nd the feelings
aroused in war are reversions. Wars, beyond a doubt, do involve to a
greater extent than peaceful life certain instinctive reactions. Wars
are so impulsive and so persistent that we must suppose very deep
motives to be engaged in war; and the fact that in all wars, and on
both sides of every war, the feelings and the reactions are
fundamentally the same, indicates that war is something less
differentiated than the peaceful life. But that war can be explained
in terms of instinct as such, or that war can be disposed of as a mere
recrudescence of old impulses and types of conduct buried beneath
civilization, is very much to be doubted. War, in the first place, in
its moods and passions, appears to be too complex, too synthetic a
process to be quite what this view would imply. It is too intimately
related to everything that occurs and exists in present day society.
It means too much, concretely and with reference to objects
specifically desired for the future. War is related to the past, but
to a great extent, it may be, wars represent and contain the present
and look toward the future. The distinctions and differences in the
interpretation of war thus implied, and the conflicting understanding
of facts about society and individual life cannot be very clear at
this point, but that there are involved fundamental problems of
psychology, and perhaps divergent ways of thinking of history and
society, and of such principles of philosophy at least as are
implicated in aesthetics, and finally of the practical questions that
are of most interest in these fields to-day, may begin to be evident.

There is one aspect of war, or one question about war, that seems to
suggest that its problems are more subtle and less simple than the
instinct-theories imply. War has been, and still is, the great story
of the world, the center of all that is dramatic and heroic in life.
Its mood--and that is the essential thing in it, whatever else war may
have been, and in spite of all its horrors--is _ecstatic_. War
produces, or is produced by, states of mind that affiliate it with all
the other ecstasies--of love, religion, intoxication, art. We may well
doubt whether any explanation of war can ever be satisfactory that
does not take this quality of it fully into account. One may say, of
course, that war is ecstatic just because it does satisfy instincts,
that the satisfaction of all instincts is pleasant, or that pleasure
_is_ the sa