The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National AdvantageAngell, Norman
History
The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage
Angell, Norman
Commercial policy; Disarmament; Imperialism; War; War, Cost of
and as though impulses which are redirected every day can never receive
the particular redirection involved in abandoning the struggle between
States, ignorantly adopt the formula of science, but leave half the
facts out of consideration. And just as the direction of the impulses
will be changed, so will the character of the struggle be changed; the
force which we shall use for our needs will be the force of
intelligence, of hard work, of character, of patience, self-control, and
a developed brain, and pugnacity and combativeness which, instead of
being used up and wasted in world conflicts of futile destructiveness,
will be, and are being, diverted into the steady stream of
rationally-directed effort. The virile impulses become, not the tyrant
and master, but the tool and servant of the controlling brain.
The conception of abstract imponderable forces by the human mind is a
very slow process. All man's history reveals this. The theologian has
always felt this difficulty. For thousands of years men could only
conceive of evil as an animal with horns and a tail, going about the
world devouring folk; abstract conceptions had to be made understandable
by a crude anthropomorphism. Perhaps it is better that humanity should
have some glimmering of the great facts of the universe, even though
interpreted by legends of demons, and goblins, and fairies, and the
rest; but we cannot overlook the truth that the facts are distorted in
the process, and our advance in the conception of morals is marked
largely by the extent to which we can form an abstract conception of the
fact of evil--none the less a fact because unembodied--without having to
translate it into a non-existent person or animal with a forked tail.
As our advance in the understanding of morality is marked by our
dropping these crude physical conceptions, is it not likely that our
advance in the understanding of those social problems, which so nearly
affect our general well-being, will be marked in like manner?
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