becomes so
complicated that each new adjustment has such wide ramifications that it
threatens the whole structure. Finally, as the result of the accumulated
structure of diplomatic relations and precedents, a situation arises to
which adjustment, with the machinery that has been developed, is
impossible and the whole house of cards collapses. The collapse is a
process of dedifferentiation during which the old structures are
destroyed, precedents are disavowed, new situations occur with
bewildering rapidity, for dealing with which there is no recognized
machinery available. Society reverts from a state in which a high grade
of individual initiative and development was possible to a relatively
communistic and paternalistic state, the slate is wiped clear, and a
start can be made anew along lines of progress mapped out by the new
conditions--rejuvenescence is possible.

War, from this point of view, is a precondition for development along
new lines of necessity, and the dedifferentiation is the first stage of
a constructive process. Old institutions have to be torn down before the
bricks with which they were built can be made available for new
structures. This accounts for the periodicity of war, which thus is the
outward and evident aspect of the progress of the life-force which in
human societies, as elsewhere, advances in cycles. It is only by such
means that an _impasse_ can be overcome.

War is an example of ambivalency on the grandest scale. That is, it is
at once potent for the greatest good and the greatest evil: in the very
midst of death it calls for the most intense living; in the face of the
greatest renunciation it offers the greatest premium; for the maximum of
freedom it demands the utmost giving of one's self; in order to live at
one's best it demands the giving of life itself. "No man has reached his
ethical majority who would not die if the real interests of the
community could thus be furthered. What would the world be without the
values that have been bought at the price of death?" In this sense the
great creative force, love, and the supreme negation, death, become one.
That the larger life of the race should go forward to greater things,
the smaller life of the individual must perish. In order that man shall
be born again, he must first die.

Does all this necessarily mean that war, from time to time, in the
process of readjustment, is essential? I think no one can doubt that it
has been necessary