f a self-love to
perhaps the greater evils of self-assertion.

Nations in war, and even in the thought of war realize their own
potentiality, take account of stock of their powers, and create an
ideal, romantic and dream world. They make castles-in-air, and these
castles-in-air always take the form of empires. War, precisely like
art, is at first more and then less practical, and sought for
practical purposes. More and more there is a craving for glory, for
prestige, for subjective satisfaction and symbols of power. Nations
take lands that they cannot use for any good purpose, inflict
indemnities that may ruin themselves rather than their enemies,
exploit economic relations that are dangerous to the nations' very
existence. It is power that they seek, and it is power they thus
create, but it is often different in form and in value from what the
conscious purpose holds. They are really seeking general and
subjective states in part for their own sake. Psychologically it is
all one and the same whether we realize this power by actually killing
an enemy, or believe we overpower him by the performance of some
mystic and ecstatic act, or in some more modern way become confident
in our own power and prestige. National life, in order to maintain its
integrity, must move upon a plane of intense feeling. It must have
objectives, but these objectives are not necessarily of value in
themselves. This is the delusion and enigma of history. Peoples enact
dramas in their own subjective lives, and these things they do have
reference to the desires for inner experiences. We may say that
nations, like individuals, crave for luxuries of the emotional life,
but to think of these experiences as merely static pleasure-states,
after the fashion of a certain conception of the emotions, would be
wholly to misunderstand this view which we have been trying to
present. These subjective states are full of meaning and of purpose.
They are not reactions, but rather, in so far as these collective
lives are normal and progressive, these moods and ecstasies are more
of the nature of crucibles in which old reactions and feelings are
fused, given new direction, new forms and in a certain way a new
nature. History is made in these moods of war. They are subjective
forces, but they are also objectively creative.

What is it that nations really desire? What is it, we might ask, that
an individual desires? On the side of experience it is an _abundant
life_,