icy is the womb in which War is
developed, in which its outlines lie hidden in a rudimentary state, like
the qualities of living creatures in their germs.(*)

(*) The analogy has become much closer since Clausewitz's
time. Now that the first business of the State is regarded
as the development of facilities for trade, War between
great nations is only a question of time. No Hague
Conferences can avert it--EDITOR.

4. DIFFERENCE.

The essential difference consists in this, that War is no activity of
the will, which exerts itself upon inanimate matter like the mechanical
Arts; or upon a living but still passive and yielding subject, like
the human mind and the human feelings in the ideal Arts, but against
a living and reacting force. How little the categories of Arts and
Sciences are applicable to such an activity strikes us at once; and we
can understand at the same time how that constant seeking and striving
after laws like those which may be developed out of the dead material
world could not but lead to constant errors. And yet it is just the
mechanical Arts that some people would imitate in the Art of War. The
imitation of the ideal Arts was quite out of the question, because these
themselves dispense too much with laws and rules, and those hitherto
tried, always acknowledged as insufficient and one-sided, are
perpetually undermined and washed away by the current of opinions,
feelings, and customs.

Whether such a conflict of the living, as takes place and is settled
in War, is subject to general laws, and whether these are capable of
indicating a useful line of action, will be partly investigated in this
book; but so much is evident in itself, that this, like every other
subject which does not surpass our powers of understanding, may be
lighted up, and be made more or less plain in its inner relations by an
inquiring mind, and that alone is sufficient to realise the idea of a
THEORY.

CHAPTER IV. METHODICISM

IN order to explain ourselves clearly as to the conception of method,
and method of action, which play such an important part in War, we
must be allowed to cast a hasty glance at the logical hierarchy through
which, as through regularly constituted official functionaries, the
world of action is governed.

LAW, in the widest sense strictly applying to perception as well as
action, has plainly something subjective and arbitrary in its literal
meaning, and expresses just tha