the past _forms_ of strife are inevitably recurrent.[11] It may be well at the outset to insist that the general principle involves no such particular necessity. War is simply a form in which the instincts of attraction and repulsion have operated in human societies during ages in which certain psychological and physiological types have been normal. It may very well recur, with growing infrequency, for a long time to come; but it is not rationally to be regarded as a necessary function of the grand biological forces. What does seem certain is a different thing--that the forces of attraction and repulsion will always operate in _some_ form; and that the very fact of their finding less expression in the mode of physical strife will imply their coming into play in other modes, such as the strife of ideals, doctrines, and class interests as they are expressed in politics without bloodshed. The general law is that the forces of attraction and repulsion, as exhibited in human thought or feeling, run during the earlier stages of growth in channels which may be broadly regarded as animal; and that when altered political and social conditions partly or wholly close these channels, the biological forces open for themselves new ones. War is precisely the blindest, the least rational, the least human of all the forms of human conflict, inasmuch as it is the collective clashing of communities whose members, divided among themselves by many real differences of interest, bias, and attraction, are set against each other, as wholes--if by anything higher than animal pugnacity--either by the mere ideals or appetites of rulers or leaders, or by more or less imaginary differences of interest, seen under the moral illusion of the most primitive of social instincts--the _sensus gregis_. As evolution proceeds, the blind form may be expected to disappear, and the more reasoned forms--that is, the inter-social and intellectual--to develop. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: It is one of the shortcomings of Buckle that, though he at least once (_Introd. to Hist. of Civ. in Eng._, Routledge's ed. p. 352) recognises the futility of explaining history in terms of national character, he repeatedly lapses to that method, and speaks of peoples as if they were of one will, bent, and mind. (Ed. cited, edit. notes pp. 354, 385, 540, 553, 558, 719, etc.). See below, pt. iii, ch. iii, second note, as to Eduard Meyer.]