Germany, governed by the ideals of rationalism, has assumed that history can be made, wars conducted, life regulated in accordance with a program. On the other side we see a very general acceptance of a philosophy of life in which many evils of disorder and waste and the necessity of an experimental attitude toward life are accepted as necessary consequences of the life of freedom. We see implied in this philosophy of life a belief in a morality and a religion that are based upon feeling rather than upon objective evidences, and a way of judging conduct more or less naively and simply or according to methods of appreciation that are essentially aesthetic, using the term in a wide sense. This mode of life is accepted in the belief that order in due season will come out of relative disorder, by a natural process or by a gradually increasing organization and voluntary adjustment. If we accept the validity of this attitude in life we shall be inclined to regard rationalism as it is manifested to-day in German life as an evil. We may believe that in the end the cure for this rationalism will not be less reason but rather more, but we shall see also that it is possible for reason to outstrip and pervert life, and indeed involve life in an absurdity, simply because as a method of dealing with the whole of life it cannot be sufficiently comprehensive. Are these and all such issues that we find in war, causes of war? Do nations fight for principles? Opinions certainly differ on this point. Some think of wars, we say, as essentially conflicts of principles; some interpret wars wholly in terms of political issues. We should say that the truth lies between these assertions or is the sum of their half-truths. Wars are not in their origin wars of principle. The political, the personal, the concrete aspects of the relations of nations are always in the foreground in causing wars. Wars become wars of principle after they have been begun for other reasons. Sanctions and motives appear after the fact. Fundamental differences of mores which include the raw material, so to speak, of principles and causes are factors in wars in so far as they create misunderstanding and antipathy, but in so far as these differences of nature and of principle do not enter into the sphere of politics and of national honor, they do not as such cause wars Those deep moods which accumulate in the minds of peoples and enter into the causes of war are not convictions about principles. They are more generic and natural. History does not seem to show us wars caused by pure principles. We sometimes say that the Civil War in our own country was fought over a principle, but that is something less than the truth. The fundamental question at issue was plainly that of the rights of certain states at a particular time to be independent and free.