LITMIR.BIZ

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account for war as a purely biological phenomenon. Its roots lie deep in organic life, but there is no direct development or exclusive development from animal behavior to human. War is peculiarly human. That, in a way, may be accepted as the truth. Warfare as we know it among human groups, as conflict within the species is due in some way to, or is made possible by, the secondary differentiations within species which give to groups, so to speak, a pseudo-specific character. And these differences depend largely upon the conditions that enter into the formation of groups—upon desires, impulses and needs arising in the social life rather than in instinct as such. These characteristic differences are not variations having selective value, but are traits that merely differentiate the groups as historical entities. These secondary variations have not resulted in the elimination of those having inferior qualities, but have shared the fortunes of the groups that possessed them—the fortunes both of war and of peace. War, from this point of view, belongs to history rather than to biology. It belongs to the realm of the particular rather than to the general in human life. War has favored the survival of this or that group in a particular place, but has probably not been instrumental in producing any particular type of character in the world, either physical or mental.

      Very early in the history of mankind, in fact as far back as we can trace history, we find these psychic differentiations, as factors in the production of war. There are significant extensions and also restrictions of the consciousness of kind pertaining to the life of man, as distinguished from animals. Animals have not sufficient intelligence to establish such perfect group identities as man does, and they lack the affective motives for carrying on hostilities among groups. They remain more clearly subjected to the simple laws of biological selection, and are guided by instincts which do not impel them to act aggressively as groups toward their own kind. Man proceeds almost from the beginning to antagonize these laws, so that it is very likely that the best, in the biological sense, has always had some disadvantage, in human life, and may still have. The real value that has thus been conserved by this human mode of life consists in preserving a relatively large number of secondary types or individual groups, rather than in insuring the predominance of any one biologically superior type. Man's work in the world is to make history. Even though war were a means of making a biologically superior type of man prevail we should not be justified in saying that it is thus vindicated as a method of selection.

      Many writers whom we do not need to review in great detail have contributed to the objections to the biological principle as an explanation of war. Trotter (82) examines the doctrine that war is a biological necessity, and says that there is no parallel in biology for progress being accomplished as a result of a racial impoverishment so extreme as is caused by war, that among gregarious animals other than man direct conflict between major groups such as can lead to the suppression of the less powerful is an inconspicuous phenomenon, and that there is very little fighting within species, for species have usually been too busy fighting their external enemies. Mitchell (10) says that war is not an aspect of the natural struggle for existence, among individuals; that there is nothing in Darwinism that explains or justifies wars; that the argument from race is worthless since there are no pure races. M'Cabe (76) maintains that war is not a struggle between inferior and superior national types. Dide (20) also discusses the question of differences of race as causes of war, and the use that has been made of this dogma. Chapman (39) says that no race question is involved in the present war as has been supposed. There is no conflict of economic forces, no nations compelled to seek expansion.

      Precisely how warfare originated (assuming that it arose in one way) we shall probably never know, since we cannot now reconstruct the actual history of man. We think of men as living at first in groups containing a few individuals, and presumably for a long time these small and isolated groups of men prevailed as the type of human society. We can already detect the elements of conflict in these groups, but whether warfare in the sense of deadly conflict originated there we cannot know; or whether it was only in the experience of men as large migrating hordes which had been formed by the amalgamation of smaller groups under the influence of hunger or climatic change, that warfare in any real sense came into the world. We do not know to what extent the small groups of men we find in conditions of savagery now represent primitive conditions. Fortunately, however, some of these problems of origin are of but little practical importance and their interest is chiefly antiquarian or historical.

      The assumption that in the behavior of original groups of men war arose as a natural result of the life of the group seems to be an allowable hypothesis. Whether warlike conduct came by some modification of the habits brought up from animal life as instinctive reactions, or whether man invented warfare from some strong motive peculiar to human life, and produced it intelligently, so to speak, under stress of circumstances may have to remain an open question so far as conclusive evidence is concerned. What we lack is a knowledge of the type and form of the instincts of man in his first stages, and the degree and kind of intelligence he had. But the reconstructed pre-human history of man so far as we can make it seems to show, as we have already suggested, that early man could have had no definite herd instincts or pack instincts such as some of the animals have, that his habits were plastic and guided by intelligence rather than by impulse. His social life, his predaceous habits, the habit of killing large game, his warfare must have been a gradual acquisition, and from the beginning have been very different as regards motive and development from animal behavior which judged externally may seem to be like it in character and to have the same ends.

      There are already inherent in any group of human individuals that fits into such knowledge of man past and present as we have, all the necessary motives of warfare in some form. There are the reactions of anger made to any threat or injury, fear, the predaceous impulse and habit, originating in hunger, the motives arising in sexual rivalry. These motives are the source of behavior toward both members of the group and outsiders. There is no absolute distinction between these objects. It is of the nature of man to be both aggressive and social. One instinct or motive did not come from the other, since there are emotions and desires at every stage that tend, some of them to unite and some to disrupt, the group. The sense of difference of kind and the fear of the strange on the one hand, and the effect of propinquity and practical necessity in the conduct in regard to the familiar on the other make the reactions different in degree in the two spheres but not different in kind. There is no aggressive instinct or war motive that is directed exclusively toward the outsider. Certain tendencies toward violence and strife, modified and controlled within the group, become unrestrained when directed toward the stranger. Among these motives are those of sexual rivalry, fear, anger, desire, and the play motive as an expression of any instinctive habits of aggression that may have been phyletically established.

      Since every individual creature has his needs that can be satisfied only by preying in some way upon other animals of his own species or others, the motives for strife are original in organic life. Every animal lives in a world of which he is suspicious, and rightly so. He is suspicious toward the members of his own kind and group, and toward all strangers he shows watchfulness and fear. There are two motives, therefore, of a highly practical nature that contribute to a general state of unfriendliness in animal life. Both the motives of conflict within the group, the habit of aggression and its complement, fear, and the jealousy and display motive (the display itself probably having originated as a show of ferocity on the part of males) must have been transferred to relations between groups as a natural result of the proximity of groups to one another, although this process is not quite so simple as this would imply, since in part the outside groups are produced by these very same antagonistic motives in the group, for example the driving out of young males because of sexual jealousy. The presence of other groups must have excited all the motives of warfare at a very early stage, and this contrast had the effect of stimulating the social feeling of the group and developing control of impulses on the part of individuals within the group toward one another. So the motives of combat, as shown within the group and toward outsiders, developed, so to speak, by a dialectic process.

      Fear and the predatory impulse, the sexual and display motive, play or the hunting activity as a pleasure for its own sake, with a desire perhaps to practice deception and to exercise intelligence, presumably introduced some kind and degree of definite warfare among primitive groups of men at a very early stage of human life, although of course such a conclusion can be only speculative. Increasing intelligence, the power

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