ization, it will not
be because we have developed these enormous powers of destruction but
because we have failed to develop adequate powers of control for them
and collective determination. This panoply of war waits as the test of
our progress towards the realization of that collective mind which I
hold must ultimately direct the evolution of our specific being. It is
here to measure our incoherence and error, and in the measure of those
defects to refer us back to our studies.

Just as we understand does war become needless.

But I do not think that war and military organization will so much
disappear as change its nature as the years advance. I think that the
phase of universal military service we seem to be approaching is one
through which the mass of mankind may have to pass, learning something
that can be learnt in no other way, that the uniforms and flags, the
conceptions of order and discipline, the tradition of service and
devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion and universal
responsibility, will remain a permanent acquisition, though the last
ammunition has been used ages since in the pyrotechnic display that
welcomed the coming of the ultimate Peace.

3.20. OF ABSTINENCES AND DISCIPLINES.

From these large issues of conduct, let me come now to more intimate
things, to one's self control, the regulation of one's personal life.
And first about abstinences and disciplines.

I have already confessed (Chapter 2.6) that my nature is one that
dislikes abstinences and is wearied by and wary of excess.

I do not feel that it is right to suppress altogether any part of one's
being. In itself abstinence seems to me a refusal to experience, and
that, upon the lines of thought I follow, is to say that abstinence for
its own sake is evil. But for an end all abstinences are permissible,
and if the kinetic type of believer finds both his individual and his
associated efficiency enhanced by a systematic discipline, if he is
convinced that he must specialize because of the discursiveness of his
motives, because there is something he wants to do or be so good that
the rest of them may very well be suppressed for its sake, then he must
suppress. But the virtue is in what he gets done and not in what he does
not do. Reasonable fear is a sound reason for abstinence, as when a
man has a passion like a lightly sleeping maniac that the slightest
indulgence will arouse. Then he must needs adopt heroic abstinenc