Bergson says that in the war spirit of Germany one sees matter arrayed against spirit. One can see some truth in this, but spirit and matter are not two armies pitted against one another. In Germany, as we may believe elsewhere, the spiritual in the sense of creative forces in the subconscious life of nations does try to organize the practical life, with its routine and convention, into an onward moving progress, in which, necessarily, exalted moods (if energies are to get themselves expressed at all) must prevail, and must be full of possibilities, both of great good and of great evil. Life in its collective form will be abundant, because that is its most fundamental craving. It may be terribly and destructively abundant, or benignly, but progress, as history seems to show us--if reason and psychology do not--can never be orderly and complacent. Order and convention must break down to introduce new spirit and new desires which are continually being created in the inner life. These forces may be old instincts which are continually upsetting civilized life, but the desires they produce and the mechanism of their operation seem to be different from what our customary psychology and interpretation of history imply. Just as these moods make the child play and be wholly unpractical when one might suppose he could be useful, and the individual, as man, live a certain life of adventure rather than in security and routine, so this spirit or mood that dominates nations makes them imperialistic, and causes them to crave those things which lead toward war, if they do not crave war itself, when we might think they ought to be most concerned about the economic welfare of the world as a whole. Whether this spirit of nations be an evil to be overcome, and to suppress, or an untamed force to direct to right objects, or a good that by some logic of events which we do not understand works out the right course of history, we do not know. But here, of course, we come to problems, which, if they are problems at all in any real sense, are philosophical and ultimate. CHAPTER III INSTINCTS IN WAR: FEAR, HATE, THE AGGRESSIVE IMPULSE, MOTIVES OF COMBAT AND DESTRUCTION, THE SOCIAL INSTINCT