The Psychology of Nations | Page 4

the instinct in question in the animal world. Some writers express this very view, calling war an expression of an instinct or of several instincts; others find different or more complex beginnings of war.
Nusbaum (86) says that both offense and defense are based upon an expansion impulse. Nicolai (79) sees the beginning of war in individual predatory acts, involving violence and the need of defense. Again we find the migratory instinct, the instinct that has led groups of men to move and thus to interfere with one another, regarded as the cause of war, or as an important factor in the causes. Sometimes a purely physiological or growth impulse is invoked, or vaguely the inability of primitive groups to adapt themselves to conditions, or to gain access to the necessities of life. Le Bon (42) speaks of the hunger and the desire that led Germanic forces as ancient hordes to turn themselves loose upon the world.
Leaving aside for the moment the question of the nature of the impulses or instincts which actuated the conduct of men originally and brought them into opposition, as groups, to one another, we do find at least some suggestion of a working hypothesis in these simple explanations of war. Granted the existence of groups formed by the accident of birth and based upon the most primitive protective and economic associations, and assuming the presence of the emotions of anger and fear or any instinct which is expressed as an impulse or habit of the group, we might say that the conditions and factors for the beginning of warfare are all present. When groups have desires that can best and most simply be satisfied by the exertion of force upon other groups, something equivalent to war has begun.
If we take the group (as herd or pack) and the instinct as the original factors or data of society, however, we probably simplify the situation too much. The question arises whether the motives are not more complex, even from the beginning, and whether both the tendencies or impulses by which the group was formed or held together and the motives behind aggressive conduct against other groups have not been produced or developed in the course of social relations, rather than have been brought up from animal life, or at any point introduced as instincts. We notice at least that animals living in groups do not in general become aggressive within the species. Possibly it was by some peculiarity of man's social existence, or his superior endowment of intelligence or some unusual quality of his instincts, perhaps very far back in animal life, that has in the end made him a warlike creature. Man does seem to be a creature of feelings rather than of instincts as far back as we find much account of him, and to be characterized rather by the weakness and variability of his instincts than by their definiteness. It is quite likely, too, that man never was at any stage a herd animal; in fact it seems certain that he was not, and that his instincts were formed long before he began to live in large groups at all. So he never acquired the mechanisms either for aggression or defense that some creatures have. Apparently he inherited neither the physical powers nor the warlike spirit nor the aggressive and predatory instincts that would have been necessary to make of him a natural fighting animal; but rather, perhaps, he has acquired his warlike habits, so to speak, since arriving at man's estate. Endowed with certain tendencies which express themselves with considerable variability in the processes by which the functions of sex and nutrition are carried out, man never acquired the definiteness of character and conduct that some animals have. He learned more from animals, it may be, than he inherited from them, and it is quite likely that far back in his animal ancestry he had greater flexibility or adaptability than other animals. The aggressive instinct, the herd instinct, the predatory instinct, the social instinct, the migratory instinct, may never have been carried very far in the stock from which man came. All this, however, at this point is only a suggestion of two somewhat divergent points of view in regarding the primitive activities of man from which his long history of war-making has taken rise.
The view is widely held and continually referred to by many writers on war and politics, that the most fundamental of all causes of war, or the most general principle of it, is the principle of selection--that war is a natural struggle between groups, especially between races, the fittest in this struggle tending to survive. This view needs to be examined sharply, as indeed it has been by several writers, in connection with the present war. This biological theory or