Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers — Volume 2De Quincey, Thomas
Philosophy
Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers — Volume 2
De Quincey, Thomas
English essays
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.
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