The Psychology of Nations: A Contribution to the Philosophy of HistoryPartridge, G. E. (George Everett)
Philosophy
The Psychology of Nations: A Contribution to the Philosophy of History
Partridge, G. E. (George Everett)
Education; History -- Philosophy; War
Since every individual creature has his needs that can be satisfied
only by preying in some way upon other animals of his own species or
others, the motives for strife are original in organic life. Every
animal lives in a world of which he is suspicious, and rightly so. He
is suspicious toward the members of his own kind and group, and toward
all strangers he shows watchfulness and fear. There are two motives,
therefore, of a highly practical nature that contribute to a general
state of unfriendliness in animal life. Both the motives of conflict
within the group, the habit of aggression and its complement, fear,
and the jealousy and display motive (the display itself probably
having originated as a show of ferocity on the part of males) must
have been transferred to relations between groups as a natural result
of the proximity of groups to one another, although this process is
not quite so simple as this would imply, since in part the outside
groups are produced by these very same antagonistic motives in the
group, for example the driving out of young males because of sexual
jealousy. The presence of other groups must have excited all the
motives of warfare at a very early stage, and this contrast had the
effect of stimulating the social feeling of the group and developing
control of impulses on the part of individuals within the group toward
one another. So the motives of combat, as shown within the group and
toward outsiders, developed, so to speak, by a dialectic process.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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