itical relations_, and are,
indeed, fictitious and exist in the region of the imagination, that
they pertain to the conventional and ornamental sides of national
life, might be supposed to indicate that they could easily be done
away with, and all these fertile causes of war be eliminated. That
must not be assumed. Vanity has deep roots. The ornamental in life
symbolizes the real. It is the point of entrance to the deepest
motives. Conventional and archaic forms do not die out, just because
we discover that they are irrational and harmful, and the causes they
serve seem to us to be unreal. This kind of unreality in the
consciousness of nations is in fact the ideal for which nations live.
Nations play at being great, and fight to defend their prestige--but
this play, as we know, is oftentimes terribly real.

CHAPTER VI

"CAUSES" AS PRINCIPLES AND ISSUES IN WAR

The causes for which wars are fought, or which are asserted to be the
causes, make one of the important psychological problems of war.
Sometimes these causes are elusive, sometimes they may give occasion
for cynicism and a pessimistic view of national morals; again we see
self-deception, again ideals seeking for light, peoples trying to find
something to live for or to die for. We see in the recent great war as
in other wars, a great variety of causes for which men are said to be
fighting. Some would say that the war was entirely a war of
principles; some take a purely political point of view and say that
principles are not involved at all, and others that nothing was
displayed at all of motives except primitive passions which are
equally devoid of moral issues or any principles.

It would be interesting from the psychological point of view to make,
if possible, a complete collection and classification of the causes
that have been brought forward as the fundamental things fought for in
the late war. Many widely different and divergent views are held. The
forms in which the issues of the war have been stated are almost
innumerable. New definitions and new statements of old conventional
ideas appear continuously. Every writer seems to see the war from a
different point of view from all others. Eventually, we may suppose,
all this will be clear, since these "causes" of the war will be one of
the great themes of future philosophical history. At present we can
only formulate such a view as may be suggestive with reference to
general interpretations of the