raised to a white heat, so to speak, in which purposes are for the moment fused and it may be confused—but still an expression of what, for better or for worse weare, not of what in some remote past time wewere. We cannot explain war or excuse ourselves for waging wars by saying that we lapse for a time into barbarism, but on the other hand the heroism we suddenlyfind in ourselves as nations or as individuals, is not so different from that of ordinary life as we may have supposed. We have perhaps no right to say that all war is thus to be characterized. War is a very complex and a widely variable phenomenon, but this is the explanation of that aspect of the motive of history which in general produces war. War may have its abnormalities, if we may speak of a worse in that which is already bad enough. War may satisfy the desperate mind; it may, on occasion, be a narcotic to cover up worse pain, or an evidence of decadence; or even be what those who think of it as a reversion believe. But all these aspects of war, if our view be sound, are the eccentricities rather than the essence of war.
The conditions preceding our recent great war will doubtless in the course of future historical and sociological research, be minutely scrutinized, in the effort to find the causes of the war—factors deeper than and different from the political and economic causes and the personal intrigues that are now most emphasized. If we believe that the war was made in Germany rather than elsewhere, we might look there, especially for these psychological factors of war—for our intoxication motives and unconscious impulses and our causes of reversion, but we should probably not find anything different in kind there from what we should discover in other great countries. Those who have seen in modern industrialism dangers of coming disaster, or who now look back upon it as a genuine cause of the war were probably not mistaken. Industrialism has been producing rapidly, and in an intense form, what we may call the mood of the city, and this mood of the city contains all the conditions and all the emotions that tend to bring to the surface the deep-lying motives of the social life that we are trying to point out. There are both the joy of the abundant life, the craving for new experiences, and the sense of reality, and also the disorganization of interests and motives, the stress and fatigue and monotony which prepare the mindfor culmination in dramatic events. There is, in a word, a deep stirring of all the forces that make for progress and expansion, and also conditions that disorganize the individual and the social life. Lamprecht (59) of all German writers seems to have appreciated this. He has written before the war, describing a condition in Germany which he says began in the seventies of the preceding century—a change of German life in which there is a great increase of the activities of the cities, with haste and anxiety, unscrupulous individual energy, general nervous excitement, a condition of neuro-muscular weakness (and he might have added as another sign, over-stimulation of the mind by a great flood of morbid literature).
In Lamprecht's opinion, this period of excitement, this strong tendency to the enjoyment of excitation in general, is a form of socio-psychic dissociation. It is a period of relative disorganization, when the individual is subjected to a great variety of new experiences, when outside influences prevail over the inner impulses of the individual, in which the individual is unsettled and there is a tendency toward pessimism and melancholia. Lamprecht thinks of this state as something transitory, and already as he writes (in 1905) nearing an end. This state of continuous excitement, with its shallow pathos of the individual and its constant and superficial happiness, its worship of the novel and the extraordinary, the suggestibility and the receptivity of the masses, automatic action of the will and the emotions—all this Lamprecht thinks will pass. It is a stage in the process of a new formation. The very elements of dissociation are positively charged, so to speak, and contain creative power. A new system of morals, a new philosophy, new religion begin to emerge. There is a strong effort to reach a new dominant.
This is Lamprecht's psychological interpretation of recent German history. This view and the various aspects of the condition which Lamprecht describes, the relation ofthe materialism, the pessimism and the melancholy of such a time to the optimistic trends and the deep forward movement need a closer study than we can here give it, but may we not see in it the truth that such conditions as these are prone to cause wars as a phase of the process of the inner adjustment of national life? Wars occur as forms of expression of those impulses which appear in the individual life in times of rapid growth and relative dissociation as outbreaks of intemperance and passion—a culmination, according to our view and terminology, of the intoxication motive. Industrialism itself is perhaps but one manifestation of deep impulses in the life of nations; it is at once an intensification and a formalizing of life. Hence perhaps its paradoxical appearance as an increase of both joy and distress. There is nothing in it that is wholly satisfying.
Germany, says Lamprecht, was seeking, in this transition period, a new dominant, a new religion and a new philosophy. But Germany, let us help Lamprecht to say, since he does not himself draw this conclusion, has failed to emerge upon the level of an exalted ecstasy, failed to produce the philosophical, the moral and religious fruit of its new impulses,failed, in a word, to find its dominant on a high level, precisely as often the promising individual fails and has expressed his truly great nature in low forms of activity. So Germany, and the world, dominated by industrialism and all the desires and forces that the rapid development of industrialism has brought into action, has come to a culmination of its efforts in an outbreak unparalleled in history. On the side of Germany we see a nation governed by a mood of war in which the chief modes of thought and action represented are the pseudo-mystical and religious longings for new empire, romantic love of the past, militarism, and all the motives of the new industrialism and the new science. The best motives of the old feudalism and the new industrialism tried to unite, as we might say, into a new and very great civilization—and they failed. What has happenedis that the material powers and the cynical moods of industrialism have combined with the mystical elements and the superficial æstheticism of the old feudalistic régime to create a philosophy of life, a temporary stage it may be, in which force and fanaticism and the uncompromising ideals of national honor and brute strength prevail over those of a wider efficiency and a broader devotion which might have inspired a greater and a better Germany. Convention and political motives have done the rest.
Bergson says that in the war spirit of Germany one sees matter arrayed against spirit. One can see some truth in this, but spirit and matter are not two armies pitted against one another. In Germany, as we may believe elsewhere, the spiritual in the sense of creative forces in the subconscious life of nations does try to organize the practical life, with its routine and convention, into an onward moving progress, in which, necessarily, exalted moods (if energies are to get themselves expressed at all) must prevail, and must be full of possibilities, both of great good and of great evil. Life in its collective form will be abundant, because that is its most fundamental craving. It may be terribly and destructively abundant, or benignly, but progress, as history seems to show us—if reason and psychology do not—can never be orderly and complacent. Order and convention must break down to introduce new spirit and new desires which are continually being created in the inner life. These forces may be old instincts which are continually upsetting civilized life, but the desires they produce and the mechanism of their operation seem to be different from what our customary psychology and interpretation of history imply. Just as these moods make the child play and be wholly unpractical when one might suppose he could be useful, and the individual, as man, live a certain life of adventure rather than in security and routine, so this spirit or mood that dominates nations makes them imperialistic, and causes them to crave those things which lead towardwar, if they do not crave war itself, when we might think they ought to be most concerned about the economic welfare of the world as a whole.
Whether this spirit of nations be an evil to be overcome, and to suppress, or an untamed force to direct to right objects, or a good that by some logic of events which we do not understand works out the right course of history, we do not know. But here, of course, we come to problems, which, if they are problems at all in any real sense, are philosophical and ultimate.
We have found that the essential, and we might say, primary psychological datum of war is a war-mood, that the central motive of this war-mood is a general impulse which we called the intoxication motive, and that this intoxication motive, considered generically, and in regard to its specific meaning is a craving for power and for the experience of exerting and feeling power. The war-mood is not a mere collection of instincts; it is a new product, in which instincts and emotions have a place. There are several reasons, practical and theoretical, for regarding it as a highly important problem to discover what the actual content of this war-mood is. This mood, being one of the greatest of all powers of good and evil, and one most in need to-day of education and re-direction, it may be, it will probably be controlled, if ever, upon the basis of a knowledge of what it means as a whole, and of what its elements are which appear in the form of fused, transformed, truncated, generalized and aborted instincts and feelings.
Primitive Tendencies
First of all, the highly complex emotions, moods and impulses we find in the social consciousness as expressed in the moods of war, do contain and revert to instincts and feelings that are part of the primitive equipment of organic life, and are usually identified as nutritional andreproductive tendencies. The part played in war by the migratory impulse, the predatory impulse and the like indicates the connection of the war-moods with the nutritional tendencies; and the display elements found already in primitive warfare and, as we have already inferred, in all forms of ecstasy contain factors that are at bottom sexual. We no longer eat our enemies, and we do not bring home their heads to our women or practice wife stealing, but it is easy to observe the remnants of these old feelings and instincts in war. Trophy hunting continues, and we may suppose that even the moods of primitive cannibalism have not entirely been lost. The ready habituation of soldiers to some of the scenes of the recent war seems to suggest a lingering trace of this motive, while the looting impulse which plays such a part in war, and some aspects of the destructive impulses and the like that are displayed, are, with a high degree of probability, closely related to instincts that were once specifically practical and belong to the fundamental nutritional motives. Nor is it a mere euphemism, perhaps, when we speak of the greed of nations, nor solely analogical when we compare the ambitions of peoples with certain adolescent phenomena in the life of the individual. Plainly the social consciousness, as a collective mood, does not command the specific reactions connected with sexuality and nutrition, but we may observe the presence of these instinctive reactions in two phases of war. We see them in the tendencies of various individuals, who under the excitements of the war moods are controlled more or less specifically by instinctive reactions. We see also fragments of instinctive reactions and primitive feeling woven into the total states of social consciousness. The hunger motive may, and probably does, supply some of the elements of the fear and the aggressive moods of war; just as the sex motive provides some of the elements of anger and hatred, and some of the qualities of combat itself.