Nature.” For we are here concerned with the human instincts and volitions that control all social machinery and we are urging, against upholders of the dogma of perpetual war, that the abolition of war is psychologically possible and even reconcilable with the retention of martial virtue. But the difficulty of the undertaking, the obstacles in the pathway of such a redirection of our fighting instincts, must certainly not be minimized in an outburst of mere emotional enthusiasm. The abolition of war requires nothing less than the divorce of pugnacity from the great egoistic instincts, fear and avarice, with which since the dawn of human history it has been most intimately affiliated. For fear and acquisitiveness are instincts so strong and so primitive that, reinforced by pugnacity, they lead almost inevitably to the attack on personality, on home and on society, which is war. Those who bewail war as inevitable reiterate their conviction that such a separation of pugnacity from fear and greed and physical aggressiveness is impossible. And those who idealize war as the “sacrifice of individual motives to group motives”[1] insist that the only alternative to war is a selfish, cowardly and supine peace. But students of animal and human life know the power of the social instincts. And students of history attest the fact that even nations, though public opinion so largely exempts them from moral obligations in their international relations, do yet on rare occasions in circumstances which might well lead to war voluntarily and without compulsion treat each other with justice tempered by courage—yielding and exacting the fulfilment of international obligation. Thus, on the basis of actual experience we may assert the conviction that the fighting instinct of a virile people may be under the control of its social instincts. For it can not too often be reiterated that liking and sympathy, as well as anger and acquisition, are instinctive impulses—impulses which may be transmuted into the virtues of generosity and justice. War against human life will cease when these social instincts dominate
- ↑ Frederick Lyman Wells, in The Atlantic Monthly, July 1916, Vol. 118, p. 46.
