The idea that history repeats itself is similar to that of social rhythm. Certain principles of human nature and social process operate throughout history, and their working may be traced in one age as in another. Thus when one nation is believed to be trying to dominate others it is human nature that the latter should combine against it; and in this sense it may be said that the Entente of 1914 was a repetition of the league against Napoleon. But such resemblances are accompanied by essential differences, so that the situation as a whole is new, and you cannot predict the course of events except on the basis of a fresh synthesis. It is easy to discover resemblances, and to overestimate their importance. I take it that life as a whole is not a series of futile repetitions, but an eternal growth, an onward and upward development, if you please, involving the continual transformation or elimination of details. Just as humanity lives on while individuals perish, so the social organization endures while particular forms of it pass away. CHAPTER IV CONFLICT AND CO-OPERATION LIFE AS CONFLICT—CONFLICT AND ORGANIC GROWTH—CONFLICT INSTIGATES CO-OPERATION—ORGANIZATION MAKES THE CONDITIONS OF CONFLICT—THE TWO AS AN ORGANIC WHOLE—CONFLICT AND WASTE—CONFLICT AND PROGRESS From the perennial discussion regarding the meaning of conflict in life two facts clearly emerge: first, that conflict is inevitable, and, second, that it is capable of a progress under which more humane, rational, and co-operative forms supplant those which are less so. We are born to struggle as the sparks fly upward, but not necessarily to brutality and waste. _Vivere militare est_; even the gentlest spirits have felt that life is an eternal strife. Jesus came to bring not peace but a sword, and the Christian life has always been likened to that of a soldier. “Sure I must fight if I would reign, Increase my courage, Lord!” The thing is to fight a _good_ fight, one that leaves life better than it found it. In the individual and in the race as a whole there is an onward spirit that from birth to the grave is ever working against opposition. A cloud of disease germs surrounds us which we beat off only by the superior vigor of our own blood-corpuscles, and to which as our organism weakens in age we inevitably succumb. It is much the same in the psychological sphere. Every meeting with men is, in one way or another, a demand on our energy, a form of conflict, and when we are weakened and nervous we cannot withstand the eyes of mankind but seek to avoid them by seclusion.