Only a keener feeling for truth will enable them to see. About indifferent things--about the dead matter that we handle in our science--we can be honest, impartial, true. That is why we succeed in dealing with matter. But about the things we care for--which are ourselves--our desires and lusts, our patriotisms and hates, we find a harder test of thinking straight and truly. Yet there is the greater need; only by that rectitude shall we be saved. There is no refuge but in truth. ADDENDUM THE ARGUMENT OF _THE GREAT ILLUSION_ CHAPTER I THE 'IMPOSSIBILITY OF WAR' MYTH It will illustrate certain difficulties which have marked--and mark--the presentation of the argument of this book, if the reader will consider for a few minutes the justice of certain charges which have been brought against _The Great Illusion_. Perhaps the commonest is that it argued that 'war had become impossible.' The truth of that charge at least can very easily be tested. The first page of that book, the preface, referring to the thesis it proposed to set out, has these words: 'the argument is _not_ that war is impossible, but that it is futile.' The next page but one describes what the author believes to be the main forces at work in international politics: a fierce struggle for preponderant power 'based on the universal assumption that a nation, in order to find outlets for expanding population and increasing industry, or simply to ensure the best conditions possible for its people, is necessarily pushed to territorial expansion and the exercise of political force against others ... that nations being competing units, advantage, in the last resort, goes to the possessor of preponderant military force, the weaker going to the wall, as in the other forms of the struggle for life.' A whole chapter is devoted to the evidence which goes to show that this aggressive and warlike philosophy was indeed the great actuating force in European politics. The first two paragraphs of the first chapter forecast the likelihood of an Anglo-German explosion; that chapter goes on to declare that the pacifist effort then current was evidently making no headway at all against the tendencies towards rivalry and conflict. In the third chapter the ideas underlying those tendencies are described as 'so profoundly mischievous,' and so 'desperately dangerous,' as to threaten civilisation itself. A chapter is devoted to showing that the fallacy and folly of those all but universal ideas was no guarantee at all that the nations would not act upon them. (Particularly is the author insistent on the fact that the futility of war will never in itself suffice to stop war. The folly of a given course of action will only be a deterrent to the degree to which men realise its folly. That was why the book was written.) A warning is uttered against any reliance upon the Hague Conferences, which, it is explained at length, are likely to be quite ineffective against the