The Psychology of Nations | Page 2

set our minds to the task of making the social life progressive, we might be willing to let wars take care of themselves, so to speak, without any radical philosophy of good and evil. We ought at least to examine war fairly, and to see what, in the waging of war, man has really desired. A study of war ought to help us to decide whether we must accept our future, with its possibility of wars, as a kind of fate, or whether we must now begin, with a new idea of conscious evolution, to apply our science and our philosophy and our practical wisdom seriously for the first time to the work of creating history, and no longer be content merely to live it.
As to the details of the study of war--we first of all consider the origin and the biological aspects of war; then war as related to the development, in the social life and in the life of the individual, of the motive of power. The instincts that are most concerned in the development of this motive of power are then considered, and also the relations of war to the ?sthetic impulses and to art. Nationalism, national honor and patriotism are studied as causes of war. The various "causes" that are brought forward as the principles fought for are examined; also the philosophical influences, the moral and religious motives and the institutional factors among the motives of war. Finally the economic and political motives and the historical causes are considered. The conclusion is reached that the motive of power, as the fundamental principle of behavior at the higher levels, is the principle of war, but that in so general a form it goes but a little way toward being an explanation of war. We find the real causes of war by tracing out the development of this motive of power as it appears in what we call the "intoxication impulse," and in the idea of national honor and in the political motives of war. It is in these aspects of national life that we find the motives of war as they may be considered as a practical problem. But we find no separate causes, and we do not find a chain of causes that might be broken somewhere and thus war be once for all eliminated. Wars are products of the whole character of nations, so to speak, and it is national character that must be considered in any practical study of war. It is by the development of the character of nations in a natural process, or by the education of national character, that war will be made to give way to perpetual peace, if such a state ever comes, rather than by a political readjustment or by legal enactments, however necessary as beginnings or makeshifts these legal and political changes may be.
The second part of the book is a study of our present situation as an educational problem, in which we have for the first time a problem of educating national consciousness as a whole, or the individuals of a nation with reference to a world-consciousness. The study has reference especially to the conditions in our own country, but it also has general significance. The war has brought many changes, and in every phase of life we see new problems. These may seem at the moment to be separate and detached conditions which must be dealt with, each by itself, but this is not so; they are all aspects of fundamental changes and new conditions, the main feature of which is the new world-consciousness of which we speak. Whatever one's occupation, one cannot remain unaffected by these changes, or escape entirely the stress that the need of adjustment to new ideas and new conditions compels. What we may think about the future--about what can be done and what ought to be done, is in part, and perhaps largely, a matter of temperament. At least we see men, presumably having access to the same facts, drawing from them very different conclusions. Some are keyed to high expectations; they look for revolutions, mutations, a new era in politics and everywhere in the social life. For them, after the war, the world is to be a new world. Fate will make a new deal. Others appear to believe that after the flurry is over we shall settle down to something very much like the old order. These are conservative people, who neither desire nor expect great changes. Others take a more moderate course. While improvement is their great word, they are inclined to believe that the new order will grow step by step out of the old, and that good will come out of the evil only in so far as we strive to make it. We shall