ined
with the mystical elements and the superficial aestheticism of the old
feudalistic regime to create a philosophy of life, a temporary stage
it may be, in which force and fanaticism and the uncompromising ideals
of national honor and brute strength prevail over those of a wider
efficiency and a broader devotion which might have inspired a greater
and a better Germany. Convention and political motives have done the
rest.

Bergson says that in the war spirit of Germany one sees matter arrayed
against spirit. One can see some truth in this, but spirit and matter
are not two armies pitted against one another. In Germany, as we may
believe elsewhere, the spiritual in the sense of creative forces in
the subconscious life of nations does try to organize the practical
life, with its routine and convention, into an onward moving progress,
in which, necessarily, exalted moods (if energies are to get
themselves expressed at all) must prevail, and must be full of
possibilities, both of great good and of great evil. Life in its
collective form will be abundant, because that is its most fundamental
craving. It may be terribly and destructively abundant, or benignly,
but progress, as history seems to show us--if reason and psychology do
not--can never be orderly and complacent. Order and convention must
break down to introduce new spirit and new desires which are
continually being created in the inner life. These forces may be old
instincts which are continually upsetting civilized life, but the
desires they produce and the mechanism of their operation seem to be
different from what our customary psychology and interpretation of
history imply. Just as these moods make the child play and be wholly
unpractical when one might suppose he could be useful, and the
individual, as man, live a certain life of adventure rather than in
security and routine, so this spirit or mood that dominates nations
makes them imperialistic, and causes them to crave those things which
lead toward war, if they do not crave war itself, when we might think
they ought to be most concerned about the economic welfare of the
world as a whole.

Whether this spirit of nations be an evil to be overcome, and to
suppress, or an untamed force to direct to right objects, or a good
that by some logic of events which we do not understand works out the
right course of history, we do not know. But here, of course, we come
to problems, which, if they are problems at all