Schopenhauer, also, as the great pessimist; Hegel, with his doctrine of the supremacy of the State as the representative of the Idea on earth; Kant, as the discoverer of the subjective moral principle; English utilitarianism as the doctrine of the main chance; empiricism, as the philosophy of inconsistency and dual principles of thought and conduct; even the whole spirit of the English philosophy, which Wundt says is nothing but an attempt to reconcile thought with the ideas of peace and comfort--all these have been charged with being instigators of the war. Bergson (17) takes a different view. He says that the desire comes first, the doctrine afterwards. Germany, determined upon war, invokes Nietzsche or Hegel. Germany in a moral temper would appeal to Kant, or in still a different mood to the Romanticists. Le Bon (42) says that nations are pushed forward by forces which they cannot understand, and that rational thoughts and desires play but a little part in war. That appears to be true. We cannot say that philosophies do not enter at all into the causes of war, but among these causes they must be insignificant as compared with other causes that neither arise from abstract thought nor are greatly modified by reason in any way. Consider the influence of Napoleon (himself so little a product of any philosophical influence), as compared with Hegel; or of Bismarck as compared with Nietzsche, and this will be apparent. There are in the course of the centuries books and men that, as rational forces, do exert profound effect upon the practical life, but they must be rarer than is sometimes supposed. It is all too easy to assume a relation of cause and effect when there is only a similarity between thought and subsequent conduct. Rousseau may or may not have inspired the French Revolution. Probably he did not. The recent great war, we might say, has occurred in spite of philosophy, and if Nietzsche's influence gravitated toward war, it can hardly be thought to have had any deciding force in turning the scales already so overloaded by fate. Philosophy failed to prevent war. Nietzsche's philosophy did not cause it. His philosophy affords a convenient phraseology in which to express a philosophy of war, granting sufficient misinterpretation of his philosophy. Probably what influence he has had has been due rather to his literary impressiveness than to his thought as a contribution to philosophy.