and ferocity to patriotism.
The gambling mood, which is in part a play with fear, is another
ecstatic reaction seen in war, and it is often the means of clearing
the way, so to speak, for free and uninhibited action.

Of course all the purely aesthetic elements in the social life have
this effect of arousing exalted moods, and indeed that is precisely
their function. All social impulses tend in this same direction, and
there is induced in all intense social states an intoxication mood. In
these social states, the reproductive motive is often clearly
discernible, but partly by common consent and convention, and partly
because of the composite and fused form of impulses in the social
mood, robbed of its specific reactions and converted into a new
product, regarded both as conduct and as feeling.

All religious states aroused in war tend to become ecstatic. Their
work is to overcome the sense of tragedy of war, and it is only by
becoming intense and voluminous, so to speak, that they can accomplish
their work at all. Either they must end in a mysticism which includes
or takes the form of exalted moods, or they must, as can be
accomplished in some temperaments, become dynamic states by inspiring
a fatalistic attitude, which is at bottom a sense of throwing oneself
unreservedly into the hands of fate.

We may best think of these complex war moods as the forces out of
which wars are made, and the spirit in which they are conducted, but
not as by their own initiative creating wars. These intoxication moods
or ecstasies are forces which contain desires that are general, we
say; they are mental processes that act as a means of greatly
increasing the volume of all social actions. When we analyze them we
find specific desires in them, and evidences of instinct and primitive
feeling, but they are not in themselves tendencies toward specific
reactions and in fact the motor tendencies they contain more or less
inhibit one another.

In general, these war moods of which we speak are _precipitated_ by
definite and incisive reactions of fear and anger. These emotions of
fear or anger seem to be the necessary positive stimuli to induce the
moods of war. Fear and anger, no one can maintain, are the sole causes
of war, and they are far from being the sole factors of the war moods,
but they are the usual precipitants of war.

Fear and anger as social emotions cannot sustain organized and
effectual social activity upon a large scale; we