and the other modes of spiritual _agonia_,
are not these equivalent with the life, not death, of the soul?

And those moments of serenest peace, when the desire of the heart is
one with the desire of the world-soul, are not these attained by
conflict? In the life of the State, the soul of the State, as composed
of such monads, such constituent forms and organic elements, each
penetrated and impelled by the divine, self-realizing, omnipresent
_nisus_, how vain to hope, to desire, to pray, that _there_ this mystic
all-pervading Force, this onward-striving, this conflict, which is as
it were the very essence and necessary law of being, should pause and
have an end! War may change its shape, the struggle here intensifying,
there abating; it may be uplifted by ever loftier purposes and nobler
causes--but cease? How shall it cease?

Indeed, in the light of History, universal peace appears less as a
dream than as a nightmare which shall be realized only when the ice has
crept to the heart of the sun, and the stars, left black and trackless,
start from their orbits.

Sec. 7. IMPERIALISM AND WAR

If war then be a permanent factor in the life of States, how, it may be
asked, will it be affected by Imperialism and by such an ideal as this
of Imperial Britain? The effects upon war, will, I should say, be
somewhat of this nature. It will greaten and exalt the character of
war. Not only in constitutional, but in foreign politics, the roots of
the present lie deep in the past. In the wars of an imperial State the
ideals of all the wars of the past still live, adding a fuller life to
the life of the present. From the earliest tribal forays, slowly
broadening through the struggles of feudalism and Plantagenet kings to
the wars of the nation, one creative purpose, one informing principle
links century to century, developing itself at last in the wars of
empire, wars for the larger freedom, the higher justice. And this
ideal differs from the ideal of primitive times as the vast complexity
of races, peoples, religions, climates, traditions, literatures, arts,
manners, laws, which the word "Britain" now conceals, differs from the
'companies' and 'hundreds' of daring warriors who followed the fortunes
of a Cerdic or an Uffa. For the State which by conquest or submission
is merged in the life of another State does not thereby evade that law
of conflict of which I have spoken, but becomes subject to that law in
the life of t