war, scornful or ironic, of the great
thinkers and speculative writers of modern times, when it is not merely
the phantom of their logic, an _eidolon specus_ created by their
system, arises in the most impressive instances less from admiration or
desire or hope of perpetual peace than from the arraignment of all
life, and all the ideals, activities, and purposes of men.

Hence the question whether war be a permanent condition of human life
is answered by implication. For the history of the ideal of Universal
Peace but re-enforces that definition of war set forth above, as a
manifestation of the world-spirit, co-extensive with being, and as
such, inseparable from man's life here and now. In all these great
wars which we have touched upon, the conflict of two ideas, in the
Platonic sense of the word, unveils itself, but both ideas are
ultimately phases of one Idea. It is by conflict alone that life
realizes itself. That is the be-all and end-all of life as such, of
Being as such. From the least developed forms of structural or organic
nature to the highest form in which the world-force realizes itself,
the will and imagination of Man, this law is absolute. The very magic
of the stars, their influence upon the human heart, derives something
of its potency, one sometimes fancies, from the vast, the silent,
mighty strife, the victorious energy, which brings their rays across
the abysses and orbits of the worlds.

What is the art of Hellas but the conquest of the rock, the marble, and
the fixing there in perennial beauty, perennial calm, the thought born
from the travail of the sculptor's brain, or from the unrecorded
struggle of dark forces in the past, which emerge now in a vision of
transcendent rapture and light? By this conflict, multiplex or simple,
the conquering energy of the form, the defeated energy of the material,
the serenity of the statues of Phidias, of the tragedies of Sophocles,
is attained. They are the symbol, the visible embodiment of the moment
of deepest vision, and of the deepest agony now at rest there, a
loveliness for ever. And as the aeons recede, as the intensity of the
idea of the Divine within man increases, so does this conflict, this
_agonia_ increase. It is in the heart of the tempest that the deepest
peace dwells.

The power, the place of conflict, thus great in Art, is in the region
of emotional, of intellectual and of moral life, admittedly supreme.
Doubt, contrition of soul,