Narrative and Miscellaneous PapersDe Quincey, Thomas
General
Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers
De Quincey, Thomas
English essays; English fiction
war though merely viewed as a rude trade of bloodshed, ripened into an
intellectual art. Were it merely with a view to more effectual carnage,
this art (however simple and gross at first) opened at length into wide
scientific arts, into strategies, into tactics, into castrametation,
into poliorcetics, and all the processes through which the first rude
efforts of martial cunning finally connect themselves with the exquisite
resources of science. War, being a game in which each side forces the
other into the instant adoption of all improvements through the mere
necessities of self-preservation, became continually more intellectual.
It is interesting to observe the steps by which, were it only through
impulses of self-conservation, and when searching with a view to more
effectual destructiveness, war did and must refine itself from a horrid
trade of butchery into a magnificent and enlightened science. Starting
from no higher impulse or question than how to cut throats most rapidly,
most safely, and on the largest scale, it has issued even at our own
stage of advance into a science, magnificent, oftentimes ennobling, and
cleansed from all horrors except those which (not being within man's
power utterly to divorce from it) no longer stand out as reproaches to
his humanity.
Meantime a more circumstantial review of war, in relation to its motives
and the causes assigned for its justification, would expose a series
of changes greater perhaps than the reader is aware of. Such a review,
which would too much lengthen a single paper, may or may not form the
subject of a second. And I will content myself with saying, as a closing
remark, that this review will detect a principle of steady advance in
the purification and elevation of war--such as must offer hope to those
who believe in the possibility of its absolute extermination, and must
offer consolation to those who (like myself) deny it.
THE LAST DAYS OF IMMANUEL KANT.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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