III

MOODS AND EDUCATION: A REVIEW

In the philosophy of education it is with moods that in our view, we
have most of all to deal. Man, we have a right to say, is a creature
of _feeling_, not of instinct or of reason. It is not the instinct as
a definite reaction to stimulus or as an inner necessity, nor emotion
as a subjective response to this stimulus that is the driving force of
conduct, but rather the more lasting and deeper and more complex
states or processes that we can call by no other name than moods.
Since it is in the moods that the most profound longing or tendency or
desire is represented, we say that moods are the object of chief
concern in a practical philosophy of life. These moods are the
repositories, so to speak, of instinct, impulse, tendency, desire, and
it is therefore by the control and education of moods that the
individual in all his social and in all his personal aspects will be
most fundamentally educable if he is educable at all.

It is as the seat of the will to power, we might say, that the moods
which are the main sources of human energy are to be conceived. The
craving for power, as a generalization of more primitive desires,
comes to take the position of the main motive in life. The craving for
power is a desire, as we see when we analyze it, that expresses itself
as a longing for ecstatic or intense states of consciousness, and an
abundant life. It is a craving to be possessed by strong desire and
also for the satisfaction of many desires--often vicariously, since
the objects desired may be confused and general. So this motive of
power and the ecstatic states in which it is expressed or realized is
no instinct and no pure emotion. It is an outgrowth and culmination
of instincts, a fusion of them into a new product.

It would be going too far afield to try to summarize here the
psychology of moods or of the motive of power in the individual and in
society, but the main fact needed for the moment seems plain. In this
motive and its expression in feeling and conduct there is a very
general tendency which is the source of many forms of interest and
enthusiasm, of ambition, of the spirit of war, of various kinds of
excitement, and to some extent of morbid and criminal tendencies. The
spirit of war we think of as a summation of the same forces as those
which in other ways appear as the energies behind various enterprises
having quite different objectives. War is an anachronism, we may