There is one aspect of war, or one question about war, that seems to suggest that its problems are more subtle and less simple than the instinct-theories imply. War has been, and still is, the great story of the world, the center of all that is dramatic and heroic in life. Its mood--and that is the essential thing in it, whatever else war may have been, and in spite of all its horrors--is _ecstatic_. War produces, or is produced by, states of mind that affiliate it with all the other ecstasies--of love, religion, intoxication, art. We may well doubt whether any explanation of war can ever be satisfactory that does not take this quality of it fully into account. One may say, of course, that war is ecstatic just because it does satisfy instincts, that the satisfaction of all instincts is pleasant, or that pleasure _is_ the satisfaction of instincts. But there is more in the problem than that. Love, the source of the other great romance of the world, is not exhausted by calling it a gratification of the sexual instinct, or a primitive tendency of all organic life. It is at the other end of the process of development of it, so to speak, its place as a present motive in life, that it is most significant, and it is by no means explained by calling it a product of sexuality. So with war. Made out of instincts, it may be, but it is not explained as the sum of instinctive reactions. _That, at least, is our thesis._ It is the fact that war is a great ecstasy of the social life, that it holds a high place in art, that history--our selective way of reacting upon human experience--is in a large measure the story of war, that its representations in dramatic forms are almost endless in variety; it is such facts that give us our clew to the nature of the problems of war, and also to the practical questions of its future.