The Psychology of Nations Part 5

There is another argument which is in part based upon an interpretation of scientific principles, but is in part also a fatalistic doctrine--confidence in the issues of battle as a means of testing the right and the validity of culture. The right will prevail, on this theory, because the right is the stronger or because in some sense strength _is_ the right, and because the method of selection of the best by struggle is a basic principle, and may be applied to everything that is living or is a product of life.

If the German interpretation of the German cause has been dominated by an ideal of objective proof, we hear on the other side much about subjective rights and subjective evaluations--the right, for example, of every people to determine its own life, to have its own culture, to decide upon its own nationality. The Allies have believed that they were fighting to establish this principle throughout the world, and that this principle is diametrically opposed to the German principle.

The thought of centralization, of a hierarchy of nations and the like, is wholly foreign to this democratic principle. Bergson (17) finds in the idea of industry the cause of the war and the principle of opposition in it. The Allies, he says, have been fighting against materialism with the forces of the spirit. Germany's forces are material. A mechanism is fighting against a self-renewing spirit. The ideal of force is met by the force of the ideal.

Boutroux (13) says that France, in the war, has had before her eyes the idea of humanity; France was fighting for the recognition of the rights of personality--rights of each nation to its own existence.

France is a champion of freedom; she wants all the legitimate aspirations of peoples to be realized. Germanism, with its ideal of force, is contrasted with the ideal of Greek and Christian culture and philosophy. A cult of justice and modesty is contrasted with the cult of power; in the former, sentiment and feeling have a place as criteria of values; in the latter the appeal is to science and to reason.

Hobhouse (34) says that the war is a conflict of the spirit of the West against the spirit of the East (precisely the same as the German view, we see, but with a very different identification of the champions). Germany has never felt the spirit of the West. The war is for something far deeper than national freedom; it is a war to justify the primary rules of right. Burnet (18) thinks that the great conflict was a conflict between Kultur as nationalistic, and humanism as something international--that Germany, in recent years, had abandoned an ideal of culture for that of specialization in the service of the State. England's answer to the call was not to the specific need and appeal of Belgium, but because England felt that there was something in Germany incompatible with Western civilization.

Le Bon (42) says that we must always remember that the Teuton is the irreconcilable enemy of the civilization of the French and of all it stands for, and that he must always be kept at a distance. Durkheim's view is that Germany's ambition and energy and will antagonize the freedom of the rest of the world, and the rest of the world felt this and the war was the consequence. Dillon (55) says that the future for which Germany has been striving is a future incompatible with those ideals which our race cherishes and reveres, and that we must make a definite choice between our philosophy and religion and our code on one side and those of the German on the other. Drawbridge (19) says that the war has been a conflict between the ideals of gentleness and tact, on one side, and of brutality and ruthlessness on the other. It is the Christian spirit against the Nietzschean.

Again we have been told that the war was simply a war of autocracy against democracy, of mediaevalism against modern life, of progress against stagnation, of militarism and war against peace, of the Napoleonic against the Christian spirit. Occasionally we hear more personal and subjective notes. Redier (30) says that France was fighting solely to retain mastery of her own genius, in order to draw from it n.o.ble joys and just profits.

The American point of view has been expressed in several forms by the President of the United States. For example, he has said that we are one of the champions of the rights of mankind. The world must be made safe for democracy. And again, that America is fighting for no selfish purpose, but for the liberation of peoples everywhere from the aggression of autocratic powers. This view that the war was remedial, that it was in the interest of progress, to prevent that which is belated in civilization from gaining the upper hand, and that it is on the part of America a war of partic.i.p.ation and aid in a cause which though supremely good might otherwise be lost, is the prevailing idea.

That this spirit of the champions.h.i.+p of causes and of justice to other nations is a stronger motive in the Anglo-Saxon peoples than in others appears to be an opinion that history on the whole can confirm.

It is relatively easy to obtain the opinion of philosophers about the "causes" represented in the war; it would be of interest also to know what the millions of men in the field think. Data are not altogether wanting, but there appear to be no general studies. That many men, in more than one army, have no clear knowledge of any cause for which they have fought, except as these causes are nationalistic is certain.

That there is ignorance even among the men of our own army in regard to the causes and purposes of the war has been made evident. Knowledge and enlightenment can hardly have been greater elsewhere. German soldiers are credited with believing that they are defending Germany from attack. The French soldier was fighting for France. The invasion of his country left him no doubt and no choice. The English soldier has often said that he was doing it for the women and the children, and one writer says that the deepest motive of two thirds of the British army was to make this war the last. The American soldier, from the nature of the circ.u.mstances under which he himself entered the war has been more conscious of a motive of helpfulness and of comrades.h.i.+p with other peoples who are in distress and danger. Probably the idea of America's honor, and the more abstract idea still of the cause of freedom, even though this idea has been, so to speak, our watchword, have not been the most influential motives in the mind of the individual. Germany was attacking people who were in distress, and the American soldier went over to make the scales turn in the direction of victory for the oppressed.

There is, of course, a literature of the war produced by the soldier in the field, in which there are expressed high ideals, abstract conceptions and firm principles. The French soldier has written about liberty, the German soldier has had considerable to say about a Kultur war. An American volunteer in the British army has written, "I find myself among the millions of others in the great allied armies fighting for all I believe right and civilized and humane against a power which is evil and which threatens the existence of all the right we prize and the freedom we enjoy" (24). But in general the consciousness of the soldier, from all the evidence we have, was concerned, as presumably was that of most of us, mainly with the most obvious qualities of opposing forces, their concrete actions, and the personal motives of rulers.

Leaving aside so far as one can one's own partisans.h.i.+p and mores (which is not a very easy task), what causes can we say, with a considerable degree of certainty, have actually been issues in the present war? To some extent what one thinks these causes are will remain matters of personal opinion and preference. Are there also principles which, when once observed, will be accepted as the fundamental "causes" of the war? There seem to be three at least which characterize wide differences in the ideals and the civilization of the opposing forces.

There is, first of all, an issue between the ideals of a relatively autocratic form of government and a relatively more democratic form of government. This was a cause of the intellectuals, but it was also a popular cause. Men in general like the form of government under which they live. From the standpoint of those who hold that a democratic form of government is right, the war seemed to be a conflict between a modern and progressive regime and an old and vicious one. So far as this autocratic principle aimed to suppress the rights of individuals, or to menace the liberties of small nations, so far as it was aggressively militaristic and had imperial ambitions, which could be achieved only by force, it stood clearly opposed to democracy.

Democracy and autocracy were plainly at war with one another, and yet if we look closely we shall see that neither one can offer any actual demonstration of its validity as the most superior or the final form of government. In part they may appeal to the observable course of history for their justification, but the final source of judgment seems to rest in the ma.s.s of opinion in the world. Questions of form and taste are not wholly absent. But the believer in democracy and the believer in autocracy will both a.s.sert that deep differences in principle are involved. They will not admit that democracy and autocracy are superficial forms, and are questions of taste, and they will not agree with Munsterberg, who says that the two forms tend inevitably toward a compromise, by a process of alternation in which first one and-then the other is the dominant form in the world.

The war, in another aspect of it, has been a conflict between the idea of nationalism and that of internationalism. It is a conflict between an ideal of state, represented in the German philosophy of state by the principle of complete autonomy of the individual nation, and one which a.s.sumes that states, while retaining their rights of sovereignty are to be governed by laws which regulate their conduct as functioning members of a society of nations. The difference is that, relatively, between a state of anarchy among nations and a state of order. To some extent there has been a conflict between the idea of rights and the idea of duties of nations. This internationalism is not merely a sociological principle, something academic and scientific, as a theory of state or society; it is an ethical principle, which contains some recognition of justice as a subjective principle. It has some roots in theory, but it is also based upon the immediate recognition of the rights of peoples to their own individual lives. Its ideal is a world containing many nations, coordinated by natural processes and not a world in which a single nation or a few may hold the supreme place, except as this supremacy might come by a process of natural development.

The third conflict of the war was one which we may call a psychological conflict. It was a conflict between two ideas of life, one based upon a belief in the supremacy of reason, the other implying that the final test of values in life remains in the sphere of the feelings, or is a matter of appreciation. Germany, in her recent history, has stood conspicuously for the belief that human society may and indeed must be controlled and regulated by definite principles--principles that must be determined according to the methods of science. These principles take the place, in this philosophy of life, of certain typical human reactions that are believed to be demonstrably irrational. In its visible and most practical form the application of this principle is through organization.

This characterization of German life reveals something very much like a paradox in the principles of the war. We see a conflict in one direction between a certain mediaevalism in government and social forms and a more modern and progressive type; we see also a conflict of a modernism of an extreme form, represented by a scientific civilization, united with this mediaevalism, and in opposition to a conception of life which is in some respects more nave and more primitive. The explanation of this paradox is that Germany offers an ill.u.s.tration of a phenomenon of development that has been seen before in history, of an excess of development and specialization in a direction that appears to be off the main line of progress, or at least is an anachronism. Germany has shown us the effects of rationalism, some would say a morbid and hypertrophied reason. This rationalism is certainly in part a product of systematic education and propaganda, a conscious exploitation of science, and it is in part temperamental. Such a result is always possible in a small state with a highly centralized form of government. It is a notorious fact that Germany's type of civilization can be spread neither by persuasion nor by force. If we may apply a biological a.n.a.logy we may say that German Kultur in its modern form cannot survive. That this German civilization has been felt by the world at large to be abnormal and of the nature of a monstrosity we can hardly doubt, and that therefore to some extent there has been a sense, on the part of the enemies of Germany, of fighting to root out a dangerous and rank growth. Germany, seeing in her own civilization only the appearance of modernism, has been inclined to regard all other civilizations as decadent.

Germany, governed by the ideals of rationalism, has a.s.sumed that history can be made, wars conducted, life regulated in accordance with a program. On the other side we see a very general acceptance of a philosophy of life in which many evils of disorder and waste and the necessity of an experimental att.i.tude toward life are accepted as necessary consequences of the life of freedom. We see implied in this philosophy of life a belief in a morality and a religion that are based upon feeling rather than upon objective evidences, and a way of judging conduct more or less naively and simply or according to methods of appreciation that are essentially aesthetic, using the term in a wide sense. This mode of life is accepted in the belief that order in due season will come out of relative disorder, by a natural process or by a gradually increasing organization and voluntary adjustment. If we accept the validity of this att.i.tude in life we shall be inclined to regard rationalism as it is manifested to-day in German life as an evil. We may believe that in the end the cure for this rationalism will not be less reason but rather more, but we shall see also that it is possible for reason to outstrip and pervert life, and indeed involve life in an absurdity, simply because as a method of dealing with the whole of life it cannot be sufficiently comprehensive.

Are these and all such issues that we find in war, causes of war? Do nations fight for principles? Opinions certainly differ on this point.

Some think of wars, we say, as essentially conflicts of principles; some interpret wars wholly in terms of political issues. We should say that the truth lies between these a.s.sertions or is the sum of their half-truths. Wars are not in their origin wars of principle. The political, the personal, the concrete aspects of the relations of nations are always in the foreground in causing wars. Wars become wars of principle after they have been begun for other reasons. Sanctions and motives appear after the fact. Fundamental differences of mores which include the raw material, so to speak, of principles and causes are factors in wars in so far as they create misunderstanding and antipathy, but in so far as these differences of nature and of principle do not enter into the sphere of politics and of national honor, they do not as such cause wars Those deep moods which acc.u.mulate in the minds of peoples and enter into the causes of war are not convictions about principles. They are more generic and natural. History does not seem to show us wars caused by pure principles. We sometimes say that the Civil War in our own country was fought over a principle, but that is something less than the truth.

The fundamental question at issue was plainly that of the rights of certain states at a particular time to be independent and free.

Principles emerge in war, we say, and then they become secondary causes. And it is precisely this emergence of principles from fields of battle that perhaps const.i.tutes the greatest contribution of wars to the civilization of the world. We need to reflect upon this deeply, since the whole philosophy of history is concerned in it. The virtues that nations discover in themselves in war they elaborate in peace.

Nations at war become conscious of their spiritual possessions. Since their existence, they believe, is at stake, it is a part of their self-defense to justify their value in the world. They discover in themselves that which is most characteristic of them, and this becomes their principle. The principle of a nation is that which the national consciousness fixates itself upon as the t.i.tle of the nation to continued existence. Nations do not go to war over their causes, or about their distinctive virtues and missions in the world. Rather it is their likenesses that precipitate wars,--their resemblances and ident.i.ties in being the same in ambition, and having the same conceptions of national honor and the same motives for war and desiring the same objects. Nations in general do not go to war over principles because they are not motivated by principles in their historical course. The principles of nations are aspects of their inner development. The "causes" of nations at war, according to our view, are these inner qualities of which they have become conscious.

Nations discover them in the stress of war, and it is quite natural also that in such times they should not always judge them fairly, and that they should often make for themselves a fict.i.tious character.

CHAPTER VII

PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCES

Philosophy, in the minds of many writers, must be given a high place among the causes of war, and a considerable fraction of the literature of the late war is devoted to the problem of discovering, in the field of abstract thought, the influences that led to the great conflict.

Nietzsche, especially, seems to have been held responsible for the European conflagration. As the philosopher of the New Germany, as the chief expositor of the doctrine of force, the inventor of the super-man and of the idea of the beyond-good, Nietzsche seems to stand convicted of furnis.h.i.+ng precisely the concepts that have become the German's gospel of war; and since the German is p.r.o.ne to be guided by abstractions, the evidence, even though circ.u.mstantial, seems to many to be convincing.

Schopenhauer, also, as the great pessimist; Hegel, with his doctrine of the supremacy of the State as the representative of the Idea on earth; Kant, as the discoverer of the subjective moral principle; English utilitarianism as the doctrine of the main chance; empiricism, as the philosophy of inconsistency and dual principles of thought and conduct; even the whole spirit of the English philosophy, which Wundt says is nothing but an attempt to reconcile thought with the ideas of peace and comfort--all these have been charged with being instigators of the war.

Bergson (17) takes a different view. He says that the desire comes first, the doctrine afterwards. Germany, determined upon war, invokes Nietzsche or Hegel. Germany in a moral temper would appeal to Kant, or in still a different mood to the Romanticists. Le Bon (42) says that nations are pushed forward by forces which they cannot understand, and that rational thoughts and desires play but a little part in war. That appears to be true. We cannot say that philosophies do not enter at all into the causes of war, but among these causes they must be insignificant as compared with other causes that neither arise from abstract thought nor are greatly modified by reason in any way.

Consider the influence of Napoleon (himself so little a product of any philosophical influence), as compared with Hegel; or of Bismarck as compared with Nietzsche, and this will be apparent. There are in the course of the centuries books and men that, as rational forces, do exert profound effect upon the practical life, but they must be rarer than is sometimes supposed. It is all too easy to a.s.sume a relation of cause and effect when there is only a similarity between thought and subsequent conduct. Rousseau may or may not have inspired the French Revolution. Probably he did not. The recent great war, we might say, has occurred in spite of philosophy, and if Nietzsche's influence gravitated toward war, it can hardly be thought to have had any deciding force in turning the scales already so overloaded by fate.

Philosophy failed to prevent war. Nietzsche's philosophy did not cause it. His philosophy affords a convenient phraseology in which to express a philosophy of war, granting sufficient misinterpretation of his philosophy. Probably what influence he has had has been due rather to his literary impressiveness than to his thought as a contribution to philosophy.

Darwin, as the great force behind a new and varied development of science, has had the fate to be, in some sense, a factor in the moods and the new habits of life that led toward the final issue in the great war. It is not so much that his principle, misapplied, or applied uncritically may become a justification of war or even its basic principle that has made him so great an influence, but precisely because his thought, by becoming one of the great coordinating principles of all the natural sciences has given power to a movement which has had various practical consequences, not all of them good, or at least not all yielding fruit for our own age.

Darwin's great influence as a force turning scholarly interest toward naturalism and away from cla.s.sicism, as a factor in modern materialism and even pessimism, as a background, if no more, for the Haeckels and Ostwalds of science is no inconsiderable factor in the scientific and objective spirit of the day.

Facts must be faced. It is not such influences as that of Schopenhauer, who expresses a logical or at least an abstract and we might add literary form of pessimism, that in the generations just past have transformed most of the conceptions of religion, with all the effects upon the practical life that have followed, but the force of our modern science combining with tendencies which it fosters but perhaps does not create, giving momentum to industrialism and specialization,--it is this change in the ideas of men that we must suspect of being implicated in the present catastrophe of the world, if any influence from the rational life is to be counted at all. Hegel and Kant hover in the background. The author of the plan for universal peace provides us with a subjective principle of morality which can be distorted into a philosophy of moral independence and even of independence from morality, and Hegel must have helped to establish the German theory of the State, although with Treitschke and with the practical state-makers like Frederick the Great and his followers, we can hardly believe Hegel indispensable. The causes of war are too general, too old and too fundamental to be greatly added to or detracted from as yet by philosophy. Philosophy is the hope of the world, it may be, and by no means a forlorn hope, but it is not yet one of the great powers. When philosophy is a mere endors.e.m.e.nt by reason of some motive that has arisen in the practical life, or is a literary expression of views about life, it may give the appearance of being a profound force in the world. But this is not real philosophy, in any case. Philosophy has not as yet shown itself highly creative even in the calm fields of education and the moral life.

No! Philosophy is a factor in the motives of war rather by reason of what it has not done, than because of its positive teachings. To-day we ought no longer to be under illusions on that point. Neither Christianity nor philosophy can make or prevent wars as yet. They have not been able to cope with the practical forces of the world which make for nationalism, partisans.h.i.+p and personal interests. It would require a greater amount both of religion and of philosophy than we now can bring to bear upon the world to offset the influence of Napoleon alone in the practical life of nations. It is the Napoleonic spirit that still governs Europe. Philosophy has been thus far a science of being an explanation of the world after the fact, and not even to any great extent a science of its progress, except in so far as, we may say, beginning with Hegel and with Spencer, there has been some development of the methods and the most formal conceptions of such a science. It is asking too much of philosophy, in its present stage, to expect it to preach the gospel, or to teach school, or to direct politics, and for the same reason it is unjust to charge philosophy with having created the greatest catastrophe of history. If philosophy cannot wield any great power now in those parts of life that are by their nature presumably most amenable to reason, its effect upon those events that express the supreme force of human pa.s.sions and the totality of life will not be very important. The influences of philosophy are academic, and presumably any doctrine of life that preaches achievement, virility and unmorality will include in some degree war among the interests that it will affect, within the limits of its academic nature. But youth is inherently warlike, because above everything else it seeks to realize life in its fullness, and war at least does symbolize this reality and abundance of life. A philosophy which preached peace would hardly become a great influence with youth. A philosophy advocating the cause of war would form a natural background for the essential motives of youth. If the scales were evenly balanced, it might turn them. It is hard at least to see the relations of philosophy to the practical life in any other light to-day. Philosophies are tenuous and adaptable things. We see them used to support opposite causes, and they change color under the influence of strong desires. Bosanquet (91) shows us how Hegel's n.o.ble conception of the State, if we but subst.i.tute for its central thought of welfare of the State, that of selfish interest, may be made to change before our eyes into the meanest of maxims. This process is, however, not unique in the history of the relations of thought and life.

A detailed study of the relations of intellectual factors to war would need to consider the effects of a great number of more or less philosophical ideas which throw their weight on the side of war. So far as these ideas are simple and clear, and especially if they can be conveyed in the form of the phrase, their influence cannot wholly be ignored. Some we have already referred to. The doctrine that might makes right, the conception of state as supreme, the belief in the divine right of kings, the belief in the ordained rights of aristocracy, belief in militarism as a social inst.i.tution, the doctrine that life may be controlled by reason, all intellectual pessimism, skepticism, any form of concept-wors.h.i.+p, whether Hegelian or other, acceptance of the methods of science and the results of science as applicable to all the problems of life--all such principles which inhabit the region, so to speak, between philosophy and the practical life manifestly have some relation to the spirit of war. In a very general way they may be counted as philosophical factors in war. For the most part, however, those ideas that have been accused of abetting war are exaggerations and perversions of philosophical ideas. Nietzsche, Darwin and Hegel have all been exploited and made to stand sponsor for specific philosophies of war. In the new philosophy of life which Patten thinks has greatly influenced German conduct, and which may be expressed in the words _Dienst_, _Ordnung_, and _Kraft_, we can see both the effects of impulses that have grown out of the new life itself, and the influences of formal philosophy. That such ideas have had relatively a greater influence in Germany than elsewhere must be admitted, but that either this devotion to ideas or the ideas themselves have been derived from philosophical interests and from philosophies that have played any important part in the history of thought we may well doubt. We should suspect that the same practical interest that works unceasingly to distort and popularize philosophy would help to create such pseudo-philosophy.

Von Bulow (65) says that the German people have a pa.s.sion for logic, and that this pa.s.sion amounts to fanaticism:--that when an intellectual form or system has been found for anything, they insist with obstinate perseverance on fitting realities into the system.

Durkheim (16) says that the Germans' organized system of ideas is a cause of war. It is also true, we should say, that the tendency to organize ideas and even the fundamental ideas by which the Germans have been guided are deeply rooted in temperament, in history and in the social order of the past. Boutroux (13) says that the Germans themselves regard the war as the culmination of their philosophy. We should say on the contrary that the whole war philosophy of Europe is almost wholly a product of strife and comes from impulses that arise irresistibly in the practical life. Into these movements philosophy fits or may be made to fit, and the presence of ideas in a society in which the academic life has great prestige, ideas which coincide with beliefs readily gives an illusion of an order governed by the higher reason. The fact that Germany's recent wars had all been highly successful, the fact that Germany had learned to depend upon her good sword in time of need are the chief sources of Germany's doctrines of war: the Hegelian background in the light of what we have learned in recent times about the psychology of nations, must seem to be rather of the nature of the ornamental. The ideal of the Prussian State to be a power directed by intelligence suggests Hegel, but it seems highly improbable, to say the least, that Hegelian philosophy has had much to do with shaping this ideal. Behind all this is the necessity of shaping German life in the form which it has taken--necessity if we accept, at least, Germany's national temperament itself as a necessity. That other belief, widely held by German intellectuals and officers that war is the testing of the validity of national cultures would also probably never have appeared on the scene had not Germany been secure in the belief that she herself had both the right and the might on her side. It is possible, of course, that the war has distorted our vision so that the relations of the practical life and the life of reason have all been thrown out of focus, but when we see what forces have been at work, and what they have done, it is difficult to escape the conviction that we have been inclined to believe too much in the power of mere ideas. This may be the great lesson of the war. We may learn from it how to make ideas become the power that hitherto they have failed to be.

CHAPTER VIII

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL INFLUENCES

That war and religion have always been closely a.s.sociated with one another is one of the outstanding facts of history. This is true both of primitive warfare and of warfare to-day. Yet we cannot say that religion as such has been a cause of war. Religious wars are almost invariably also political wars, and as soon as religion and politics are separated, religion no longer appears to be a war motive. When religion becomes a.s.sociated with worldly ideas which it supports and makes dynamic it may become a strong factor in the spirit of war, but as a means of segregating men, and giving them unity of action religion can no longer be regarded as a power, if it ever was. Any motive that will not so segregate men and break up all other bonds cannot be said to be a very fertile cause of war. Religion as a cause of war belongs to a day in which the spirit of nationalism was weak, and when religious empire had a visible and political position in the world. Nationalism, growing stronger, became the supreme force dominating the motives and interests of men and governing the formation of groups, or at least the actions of groups as interrelated units. In the recent war we have seen how the sense of national unity has been able to hold in check all other motives. Neither religion nor any cla.s.s or clan or guild interests could trace the faintest line of cleavage so long as the motive of war remained.

The mood of war always contains a religious element. Not only is this shown in primitive wars, where the relations of religion, war and art are indicated in such phenomena as the war dance, which is of the nature of a magic weapon, but we see it also in the complex moods of the present war spirit of the world. The idea and mood of valor have a religious significance. Cramb says that we can trace in Germany before the war, showing through the transient mists of industrialism and socialism, the vision of the religion of valor which runs through all German history. The craving for a valorous life, for reality, the desire to lose one's own individuality--these moods of war are religious or mystic whatever else they may be or contain. The inseparable relation of war and death necessarily inspires a religious consciousness. Without exalted moods which in some way contain religious faith--faith on the part of the individual in the eternal values which he represents and in his own security in the hands of fate, and in the immortality of the country which he serves, war could not exist.

The mood of war always contains a religious sanction, and every important religion sanctions war. This explicit relation between religion and war is seen very early. Wherever there is ghost wors.h.i.+p, and the warriors justify war and fortify themselves for it by believing that their ancestors still partic.i.p.ate in the combats of their children, and that in waging war they are doing a duty in keeping up the traditional feuds of their race there is found the root of the relation between war and religion. Every war is a holy war; it is but a change in degree from these primitive wars in which the ideas of ghosts must have had almost the clearness of reality to our modern wars with their deeper but more indefinite religious sanctions. Since war always creates the need of moral justification, the war mood at all times tends to seek religious sanctions. Christianity, the doctrine of peace and good will, very readily lends its support to war, since wars are almost invariably regarded as defensive by all who partic.i.p.ate in them. War in the service of the weak and endangered can always invoke the spirit of Christianity. The logical ground for this has been laid for us by many writers; Drawbridge (19), one of the most recent, finds no support in Christianity for the doctrines of pacifism. All nations, when they fight, fight for G.o.d, for liberty and the right, with the implied belief that their own country has a mission in the world, supported by divine authority.

All governments have in them a strain of theocracy. We see this in many degrees and forms, from the original totemistic belief in descent from animals that are also G.o.ds to the vaguest remnants of the habit of interpreting national interests as guarded by divine powers that we often see in the language of practical statesmen. The doctrine of the divine rights of kings of course had its origin in that of divine descent. The most striking revelation of the place such theories may have, even in modern times and in enlightened nations, is to be seen in the revival and deliberate use of the doctrine of divine descent as a fundamental principle of the government and theory of State in the New j.a.pan. All nations hold something of this philosophy; G.o.d and State are always related and all wars, whatever else they may be, are waged in the service of religion and with the sanction of it. This spirit is not wanting even in the most modern democracy. The historians of Germany have shown us to what an extent the theory of the divinity of state and its divine mission may be intermingled with practical politics and have helped to bring to light the psychology of this movement in history.

Several writers, but especially Le Bon (42), have written about the relation of mysticism to war. Le Bon said indeed that the main causes of war, including the most recent one, are mystical causes. By mysticism he means unconscious factors which are religious in quality and which contain a race ideal which is both powerful and irrational.

German mysticism appears to have attracted much attention during the years of the war. Germany has presented the picture, we are told, of a people becoming dangerous by couching national ambition and honor in terms of religion. This mysticism of the German contains a powerful belief in race superiority, and in the supremacy of the culture of their own nation, beliefs which have the clear marks of mysticism about them. The traces of the theory of divine origin still cling to them. Boutroux (13) says the Prussian State is a synthesis of the divine and the human. Another writer observes that the Germans believe in the altogether unique and quasi-divine excellence of the German race, and of Germanism, and that the Germans have a new religion which they believe in spreading by the sword. Some see in Germany a serious demand for the revival of the religion of Odin and Thor, the religion of conflict of primeval forces, and of the triumph of might. Literary expressions of this religion are certainly to be found, and it may fairly be maintained that Germany has never become Christianized to the extent that most modern nations have.

That mysticism has been a large factor in the war spirit of the Germans in the late war can hardly be doubted, or at least that a religious element of some kind has played a great part in it. The war began as Germany's holy war. A cult of State and of self-wors.h.i.+p are involved in it. If not, innumerable expressions of Germany's cause among German writers are simply literary exaggerations. The Germans have believed that they are G.o.d's chosen people, that they represent G.o.d, and since the German civilization grew up in antagonism to the Graeco-Roman civilization, G.o.d must have adopted the one and discarded the other. One German writer says that we must eliminate from our belief the last drop of faith in the idea of a progressive movement of humanity as a whole. Reality is represented in one nation at a time, and the chosen nation is the leader of all the rest.

While such mysticism as this (if it be mysticism) is most conspicuous in aristocratic and imperialistic nations, we find it elsewhere. It is a powerful force in imperialistic j.a.pan and in Russia. We find it everywhere in history in some form. In France it is still the "saintly figure" of France that inspires the soldier and induces a religious mood. There is no longer a vision of an empire of the future, perhaps, and this mysticism of France has not in recent history shown itself in the form of aggression, but French mysticism clings to the ideal and the hope of a glorious future for a deathless France soon to be renewed. All peoples that have declined or suffered an adverse fate, even the pathetic remnants of the American Indians, expect the return of their lost power. Such mysticism is, we may think, the only condition under which national life in many cases can continue. The religious or the mystical mood of nations is created by the need of making belief dynamic, of overcoming doubts and fears. Hence the exaggerated and irrational claims peoples make in regard to the value of their culture and about their mission on earth. By their mysticism nations justify their aggressive wars and fortify themselves in their defensive wars. Thus nations acquire a feeling of security. They believe in their star of destiny. They feel that their life which is of supreme value to the world cannot perish. It is this spirit that nations take with them into battle. It is a mystic force, and this mystic force is, in great part, we may believe, one of the by-products of the tragedy of history. Faith and hope have one of their roots at least in fear and pessimism.

_Moral Motives and War_

That the att.i.tude of nations toward one another is not, generally speaking, an ethical att.i.tude and that moral principles do not motivate the conduct of peoples we have already suggested. Sumner (70) says that the whole history of mankind is a series of acts open to doubt, dispute and criticism as to their right and justice.

Differences end in force, and the defeated side always protests that the results are unjust. And yet wars are always conducted with moral justification and in the belief that moral principles are involved.