ir content. There is the ecstatic state,
and the craving to experience it, the love of excitement, the desire
to have a sense of reality, the impulse to seek an abundant life, the
love of power and of the feeling of power. These are all related, and
at least they have something in common, but it is the last mentioned,
the motive of power, that seems to be the most definite and to have
the clearest biological meaning and implications. Indeed this motive
of power (and we must here again depend upon previous studies of the
aesthetic motives and other aspects of ecstasy), appears to be
fundamental in art, in religion, and in history. It is a concept that
gives us a vantage ground for the interpretation of some of the most
significant parts of life. The idea of power and the craving for power
as a general motive, but also containing and exploiting specific
purposes and desires, runs through all the history of art and religion
and also through history itself. Religion is based upon the desire to
exert and to feel power, and it is the manifest and indeed the
expressly acknowledged purpose of all primitive art, and is concealed
and implied in all later art. Art is practical, an effort to realize a
sense of power, to become a god (just as in his motive of play the
child desires more than anything else to realize himself as a man), to
influence people, or objects, or gods, to exert magic somewhere in the
world. In the feeling of power which the ecstatic state produces, the
belief in the power of art is established, and at the same time deep
and hidden impulses are exploited. On the feeling side, and indeed in
every way, this ought to explain how art, religion, and all states of
intoxication have a common element, if they are not primitively the
same.

A psychology of the war moods must undertake to trace the history of
the motive of power, considering its beginnings as the desire and
sense of satisfaction connected with the performance of definite
instinctive acts, and with their physiological results, with the
exertion of power and the production of effects upon objects. It is in
the performance of instinctive acts, in which superiority is inborn,
that animal and man obtain their original sense of power or
superiority. As capacities are differentiated and multiplied, the
experiences of achievement generate a mood and a more general impulse,
a desire to exert power for its own sake. The sensory or organic
elements tend to predom