fferences have been utilized as a means of still further developing
the desires and satisfying them, or justifying their satisfaction. It
is man's intelligence and his capacity for being governed in his
conduct by many desires that teaches him to make war upon his own
kind, and the very same qualities make his associations firm and
lasting. _But just in this way the human group ceases to be a herd and
to be dominated by herd instincts._ To interpret war, therefore, as an
effect of social instinct or herd instinct upon the instincts of
aggression or of self-protection, or as the effect of aroused
instincts of aggression and self-protection exciting the herd
instinct, is unsatisfactory because it is too simple, and erroneously
undertakes to explain human life in terms of instinct and also carries
biological analogies too far. These views, if we understand them, seem
to have the characteristic faults of all purely biological sociology.

That, however, the "herd instinct," or the social feeling or the
cohesive force in groups, whatever it may be, is exceedingly strong
and persistent is shown by the recent war. We see a world highly
differentiated, and with wide associations which seemed to have become
permanent becoming at once a world in which the lines of cleavage are
based upon propinquity and political organization. All ties, except
national ties, were broken up. The nation, conscious of itself,
becomes a unit or personality, and the sense of personality of a
nation becomes greatly intensified in time of war. The individual
becomes unimportant, both in his own estimation and in the eye of the
law. It is the life of the nation as a whole that is felt to be
threatened and under this threat the group as a whole becomes an
object of devotion and solicitude. Nicolai (79) comments upon this
_Massengefuehl_ and says that, when not counterbalanced by higher
elements of social consciousness, it may be a low and dangerous
element in the consciousness of groups. Sumner (70) also speaks of the
extraordinary power of gregariousness, and says that when the movement
is upon a vast scale, the numbers engaged being very large, there is
always an exhilaration connected with the movement, and that if the
causes involved are believed to be deep and holy, the force of this
gregarious mood may become demoniacal.

There are two especially remarkable changes that take place in the
social life in war or in the act of going to war, and which re