LITMIR.BIZ

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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 passions for violence, as MacCurdy (37) maintains, reënforce 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 passions 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 analysis 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 associations themselves but in all that the associations 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 analogies 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 assumed 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 assume 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.

      Social Instincts

      Whatever the specific causes of war may be, war is of course possible only because there exists a mechanism or instinct or feeling, because of which great groups of people act as a unit in the common interests of all. We usually speak of this collective action as the result of social instincts or a general social instinct. It is the place of this "instinct" in the causes and moods of war that we must consider. War is a social phenomenon: it is a movement directed toward an object, but the force that drives the movement is of course social.

      Several writers, among them MacCurdy (37), Murray (90), and Trotter (82), have dealt with this social aspect of war, and have interpreted war as a herd reaction. All these theories are simple. Trotter maintains that in man there are four instincts and no more: self-preservative, reproductive nutritional, and herd instincts. The peculiarity of the herd instinct is that it does not itself have definite motor expression, but serves to intensify and direct the other instincts. This herd instinct is a tendency, so to speak, which can confer instinctive sanction upon any other part of the field of action or belief. The herd instinct, for example, gives instinctive quality to the social organization and social proclivities of three different types of society, which appear as national characters. These are the wolf, the sheep, and the bee types. The aggressive type of social organization is represented by the Roman and now by the German civilization. This is a declining type, but it was because moral equality could not be tolerated in Germany that the rulers were obliged to cause Germany to revert to the primitive aggressive form of gregariousness. China would be a good example of Trotter's herd of the sheep type, for here the defensive instinct seems to be the dominating social reaction. War becomes, in such a herd, a great stimulus when, and only when, it is a threat to the whole nation, and when, therefore, the individual fears for the whole herd rather than for himself.

      The third type is the bee type, well represented by England, although still imperfectly. This is the type toward which the world as a whole tends, but as yet there is no complete form of it. At present the capacity for individual reactions to the same stimulus has far outstripped the capacity for intercommunication. Intercommunication in the biological sense has been allowed to run at haphazard. When once a great gregarious unit of this type shall have been thoroughly organized, and be subject to conscious direction as a whole, there will appear in the world a new kind of social mechanism and a new biological form. The interest in war will give way to a larger and more dramatic field of interest and of conquest than the mere taking and re-taking of land. But there is as yet no such society. Even in times of a great war, there is an internal differentiation that cannot be overcome, an individualism that creates antagonism, and a type of leadership which is conservative and static rather than progressive.

      If we may safely apply Trotter's generalization to the present antagonism among groups (within nations, and also national groups) we might say that the rapid differentiation of the human species has had an effect of creating within the species man a large number of types of sub-specific value, and in this respect man differs greatly from any other species. Differences recognized by groups of the same species of animals are generally not sufficient to create antagonism among the groups, but in the case of man these differences have had precisely the effect of marking off groups with antagonistic interests. The animal society dominated by a few instincts directed for the most part toward external objects preserves a state of peace within the species. Man by reason of his intelligence and his capacities for specialization and the great number of his desires tends to prey upon his own kind. This segregation is in part artificial, becomes conventional and is subject to the effects of leadership that tends to fixate artificial distinctions, but it is also in part an effect of the exigencies of the wider life of man, of his superiority of which variability of conduct is an essential aspect. This differentiation is one of the conditions of a firmer organization in the society of man than any animal society can attain, but at the present time the two processes of differentiation and organization are to some extent antagonistic to one another.

      Trotter maintains that the tendency of nature is to increase and maintain the homogeneity of the species, but we should say rather that the whole process of differentiation and organization is upon

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