in any real sense, are
philosophical and ultimate.

CHAPTER III

INSTINCTS IN WAR: FEAR, HATE, THE AGGRESSIVE IMPULSE, MOTIVES OF
COMBAT AND DESTRUCTION, THE SOCIAL INSTINCT

We have found that the essential, and we might say, primary
psychological datum of war is a war-mood, that the central motive of
this war-mood is a general impulse which we called the intoxication
motive, and that this intoxication motive, considered generically, and
in regard to its specific meaning is a craving for power and for the
experience of exerting and feeling power. The war-mood is not a mere
collection of instincts; it is a new product, in which instincts and
emotions have a place. There are several reasons, practical and
theoretical, for regarding it as a highly important problem to
discover what the actual content of this war-mood is. This mood, being
one of the greatest of all powers of good and evil, and one most in
need to-day of education and re-direction, it may be, it will probably
be controlled, if ever, upon the basis of a knowledge of what it means
as a whole, and of what its elements are which appear in the form of
fused, transformed, truncated, generalized and aborted instincts and
feelings.

_Primitive Tendencies_

First of all, the highly complex emotions, moods and impulses we find
in the social consciousness as expressed in the moods of war, do
contain and revert to instincts and feelings that are part of the
primitive equipment of organic life, and are usually identified as
nutritional and reproductive tendencies. The part played in war by
the migratory impulse, the predatory impulse and the like indicates
the connection of the war-moods with the nutritional tendencies; and
the display elements found already in primitive warfare and, as we
have already inferred, in all forms of ecstasy contain factors that
are at bottom sexual. We no longer eat our enemies, and we do not
bring home their heads to our women or practice wife stealing, but it
is easy to observe the remnants of these old feelings and instincts in
war. Trophy hunting continues, and we may suppose that even the moods
of primitive cannibalism have not entirely been lost. The ready
habituation of soldiers to some of the scenes of the recent war seems
to suggest a lingering trace of this motive, while the looting impulse
which plays such a part in war, and some aspects of the destructive
impulses and the like that are displayed, are, with a high