The Psychology of Nations | Page 3

advance along the old lines of progress, but faster, perhaps, and with life attuned to a higher note.
The writer of this book must confess that he belongs in a general way to the third species of these prophets. There is a natural order of progress, but the good must, we may suppose, also be worked for step by step. The war will have placed in our hands no golden gift of a new society; both the ways and the direction of progress must be sought and determined by ideals. The point of view in regard to progress, at least as a working hypothesis, becomes an educational one, in a broad sense. Our future we must make. We shall not make it by politics. The institutions with which politics deals are dangerous cards to play. There is too much convention clinging to them, and they are too closely related to all the supports of the social order. The industrial system, the laws, the institutions of property and rights, the form of government, we change at our own risk. Naturally many radical minds look to the abrupt alteration of these fundamental institutions for the cure of existing evils, and others look there furtively for the signs of coming revolution, and the destruction of all we have gained thus far by civilization. But at a different level, where life is more plastic--in the lives of the young, and in the vast unshaped forms of the common life everywhere, all this is different. We do not expect abrupt changes here nor quick and visible results. Experimentation is still possible and comparatively safe. There is no one institution of this common and unformed life, not even the school itself, that supports the existing structures, so that if we move it in the wrong way, everything else will fall. When we see we are wrong, there is still time to correct our mistakes.
Our task, then, is to see what the forces are that have brought us to where we stand now, and to what influences they are to be subjected, if they are to carry us onward and upward in our course. Precisely what the changes in government or anywhere in the social order should be is not the chief interest, from this point of view. The details of the constitution of an international league, the practical adjustments to be made in the fields of labor, and in the commerce of nations, belong to a different order of problems. We wish rather to see what the main currents of life, especially in our own national life, are, and what in the most general way we are to think and do, if the present generation is to make the most of its opportunities as a factor in the work of conscious evolution.
The bibliography shows the main sources of the facts and the theories that have been drawn upon in writing the book. Some of the chapters have been read in a little different form as lectures before President G. Stanley Hall's seminar at Clark University. More or less of repetition, made necessary in order to make these papers, which were read at considerable intervals, independent of one another, has been allowed to remain. Perhaps in the printed form this reiteration will help to emphasize the general psychological basis of the study.

CONTENTS
Preface v

PART I
NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE MOTIVES OF WAR

CHAPTER
I
ORIGINS AND BIOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS 3
II UNCONSCIOUS MOTIVES, THE REVERSION THEORIES OF WAR, AND THE INTOXICATION MOTIVE 17
III INSTINCTS IN WAR: FEAR, HATE, THE AGGRESSIVE IMPULSE, MOTIVES OF COMBAT AND DESTRUCTION, THE SOCIAL INSTINCT 38
IV AESTHETIC ELEMENTS IN THE MOODS AND IMPULSES OF WAR 70
V PATRIOTISM, NATIONALISM AND NATIONAL HONOR 78
VI "CAUSES" AS PRINCIPLES AND ISSUES IN WAR 97
VII PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCES 110
VIII RELIGIOUS AND MORAL INFLUENCES 117
IX ECONOMIC FACTORS AND MOTIVES 128
X POLITICAL AND HISTORICAL FACTORS 142
XI THE SYNTHESIS OF CAUSES 153

PART II
THE EDUCATIONAL FACTOR IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONS
I EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS OF THE DAY 161
II INTERNATIONALISM AND THE SCHOOL 168
III INTERNATIONALISM AND THE SCHOOL Continued 184
IV PEACE AND MILITARISM 197
V THE TEACHING OF PATRIOTISM 211
VI THE TEACHING OF PATRIOTISM Continued 226
VII POLITICAL EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 242
VIII INDUSTRY AND EDUCATION 269
IX NEW SOCIAL PROBLEMS 290
X RELIGION AND EDUCATION AFTER THE WAR 305
XI HUMANISM 309
XII AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE IN EDUCATION 315
XIII MOODS AND EDUCATION: A REVIEW 319
BIBLIOGRAPHY 327
INDEX 331


PART I
NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE MOTIVES OF WAR

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF NATIONS
A CONTRIBUTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
CHAPTER I
ORIGINS AND BIOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
The simplest possible interpretation of the causes of war that might be offered is that war is a natural relation between original herds or groups of men, inspired by the predatory instinct or by some other instinct of the herd. To explain war, then, one need only refer to this instinct as final, or at most account for the origin and genesis of