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
We have found that the essential, and we might say, primary
psychological datum of war is a war-mood, that the central motive of
this war-mood is a general impulse which we called the intoxication
motive, and that this intoxication motive, considered generically, and
in regard to its specific meaning is a craving for power and for the
experience of exerting and feeling power. The war-mood is not a mere
collection of instincts; it is a new product, in which instincts and
emotions have a place. There are several reasons, practical and
theoretical, for regarding it as a highly important problem to
discover what the actual content of this war-mood is. This mood, being
one of the greatest of all powers of good and evil, and one most in
need to-day of education and re-direction, it may be, it will probably
be controlled, if ever, upon the basis of a knowledge of what it means
as a whole, and of what its elements are which appear in the form of
fused, transformed, truncated, generalized and aborted instincts and
feelings.
_Primitive Tendencies_
First of all, the highly complex emotions, moods and impulses we find
in the social consciousness as expressed in the moods of war, do
contain and revert to instincts and feelings that are part of the
primitive equipment of organic life, and are usually identified as
nutritional and reproductive tendencies. The part played in war by
the migratory impulse, the predatory impulse and the like indicates
the connection of the war-moods with the nutritional tendencies; and
the display elements found already in primitive warfare and, as we
have already inferred, in all forms of ecstasy contain factors that
are at bottom sexual. We no longer eat our enemies, and we do not
bring home their heads to our women or practice wife stealing, but it
is easy to observe the remnants of these old feelings and instincts in
war. Trophy hunting continues, and we may suppose that even the moods
of primitive cannibalism have not entirely been lost. The ready
habituation of soldiers to some of the scenes of the recent war seems
to suggest a lingering trace of this motive, while the looting impulse
which plays such a part in war, and some aspects of the destructive
impulses and the like that are displayed, are, with a high degree of
probability, closely related to instincts that were once specifically
practical and belong to the fundamental nutritional motives. Nor is it
a mere euphemism, perhaps, when we speak of the greed of nations, nor
solely analogical when we compare the ambitions of peoples with
certain adolescent phenomena in the life of the individual. Plainly
the social consciousness, as a collective mood, does not command the
specific reactions connected with sexuality and nutrition, but we may
observe the presence of these instinctive reactions in two phases of
war. We see them in the tendencies of various individuals, who under
the excitements of the war moods are controlled more or less
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