virtues
that nations discover in themselves in war they elaborate in peace.
Nations at war become conscious of their spiritual possessions. Since
their existence, they believe, is at stake, it is a part of their
self-defense to justify their value in the world. They discover in
themselves that which is most characteristic of them, and this becomes
their principle. The principle of a nation is that which the national
consciousness fixates itself upon as the title of the nation to
continued existence. Nations do not go to war over their causes, or
about their distinctive virtues and missions in the world. Rather it
is their likenesses that precipitate wars,--their resemblances and
identities in being the same in ambition, and having the same
conceptions of national honor and the same motives for war and
desiring the same objects. Nations in general do not go to war over
principles because they are not motivated by principles in their
historical course. The principles of nations are aspects of their
inner development. The "causes" of nations at war, according to our
view, are these inner qualities of which they have become conscious.
Nations discover them in the stress of war, and it is quite natural
also that in such times they should not always judge them fairly, and
that they should often make for themselves a fictitious character.

CHAPTER VII

PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCES

Philosophy, in the minds of many writers, must be given a high place
among the causes of war, and a considerable fraction of the literature
of the late war is devoted to the problem of discovering, in the field
of abstract thought, the influences that led to the great conflict.
Nietzsche, especially, seems to have been held responsible for the
European conflagration. As the philosopher of the New Germany, as the
chief expositor of the doctrine of force, the inventor of the
super-man and of the idea of the beyond-good, Nietzsche seems to stand
convicted of furnishing precisely the concepts that have become the
German's gospel of war; and since the German is prone to be guided by
abstractions, the evidence, even though circumstantial, seems to many
to be convincing.

Schopenhauer, also, as the great pessimist; Hegel, with his doctrine
of the supremacy of the State as the representative of the Idea on
earth; Kant, as the discoverer of the subjective moral principle;
English utilitarianism as the doctrine of the main chance; empiricism,
as the