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
It is precisely because ecstatic moods are presumably thus general and
composite, and involve fundamental instincts (but in such a way that
they are transformed, and no longer present in body, so to speak, but
are represented by their organic processes rather than appearing as
specific concatenated chains of motor events), with their purposes
changed and their whole meaning determined by the present states to
which they belong, that we should be inclined to say that to explain
any great and powerful movement in the lives of individuals or nations
as merely reversions is very inadequate and indeed wrong. They are
emotional forces that are at work, composite feelings and moods rather
than instincts. They are aspects of the continuity of the life of the
present, rather than of the fragmentary past that lives in the
individual. These forces are plastic, complex and organized, rather
than haphazard and suppressed. They are directive, creative, but
incidentally they make amends for and satisfy and exploit the past.
If these principles be valid, their application to the psychology of
war seems plain. The central purpose or motive of war to-day is a
craving for the realization of the sense of power. This is the
subjective side of it, the unconscious, instinctive, mystical motive
so often observed. The question of the actual power exerted or
displayed is not the most essential point of this war mood. It is the
manipulation and the satisfaction of inner factors that make the most
significant aspect of these moods. History, we should hold, is in
great part an unfoldment of this motive. Nations crave, as collective
or group consciousness, the feeling of power. Just as we say the child
in his plays wants to be a man, and the individual in his art feels
himself a god, so nations in their wars and in their thoughts of wars,
feel themselves more real, realize themselves as world powers, and as
supreme and divine. To be first and all is indeed the purpose that
runs in these moods, and this we believe is true, in its way, of the
most insignificant and hopelessly decrepit of peoples. This must be
taken account of in the interpretation of history, and in that larger
pedagogy, the pedagogy of nations to which we just now look forward.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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