ions, but both in the phyletic development and the development in
the individual, elements that enter into the modern social life as
instincts have tended to lose their specific character, have become
general or merely organic, have been transformed and have to some
extent lost their original significance.

The motives of hunger, the reactions of the reproductive mechanisms,
reactions to visual impressions and to sounds, warmth reactions, the
huddling of fear, the influences of suggestion, susceptibility to all
the stimuli of the social object enter into social feelings, and
remain to some extent as instinctive reactions in the higher social
processes. But we do not seem to find any general social instinct, or
any specific herd instinct or any definite and broadly acting
protective and aggressive instincts. As compared with some other views
of the social feelings ours assumes in one way more and in another
less of instinct in the social life. There is more instinct in the
sense that more specific instinctive reactions are recognized in it,
but less in assuming that these reactions are derivatives of primitive
reactions of the organism, and also because they become transformed
and fused and lose their original forms. They have come from common
sources in organic life, we might say, and they meet again in the
general moods which they help to create.

_Conclusions_

It is an important point to observe that most if not all of the
specific instinctive reactions and feelings engendered in war, or
occurring as an incitement to war, are capable of inducing ecstatic
states. There are several of these movements and states, each of which
can become, so to speak, a foundation for the development of ecstasy.
Combat may and must do this, and probably war could never be carried
on at all unless danger and death had qualities which arouse ecstatic
moods. There is a joy in fighting, in killing, and in the tumult of
battle that becomes one of the most important of military assets, and
is one of the main elements of morale in the field. This capacity of
human nature to make over that which is intrinsically painful into the
pleasurable is one of the paradoxes of human life to be explained and
taken into account in the study of the psychology of war. Fear itself
may induce an ecstasy, both in the individual, as we know from many
reported cases from the late war, and as a social mood in which the
fear contributes a quality of intensity