The old sacrifices which grew out of cannibalism and are due to the persistence of the craving for blood show an instinctive desire for slaughter, or at least a confirmed habit of killing that dies hard. But in all these characterizations of national temperament there is no clear distinction among various motives of conduct. Anger and fear reactions, love of combat itself, the motives of display are all intermingled. There can of course be no precise way of estimating the place of a pure instinct of combat among the causes of war, or in the war moods. We have seen reason for believing that although these instincts remain as fragments in the individual and especially are utilized in higher processes of the social life, they are less influential in determining motives and conduct than is sometimes believed. We cannot at least explain war as a sudden release of these instincts. That primitive passions for violence, as MacCurdy (37) maintains, reenforce the herd antagonism, and in the midst of the apprehension at the threat of war, give rise to a desire for war, may be true, but such primitive passions are not all of the forces that are at work in causing modern wars. To say that in the individual of modern society a savage still lives is an exaggeration, and does not properly express what social consciousness is or has done. The social life is not a balance in which primitive instincts are held in leash by other instincts or feelings, but a new product in which there is a synthesis of impulses in which the original form of the impulses may be greatly transformed. We live in composite situations to which there correspond composite moods. Often motives which clearly reveal to analysis their instinctive character have no tendency to express themselves in the definite instinctive movements corresponding to this instinct-feeling, having permanently become dissociated from the primitive reactions, either by a process of generalization and fusion of states and processes in the individual, or by the inheritance of structural changes. There are, it is true, all degrees of amalgamation of old and new elements or of transformation of old elements, but to think of instincts as remaining intact and unchanged in modern life seems wholly wrong.