olled as a whole, or we may resort
to the opposite way of thinking, and say that all of history, in every
particular and detail, is divinely planned and prearranged, and each
event fits into a rational whole. This, of course, is our final
problem of history, we say, as it is the final problem of every
question that considers life as concrete events having value precisely
as the particular sequence that it is--when we view life historically,
in a word, rather than by the methods of the quantitative sciences, or
by the genetic methods such as are used mainly in the psychological
sciences, and which we may say stand between history and the sciences
of matter.

CHAPTER XI

THE SYNTHESIS OF CAUSES

It appears to be no very difficult matter to discover causes of war,
and indeed a considerable number of causes. In fact the problem seems
to yield an embarrassment of riches, especially if our chief interest
happens to be a practical one, and we wish to find the causes of war
in order to see how they may be controlled. We might even have
discovered all the causes of war and still be as far as before from
any real understanding of the cause of war. Unless one can know the
relative importance of the causes, and the manner in which the causes
combine to produce wars; unless the results give in some way a
synthetic view of the causes of war, show _dominating_ causes, or
reveal a total cause which is not merely a summation of stimuli, but
is both a necessary and a sufficient situation for the production of
war; unless we have shown some fundamental cause and movement in the
social order, we are still left in search of the cause of war.

We have, indeed, found a number of causes of war, but at the same time
the causes have not appeared to exist as separate causes. We are
always catching sight of a movement in the development of nations and
of the world--of certain fundamental motives, the most basic of all,
the most general, being the motive of power. These causes of war do
not appear, however, to be of the nature of a _chain_, giving us the
impression that in order to break the habit of war, all we need do is
to discover the weakest link in the chain of causes, break the chain
there, and so interrupt the whole mechanism of war-making in the
world. Above all, although fortuitous events as causes of war must
not be overlooked, war is not continually being made anew by the
appearance again and again of accidental situations,