The Psychology of Nations Part 2

CHAPTER III

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

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

_Primitive Tendencies_

First of all, the highly complex emotions, moods and impulses we find in the social consciousness as expressed in the moods of war, do contain and revert to instincts and feelings that are part of the primitive equipment of organic life, and are usually identified as nutritional and reproductive tendencies. The part played in war by the migratory impulse, the predatory impulse and the like indicates the connection of the war-moods with the nutritional tendencies; and the display elements found already in primitive warfare and, as we have already inferred, in all forms of ecstasy contain factors that are at bottom s.e.xual. 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 a.n.a.logical 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 s.e.xuality 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 s.e.x motive provides some of the elements of anger and hatred, and some of the qualities of combat itself.

_The Aggressive Instinct_

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

One aspect of the aggressive habit of man has been too much neglected.

It is highly probable that aggression in man has been far more closely related to the emotion of fear than to any a.s.sumed 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 acc.u.mulation 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 att.i.tude 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 ident.i.ty 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 att.i.tude 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 partic.i.p.ate 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 l.u.s.ts 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 pa.s.sion. 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 a.s.sumed 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 partic.i.p.ants 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 att.i.tude 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 att.i.tude 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 att.i.tudes 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 ent.i.ties, 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 att.i.tudes 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 att.i.tude 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 t.i.tles 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 G.o.d 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 cla.s.s 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 att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sions. 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sociate, or some writers do a.s.sociate 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 cooperative 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 compet.i.tion 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 coordinated 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 sh.e.l.l 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 circ.u.mstances 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 p.r.o.nounced type or an exaggerated predatory instinct to the Germans.

Chapman (39) says that the war is a flaming forth of pa.s.sions 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 pa.s.sions 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 pa.s.sions 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 a.s.sociations themselves but in all that the a.s.sociations 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 a.n.a.logies 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 a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sume 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.