inly that it would be pedantry to look for direct effects
on the field of battle from a theoretical distinction.

But the first business of every theory is to clear up conceptions and
ideas which have been jumbled together, and, we may say, entangled and
confused; and only when a right understanding is established, as to
names and conceptions, can we hope to progress with clearness and
facility, and be certain that author and reader will always see things
from the same point of view. Tactics and strategy are two activities
mutually permeating each other in time and space, at the same time
essentially different activities, the inner laws and mutual relations of
which cannot be intelligible at all to the mind until a clear conception
of the nature of each activity is established.

He to whom all this is nothing, must either repudiate all theoretical
consideration, OR HIS UNDERSTANDING HAS NOT AS YET BEEN PAINED by the
confused and perplexing ideas resting on no fixed point of view,
leading to no satisfactory result, sometimes dull, sometimes fantastic,
sometimes floating in vague generalities, which we are often obliged to
hear and read on the conduct of War, owing to the spirit of scientific
investigation having hitherto been little directed to these subjects.

CHAPTER II. ON THE THEORY OF WAR

1. THE FIRST CONCEPTION OF THE "ART OF WAR" WAS MERELY THE PREPARATION
OF THE ARMED FORCES.

FORMERLY by the term "Art of War," or "Science of War," nothing was
understood but the totality of those branches of knowledge and those
appliances of skill occupied with material things. The pattern
and preparation and the mode of using arms, the construction of
fortifications and entrenchments, the organism of an army and the
mechanism of its movements, were the subject; these branches of knowledge
and skill above referred to, and the end and aim of them all was the
establishment of an armed force fit for use in War. All this concerned
merely things belonging to the material world and a one-sided activity
only, and it was in fact nothing but an activity advancing by gradations
from the lower occupations to a finer kind of mechanical art. The
relation of all this to War itself was very much the same as the
relation of the art of the sword cutler to the art of using the sword.
The employment in the moment of danger and in a state of constant
reciprocal action of the particular energies of mind and spirit in the
direction proposed