philosophy of inconsistency and dual principles of thought and
conduct; even the whole spirit of the English philosophy, which Wundt
says is nothing but an attempt to reconcile thought with the ideas of
peace and comfort--all these have been charged with being instigators
of the war.

Bergson (17) takes a different view. He says that the desire comes
first, the doctrine afterwards. Germany, determined upon war, invokes
Nietzsche or Hegel. Germany in a moral temper would appeal to Kant, or
in still a different mood to the Romanticists. Le Bon (42) says that
nations are pushed forward by forces which they cannot understand, and
that rational thoughts and desires play but a little part in war. That
appears to be true. We cannot say that philosophies do not enter at
all into the causes of war, but among these causes they must be
insignificant as compared with other causes that neither arise from
abstract thought nor are greatly modified by reason in any way.
Consider the influence of Napoleon (himself so little a product of any
philosophical influence), as compared with Hegel; or of Bismarck as
compared with Nietzsche, and this will be apparent. There are in the
course of the centuries books and men that, as rational forces, do
exert profound effect upon the practical life, but they must be rarer
than is sometimes supposed. It is all too easy to assume a relation of
cause and effect when there is only a similarity between thought and
subsequent conduct. Rousseau may or may not have inspired the French
Revolution. Probably he did not. The recent great war, we might say,
has occurred in spite of philosophy, and if Nietzsche's influence
gravitated toward war, it can hardly be thought to have had any
deciding force in turning the scales already so overloaded by fate.
Philosophy failed to prevent war. Nietzsche's philosophy did not cause
it. His philosophy affords a convenient phraseology in which to
express a philosophy of war, granting sufficient misinterpretation of
his philosophy. Probably what influence he has had has been due rather
to his literary impressiveness than to his thought as a contribution
to philosophy.

Darwin, as the great force behind a new and varied development of
science, has had the fate to be, in some sense, a factor in the moods
and the new habits of life that led toward the final issue in the
great war. It is not so much that his principle, misapplied, or
applied uncritically may become a justifica