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
These primitive motives of war are not merely numerous. They fuse,
reenforce one another, and almost from the beginning, we must suppose,
create complex states of consciousness, and form moods. War very
early, we say, must contain all the motives that ever enter into it.
The predatory impulse, the love of deception, of conquest, the love of
combat for its own sake, the hunting impulse, the motive of power, of
fear and anger, the impulse of display and the more primitive sexual
motives, the motives of courage and jealousy, even a beginning of the
aesthetic motive, are all there. They become the warlike mood or
produce war, in the sense in which we now understand it, only when the
intelligence gives to the relations between groups definite intentions
and directions, and out of the many impulses that lead to combat, a
distinctive motive and mood are derived. So we may say with all
certainty that the making of war is not a mere perpetuation of some
alleged instinct of murder, surreptitiously retained by man in his
rise from an animal state, but it is quite as much a product of his
whole social nature. It becomes established as life grows more
complex, as specific desires increase in number. Man is not, as thus
seen in these genetic views of him, a self-tamed animal. He has not
arrived at a precarious and unstable social condition out of a
primitive individualism which is the essence of his warlike nature. On
the other hand, he has not degenerated from some ideal pacific state.
Ages ago he was already divinely human, and possessed those capacities
both for cooeperation and antagonism out of which war is created.
CHAPTER II
UNCONSCIOUS MOTIVES, THE REVERSION THEORIES OF WAR, AND THE
INTOXICATION MOTIVE
There are several interesting theories of the causes of war, now in
the field, most of them inspired by our recent great conflict, all of
which (but no one perhaps completely or quite justly) may be described
as based upon the view that war is an outbreak of, or reversion to,
instincts and modes of activity which as primitive tendencies remain
in the individual or in the social life and which, from time to time,
with or without social cause, may break loose, so to speak, and hurl
man back into savagery. These theories of war show us, in some cases,
human character in the form of double personality, or liken
civilization to a thin and insecure incrustation upon the surface of
life, beneath which all that is animal-like and barbaric still remains
smoldering. Some of these theories we need to review briefly here.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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