hown to have been a cause of
progress in anything except the wealth or power of a state which extends
its dominions by conquest or draws tribute from the vanquished.

What, then, are the causes to which the progress of mankind is due? It
is due partly, no doubt, if not to strife, to competition. But chiefly
to thought, which is more often hindered than helped by war. It is the
races that know how to think, rather than the far more numerous races
that excel in fighting rather than in thinking, that have led the world.
Thought, in the form of invention and inquiry, has given us those
improvements in the arts of life and in the knowledge of nature by which
material progress and comfort have been obtained. Thought has produced
literature, philosophy, art, and (when intensified by emotion)
religion--all the things that make life worth living. Now the thought of
any people is most active when it is brought into contact with the
thought of another, because each is apt to lose its variety and freedom
of play when it has worked too long upon familiar lines and flowed too
long in the channels it has deepened. Hence isolation retards progress,
while intercourse quickens it.

The great creative epochs have been those in which one people of natural
vigor received an intellectual impulse from the ideas of another, as
happened when Greek culture began to penetrate Italy, and thirteen
centuries later, when the literature of the ancients began to work on
the nations of the medieval world.

Such contact, with the process of learning which follows from it, may
happen in or through war, but it happens far oftener in peace; and it is
in peace that men have the time and the taste to profit fully by it. A
study of history will show that we may, with an easy conscience, dismiss
the theory of Treitschke--that war is a health-giving tonic which
Providence must be expected constantly to offer to the human race for
its own good.

The future progress of mankind is to be sought, not through the strifes
and hatreds of the nations, but rather by their friendly co-operation in
the healing and enlightening works of peace and in the growth of a
spirit of friendship and mutual confidence which may remove the causes
of war.

4. Progress and the Cosmic Urge

_a. The "Elan Vitale"_[344]

All life, animal and vegetable, seems in its essence like an effort to
accumulate energy and then to let it flow into flexible channels,
changeable in shape, at t