Paris all the motives that have ever
entered into human history and all the ideals that have influenced
human affairs. The question must have arisen in all minds in, some
form as to what the place of these motives and ideals and dramatic
moments is in the progress of the world. Is the world governed after
all by the laws of nature in all its progress? Do ideals and motives
govern the world, but only as these ideals and motives are themselves
produced according to biological or psychological principles? Or,
again, does progress depend upon historical moments, upon conscious
purposes which may divert the course of nature and in a real sense
create the future? It is with the whole problem of history that we are
confronted in these practical hours. At heart our problem is that of
the place of man in nature as a conscious factor of progress. This is
a problem, finally, of the philosophy of history, but it is rather in
a more concrete way and upon a different level that it is to be
considered here,--and somewhat incidentally to other more specific
questions. But this is the problem that is always before us, and the
one to which this study aims to make some contribution, however small.

The first part of the book is a study of the motives of war. It is an
analysis of the motives of war in the light of the general principles
of the development of society. We wish to see what the causes of past
wars have been, but we wish also to know what these motives are as
they may exist as forces in the present state of society. In such a
study, practical questions can never be far away. We can no longer
study war as an abstract psychological problem, since war has brought
us to a horrifying and humiliating situation. We have discovered that
our modern world, with all its boasted morality and civilization, is
actuated, at least in its relations among nations, by very unsocial
motives. We live in a world in which nations thus far have been for
the most part dominated by a theory of States as absolutely sovereign
and independent of one another. Now it becomes evident that a logical
consequence of that theory of States is absolute war. A prospect of a
future of absolute war in a world in which industrial advances have
placed in the hands of men such terrible forces of destruction, an
absolute warfare that can now be carried into the air and under the
sea is what makes any investigation of the motives of war now a very
practical problem.

If