desire to be an empire is the whole meaning
of a nation, for without the ambition to be supreme, peoples, some of
them, would be nothing. It is the vision of empire, however forlorn
and hopeless, that keeps many nations alive, perhaps all. Nations seek
to express in visible form the evidence of their inner and potential
greatness. The historic and time-honored art of empire-building is the
only art they know. Whether this is the tragedy of history, the
world's fate and the condemnation of it to perpetual warfare--or is
but a term in the logic by which nations rise to other and higher
forms; or finally is a crime or a mistake which it is within the power
of the will of man to abandon or amend--these are problems of the
philosophy of history.

_Historical Causes_

Historical causes of war are in part the sequences of events that the
political causes of war produce (political as the causes inherent in
the wills of nations), and we must suppose they are mainly this.
History, from this point of view, is the working out of the motives or
the desires contained in these national wills. The causes of our late
war, for example, are to be sought mainly in the wills of the great
powers that are concerned in it. Economic forces, the laws of the
growth of nations (both psychological and physical laws), the
conditions of the geographical distributions of peoples over the
earth--all these are involved in the cause of wars. There are also
great personages whose actions must to some extent be considered apart
from these general laws; these personages contribute factors to the
causation of any given war that are not entirely inherent in the laws
of growth or the psychology of nations. Shall we say also that there
are fortuitous factors, historical causes that are not contained in
any logic of human desires? Can we say, perhaps, that these fortuitous
causes are indeed the main causes--in a word that wars are not
desired, mainly, but are the product, indeed, either of the mere logic
of chance, or of a design that transcends human will altogether? Are
wars willed, or are they the results of the complex, the illogical and
uncontrollable factors of the world's existence and movement? These
may not be practical problems, but they are serious problems, since in
the end they implicate the whole of philosophy.

What place shall we give, in the laws of history, to the sudden and
chance turn of affairs; to the quick shift of the wheels of fortu