The Psychology of Nations | Page 9

the feud as a more generalized and psychical antagonism is produced, and these states are possible because of the powers of generalization in man which extend to the emotions and make possible the formation of deep moods.
In another direction, also, the practical motives tend to be superseded by more abstract and more subjective motives. Both in the fear and anger reactions and in the motive that originates in the sexual impulse--display of males, and combat with reference to females--consciousness of prowess for its own sake, and the display of it in order to intimidate the enemy, arise. Into this motive of war there enter all the antagonisms that come from self-consciousness, the whole force of the diathesis of developing sexuality, with its jealousy and cruelty, and tendencies to perversion. The force of this motive of prowess must at some period of development have become very great. It extends out into a love of combat for its own sake, re?nforces other motives, and issues in the more abstract motives of honor and power that we see playing such a great part in modern warfare.
These primitive motives of war are not merely numerous. They fuse, re?nforce one another, and almost from the beginning, we must suppose, create complex states of consciousness, and form moods. War very early, we say, must contain all the motives that ever enter into it. The predatory impulse, the love of deception, of conquest, the love of combat for its own sake, the hunting impulse, the motive of power, of fear and anger, the impulse of display and the more primitive sexual motives, the motives of courage and jealousy, even a beginning of the aesthetic motive, are all there. They become the warlike mood or produce war, in the sense in which we now understand it, only when the intelligence gives to the relations between groups definite intentions and directions, and out of the many impulses that lead to combat, a distinctive motive and mood are derived. So we may say with all certainty that the making of war is not a mere perpetuation of some alleged instinct of murder, surreptitiously retained by man in his rise from an animal state, but it is quite as much a product of his whole social nature. It becomes established as life grows more complex, as specific desires increase in number. Man is not, as thus seen in these genetic views of him, a self-tamed animal. He has not arrived at a precarious and unstable social condition out of a primitive individualism which is the essence of his warlike nature. On the other hand, he has not degenerated from some ideal pacific state. Ages ago he was already divinely human, and possessed those capacities both for co?peration and antagonism out of which war is created.
CHAPTER II
UNCONSCIOUS MOTIVES, THE REVERSION THEORIES OF WAR, AND THE INTOXICATION MOTIVE
There are several interesting theories of the causes of war, now in the field, most of them inspired by our recent great conflict, all of which (but no one perhaps completely or quite justly) may be described as based upon the view that war is an outbreak of, or reversion to, instincts and modes of activity which as primitive tendencies remain in the individual or in the social life and which, from time to time, with or without social cause, may break loose, so to speak, and hurl man back into savagery. These theories of war show us, in some cases, human character in the form of double personality, or liken civilization to a thin and insecure incrustation upon the surface of life, beneath which all that is animal-like and barbaric still remains smoldering. Some of these theories we need to review briefly here.
Bertrand Russell, in answer to the question, "Why do men fight?" which is the title of his book dealing with the causes of war, says, in substance, that men fight because they are controlled by instinct (and also by authority), rather than by reason. Men will cease fighting when reason controls instinct, and men think for themselves rather than allow their thinking to be done for them. This view does not explicitly state that war is a reversion, for man may be at no point better or more advanced than a creature of instinct, but it lays the blame for war upon the original nature of man. Man has instincts which presumably he has brought with him from his pre-human stage, and some of these instincts are, on their motor side, the reactions of fighting.
Le Bon (42) speaks of a conscious and an unconscious will in nations, and says that the motives behind great national movements may be beneath all conscious intentions, and may anticipate them. The Englishman in particular lives, in a sense, a divided life, since there is a manifest inconsistency