apted to successful
movements, there is developed on the psychic side an interest in the
conflict situation as complete and perfect as is the structure itself.
The emotional states are, indeed, organic preparations for action,
corresponding broadly with a tendency to advance or retreat, and a
connection has even been made out between pleasurable states and the
extensor muscles, and painful states and the flexor muscles. We can
have no adequate idea of the time consumed and the experiments made in
nature before the development of these types of structure and interest
of the conflict pattern, but we know from the geological records that
the time and experiments were long and many, and the competition so
sharp, that finally, not in man alone, but in all the higher classes
of animals, body and mind, structure and interest, were working
perfectly in motor actions of the violent type involved in a life
of conflict, competition, and rivalry. There could not have been
developed an organism depending on offensive and defensive movements
for food and life without an interest in what we call a dangerous or
precarious situation. A type without this interest would have been
defective, and would have dropped out in the course of development.

There has been comparatively little change in human structure or human
interest in historical times. It is a popular view that moral and
cultural views and interests have superseded our animal instincts;
but the cultural period is only a span in comparison with prehistoric
times and the prehuman period of life, and it seems probable that
types of psychic reaction were once for all developed and fixed;
and while objects of attention and interest in different historical
periods are different, we shall never get far away from the original
types of stimulus and reaction. It is, indeed, a condition of normal
life that we should not get too far away from them.

The fact that our interests and enthusiasms are called out in
situations of the conflict type is shown by a glance at the situations
which arouse them most readily. War is simply an organized form of
fight, and as such is most attractive, or, to say the least, arouses
the interests powerfully. With the accumulation of property, and the
growth of sensibility and intelligence, it becomes apparent that war
is a wasteful and unsafe process, and public and personal interests
lead us to avoid it as much as possible. But, however genuinely war
may b