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This book contains two closely related studies of the consciousness ofnations. It has been written during the closing months of the war andin the days that have followed, and is completed while the PeaceConference is still in session, holding in the balance, as manybelieve, the fate of many hopes, and perhaps the whole future of theworld. We see focussed there in Paris all the motives that have everentered into human history and all the ideals that have influencedhuman affairs. The question must have arisen in all minds in, someform as to what the place of these motives and ideals and dramaticmoments is in the progress of the world. Is the world governed afterall by the laws of nature in all its progress? Do ideals and motivesgovern the world, but only as these ideals and motives are themselvesproduced according to biological or psychological principles? Or,again, does progress depend upon historical moments, upon consciouspurposes which may divert the course of nature and in a real sensecreate the future? It is with the whole problem of history that we areconfronted in these practical hours. At heart our problem is that ofthe place of man in nature as a conscious factor of progress. This isa problem, finally, of the philosophy of history, but it is rather ina more concrete way and upon a different level that it is to beconsidered here,—and somewhat incidentally to other more specificquestions. But this is the problem that is always before us, and theone to which this study aims to make some contribution, however small.
The first part of the book is a study of the motives of [vi]war. It is ananalysis of the motives of war in the light of the general principlesof the development of society. We wish to see what the causes of pastwars have been, but we wish also to know what these motives are asthey may exist as forces in the present state of society. In such astudy, practical questions can never be far away. We can no longerstudy war as an abstract psychological problem, since war has broughtus to a horrifying and humiliating situation. We have discovered thatour modern world, with all its boasted morality and civilization, isactuated, at least in its relations among nations, by very unsocialmotives. We live in a world in which nations thus far have been forthe most part dominated by a theory of States as absolutely sovereignand independent of one another. Now it becomes evident that a logicalconsequence of that theory of States is absolute war. A prospect of afuture of absolute war in a world in which industrial