ns that cause pain, disorder and repression.
Under the latter conditions we think of it not as desire for relief
from strain but desire to be released from obstacles that impede the
expression of the growth force. If all this be true, we see war in a
somewhat different light from that in which it is ordinarily regarded.
It is not, in its typical forms, a reversion to barbarism, and it is
not a political mishap. It is rather a readjustment of tendencies or
forces and an expression and product of the living and progressive
forces of society--not necessarily a good or even a normal expression
of them, but an awakening and a realization of such desires as are
to-day at work in everything we do--forces which for the moment are
raised to a white heat, so to speak, in which purposes are for the
moment fused and it may be confused--but still an expression of what,
for better or for worse we _are_, not of what in some remote past time
we _were_. We cannot explain war or excuse ourselves for waging wars
by saying that we lapse for a time into barbarism, but on the other
hand the heroism we suddenly find in ourselves as nations or as
individuals, is not so different from that of ordinary life as we may
have supposed. We have perhaps no right to say that all war is thus to
be characterized. War is a very complex and a widely variable
phenomenon, but this is the explanation of that aspect of the motive
of history which in general produces war. War may have its
abnormalities, if we may speak of a worse in that which is already bad
enough. War may satisfy the desperate mind; it may, on occasion, be a
narcotic to cover up worse pain, or an evidence of decadence; or even
be what those who think of it as a reversion believe. But all these
aspects of war, if our view be sound, are the eccentricities rather
than the essence of war.

The conditions preceding our recent great war will doubtless in the
course of future historical and sociological research, be minutely
scrutinized, in the effort to find the causes of the war--factors
deeper than and different from the political and economic causes and
the personal intrigues that are now most emphasized. If we believe
that the war was made in Germany rather than elsewhere, we might look
there, especially for these psychological factors of war--for our
intoxication motives and unconscious impulses and our causes of
reversion, but we should probably not find anything different in kind
there from