ery over us) of a
more primitive life than our own. The child and the primitive man, as
we have long known them in the Freudian theories, live still in us and
are indestructible. We have supposed ourselves to have overcome these
primitive impulses, but we are far from being so civilized as we
thought. The evil impulses, as we call them, which we supposed had at
least been transformed are changed only in the sense that they have
been influenced by the erotic motive, or have been repressed by an
outer restraint, an educational factor, the demands of what we call
civilized environment. But let us not deceive ourselves; the old
impulses are still alive; the number of people who have been
transformed by civilization is less than we supposed. All society is
at heart barbaric. Judged by our unconscious wishes, we are a band of
murderers, for the primitive wish is to kill all who oppose our
self-interests, and war is precisely a reversion to the method of free
expression of our desires in action. Society and the authority of
government have suppressed these primitive reactions in the
individual, but instead of eliminating them altogether from human
nature (which, of course, no legislation can do in any case),
government and society as a whole have appropriated all these
primitive actions to their own use.

Jones (37), the Freudian, distinguishes two quite different groups of
causes of war: the conscious causes, all expressed in the feeling of
patriotism; and the unconscious causes, which grow out of the desire
to release certain original passions--the passions of cruelty,
destruction, loot and lust.

The central thought of all these views, it is plain, is that war
belongs to the past. It is a return to something that, in a
significant sense, is the natural man--is his instinctive and
unguarded self. It is also plainly implied in these views, here and
there, that modern man, by thus lapsing into war, is renewing his
stock of primitive nature. The modern man is in unstable equilibrium,
and whatever upsets that equilibrium sends him back through the ages.
MacCurdy (37), having Jones and Freud in mind, protests against these
views to this extent: he says that the present state of man, rather
than the past, is the natural state, and that at least in reverting to
the primitive state man becomes unnatural.

The question upon which our discussion of this aspect of war is going
to hinge is whether, or in what sense, the activities a