life grows more
complex, as specific desires increase in number. Man is not, as thus
seen in these genetic views of him, a self-tamed animal. He has not
arrived at a precarious and unstable social condition out of a
primitive individualism which is the essence of his warlike nature. On
the other hand, he has not degenerated from some ideal pacific state.
Ages ago he was already divinely human, and possessed those capacities
both for cooeperation and antagonism out of which war is created.

CHAPTER II

UNCONSCIOUS MOTIVES, THE REVERSION THEORIES OF WAR, AND THE
INTOXICATION MOTIVE

There are several interesting theories of the causes of war, now in
the field, most of them inspired by our recent great conflict, all of
which (but no one perhaps completely or quite justly) may be described
as based upon the view that war is an outbreak of, or reversion to,
instincts and modes of activity which as primitive tendencies remain
in the individual or in the social life and which, from time to time,
with or without social cause, may break loose, so to speak, and hurl
man back into savagery. These theories of war show us, in some cases,
human character in the form of double personality, or liken
civilization to a thin and insecure incrustation upon the surface of
life, beneath which all that is animal-like and barbaric still remains
smoldering. Some of these theories we need to review briefly here.

Bertrand Russell, in answer to the question, "Why do men fight?" which
is the title of his book dealing with the causes of war, says, in
substance, that men fight because they are controlled by instinct (and
also by authority), rather than by reason. Men will cease fighting
when reason controls instinct, and men think for themselves rather
than allow their thinking to be done for them. This view does not
explicitly state that war is a reversion, for man may be at no point
better or more advanced than a creature of instinct, but it lays the
blame for war upon the original nature of man. Man has instincts which
presumably he has brought with him from his pre-human stage, and some
of these instincts are, on their motor side, the reactions of
fighting.

Le Bon (42) speaks of a conscious and an unconscious will in nations,
and says that the motives behind great national movements may be
beneath all conscious intentions, and may anticipate them. The
Englishman in particular lives, in a sense, a divided life, since
there is a ma