e feelings and moods rather
than instincts. They are aspects of the continuity of the life of the
present, rather than of the fragmentary past that lives in the
individual. These forces are plastic, complex and organized, rather
than haphazard and suppressed. They are directive, creative, but
incidentally they make amends for and satisfy and exploit the past.

If these principles be valid, their application to the psychology of
war seems plain. The central purpose or motive of war to-day is a
craving for the realization of the sense of power. This is the
subjective side of it, the unconscious, instinctive, mystical motive
so often observed. The question of the actual power exerted or
displayed is not the most essential point of this war mood. It is the
manipulation and the satisfaction of inner factors that make the most
significant aspect of these moods. History, we should hold, is in
great part an unfoldment of this motive. Nations crave, as collective
or group consciousness, the feeling of power. Just as we say the child
in his plays wants to be a man, and the individual in his art feels
himself a god, so nations in their wars and in their thoughts of wars,
feel themselves more real, realize themselves as world powers, and as
supreme and divine. To be first and all is indeed the purpose that
runs in these moods, and this we believe is true, in its way, of the
most insignificant and hopelessly decrepit of peoples. This must be
taken account of in the interpretation of history, and in that larger
pedagogy, the pedagogy of nations to which we just now look forward.

These moods which, slumbering, become the ecstasies of war are vague,
even secretive. They contain aggressive thoughts that are disavowed,
vanities that are concealed, fears that present a quiet front. But we
must not think that the war mood always intends war. Nations have
their subjective lives and inner history, and their vicarious
satisfactions. A nation in arms already feels itself victor by reason
of its sense of power. Otherwise few wars would be entered upon.
Dreams and talk of war may incite to war, but they may also satisfy
the desire and need of war. There is a certain narcissism in nations,
and this is due precisely to the fact that patriotism as a feeling and
impulse necessarily lacks in the group consciousness the mechanisms
for externalization, except indeed in war. War is an escape, for a
people, from a kind of subjectivism, from the evils o