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
The conditions preceding our recent great war will doubtless in the
course of future historical and sociological research, be minutely
scrutinized, in the effort to find the causes of the war--factors
deeper than and different from the political and economic causes and
the personal intrigues that are now most emphasized. If we believe
that the war was made in Germany rather than elsewhere, we might look
there, especially for these psychological factors of war--for our
intoxication motives and unconscious impulses and our causes of
reversion, but we should probably not find anything different in kind
there from what we should discover in other great countries. Those who
have seen in modern industrialism dangers of coming disaster, or who
now look back upon it as a genuine cause of the war were probably not
mistaken. Industrialism has been producing rapidly, and in an intense
form, what we may call the mood of the city, and this mood of the city
contains all the conditions and all the emotions that tend to bring to
the surface the deep-lying motives of the social life that we are
trying to point out. There are both the joy of the abundant life, the
craving for new experiences, and the sense of reality, and also the
disorganization of interests and motives, the stress and fatigue and
monotony which prepare the mind for culmination in dramatic events.
There is, in a word, a deep stirring of all the forces that make for
progress and expansion, and also conditions that disorganize the
individual and the social life. Lamprecht (59) of all German writers
seems to have appreciated this. He has written before the war,
describing a condition in Germany which he says began in the seventies
of the preceding century--a change of German life in which there is a
great increase of the activities of the cities, with haste and
anxiety, unscrupulous individual energy, general nervous excitement, a
condition of neuro-muscular weakness (and he might have added as
another sign, over-stimulation of the mind by a great flood of morbid
literature).
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