CLIVEDEN LIBRARY 
 
 Nurabep 
 
 Date -.J<^:i.2. 
 
 ^^Qdopf ASTOR ^anc-r
 
 The Nature of War
 
 "By th 
 
 e same 
 
 Attth 
 
 or 
 
 THE WAY OF PEACE 
 10/6 net 
 
 THE WORLD SOUL 
 
 10/6 net 
 
 THE PASSING OF EMPIRE 
 10/6 net 
 
 THE HEARTS OF MEN 
 6/- net 
 
 London: 
 HURST S BLACKBTT LTD.
 
 The Nature of War 
 
 :: :: And its Causes :: :: 
 By H. Fielding HalL Author of - The 
 
 Soul of a People,' " The Way of Peace, etc. :: :: 
 
 
 
 
 LONDON: HURST & BLACKETT, LTD. 
 PATERNOSTER HOUSE, E.G. .. 1917
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CnAP. PAGE 
 
 I. The Inevitability of War . . 5 
 
 II. The Fallacy of Ethics. . . 89 
 
 III. The Failure of Experience . . 71 
 
 IV. The Teachings of Religions. . 98 
 
 V. Conceptions of God , . . 119 
 
 VI. The Purpose of Evolution . .145 
 
 VII. The Phenomena of Life . . 177 
 
 VIII. The Struggle for Existence . 201 
 
 IX. The Objectives of Civilization . 229 
 
 X. A "Greater Freedom". . . 247 
 
 XI. The Prevention of War . . 259
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE INEVITABILITY OF WAR
 
 THE NATURE OF WAR AND 
 ITS CAUSES 
 
 ?^ every great trial that a man, a 
 ' nation, or a civilization, passes 
 through, it makes two resolves, or rather 
 it cherishes two hopes, to help it through 
 the trouble, the first that it will win 
 through at all costs, and the second that 
 when peace has returned it will so arrange 
 the future that this particular trouble 
 can never occur again. And of these two 
 hopes, the first, though the most imme- 
 diate, is perhaps the lesser. For in a 
 great and stubborn war, the suffering 
 caused even to the victor is so terrible, 
 that the difference between those who win 
 and those who lose is only a diffArendfe in "^ 
 
 7
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 degree. The horror and the suffering are 
 not confined to one side, and it is only 
 the hope that, taught by much sorrow, 
 we shall learn to avoid it for the future, 
 that makes us keep up our courage and 
 determination. So in the present terrible 
 war that has overtaken us, our vows 
 that we would fight the matter to a finish 
 are always followed by " and never again, 
 no, never again, shall this be possible." 
 
 So we resolve, but in fact we have no 
 idea how to set about it. That does not, 
 however, mean that we lack prophets. 
 We have plenty of them who have abso- 
 lutely certain cures. There are the 
 socialists, there are pacificists, there are 
 the various Churches. " Follow my 
 advice and war shall cease," they tell us ; 
 but I do not think that we much believe 
 in them. You won't stop war by de- 
 nouncing it as terrible, and proving its 
 horrors. Everyone knows them. You
 
 The Inevitability of War 
 
 won't stop war by arbitration treaties, 
 because no nation will arbitrate in a 
 matter that it considers affects its honour 
 or its vital interests. It would tear up 
 any treaty and disregard any award that 
 affected it vitally. And, moreover, arbi- 
 tration does not apply to civil war. No 
 nation would allow itself to be " treatied " 
 or " awarded " to death. You won't 
 stop war by declaring that all war is 
 wicked, for that is not true ; the world 
 being as it is, wars of self-defence are not 
 wicked, nor even all wars of aggression, 
 and nobody knows which is which. You 
 won't stop war by an United States of 
 Europe, because United States and United 
 Kingdoms under stress become disunited 
 States and Kingdoms. You won't stop 
 war by building temples of Peace, and 
 offering prayers and hymns thereto in 
 the daily or weekly papers. You won't 
 stop war by proving that " it does not 
 
 9
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 pay." Belgium is not fighting for money. 
 And as for the Churches, were not most 
 wars under their segis and, therefore, holy 
 wars ? 
 
 And further, even if war could be 
 abolished and peace enforced upon the 
 world by some machinery, or some teach- 
 ing, would not that be worst of all ? 
 
 It is not so very long ago that the 
 rise of temperature in a fever patient 
 was regarded as the great evil. Men in 
 health have a normal temperature, and 
 when a man's temperature rose, and he 
 became flushed and heated, and perhaps 
 delirious, it seemed as if it were the heat 
 itself which caused the man's sickness 
 and perhaps death. Therefore, if the 
 fever could be subdued, the evil would 
 be exorcized. So it seemed. And when 
 the new drugs antipyrin and other drugs 
 that lower the temperature were dis- 
 covered, it seemed as if the cure were 
 
 10
 
 The Inevitability of War 
 
 found. Yet it was not so, the patient's 
 temperature was brought down, but he 
 died all the more surely. And, in fact, 
 instead of decreasing mortality the '* cure " 
 increased it. 
 
 We know now that a high temperature 
 is Nature's method, the only method, of 
 killing the bacteria in the blood which 
 would otherwise kill the patient. The 
 fever was Nature's cure for a secret and 
 deadly poison. Fever can be prevented 
 by not allowing the poison to enter the 
 blood, but once it has done so fever is 
 Nature's cure. 
 
 So it may be, so we think it is, with war. 
 It is Nature's mode of curing a hidden 
 disease that might otherwise be mortal, 
 and could we by artificial means stop war, 
 the patient would die. 
 
 Therefore, all these specifics for curing 
 
 war cause in us more doubt and alarm 
 
 than confidence. They are based on no 
 
 II
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 true knowledge of human nature and on 
 no true diagnosis of the evil. They would 
 do, we fear, far more harm than good. 
 For by stopping war we might kill civili- 
 zation, and even life itself. If we are to 
 have peace, let it be a real peace and not 
 a pretence, a natural peace and not an 
 artificial one, a free and living peace, not a 
 dead letter enforced upon us. 
 
 It seems to us that all our prophets 
 are no better than quack doctors, bent on 
 advertising their own goods and that 
 only. They explain nothing to us either 
 of the nature of war, of peace or of 
 humanity, nor do they explain how their 
 patent medicines could act. We are to 
 have faith, shut our eyes and do as we 
 are told. 
 
 But we do not care about that. We are 
 tired of this wild empiricism. We do 
 not believe in patent medicines. We 
 want not prescriptions but knowledge. 
 
 12
 
 The Inevitability of War 
 
 We want to know more about war, its 
 causes and effects, before we undertake 
 any treatment. And when we ask for 
 this we get nothing. 
 
 Yet, if we are really to prevent war, 
 we must have this knowledge. We must 
 not go catching at straws and deluding 
 ourselves with vain hopes. We must 
 know what we are about. 
 
 Let us therefore consider this matter, 
 and see what we can discover. 
 
 In the first place, what is war ? 
 
 The answer is simple. War means 
 destruction. It is the destruction first 
 of laws, conventions, institutions, morality, 
 and next the destruction of life and pro- 
 perty. War creates nothing, it merely 
 destroys. It is true that many people deny 
 this and claim for war that it brings 
 out qualities of courage, self-denial, disci- 
 pline, endurance, enthusiasm, that are 
 atrophied in peace time, and so war is a 
 
 13
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 creative force ; but that is nonsense. 
 These quahties are inherent in mankind. 
 If during peace time they are stifled by 
 civihzation that is the fault of civilization. 
 If war releases them from the lethargy 
 in which civilization has buried them, 
 it is because war destroys a false civiliza- 
 tion and allows these qualities to come 
 again to the light of day War does not 
 create them ; it frees them by breaking 
 their bonds. A true civilization would 
 be made for man and allow due exercise 
 to all his faculties. Civilizations into 
 which men can only be fitted by atrophy- 
 ing the best part of their natures are 
 false civilizations. War destroys them. 
 
 War is therefore a destructive agency 
 and nothing else. Let us never forget that. 
 
 And now let us consider the cause of 
 war. 
 
 The usual process is to look for the 
 causes of a war in previous events. For 
 
 14
 
 The Inevitability of War 
 
 instance, it is usual to say that the reason 
 we are fighting Germany is because Ger- 
 many in her attack on France is violating 
 Belgium, whose neutrality we have 
 guaranteed as did Germany also. But 
 why does Germany attack France, and 
 why, if she must attack France, must 
 she do so through Belgium ? And why 
 did we guarantee the neutrality of Bel- 
 gium ? And if we considered it vital 
 to keep that promise, why did we not 
 have an army strong enough to enforce 
 it ? And why now must we stake our 
 national existence on maintaining that 
 guarantee ? And when you have com- 
 pletely answered these questions if you 
 can ^you will find that you have only 
 answered them by raising others. 
 
 There was one war that I, for many 
 years, quite thirty years, studied most 
 carefully, not only in books but from 
 actors, not only on one side but on both 
 
 15
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 and that was the Indian Mutiny. There 
 are many books that profess to explain 
 its causes. Here are some alleged causes : 
 The annexation of Oude, the depletion of 
 the English garrison, the greased car- 
 tridges, the English attitude to the people, 
 each or all " caused " the war. But the 
 annexation of Oude was inevitable. If 
 Oude had not been annexed the situation 
 would have been impossible, so the an- 
 nexation of Oude did not " cause " the 
 mutiny, but the situation that necessitated 
 the annexation. And this situation 
 followed naturally on . . . and so on, 
 going back to before Clive. Again, the 
 depletion of the English garrison followed 
 on the Crimean war, and that on events 
 in Syria, and those so we go on again. 
 
 It was the English temperament that 
 made the conquest of India possible to 
 us, and anyhow our temperament cannot 
 
 be changed. It is innate. 
 
 i6
 
 The Inevitability of War 
 
 And the greased cartridges were merely 
 an excuse. In normal times they would 
 have attracted no attention whatever. 
 The causes of war, as of anything else, 
 are not to be found in events. No event 
 is, or could be, related to another event 
 as cause and effect. Events are caused 
 by forces, and the events of history are 
 caused by men, who in their turn are 
 governed by their minds. The causes of 
 events are therefore in men's minds. 
 
 I will take an instance. 
 
 A tower falls ; why ? It is blown down 
 
 in a gale or shaken by an earthquake, or 
 
 gravity pulls it down. That is the final 
 
 cause, a natural force. But had its 
 
 foundations been secure, it would have 
 
 withstood these natural forces, so the 
 
 real cause of its fall is faulty foundations. 
 
 Now the cause of the faulty foundations 
 
 was either bad plans, bad material, or 
 
 bad work, and all these come from a 
 
 17 2
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 defect in the mind of the architect, the 
 builder, or the contractor. Thus the real 
 cause that the tower fell was in the mind 
 of a man or men, want of foresight, 
 want of ability, want of honesty, or so 
 on. So it is with all men's institutions ; 
 their causes are in the mind. 
 
 What then are the causes of war ? 
 
 If we look at the history of Europe 
 for the last two thousand years, it is, 
 with a short respite of the Pax Romana, 
 a history of incessant wars. What is the 
 history of these wars ? 
 
 Now the general history of all wars is 
 the same. It is a fight for freedom, and 
 in the end freedom always wins. I will 
 give you a few examples. 
 
 Rome conquered the European world. 
 
 She was able to do so and to maintain 
 
 her conquest for a time because her 
 
 rule meant freedom. Her civilization and 
 
 her ideals were so much truer than that 
 
 i8
 
 The Inevitability of War 
 
 of any of the surrounding peoples that 
 her conquest and rule meant a real 
 progress towards freedom. The peoples 
 she conquered one after another were 
 sunk in superstition, were ruled without 
 any semblance of justice ; and Rome 
 brought a real advance to all these peoples. 
 They were wars for freedom, and freedom 
 won. 
 
 When several hundred years later these 
 conquered peoples rose against Rome and 
 cast off her rule, they were again at war 
 for freedom, because Roman rule had 
 degenerated into a rigid and lifeless sys- 
 tem and choked all further development 
 of her conquered peoples. They rebelled 
 and they won their freedom. 
 
 And this is what happened time after 
 time. It is the history of all wars. 
 Take the wars of the French Revolution 
 and Empire. The Revolution was an 
 intestine war for freedom to throw off 
 
 19 2*
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 the unbearable bonds of Kings by divine 
 right, of nobles by divine right, of churches 
 by divine right. It succeeded. The sub- 
 sequent external wars were to maintain 
 that freedom they succeeded. The in- 
 vaders were defeated and destroyed. 
 Then came a change. Wars still con- 
 tinued and against the same enemy, but 
 the roles were reversed. France sought 
 to dominate and enslave Europe and the 
 European states fought for freedom. The 
 Coalition won. 
 
 Take for a final example Germany from 
 1864 and since. The wars of Prussia 
 in 1864, 1866 and 1870 were wars for 
 freedom. Germany had to be freed of 
 Austrian dominance ; she had to reach 
 the sea ; she had to free herself from 
 the French threat. Germany won. She 
 gained her freedom and became a great 
 nation and free from foreign danger. 
 
 But in 1914 the roles are reversed. 
 
 20
 
 The Inevitability of War 
 
 It is the AUies who are fighting for free- 
 dom, not only our own but Germany's 
 also, and it is the Prussian aristocracy 
 which wishes to enslave the world. The 
 issue may be long deciding, but the 
 issue is not in doubt. Freedom will 
 win. 
 
 Freedom always wins in the end. I 
 know of no conflict between peoples 
 which has not in the end been won by 
 freedom. This is the case even more 
 markedly in those instances which at 
 first sight would seem contradictions. 
 There is, for instance, the Boer War. 
 It seemed a war in which we tried to 
 deprive a people of their freedom, and 
 yet we won. But, in fact, the war re- 
 sulted in the defeat of a small and ignorant 
 oligarchy and the Union of all South 
 Africa in a free dominion. It essentially 
 gave freedom which could have come no 
 other way. 
 
 21
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 As I have said, every war in the end 
 results in an advance in freedom, and 
 I know of no exception. 
 
 There then arises the question why, 
 if this be the case, and it is the case, 
 after several thousands of years of almost 
 incessant wars Europe is not yet free. 
 Why has she continually to fight anew 
 for freedom ? The answer is inevitable. 
 Because she does not know how to use 
 freedom ; because in peace there are 
 influences that destroy freedom ; be- 
 cause, no sooner is freedom in one way 
 acquired by war than a new slavery 
 arises. For freedom is not an end in 
 itself, it is only a means to an end. It 
 is liberty to raise up a new civilization, 
 to acquire new ideas, new methods, new 
 objectives. Freedom is only valuable 
 when you use it to do right. If you do 
 wrong your freedom rapidly disappears 
 again. 
 
 22
 
 The Inevitability of War 
 
 Now that has always been the case. 
 No sooner was freedom acquired by war 
 than a state of civilization was set up 
 that became, in time, unendurable, with 
 the inevitable result of a new war, foreign 
 or intestine. No civilization we have 
 made has been true, based on true ideas, 
 directed towards a true end. Every 
 civilization we have seen has become a 
 slavery and could find its solvent only 
 in war. When nations are involved in 
 war it is because their civilization has 
 proved a failure. This is true not only 
 of the aggressor but of the defenders. 
 
 Consider our state in the summer of 
 1914. 
 
 We called ourselves a democracy, that 
 is to say, a State in which the will of 
 the people obtains. Our method of 
 ascertaining that " will " was by the 
 election of members into a House of 
 Commons which we declared was re- 
 
 23
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 presentative of the majesty of the people, 
 and expressed its wisdom. That was our 
 theory. 
 
 In fact, the House of Commons had 
 sunk into disrepute with all classes, and 
 with it the system of election that produced 
 it. The House itself was widely de- 
 nounced as a windy humbug, and its 
 members were so far from being held 
 to be representative that they were 
 generally said to have succeeded in their 
 elections by misrepresentations, and when 
 elected, to be mere puppets of a secret 
 caucus. 
 
 Ulster was openly preparing to resist 
 its orders by force, and the rest of Ireland 
 as openly prepared to attack Ulster. 
 
 The labouring classes were discontented 
 not only with their lot in life, but with 
 representative institutions, and openly 
 talked of following Ulster's lead. Even 
 those who supported the decisions of 
 
 24
 
 The Inevitability of War 
 
 the present House were dissatisfied with 
 the system. 
 
 We had no real Second Chamber and 
 none in sight. 
 
 Practically everyone condemned our 
 form of democracy, but no one had any 
 alternative to propose. Neither France 
 nor the United States offered us sys- 
 tems that were any improvement, or 
 gave a wider satisfaction. On the 
 contrary. 
 
 For there is this further difficulty, 
 that, even assuming we could discover 
 a form of government which did give 
 expression to the considered will of people 
 on important matters of policy, how could 
 you secure that the will would be right ? 
 If the " wise " men have no basis on 
 which to form a judgment, will the foolish 
 find one ? As a matter of fact the great 
 majority of people have neither time, 
 nor opportunity, nor education, nor wish 
 
 25
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 to form opinions on far-reaching questions, 
 hke education, or foreign poUcy. They 
 are quite aware of this themselves, and 
 they despise a government which consults 
 them. " Shall we pay dogs to bark and 
 then bark ourselves ? " they say. So 
 they either vote blindly or one minor 
 local question, which they do understand, 
 decides how they will elect a representa- 
 tive to deal with Imperial affairs. While 
 evolution tended to make us more and 
 more democratic no one had any hope 
 from democracy, the demos least of all. 
 So it sought new " cure alls " in Socialism 
 and Syndicalism. 
 
 Civil and industrial war was imminent. 
 
 So much for our political edifice. 
 
 Our social edifice was not more satis- 
 factory. Our systems of law, criminal 
 and civil, and of education and of religion 
 were widely condemned by all who had 
 
 studied them. The gap between classes, 
 
 26
 
 The Inevitability of War 
 
 instead of decreasing under democracy, 
 increased. 
 
 And most significant, because most 
 dangerous of all, there was a widespread 
 sex war. 
 
 I am not alluding to the exploits of 
 the militants, though they were signifi- 
 cant enough, but to a sex antagonism 
 that was more or less universal. 
 
 The whole relation of man and woman, 
 in marriage and out of it, was arraigned. 
 The present laws and conventions are, 
 on the whole, even worse for men than 
 for women, and they are the outcome not 
 of men's wishes or ideas, but of ecclesias- 
 ticism, whose main supporters have been 
 women. Yet women have blindly visited 
 the shortcomings of law and convention 
 on the men, and under this pretext have 
 claimed a preponderating voice in the 
 direction of the state. They have even 
 
 hoped, if they got the vote, to change 
 
 27
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 their natures and cease to be women, 
 and so rob the world of half its organism. 
 While men have become more and more 
 dissatisfied with the suffrage as a real 
 way of ascertaining the will of the people 
 or obtaining their desires, women have 
 imagined that if only they could get it, 
 the millennium would follow. It was a 
 fight for power, and it was caused by 
 the intolerable nature of the relationship 
 of the sexes enforced by conventions and 
 laws that had no truth in them. The 
 cause was manifest enough and real 
 enough, but the cure was not apparent. 
 The demanded cure would only make 
 things worse. 
 
 Science, which, fifty years ago, was 
 sure that it had discovered the essential 
 truths of evolution in natural and sexual 
 selection, has now abandoned these 
 explanations almost entirely, and seeks 
 
 another explanation in Mendelism, but 
 
 28
 
 The Inevitability of War 
 
 I think we have given all hope up of 
 help from scientific men. Even if Mendel- 
 ism be truer than natural selection, it is a 
 method, not a cause. Even if you could 
 discover all the means by which evolution 
 proceeds, that would not explain the cause 
 nor the objective of evolution. Science 
 plays with words no less than theology 
 and has its priests as theology has. 
 
 Even medicine has become bankrupt. 
 It can diagnose but it cannot tell, except 
 in a very few cases, the cause of disease. 
 And it admits it cannot cure. Nature 
 can cure, but how it cures is not known. 
 There is no theory of life beneath modern 
 medicine. So in those cases where it 
 cannot prevent disease by sanitation, it 
 is reduced to the simple but deadly 
 expedient of either giving the patient 
 the disease by inoculation or of mutilating 
 the victim by cutting off the diseased 
 
 organ. It does even more than this 
 
 29
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 sometimes, it destroys a perfectly healthy 
 part for fear that sometimes it might 
 become diseased and then be incurable. 
 It makes a practice of mutilation. Could 
 there be a sadder confession of failure 
 than the state of the medical profession 
 to-day. 
 
 Literature and art were by all admission 
 in a bad way for want of ideals, and 
 music had become a chaos. 
 
 And worse than all, the general cry of 
 all but the very young, was that life 
 was really not worth living. It had 
 become banal. Everything had been said 
 and done, and life was dull. The most 
 significant proof of this is the enormous 
 interest taken in games, especially in 
 watching them. Games are an excellent 
 change for all, but when the interest in 
 games becomes excessive it means that 
 life and work have become insipid or 
 distasteful. 
 
 3Q
 
 The Inevitability of War 
 
 Materially, our well-being increased by 
 leaps and bounds, but our civilization 
 was fast being found out for the failure 
 that it was. 
 
 War was inevitable. We expected civil 
 war ; we got foreign war. 
 
 Now, though we say, and say truly 
 enough, that in the last resort this war 
 was forced upon us and we did not desire 
 it, that does not mean that we were 
 not in a measure responsible for it. A 
 nation in the state that we were, is a 
 danger not merely to itself, but to its 
 neighbours. It not only cannot fill its 
 proper place in Europe, but it demoralizes 
 others. For instance, we knew that the 
 neutrality of Belgium was necessary to 
 us. We had guaranteed it. We had 
 set our hands to a bond we could not 
 keep. We had incurred a liability we 
 could not meet. We had no sufficient 
 army. And if the reason for this were 
 31
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 not that our poHticians did not see the 
 danger, but that the country could not 
 be made to understand the necessity 
 for an army large enough to meet our 
 obligations, it makes no difference. The 
 intelligence of the people is according to 
 the education given it. Our civilization 
 is to blame. Had we had a true civilization 
 we should have been ready to meet our 
 obligations, and had this country been able 
 to make up its obligations on the spot, 
 this war would not have happened. 
 
 And the same remark applies to all 
 the other countries involved, except 
 Belgium, who is the victim. Look at 
 France. Ever since 1870 she has been 
 only two thirds alive. Her population 
 has not increased but decreased. She 
 has not found life worth living and 
 therefore not worth increasing. Her civil- 
 ization is played out and she feels it. If 
 she has not dissolved, it has been external 
 
 32
 
 The Inevitability of War 
 
 pressure that held her together and not 
 internal cohesion. 
 
 And as to Germany, does she not declare 
 that life has for long been so intolerable 
 that she must throw herself into a mad 
 effort for universal dominion, or perish ? 
 The utter failure of her own civilization, 
 which is only our civilization raised to 
 a higher degree, drives her on, and the 
 manifest failure in the civilization of her 
 neighbours gave her hope of winning. 
 And if she lost well, she only lost what 
 was not worth keeping life. 
 
 War, therefore, comes from a failure 
 of civilization, not in one Power but in 
 all. We are involved in a common failure, 
 for all our civilizations are much the 
 same. The differences are slight, and 
 not differences of principle but of method, 
 degree or detail or race. 
 
 We are all to blame and are all to 
 suffer. 
 
 33 3
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 And after the war what ? How shall 
 we prevent war in future ? 
 
 The war will end in giving us all freedom 
 in one form. Germany will be freed of 
 her military caste, France, Belgium and 
 ourselves will be free of the menace 
 of Germany. But that is all. The war 
 will prove no solvent for our other troubles, 
 nor for those of France and Germany. 
 It will not settle the Irish question, 
 the Syndicalist question, the sex question, 
 the thousand and one questions that are 
 now put off but will recur worse than ever. 
 
 We shall survive the bombardment 
 from without, but what about the ex- 
 plosions from within ? 
 
 Yet what are we to do ? Is there any 
 better civilization than ours that we 
 can adopt ? We look round and see 
 none. American civilization differs from 
 ours only in detail, and where it differs 
 it is usually, we think, for the worse, 
 
 34
 
 The Inevitability of War 
 
 not the better. We see nothing in their 
 social or political civilization that attracts 
 us. And in the rest of the world it is 
 even worse. Where are we to look for the 
 ideas that can be the base of a new and 
 a true civilization ? Not in the present. 
 
 If we look back at history to see what 
 help we can get from the past, what do 
 we find ? We find that the best civiliza- 
 tion the world has ever seen, that of 
 Rome, was still only temporary and un- 
 satisfactory, and fell. Then for a long 
 time all European civilizations were based 
 on Christianity, with the result that 
 Europe was reduced to a state of ig- 
 norance, anarchy and despair that surpass 
 words. 
 
 The only civilizations in the Middle 
 Ages which had any value were those of 
 the Turks and Saracens, then free peoples 
 pressing forward under an idea of free- 
 dom. But they too fell under the heel 
 
 35 3*
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 of priests, Mahommedan Moulvies, and 
 their civihzation disappeared. 
 
 Then came the Renaissance. A partial 
 return to free ideas, that is, to common 
 sense and progress, became rapid. But 
 this progress in each state always stopped 
 before long because their freedom to 
 change to meet the changes of life dis- 
 appeared. Then by wars and revolutions 
 new freedom was obtained, and again 
 was only successful for a time, and then 
 fell into the same abyss. 
 
 The French Republic at the end of 
 the eighteenth century created a tabula 
 rasa by destroying all the old institu- 
 tions that strangled it, and started again 
 fair. But although France never again 
 fell back into such slavery as it had 
 thrown off, it failed to find any true 
 system of civilization. So it had to call 
 in Napoleon to establish a despotism, 
 and he led France to ruin. 
 
 36
 
 The Inevitability of War 
 
 The French started again in 1815, 
 rebelled in 1830, again in 1848, fell into 
 despotism 1852, were crushed in 1870, 
 and started fair again, but have still 
 more markedly failed to find any civiliza- 
 tion to content them. And the history of 
 other nations varies in details only. Our 
 present civilization in England has two 
 objects, wealth and sport, and if it is 
 not in ruins to-day it is because it is 
 braced up by an outside war. To look 
 back is to look at two thousand years 
 of complete failure with nothing that 
 will help us. 
 
 37
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE FALLACY OF ETHICS
 
 A ND though our civiHzation is tum- 
 ^^ bhng about our ears, and our only 
 comfort is the hope that, when this 
 trouble is over, we will create a new 
 civilization that will be proof against 
 all storms, we have no idea how we are 
 to set about it. It must have true 
 foundations, but we do not know what 
 those foundations are. We have tried 
 empiricism, and many forms of 
 Christianity, and all have failed us com- 
 pletely. We have seen the societies and 
 civilizations based on Mahommedanism, 
 many forms of Buddhism, Hinduism and 
 other religions which have even been less 
 successful. Where are we to find strong 
 and true foundations for our new 
 civilization ? 
 
 41
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 Let us consider what we mean by 
 civilization. The word has its derivation 
 from the word city, but that helps not at 
 all. Civilization has its birth in cities 
 truly, but that is no clue to what it 
 consists of. 
 
 And first of all as to what civilization 
 is not it is not material progress. It is 
 not scientific knowledge, railways, elec- 
 tricity, chemistry, agricultural progress, 
 manufactures or art. These are but means, 
 and they are means that can be used 
 as well for destroying civilization as for 
 creating it. It is the advance in material 
 knowledge that has made this great war 
 so deadly and far reaching, that has 
 enabled millions of men to be brought 
 into the fighting line instead of hundreds 
 of thousands, that has given death and 
 destruction the arms of guns and aero- 
 planes. Nothing that can be used for 
 
 peace cannot also be used for war, even 
 
 42
 
 The Fallacy of Ethics 
 
 the organizing ability of great men tends 
 as much to destruction as creation. You 
 have to organize as much for war as 
 peace. It is common amongst many 
 writers to speak of material advance 
 as a form of civilization, but it is not. 
 
 Again, it has been common recently 
 for writers to declare the increasing deadli- 
 ness of weapons will, in time, render war 
 impossible. That is a fancy for which 
 there is no warrant and it would not be for 
 our benefit if it were true. Civilization, 
 therefore, does not lie in material means. 
 
 It is true, of course, that no great 
 civilization can be built up without 
 material progress. Just as a man's suc- 
 cess in life is dependent on his ability, 
 physical and mental, to realize his aspira- 
 tions, so it is with a civilization. It 
 requires the means to effect its purpose. 
 But unless these great material means 
 are directed in a right way they occasion 
 
 43
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 more harm than good. They can crush 
 as they can create. A true civiUzation 
 will require an ever-increasing materialism 
 wherein to express itself. Unless it had 
 that, it could never approach its in- 
 creasing purpose, but would be cramped for 
 want of physical strength and means. 
 But in itself materialism is blind, and 
 applied to the enforcement of wrong 
 ideas is an increasing danger. 
 
 Again, civilization does not consist in 
 political forms, neither in extended suf- 
 frage, universal suffrage, elected ministers, 
 and all the paraphernalia of what we 
 call democracy, any more than in kings 
 of divine right, hereditary aristocracies, 
 dictatorships or any other form of govern- 
 ment. These again are but means. 
 Could we discern the true principles on 
 which any civilization was based, the 
 form of government would be compara- 
 tively unimportant. That Government 
 
 44
 
 The Fallacy of Ethics 
 
 would be the best which could carry out 
 the universally accepted ideas. These 
 Governments would act on these ideas 
 and the best form of Government would 
 be that which, under the circumstances, 
 was most efficient. To suppose that a 
 Government is bad or good according 
 to its form alone is nonsense. If no one 
 has any idea of what a true civilization 
 would be, any form of Government will 
 fail. 
 
 What then is civilization ? 
 
 A civilized nation as a whole is, I 
 take it, jkn organism wherein individuals 
 are the cells, and whereof each part is 
 co-ordinated with all the others in a 
 certain relationship. Just as our bodies 
 are made up of many parts and organs, 
 which are again composed of cells. So 
 with a civilized nation and nations. 
 
 A true civilized Europe would be an 
 organism, where each part is co-ordinated 
 
 45
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 with all the others in a true relationship 
 wherein each has its recognized value. 
 The whole organism would be framed 
 towards the continued approach towards a 
 definite ideal recognized and desired by 
 all the cells. The organism would not 
 be rigid, but living and flexible, so that 
 it would continually grow and adapt 
 itself to changing conditions. 
 
 In a true civilization, not man alone, 
 but all life would be included. 
 
 No such civilization has ever existed. 
 
 Now let us consider its foundations. 
 
 As a civilized community is made up 
 of men, each of whom must recognize 
 and willingly co-operate towards the com- 
 mon ideal, the base of any true civilization 
 must be in the consciousness of each and 
 every man. You could not have a willing 
 and intelligent co-operation without that. 
 The purpose must be equally attractive 
 
 to all, and equally recognizable by all, 
 
 46
 
 The Fallacy of Ethics 
 
 It cannot be a civilization of prophets or 
 priests or scribes or pharisees or scientists 
 or doctors. It must be democratic. That 
 does not, of course, mean that every man 
 has the same position and the same work 
 as everyone else. Just as with the human 
 body there will be brain cells and cells 
 which make the muscles, so with civiliza- 
 tion. But no man will complain of the 
 lot which is his, for all will recognize 
 that though the brain to a certain extent 
 commands the limbs, it is only to a 
 certain extent. The limbs have necessities 
 of their own and a will of their own Which 
 in its turn commands the brain, and the 
 limbs are as necessary to the purpose as 
 the brains, and are therefore as valuable. 
 And further, that a man's happiness does 
 not depend on either wealth or power 
 but on other things which are much 
 more necessary and which should be 
 open to all. 
 
 47
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 This base will be a true base, that is to 
 say, it will be verifiable and understandable 
 by each and every one. It will not con- 
 sist of revelations nor teachings, nothing 
 will have to be taken on trust because it 
 cannot be verified. It will be verifiable, 
 not from documents of a remote age which 
 are not even authentic, but from the 
 living present. No man need believe it to 
 be true, but every man can, if he wish, 
 ascertain that it is true ; he will know 
 it to be true because he can feel it. 
 
 It will be at first a narrow base, but 
 as the civilization increases it will broaden 
 so that the civilization can rise. It will 
 not be a dead base but a living base, a 
 root extending ever wider and deeper 
 so that the tree can rise even higher 
 towards a desired objective. 
 
 On such a base alone can a true civiliza- 
 tion be founded. Therefore, the base of 
 
 a civilization is in the universal mind. 
 
 48
 
 The Fallacy of Ethics 
 
 It is, in fact, an attitude of mind towards 
 the past, the present and the future, 
 which is manifested in conduct. 
 
 A true civilization is the outcome of a 
 true perception by each individual of 
 the proper course of conduct for him to 
 adopt towards others, privately, socially 
 and nationally. A true civilization, there- 
 fore, is based on a true knowledge of 
 conduct, a perception of right and wrong. 
 
 How can that be obtained ? 
 
 Up to now have we ever had any true 
 base for conduct any certain knowledge 
 of what constitutes right and wrong in 
 our relationship to the world ? Let us 
 look at the past and the present. 
 
 There is nothing that man has so 
 assiduously striven after throughout all 
 history as some help, some definite guide 
 towards right conduct in life. This 
 necessity is not even confined to man, 
 but seems to be inherent in all life. 
 
 49 4
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 Wherever you find consciousness and 
 activity you find some effort to ascertain 
 how that activity should be rightly used. 
 Everyone who has watched wild life, 
 birds, animals, insects, has recognized 
 at once that they all have some idea, 
 sometimes a very strong and clear idea, 
 I do not say always a right idea, of what 
 they should do and what they should 
 not. To the meaning of their actions 
 which are evidently dictated by their 
 consciousness we have as yet no clue, 
 but that they have a meaning is clear. 
 Wherever we have been able to observe 
 life closely enough we have found a choice 
 of conduct. 
 
 The search of man for some means 
 of guidance began before history and it 
 still continues unabated, nay, the search 
 to-day is even more rigorous than before, 
 For man must have some guide in life. 
 He cannot act just by chance. Some 
 50
 
 The Fallacy of Ethics 
 
 things are good and some things are 
 evil ; we know this by instinct, and we 
 discover more of it by practice. We are 
 continually faced with the necessity of 
 choice. And the first thing that man 
 sought guidance in was a rigid code of 
 ethics. It has always seemed to man 
 that there must be discoverable some- 
 where, by search, in time, an absolute 
 code of ethics. He has always supposed 
 and he supposes now that there is an 
 absolute right and wrong, that some 
 things are always right, others always 
 wrong. If he could find such a code he 
 would, he thinks, be happy, because then 
 he would always be able to do right and 
 never do wrong, and would so attain an 
 imaginary happiness. All his history he 
 has striven after this Absolute. Yet he 
 has never found it. So far he has found 
 no ethic that will stand the test of ex- 
 perience. Ethics come and go and life 
 
 51 4*
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 remains, and man is unhappy. Yet he 
 still seeks after ethics. 
 
 What are ethics, and why have they 
 failed ? Let me define what the word 
 ethics means. 
 
 Ethics means customs. 
 
 It does not mean any objective or 
 purpose to be attained, it does not mean 
 the justification a custom may have either 
 in the reason or in experience ; it does 
 not mean what seems to us a good custom 
 or a bad custom. It simply means 
 custom. All customs are ethics. It is 
 true that there must be, or must have 
 been at one time, an openly avowed or 
 secretly assumed object in every custom ; 
 and sometimes this is obvious. For 
 instance, it is customary to tell the truth 
 for the simple reason, among others, 
 that if it were customary not to tell 
 the truth, men could not combine for 
 any purpose, and no civilization would 
 
 52
 
 The Fallacy of Ethics 
 
 be possible. But often the reason is 
 not known. For instance, most children 
 are taught to say grace before and after 
 meals. Why ? I think their teachers 
 would shrink from asserting that there 
 is an Almighty Being so petty, so jealous, 
 so grasping after praise, that he requires 
 to be propitiated before and after each 
 meal, lest He injure the child. But if 
 not this, what is the reason ? I thin k 
 that I know the origin of this custom, 
 but that is beside the question here. 
 Do parents frame a reason to themselves 
 or not ? I think not. It is a custom, 
 and that is all. Again, it is a custom 
 after accidentally spilling the salt to throw 
 some over the left shoulder. Why ? No 
 one knows. Possibly no one ever knew, 
 for customs sometimes arise spontaneously. 
 It is vaguely felt " better " to do so. 
 Sometimes, again, a custom had at one 
 time an object which has been lost, 
 
 53
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 while the custom remained. It is said 
 to be a custom to keep to the right when 
 walking why the right ? Because men 
 carried their swords on the left side. 
 Men no longer carry swords, but the 
 custom remains and it is useful when 
 observed. It is very hard to kill customs. 
 Generally speaking, the objective of 
 customs is some advantage in life, but 
 not always so. The custom or ethic that 
 it is better for a soldier to be killed than 
 run away has no such objective. On 
 the contrary. Neither can all customs, 
 or indeed many customs, be justified 
 as the result of experience. We have no 
 experience that the soldier who is killed 
 fighting benefits by his courage. His 
 country may, but he ? We know nothing 
 at all about what happens after death. 
 Yet this ethic is one of the strongest we 
 have. 
 
 Ethics, then, are customs ; all customs, 
 54
 
 The Fallacy of Ethics 
 
 good, bad, or indifferent, are ethics ; all 
 sayings or teachings that inculcate a fixed 
 course of conduct are ethics. 
 
 As I said in the last chapter, there is 
 nothing man has sought for so assidu- 
 ously as some system of ethics for this 
 reason. To have to think over every 
 act of life is impossible. No one has 
 time for it. Again, it is very exhausting ; 
 there is nothing so tiring as thought. 
 Moreover, most men are afraid of them- 
 selves. They don't know why they came 
 into life, nor whence, nor whither they 
 go, nor the meaning of it. The vagueness 
 terrifies them. They are like people 
 suddenly placed in the centre of a wide 
 plain. They want direction, or at least 
 warnings against danger. They think that 
 wisdom can be gained from the past 
 experience of others, and reduced to 
 formulae. 
 
 So arose the first ethics that were 
 55
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 expressed in words. Subconscious or 
 agreed ethics existed long before on 
 certain matters, but the first attempts 
 at the beginning of a code of ethics seem 
 to have been proverbs. Here are some 
 common to most peoples : 
 
 " Do not put off till to-morrow what 
 
 you can do to-day." 
 
 " Marry in haste and repent at leisure." 
 
 " Well begun is half done." 
 
 " A burnt child dreads the fire." 
 
 " Take care of the pence and the pounds 
 
 will take care of themselves." 
 
 Timid people were fond of these proverbs 
 because they obviated the trouble of 
 thought. The proverb maker has done 
 the thinking ; all you had to do was 
 to follow his advice. And so a complete 
 code might have arisen, for there are 
 proverbs about most things in life, but 
 
 56
 
 The Fallacy of Ethics 
 
 for an unfortunate circumstance ^the 
 proverbs contradict themselves. You 
 could not make one code but two, dia- 
 metrically opposed. For instance, set 
 against the above given proverbs these : 
 
 " More haste, less speed." 
 " Happy the wooing that's not long in 
 doing." 
 
 " Fine before seven, wet before eleven." 
 " Familiarity breeds contempt." 
 *' Penny wise, pound foolish." 
 
 Which are right ? the first given or 
 the second ? No one knew. Each side 
 had its adherents. Both could not be 
 completely true as they are directly 
 opposed. If either or both were half 
 truths, then you were no better off when 
 you had no proverbs. 
 
 Then some genius came to the con- 
 clusion that both were false because both 
 
 57
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 were extreme. Safety, he said, lay in 
 moderation. In medio tutissimus ibis. All 
 extremes are bad. 
 
 But neither was this found to be true. 
 There are occasions when the only safety 
 lies in the extreme. In medio tutissimus 
 ibis was balanced by " the man who 
 hesitates is lost," " Whatever your hand 
 findeth to do, do it with all your might," 
 and certain sayings about lukewarmness. 
 In fact, ib soon became obvious that 
 proverbs did not govern circumstances, 
 but that circumstances governed proverbs. 
 It depended on circumstances whether 
 the extreme on this side, the middle, or 
 the further extreme was true. Thus, 
 proverbs only left man where he was. 
 He hoped to overcome circumstances by 
 fixed rules and so rise superior to chance, 
 but he found that it was circumstances 
 that dictated to him what he should do. 
 He did not like this. 
 
 58
 
 The Fallacy of Ethics 
 
 He hoped to overcome circumstances 
 and the necessity of justly observing these 
 circumstances and framing his actions 
 according to them by having a fixed 
 ethic, but he failed. Early man failed 
 to find any Absolute, and late man has not 
 done better. The more insistently he 
 applied himself to find a fixed ethic the 
 more certainly did he ascertain that there 
 was none. Consider a little and you will 
 see that this is so. Take truth, for 
 instance. As I have already said, truth- 
 fulness is an essential to the progress of 
 man. Were not men truthful nothing 
 could be done. Mutual confidence is 
 based on truthfulness, and in confidence 
 all civilization consists. Yet to this rule 
 of truth, how many exceptions are there ? 
 The classic instance is that, while in the 
 coimtry, you see an honest man hiding 
 from would-be assassins. The assassins 
 come up to you and demand if you have 
 
 59
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 seen anyone. If you speak the truth, 
 or even if you refuse to answer, they will 
 continue their search and find him and 
 murder him. The rigid adherent to ethics 
 tells the truth, and is accessory to a 
 brutal murder ; the honourable man tells 
 a lie. 
 
 But without going to such extreme 
 instances as this there are, in daily life, 
 innumerable occasions for a deviation 
 from or concealment of the truth. A 
 man asks you for your opinion on his 
 conduct. Your opinion may frankly be 
 that he has acted like a fool. You don't 
 say so. You decline to express an opinion, 
 or, if he is a friend of yours, your dis- 
 approval is wrapped up in pleasant words. 
 A child asks you a question regarding 
 a subject which is better for the time 
 being wrapped in mystery. To refuse 
 an answer would be merely to whet its 
 
 curiosity. You invent an answer which 
 
 60
 
 The Fallacy of Ethics 
 
 is not true, but will serve the purpose 
 of quenching the child's curiosity for 
 the time. A very sick man asks the 
 doctor his opinion. The doctor knows 
 that if he tell the truth the shock may 
 kill the patient. He tells him that there 
 is very little the matter, and the patient 
 recovers. Every one acknowledges to 
 himself daily that there are many cases 
 where only a part of the truth should 
 be said. In fact, if truth be the base of 
 civilization, so too is untruth. No person 
 who consistently spoke the whole truth 
 as he conceived it to be could remain 
 in intercourse with his fellow men. They 
 would kill him justifiably. A dead, un- 
 broken ethic to tell the truth would ruin 
 this world just as certainly as an in- 
 violable rule never to speak the truth. 
 It is the same in all other matters. Take 
 the further instance of " Thou shalt not 
 kill"; "Thou shalt not steal." Were 
 
 6i
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 either of these made absolute, society 
 would dissolve. You must not go about 
 killing people in peace time, but you not 
 only may, but must do so in war. Even 
 in peace time you have the right of 
 private defence ; you may kill a person 
 who attacks you dangerously. And 
 though this is rarely exercised it is there, 
 it is known to be there. Were it abolished, 
 who would be safe ? 
 
 It is part of your duty to kill the armed 
 enemy in war. But is war justifiable ? 
 Is there an ethic of war ? There are 
 people who say that it is never justifiable, 
 there are peace at any price cranks, 
 there are those who say war is wrong 
 because it never pays. 
 
 Yet the common sense of the world 
 laughs at such ethics. Should Belgium, 
 then, lie down before the Germans ? 
 Should France ? Should we ? There is 
 
 no doubt a right and wrong in war, but 
 
 62
 
 The Fallacy of Ethics 
 
 we have not discovered it. Some people 
 tell us wars of aggression are wrong 
 and of defence are right. What is a 
 war of aggression ? Did the Northern 
 States of America wage a war of aggres- 
 sion against the Southern States ? The 
 war against Spain was a war of aggression ; 
 and some of our Indian wars have been 
 called wars of aggression ; were they 
 wrong ? The test is evidently not in any 
 hard and fast rule, in any absolute ethic. 
 
 Again, "Thou shalt not steal." No? 
 Then, if a man have a pistol, say, which 
 he is using in such a way as to be a danger 
 to himself or others, you may not take it 
 away, for to do so would be robbery ? 
 And what about taxation ? All taxation 
 comes within the definition of a robbery. 
 It is taking a man's property without his 
 consent. All early societies see this and 
 hate taxation ; yet without it, how could 
 we get on ? . ' 
 
 63
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 People who do not know law by ex- 
 perience, imagine that in laws we have 
 discovered absolute truths about life ; 
 those accustomed to see them in their 
 working know that it is not so. Laws 
 are generalizations which we have to 
 use for want of better, but which are 
 not absolute truths. Directly you make 
 law absolute, it becomes unendurable. 
 It is the common sense of judges and 
 juries mainly juries which, by bringing 
 in some other test than law, makes it 
 possible. " The height of law is the 
 height of injustice." 
 
 Further, even if laws were more nearly 
 right than they are, or than we see any 
 chance of ever making them, they would 
 remain purely negative. They tell you 
 what not to do, and not what you should 
 do ; they threaten punishments, but offer 
 no rewards. They are applicable to but 
 a very small part of our life. Therefore, 
 
 64
 
 The Fallacy of Ethics 
 
 law offers us no just base for any system 
 of conduct. 
 
 And conventions are in much the same 
 category. Conventions are prescribed 
 courses of conduct, in certain cases in- 
 fractions of which are punished by the 
 opinion of society. Where they are the 
 outcome of experience they are often of 
 great use, but many conventions are the 
 outcome of imitation. Thus it has been 
 a convention for three hundred years or 
 more for women to ride on side-saddles 
 and not astride. But this convention 
 is ascribed to no other foundation than 
 imitation of a Spanish princess who found 
 it a more convenient way of displaying 
 her embroidered dresses. It is rapidly 
 disappearing. 
 
 More conventions arise out of the needs 
 of Society, and are, in fact, the banks 
 which confine Society and make it flow 
 in a well-ordered stream instead of it 
 
 65 5
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 being a disorderly flood. They make 
 life easier and prevent friction. They 
 have great value provided their origin 
 and meaning are understood. But they 
 refer generally to small matters of conduct, 
 and as Society changes, so old conventions 
 give way or disappear, and new ones 
 arise. They are not invariable, but are 
 relative only to the state of things. 
 
 There remains philosophy. 
 
 Philosophy has, from the beginning, 
 been concerned with two matters, the 
 acquisition of knowledge and the dis- 
 covery of a base for conduct, and it 
 has completely failed in both quests. 
 It tried to acquire fresh knowledge, not 
 by experience, nor investigation, but by 
 abstract reasoning, that is to say by 
 piling words on words. But knowledge 
 cannot be acquired in such a way. Words 
 are only symbols, and most of the things 
 
 for which they stand have not an absolute, 
 
 66
 
 The Fallacy of Ethics 
 
 but only a relative value, which con- 
 stantly varies. Their reasoning becomes 
 only a juggling with words, and very 
 often a childish juggling. Look, for 
 instance, at the philosophic controversy 
 as to whether space and time are things 
 or " nothings," and if neither, what their 
 nature can be. Herbert Spencer is con- 
 cerned with this. 
 
 As to conduct, philosophy is usually 
 empirical, and consists of scattered maxims, 
 more or less true, like proverbs, and has 
 no base. Sometimes it has a base in 
 the pursuit of pleasure or the avoidance 
 of pain, which simply ignore the greater 
 and deeper emotions of mankind. To 
 Herbert Spencer the data of morality 
 are " the elements of that equilibrium 
 between constitution and conditions of 
 existence which is at once the moral 
 ideal and the limit towards which we 
 are progressing." 
 
 67 5*
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 I have no idea what that means. 
 
 It is true there is Kant's Categorical 
 Imperative and that I will refer to later 
 on. There is a Categorical Imperative 
 in life and Kant was right. His trouble 
 was that he did not know in what it 
 consisted. 
 
 Philosophers were men who " loved 
 wisdom," but their product has been 
 called philosophy and not wisdom. In 
 general estimation to " take life philo- 
 sophically " means not to fret about the 
 inevitable, an useful quality, but hardly 
 a complete guide to comfort. And for 
 the rest philosophy is not useful. It is 
 not real. It has the same relation to a 
 real knowledge of life as alchemy has to 
 chemistry. It is mirage. 
 
 Therefore in proverbs, maxims, laws, 
 conventions and philosophies mankind has 
 
 failed to find any absolute test of right 
 
 68
 
 The Fallacy of Ethics 
 
 and wrong, any base on which to build a 
 code of conduct. All that it has found 
 are generalizations which are never com- 
 pletely true, and which, if accepted as 
 the absolute, would destroy civilization 
 as certainly as the want of generalizations. 
 The secret of what determines right and 
 wrong has not been discovered in any 
 experience of the past, and without that 
 secret no civilization can be true. 
 
 69
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE FAILURE OF EXPEEIENCE
 
 TJEFORE going on to religion, and 
 *^ considering if it contains any true 
 base for conduct, it will be more con- 
 venient to see why man has failed to 
 find any true system of conduct by 
 experience. Why is it that in, say, four 
 thousand years, mankind has discovered 
 no method by which to regulate his acts ? 
 Why have ethics of all kind proved futile ? 
 
 To discover this we must consider 
 human nature, because the key lies there. 
 If no system of ethics has approved itself 
 to experience, it is because the past alone 
 will not suffice to man, because his nature 
 requires more than even a perfected past, 
 it wants a new future. What then does 
 his nature look to ? 
 
 And if no ethics have approved them- 
 73
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 selves to the consciousness of mankind, 
 it is not merely because experience has 
 falsified them, but because mankind has 
 subconsciously another test which it feels 
 to be more true. Its conscious mentality 
 strives after ethics, but its unconscious 
 instinct tries all the ethics offered to it 
 and rejects them. But why does it try 
 them, and why does it reject them ? 
 What is this secret unacknowledged test ? 
 Why not bring it into the light and air it ? 
 Why does our consciousness seek a code 
 of conduct if our instinct has a test 
 ready always to be supplied ? These are 
 interesting subjects. 
 
 Let us consider, then, any act you 
 perform. You rise up from your chair. 
 Why ? Because you want to go out. 
 You eat. Why ? To satisfy hunger. You 
 sleep in order to rise refreshed. Every 
 act you perform has a purpose. It is 
 teleological, that is to say it has an 
 
 74
 
 The Failure of Experience 
 
 objective. Otherwise it would be aimless, 
 purposeless and futile. That it was ac- 
 cording to an ethic or custom would 
 not save it from being futile, for an 
 action is good in itself only, in as much as 
 it achieves a purpose. Therefore, no act 
 has, or can have, any intrinsic value of 
 its own ; it cannot be right nor wrong 
 in itself, its value is not absolute but 
 relative ^relative to the purpose aimed 
 at or achieved. 
 
 This last distinction must not be over- 
 looked. I say aimed at, or achieved, 
 because they are rarely the same. The 
 ostensible objective may, in fact, be nil 
 or nearly so, the result achieved may be 
 great. 
 
 For instance, a team of cricketers play 
 with another team. The ostensible ob- 
 jective is victory. But the victory aimed 
 at is really little or nothing in itself. 
 It gives nothing, except, perhaps, a little 
 
 75
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 more pleasure than losing. It is, as far 
 as results go, a barren result. But victory, 
 although the ostensible objective, was 
 not the real objective, which was to 
 train eye and hand and temper, to learn 
 to subordinate self to a common cause, 
 to pass a pleasant day with friends. 
 These were the real objective, but they 
 could not, like many other things, such 
 as happiness, affection, courage, be 
 directly pursued. In framing the con- 
 ditions of your match the real objective 
 is kept in view, but the players think 
 only of victory. Otherwise the play 
 would be aimless and dull, and nothing 
 would be achieved. The real objective, 
 therefore, being not victory, but the 
 play, there are rules to control the players. 
 They may not strive for victory by any 
 means at hand, tripping up a batsman, or 
 felling a wicket keeper with a blow. These 
 
 might help to victor/, but victory is only 
 
 76
 
 The Failure of Experience 
 
 the ostensible, not the real, objectiv^e. 
 Therefore there are rules, ethics, so framed 
 as to secure the real objective of the 
 game, and these rules or ethics are them- 
 selves justified by being teleological. Rules 
 which fail to secure the desired result 
 under the ever-changing conditions be- 
 come obsolete, and new rules are required. 
 
 Thus is not only every act of man 
 teleological, but the ethics by which he 
 binds his acts must, if they are to be 
 accepted, also be teleological, that is to 
 say, directed to the achievement of a 
 purpose. Otherwise they have no value 
 whatever. Right and wrong are, there- 
 fore, never absolute qualities, they are 
 never qualities intrinsic to any act or 
 ethic, but are purely relative to the 
 purpose which they subserve. 
 
 That is one point to be remembered. 
 
 Now this purpose, whether the purpose 
 ostensibly aimed at or that really sought, 
 
 n
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 must be an acceptable purpose. It must 
 appeal to mankind as desirable, it must 
 satisfy some instinct that is within him 
 and which approves. Unless the idea of 
 victory appealed to men, you could not 
 get them to pursue a game and so realize 
 the hidden purpose. You will never get 
 willing and eager action out of men, you 
 will never get them to submit cheerfully 
 to hard work, to accept voluntarily rules 
 and limitations unless in pursuance of 
 objects desired by them. They must see 
 the goals aimed at, they must see that 
 the ethics are directed towards the achieve- 
 ment of the goal and are kept so modified 
 as to meet all changes and still achieve 
 their object. 
 
 And further, the purpose aimed at 
 must not be a final purpose. If you 
 could ever achieve a final purpose, then 
 life would hold nothing more to be achieved 
 
 and life would cease. For life is move- 
 
 78
 
 The Failure of Experience 
 
 ment towards the accomplishment of pur- 
 pose. There is, of course, no such thing 
 in reality as the absolute, but men have 
 been fond of imagining that there should 
 be some such thing as absolute happiness, 
 and placing it before them as an objective. 
 Like all untruths it is disastrous. 
 
 And the purpose we consciously pursue 
 must, as far as possible, take us in the 
 same direction as evolution, that is to 
 say, the inevitable change and progress 
 of the world, takes us. It is no use 
 trying to swim against the stream or 
 kick against the pricks. We shall only 
 come to grief. We must help nature, 
 and not try to defy her. 
 
 But and this is the most important 
 point although life is movement towards 
 a desirable objective, the real value of 
 life does not lie in the attaining the 
 objective, but in the living. We need 
 an objective to incite us to effort, to fill 
 
 79
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 us with hope, to co-ordinate our progress, 
 
 but life lies not in attainment but in 
 
 pursuit. That is its nature. Victory is 
 
 little ; what really matters is that we all 
 
 should play the game and enjoy it. If 
 
 we are not all doing so, either the objective 
 
 sought, or the means by which it is 
 
 sought, or both, are wrong. 
 
 Life is always changing. Change is a 
 
 quality inherent in life. Without change 
 
 life would cease and only existence would 
 
 remain. It is true that the emotions 
 
 which form the base of life are always 
 
 the same, but the forms in which they 
 
 express themselves vary always. Later 
 
 on, when I have to explain the true Indian 
 
 philosophy of Maya, this very simple 
 
 relation of the unchangeable towards the 
 
 ever-changeable will be easily understood. 
 
 Here all I wish to point out is that 
 
 whereas life is always in essentials the 
 
 same, the conditions of life, the human 
 
 80
 
 The Failure of Experience 
 
 organism and its environment, are subject 
 to continual variation and progress. In 
 essentials life always repeats itself ; in 
 details it never does. Did it do so it 
 would cease to be life at all. Therefore, 
 experience of the past, however perfect, 
 is no complete guide to conduct in the 
 present, because the present conditions 
 are new. They are, it is true, new only 
 in details, but these details are not 
 negligible. They may make but a slight 
 difference, or they may make an enormous 
 difference. 
 
 Let us take a very simple instance. 
 It may be said, generally speaking, that 
 the attainment and maintenance of good 
 health has been and is a right objective. 
 This, like all general statements, has 
 many exceptions. A man or woman's 
 duty to their spiritual qualities may come 
 before their duty to their physique, but 
 
 it is a fair generalization. 
 
 8i 6
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 Now there is no doubt that the means 
 to attain good health vary, not only 
 according to nationality and climate, but 
 according to circumstances and to period. 
 What was a good general regimen, say, a 
 hundred years ago in England would not 
 be so now. Our bodies are not the same 
 as those of our grandparents. There 
 has been evolution, which means change. 
 Further, we make in some ways far 
 greater and in others far less demands 
 on our physique. Life was never before 
 quite what it is to-day, and therefore 
 our necessities are changed. So it will 
 always be. 
 
 And further, no living organism is in 
 all respects absolutely the same as another. 
 No blade of grass is identicaF with 'another, 
 no insect with another, no man with 
 another man. In general you may say 
 that all men are the same in as much as 
 
 all are bom of women, are similarly con- 
 
 82
 
 The Failure of Experience 
 
 structed, and if you cut off the head of 
 any man he will cease to live. But 
 within these broad limits there are as- 
 tounding differences. One man can endure 
 what kills another man. Milk and eggs 
 are reckoned good food ; I have known 
 men on whom they acted like poisons. 
 Some men have marvellous ears for 
 music ; others cannot tell " God Save 
 the King " from " Pop goes the Weasel " ; 
 and so on. Music will draw some men 
 as the Pied Piper drew the children ; 
 it drives others towards a frenzy of 
 discomfort. You cannot standardize life 
 except by destroying it. 
 
 If now you will keep in mind these 
 various qualities inherent in life, you will 
 see why all codes framed only on ex- 
 perience of the past, and any rigid code 
 at all, have failed and must fail. 
 
 In the first place, although our present 
 
 life proceeded from the past it is aimed 
 
 83 6*
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 at the future. It is based upon the past, 
 but its direction is forwards, towards some 
 imagined or hoped-for condition ahead 
 of us which fixes its ethics. That is 
 to say that our ethics come from the 
 future, not the past ; they are the con- 
 ditions under which we can best obtain 
 our objective. Nothing is right or wrong 
 by any inherent quaUty, but acts are 
 right in so far as they help to our objective, 
 and wrong in so far as they hinder it. 
 Thus our ethics cannot be fixed things, 
 for they depend on circumstances which 
 are always changing. What will help 
 us to our objective in one set of circum- 
 stances and therefore be right, will hinder 
 us under other circumstances and there- 
 fore be wrong. Thus though experience 
 of the past is helpful, it is not absolute. 
 Because we are always moving into new 
 country. Suppose even we all agreed 
 
 on our objective, say the greater happiness 
 
 84
 
 The Failure of Experience 
 
 of the greater number, and suppose we 
 were all agreed on the meaning of happi- 
 ness and on the conditions which would 
 produce this result, we should still be 
 unable to have any absolute code because 
 circumstances are always changing, and 
 actions which yesterday had one result 
 might to-morrow have a different even 
 a contrary result. That is one reason 
 no absolute code could ever exist. Another 
 even stronger reason is the fact that, 
 were any absolute code discovered and 
 maintained, life would cease. For 
 another inherent quality of life is the 
 power of judgment or choice. Were an 
 absolute code discovered and maintained 
 this power would end. There would be 
 a fixed right and wrong for every act 
 and life would become mechanical. You 
 would know for a certainty how every- 
 one would act, and your own acts would 
 be as rigidly prescribed as those of an 
 
 85
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 automaton. All need for choice or judg- 
 ment would have disappeared, all change 
 become impossible ; there would be no 
 objective to strive after and life would 
 have ceased. 
 
 That is obvious. It is, in fact, one of 
 the most elementary things in human 
 nature, and there is, therefore, a con- 
 sistent attempt to ignore it, or at any 
 rate to suppress it. Now you cannot 
 suppress nature, nor any part of it, 
 " Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque 
 recurret," and if you ignore human 
 nature you simply build up civilizations 
 which can only dissolve in war. 
 
 Now mankind have always been sub- 
 consciously aware of this truth. It has 
 with its reason sought after fixed codes, 
 and it has with its consciousness always 
 rejected them. For man has sub- 
 conscious knowledge of a great deal more 
 
 than has yet risen into consciousness. 
 
 86
 
 The Failure of Experience 
 
 His mind has postulated and tried to 
 find absolute right and wrong ; his sub- 
 consciousness has rejected them. For 
 what reason ? That has been a difficulty, 
 because his subconsciousness, while firmly 
 rejecting fixed codes, has never been 
 able to explain why. There has been a 
 constant war between his intelligence and 
 his instinct, wherein the instinct was 
 true but voiceless, and his reason wrong 
 but voluble. He has acted one way and 
 talked another, and explained the dis- 
 crepancy by denouncing " the weakness 
 of human nature," the truth being with 
 nature and not with the intellect. 
 
 The reason why, in fact, mankind has 
 in action broken all fixed codes, is that 
 humanity is not only teleological, but that 
 it has, within, some dim idea of the ob- 
 jective it ought to pursue. 
 
 Or perhaps it would be more correct 
 to say that humanity has a vague con- 
 
 87
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 sciousness of the methods it should use 
 and should not use. It is certain that 
 fixed ethics are no use. It is certain 
 in some emergencies of what is right and 
 what is wrong. It is also conscious that 
 this certainty must come from an in- 
 stinctive knowledge of what is the true 
 objective of life, but it has never been 
 able to formulate the true objective. 
 That, also, has not been for want of 
 trying. The Epicureans, for instance, 
 imagined it to be freedom from fear ; 
 others have declared it to be pleasure, 
 ease, comfort, self-command, the * greatest 
 good of the greatest number,' peace, 
 purity, and so on. But none of these 
 teleologies have given satisfaction. None 
 fit the facts of human nature. An Epi- 
 curean who will dogmatically tell you 
 one day that " freedom from fear " is 
 the ideal he seeks, will to-morrow volunteer 
 
 for some war, or other hazardous pro- 
 
 88
 
 The Failure of Experience 
 
 ceeding, and so give the best of all denials 
 to his words. So do they all. Never- 
 theless, there is in life, not merely in 
 human life, but all life, a movement 
 somewhither. Evolution means that 
 movement, and all life is engaged in 
 perpetual evolution. Did it stop, life 
 would cease, because evolution is inherent 
 in life, and neither can exist without the 
 other. 
 
 This further is certain, that this 
 objective lies far beyond the span of 
 any individual lifetime. We know that, 
 because many of the deepest actions of 
 men have no justification in their life- 
 time. You may take the emotion of 
 love, for instance. I think that the 
 experience of humanity shows that the 
 love of the sexes, with its concomitants of 
 marriage and children, yields on an average 
 quite as much pain as pleasure. Yet it 
 is universally approved and accepted. 
 
 89
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 Its general result is the continuation of 
 life, the sacrifice of present life to future 
 life. 
 
 Why do we do that ? Because emotion 
 makes us. But why do we approve and 
 praise that emotion ? From some in- 
 stinct that is justified. But that justifi- 
 cation is not in our individual lifetime. 
 
 Why does the soldier die ? In all 
 ages it has been considered a praise- 
 worthy act and sure to meet its reward. 
 When and where ? 
 
 And so it is with many other things. 
 
 Life is instinctively conscious that there 
 
 is an objective ; it has in some ways an 
 
 instinctive consciousness of what will and 
 
 will not lead to that objective, but the 
 
 objective itself it has beeji quite unable 
 
 to formulate, because it has tried to learn 
 
 only from the past. It has continually 
 
 framed all sorts of objectives only to 
 
 reject them. There has never been any 
 
 90
 
 The Failure of Experience 
 
 objective commonly acknowledged by all 
 people. But without a true objective 
 you can't have either true work or true 
 play and you can't have any code that 
 will be satisfactory. A code must have 
 a sanction just as cricket laws have, 
 and be flexible, as much more flexible 
 than cricket laws as life is more com- 
 plicated and changeable than the game. 
 No such code has been found because no 
 such code has ever been looked for. 
 The search has been for the Absolute. 
 
 91
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE TEACHINGS OF RELIGIONS
 
 "! 7E now come to religion as the 
 " ^ base of civilization. By religion 
 I mean the system inculcated by a priest- 
 hood, not only in its words but in its 
 acts ; and in particular this chapter is 
 concerned with Christianity. Much of 
 what it contains is true of all religions, 
 but I have not thought it necessary to 
 discuss the others in detail. Christianity 
 is fixed on the European races and there 
 is not in the least likelihood that there 
 will ever be any conversion in Europe 
 to Mahommedanism or Buddhism. As 
 children our minds are so hypnotized 
 that we can rarely afterwards ever see 
 Christianity' with frank, true eyes, but 
 as regards other religions we are wide 
 awake to their defects and absurdities, 
 
 95
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 and we are not likely to succumb to them. 
 Hinduism destroyed the ancient civiliza- 
 tions of India, and Mahommedanism 
 destroyed the Arab civilization of the 
 Omniades. The Jews never had a civil- 
 ization ; how could they ? 
 
 The ordinary European by " religion " 
 means Christianity, and as he also accepts 
 the priests of the various Churches as 
 the mouthpieces of God he must accept 
 their interpretation of what Christianity 
 means. Let us go back, therefore, to 
 the decline of Rome and the rise of 
 Christianity. 
 
 As I have said, Christianity criticized 
 
 the base of the Roman civilization as 
 
 being empirical, material and atheistic, 
 
 and this in their criticism was true. 
 
 The Roman religion, like that of Greece, 
 
 had become unintelligible and chaotic. 
 
 The original tellers of Zeus and the other 
 
 Gods, and the framers of the early myths 
 
 96
 
 The Teachings of Rehgions 
 
 and legends were true seers and thinkers. 
 They saw the world about them very 
 clearly and they gave a true expression 
 to what they saw. There is deep and 
 permanent truth in all the early myths. 
 What this was I explain in a later chapter. 
 But even before the foundation of Rome 
 all real truth had departed. No one 
 understood the significance of the Gods. 
 The myths had become debased and 
 overgrown, and priests had taken up 
 their interpretation for their own ad- 
 vantage. Jupiter, Venus, Mars, Pluto and 
 others, which were to the early seers 
 names for universal emotions and in- 
 fluences within the world, building the 
 world, had become individuals situated 
 without the world, to be propitiated by 
 offerings through priests. The marvellous 
 legend of the river Ameles, which flows 
 through the plain of Lethe, had come 
 to be supposed to be a narrative of fact, 
 
 97 7
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 and very depressing fact. There was 
 no real idea at all of life after death. 
 The soul went to Hades, where there 
 was no life, but only a miserable existence. 
 Therefore the religion of Rome was simply 
 a matter of propitiatory offerings to gods, 
 or to their representatives, the priests. 
 They were useful also for ceremonial 
 occasions. But all the real true idea 
 had long passed away from the Roman 
 Pantheon, and it remained merely as an 
 ornamental debris floating upon the sur- 
 face of the Roman civilization. Their 
 religion could give the Romans no far 
 and true objective on which to base a 
 progressive civilization. And, in fact, the 
 great success of their civilization was 
 due to the fact that it was based on 
 common sense and experience, and not 
 any religious ideal. Even so it eventually 
 failed. Therefore the Christian Church 
 came forward with its ideals and its 
 
 98
 
 The Teachings of ReHgions 
 
 theory of conduct. It claimed to know 
 wherein right and wrong consisted, and 
 to have a complete system of conduct. 
 Let us see what that system was. 
 
 When the Christian Church became 
 firmly established on the ruins of Rome, 
 what did it inculcate ? What, then, were 
 the Christian ethics that were to renew 
 the world ? The only true means of 
 regulating conduct is, as I have shown, 
 by the holding out of a desirable objective, 
 or succession of objectives, to the attain- 
 ment of which conduct is directed. What 
 was the Christian objective ? It had none 
 in this world. It denounced the world 
 as evil, to be endured as best we could 
 in order to reach a state of complete 
 happiness and idleness in some imagined 
 heaven. Thus it began by denying the 
 essential truth that the value of life lies 
 in the living, and not in the attainment 
 of any objective. It supposed an im- 
 
 99 7*
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 possibility, that is, an Absolute, and 
 because it saw very well that there could 
 be no Absolute in life as we know it, 
 because the Absolute is death, it had to 
 imagine a heaven. It could assert any- 
 thing it liked of this heaven because 
 no one could prove it to be wrong. 
 
 Thus it had no base for any civilization 
 here, but was professedly a despair of life 
 in this world. Now you can't build a civili- 
 zation in a world which you despair of. 
 
 Still it had a code of ethics in this 
 world. What was this code ? 
 
 Most people who imagine themselves 
 religious will answer that this question 
 is simple ; there is the Sermon on the 
 Mount and other sayings of Jesus and 
 Paul and other people. These are the 
 Christian ethics. 
 
 I will have to consider these sayings 
 in themselves later ; all I need here to 
 say is that no Christian Church has 
 
 100
 
 The Teachings of Rehgions 
 
 ever acted on them, or professed to 
 act on them. Nothing could be further 
 from Christian ethics in practice than 
 these sayings. And not only in practice 
 has every Christian Church repudiated 
 them as a certain guide, but no Christian 
 Church has ever professed to do so. 
 Laymen may talk irresponsibly about 
 conduct, but no Church as a Church 
 ever does so. They all have a rigid 
 code of ethics, but it is not concerned, 
 except superficially, with your conduct to 
 your neighbour. The only relation that 
 Christianity considers is the relationship 
 between men and the priesthood which 
 it calls God. In fact, this is true not 
 only of Christianity, but of every religion 
 the world has ever seen. No religion 
 holds your conduct to your neighbour 
 to be the first essential, or indeed essential 
 at all. It may be convenient, or advisable, 
 but not essential. The essential of every 
 
 lOI
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 religion has been the relation, not between 
 man and man, but between men and 
 priests. It is the ceremonies of religion, 
 conducted by the priests, that are fixed 
 and absolute. This is never denied by 
 the priests themselves. It is, on the 
 contrary, steadily affirmed by them. It 
 is curious to note that it is the ignorant 
 layman who denies this and talks vaguely 
 about high ideals and " true religion " ; 
 priests do not do so, except they are 
 ignorant themselves or are trying to 
 impose on your ignorance. True they 
 will also talk at large very often, but if 
 pressed they do not usually lack the 
 courage of their opinions. The test of a 
 religion is its ceremonies. It was a priest 
 who said, " Sacrifices, lustral waters, ex- 
 piations, initiations, bloody or joyous 
 rites, this has formed the life of all liturgies, 
 and the fimctions of all priesthoods." 
 These, in fact, are religion. 
 
 102
 
 The Teachings of Religions 
 
 Everyone can easily test this as regards 
 religions he knows. What makes a man 
 a member of any Christian Church ? To 
 have been baptized into it, to acknowledge 
 its priests, and observe its ceremonies. 
 It is not in the least a question of conduct, 
 apart from this. No man, however ad- 
 mirable his life, would by that only 
 become a member of, say, the Churches 
 of Rome or of England. The worst 
 sinner does not cease to belong to his 
 Church as long as he acknowledges its 
 priests. He will repent to them, be ab- 
 solved by them and go to heaven. The 
 outsider, no matter how admirable his 
 conduct, goes to hell. 
 
 There is no word so consistently abused 
 as the word Christian. We hear con- 
 tinually of true Christians, Christian con- 
 duct. Christian virtues and so on, and 
 the speakers apparently in their own mind 
 
 attach and wish their hearers to attach 
 103
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 to the word some altruistic meaning 
 referring to conduct to your neighbours. 
 It has no such meaning, and could have 
 none. Any Church or any Society based 
 on any absolute rule or rules of conduct 
 could not exist for long. The maxims 
 of the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, 
 are not peculiarly Christian. They were 
 not new. They may have been to the 
 Jews, but elsewhere they were well known 
 hundreds of years before. And they were 
 not meant to be absolute. They were 
 given simply as additions to previous 
 rules, to balance them, just as two sets 
 of proverbs balance each other. No 
 Church, no Society which made these 
 maxims absolute could endure, and no 
 Christian Church has ever attempted to 
 enforce them on the contrary, the mark 
 of all religions has been their denunciation 
 and persecution. No Church could exist 
 
 otherwise. If it admitted that other re- 
 
 104
 
 The Teachings of Religions 
 
 ligions or want of religion were as good 
 it would lose its meaning. If our priests 
 are God, others must be the Devil. The 
 essential part of every religion is its 
 ceremonies. In fact, in many religions 
 there was nothing but ceremonies. I 
 mean there was no question of conduct 
 at all. In Druidism and the religion 
 of Mexico, in fact in all early religions, 
 conduct has no part. Look at how Abra- 
 ham acquired his wealth. Read it again 
 and reflect on it. What would happen 
 to Abraham to-day ? And what he did 
 is reprobated in all societies, even in 
 the earliest. 
 
 Religions are made up of ceremonies 
 under a priesthood, and this must be so. 
 No other customs or ethics are fixed. 
 A Church to hold together must be held 
 by bonds that are invariable. No course 
 of conduct is invariable, and therefore 
 no Church could exist for one moment 
 105
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 that depended on conduct. It must be 
 held together by ceremonies which are, in 
 fact, rehgion itself. They bind. They 
 divide exactly and clearly the sheep 
 within from the goats outside. This is 
 not to be taken as a reproach against 
 religion. It is simply the acknowledgment 
 of a fact. If you are to have a religion 
 at all it must be held together by cere- 
 monies; there is no other way. Religion, 
 all religions, are matter of obedience to 
 priests, and their ceremonies and nothing 
 else is necessary. 
 
 Look at all the religious persecutions, 
 of Buddhists by Hindus, of Hindus by 
 Mahommedans and vice- versa, of Mahom- 
 medans by Christian Churches, of Churches 
 against Protestantism and the reverse 
 what part had " conduct " in these ? 
 It had none whatever. One religion has 
 not persecuted another because it alleged 
 that the conduct of the heretics was bad, 
 io6
 
 The Teachings of Rehgions 
 
 but because they refused obedience to the 
 Church and would not accept its cere- 
 monies. Never anything but this. Re- 
 member I am speaking of rehgious per- 
 secution. There has frequently been per- 
 secution or suppression of divers religions 
 by the Civil power expressly for bad 
 conduct ^the Assassins in the near East, 
 the Thugs in India, Mormonism in America, 
 are cases everyone will have heard of. 
 But persecution of religion is never con- 
 cerned with conduct apart from cere- 
 monies and obedience to priests. Read 
 the records of the Inquisition, for instance. 
 To commit murder was nothing compared 
 to disrespect shown to the sacred wafer. 
 One could be expiated, not the other. 
 
 Conduct is imposed by the community, 
 by civilization, never by religions. They 
 consist of ceremonies. And it is because 
 they do consist of ceremonies that they 
 
 have so much success. 
 107
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 From the beginning, as I have said, 
 man has been oppressed by the vagueness, 
 the sohtude, the inexpHcable nature of the 
 Hfe in which he has been cast. He could 
 find no maxims that were always true to 
 help him. But religion declared it could 
 do so, and at a comparatively trifling 
 cost. The priests would save you if you 
 acknowledged them and observed the 
 ceremonies they dictated. They would 
 save you all trouble of thought about a 
 future life, and even in this life they were 
 of immense help. They made themselves 
 so powerful that to serve them was 
 safety, to oppose them death. 
 
 The early religions had little or no 
 teaching as to conduct, but the religions 
 which superseded them contained, theoreti- 
 cally, a good deal of teaching as to con- 
 duct. I say theoretically, because it 
 never could be more than theory if the 
 
 Church was to exist at all. It was, 
 io8
 
 The Teachings of ReHgions 
 
 however, always a conduct of ceremonial. 
 
 Nevertheless, it had an effect because, 
 
 whenever it could, religion invaded private 
 
 life, and under the pretence of morality 
 
 instituted more and more ceremonies. 
 
 There is, for instance, marriage. At first 
 
 Christianity denounced it altogether. 
 
 Then it allowed it and reduced it to 
 
 the absolute of a ceremony. A priest 
 
 says a form of words over to you, and 
 
 there you are married for ever. As to 
 
 the when, the how, the with whom, 
 
 apart from the prohibited degrees, the 
 
 Church is not concerned. It has no 
 
 course of conduct whatever leading to 
 
 marriage, and none whatever after 
 
 marriage. Nothing could dissolve the 
 
 marriage tie. It has a ceremony and that 
 
 is all, and it is absolute conduct or no 
 
 conduct. Marriage is really a fact, and 
 
 not a form, and the pretence of making 
 
 it a form only has had the worst effect 
 109
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 on human conduct. But it was all re- 
 ligion could do. No rule of life can 
 possibly be universally true. The abso- 
 lute is nothing. Now forms are in them- 
 selves nothing, hence you can make them 
 absolute, and so get what you may be 
 pleased to call an absolute right or wrong. 
 If the Church has said a formula over a 
 man and woman you have absolute and 
 eternal right. You may fight all day, 
 you may hate each other. No matter. 
 You are husband and wife. She may 
 leave you with another man. She is 
 your wife. Divorces are granted by the 
 Civil Power, not the Church. Churches 
 may talk of the duties of wives and 
 husbands, but they do not know what 
 such duties should be, nor do they attempt 
 to enforce any such duties. Conduct, 
 as you see, is little or nothing, the 
 ethic of marriage is a formula. For you 
 
 cannot standardize humanity, but you 
 no
 
 The Teachings of Religions 
 
 can standardize formulae. But the world 
 has generally found out, or is finding out, 
 the futility of formulae. Truth lies in emo- 
 tion, not words. The world could not be 
 standardized in conduct, and it is rapidly 
 declining to be standardized in formulae. 
 
 " But," it will be objected, " even if 
 this be true so far, religions consist of 
 more than this. They are societies 
 formed to maintain and encourage a 
 belief." That is true, I think, of all 
 religions. Even the fetish worship of 
 savages has a creed within it. But of 
 what does this creed consist but of a 
 formula, and how can you test the 
 believer's belief except by his repetition 
 of the formula ? No conduct has ever 
 been, or could be, a test, as I have 
 repeated before, because conduct cannot 
 be standardized. Besides, none of these 
 creeds have anything to do with con- 
 duct. Read, for instance, the verses of 
 III
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 the Koran which admit you to Moham- 
 medanism or the Apostles' Creed. They 
 are mere formulae, which you show you 
 accept by repeating them, and that is all. 
 
 Let me repeat that no religion is con- 
 cerned with conduct. When it has taken 
 conduct under its orders, the result has 
 been either an entire denial of life as 
 in the ascetics of all faiths, or a degrada- 
 tion of conduct as in the Rome of the 
 Middle Ages. Public opinion forces con- 
 duct on religion, not the other way. The 
 only ethic any religion has is ceremony. 
 
 Thus was the world provided with 
 what it demanded an absolute and rigid 
 system of ethics, which, while useful 
 in this world, would ensure safety in 
 the next. It is true that it did not 
 apply directly to the troubles of life as 
 they arose. It did not completely 
 exempt man from the labour of thought 
 he could not consult the priests about 
 
 112
 
 The Teachings of ReHgions 
 
 everything ; it did not govern conduct ; 
 still, it went a long way. It does go 
 a long way still with many people, 
 especially women. To have a form of 
 words said over them, or for them, by 
 a priest does seem to exercise a soothing 
 effect. They imagine themselves to be 
 doing a good deal. But, generally speak- 
 ing, every religion gets found out more 
 or less. The esoteric teaching is found 
 to consist of unintelligible words ; the 
 high ideals to be unattainable, and, in 
 fact, not to be high ideals at all ; the 
 emptiness of the formulae becomes patent 
 and the tyranny of the priests becomes 
 unbearable. 
 
 There is another way in which it can 
 be seen that the test of religion is not 
 conduct, but formulae. Did any religion 
 hold any true system of conduct, then 
 its exponents and priests would be 
 examples of it, and examples of life. 
 113 8
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 But they are not. I am not in the least 
 referring to " bad " priests, those who 
 fall short of the rules of their Church ; 
 I am referring to good priests. A priest 
 as a priest is not considered by the 
 world at large as a model. Very much 
 the contrary. Men say, and often do 
 suppose, that priests serve some useful 
 purpose, and are consequently neces- 
 sary ; they may suppose that occasional 
 priests have certain admirable qualities 
 which persist despite their priesthood, 
 but that is all. Speaking generally, 
 men despise priests as being something 
 less than men. They have cut them- 
 selves off from mankind, and if they 
 develop qualities to fulfil their special 
 purpose they lose qualities that are to 
 most men held in greater esteem. If 
 they acquire " divinity " they have lost 
 humanity. Very few fathers, I think, 
 
 tell their sons to imitate priests. I am 
 
 114
 
 The Teachings of Religions 
 
 not only speaking of Western nations. 
 That is universally true. 
 
 All the religions of the world have 
 their heroes, but the heroes of the world 
 are not Churchmen. Priests, even where 
 accepted, are to most men a necessary 
 evil, not a class to be imitated. 
 
 The test of a priest is not, and never 
 was nor could be, his conduct. " Once 
 a priest, always a priest," is one of the 
 principal dogmas, not merely of Christian 
 Churches, but of all the religions I am 
 acquainted with. Once made a priest, 
 or a Moulvie, or a Buddhist monk, and 
 no matter what you do, your sacred 
 status remains. A priest is no less a 
 priest because he has committed a series 
 of atrocious crimes. The absolution he 
 gives you has exactly the same value. 
 He is no less a representative of God 
 for being a scoundrel. I wonder if reli- 
 gious people at large know this fact ? 
 115 8*
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 Nothing could be more certain than it 
 is. No Church, Christian or other, will 
 deny it, nor could any Church exist on 
 other terms. If conduct in certain 
 matters is now demanded of priests, it 
 is because the public insist on it, not 
 because by the dogmas of the religion 
 it is necessary. That is to say, it is 
 advisable only, but not essential. Very 
 often it is not even advisable. There 
 have been periods in Church history 
 where it was not, and even now except 
 perhaps in one matter the standard 
 demanded from priests is far lower than 
 that demanded of the ordinary man. 
 Charity of mind, truthfulness, fair- 
 mindedness, are not demanded of priests, 
 and very rarely rendered. Priestly 
 authority is derived from a ceremony, 
 and nothing else. This, as I have said, 
 is true of all religions. 
 
 Thus, in a way, the world got what it 
 ii6
 
 The Teachings of Religions 
 
 wanted a fixed code of ethics ; but it 
 was simply an ethic of ceremony. There 
 was nothing behind it. All the essentials 
 to a true basis for a civilization are 
 wanting in Christianity, as in all other 
 religions. They have an impossible and 
 unverifiable objective ; they are a despair 
 of life. Thus they have no means of 
 formulating any true system of conduct ; 
 as a matter of fact, their only essentials 
 in conduct are ceremonies. 
 
 When the very first principles of the 
 Churches are that life is evil, to be 
 endured and, if possible, denied, and 
 that the process of the continuation of 
 life, and therefore the continuation of 
 life itself, is sin, where have you a base 
 for an increasing civilization of life ? 
 That is a negation of the first principle 
 of any civilization that the value and 
 beauty of life lies in the living of it. 
 
 There has never been, or could be, such 
 
 117
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 a thing as a Christian civilization ; the 
 terms are negations of each other. All 
 our civilization has been gained in the 
 face of religion. I need not labour this 
 point ; it has been shown over and over 
 again by many writers, and is proved 
 every day by the acts of religions. 
 Take the Church of England as an 
 example, and look at its records. It 
 supported slavery and the infamous 
 penal laws. It has always opposed 
 every approach to freedom, all exten- 
 sion of self-government, of secular educa- 
 tion, of every single move towards a 
 higher civilization and freedom. It 
 must by its constitution do so, and has 
 proved by its acts that it does so. 
 
 Remember, too, that no Church can 
 reform ; Divine, that is absolute, truth 
 was revealed to them, and they are 
 bound by it. To reform would be to 
 
 give up the whole matter. 
 
 ii8
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 CONCEPTIONS OF GOD
 
 WN order, therefore, to build a civiliza- 
 * tion which will be true, and will 
 not require to be continually destroyed 
 by wars, we must find an objective 
 in life here. No civilization can be 
 founded on a view of the world which 
 puts each man's objective elsewhere. 
 We must understand life here and find 
 our objective here, or we fail. 
 
 This at once raises a further diffi- 
 culty. It will be asserted by a great 
 number of people that though religion 
 and priests may have proved them- 
 selves to be wrong in details, yet there 
 is more than that. Beneath every reli- 
 gion there lies an idea of God, and, what- 
 ever else is false, this is a true idea. 
 No consideration of life, no search for 
 
 121
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 an objective, can succeed which ignores 
 God, the Creator of the world. Let us, 
 therefore, consider the point. And, first, 
 what is meant by the word God. Let 
 us have a clear definition of the word 
 God. 
 
 I am aware that a great many people 
 will say that this cannot be done ; 
 that God is immeasurable, indefinable 
 and the rest, and that to attempt a 
 definition is absurd. To them I would 
 reply that I am not attempting to 
 define God, if there be God, but to 
 define the meaning of a word. What do 
 religions mean when they say God ? 
 Have they a meaning ? If so, what is 
 it ? If not, then God and Nothing, or 
 Everything, are the same thing. 
 
 For instance, is God a block of stone, 
 an image called Vishnu or the Madonna, 
 bread and wine over which words have 
 been said, lightning, accident, a priest 
 
 122
 
 Conceptions of God 
 
 of any kind ? There are people who 
 maintain all these things. Ordinary 
 insurance policies, for instance, are not 
 good for " Acts of God or the King's 
 enemies." There " God " means acci- 
 dent. If you deny that the word " God " 
 means any of these things, you have 
 already begun to define ; if you refuse 
 a definition, you cannot deny that the 
 flint on my table may be God. 
 
 If you say that God is defined in the 
 dogmas of religions, I ask what dogmas ? 
 And if you say, for instance, that the 
 creeds and other dogmas contain it, 
 I reply that although they contain a 
 number of words, they are all indeter- 
 minate words, such as Almighty, and 
 are not definitions at all. No religion 
 of any kind has ever tried to determine 
 what God is, for the simple reason that 
 the gods of religions are products of 
 
 the imagination only. All that religions 
 123
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 do is to declare that God has certain 
 attributes, has performed certain acts, 
 and will in the future do certain other 
 acts. 
 
 Now in trying to attain a knowledge 
 of any material, any individual, any 
 energy, or, in fact, anything that exists, 
 we proceed first by ascertaining what it 
 does, what effect it has had and has 
 now. From these we deduce the attri- 
 butes, and frame, as far as possible, 
 a definition which can never be quite 
 correct, but which will divide light, say, 
 from heat, or man from animal, or 
 love from hate. Therefore, what has 
 God done, what does He do, what is 
 He going to do ? These may give us 
 an idea of what God is. Christianity 
 states as follows : 
 
 God made the world, including man. 
 He approved of His work when done. 
 
 That approval was premature, as man 
 
 124
 
 Conceptions of God 
 
 turned out badly. He is born in sin. 
 As there is no other way to be born 
 and as the world cannot continue except 
 by births, the whole scheme of life is 
 sinful. God made it so. 
 
 God then drowned the world, all but 
 a chosen few, but no improvement was 
 manifest. How could there be, as the 
 method of birth was not changed ? 
 Then God chose Abraham and his seed 
 the Israelites. Abraham was an aban- 
 doned scoundrel, but God didn't care. 
 He punished the Egyptians for not 
 letting them go, although the hardening 
 of Pharaoh's heart was God's own doing. 
 Eventually the chosen people set up a 
 kingdom. It developed no civilization, 
 and, except under one strong man, no 
 semblance of good government. It was 
 always being destroyed owing to its 
 being an intolerable neighbour. A 
 chosen people cannot naturally be a 
 125
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 pleasant neighbour to outsiders who, 
 though equally created by God, are all 
 destined to hell. Then God sent his 
 only Son to save the world from its 
 Creator's anger at his own failure. The 
 Son was crucified. A new religion arose 
 with his name, but the new religion is 
 really the old under other terms. The 
 chosen people are the Christian priests, 
 and that is all the real change. The 
 world is still evil, being as God created 
 it. The world is not worth loving or 
 improving. It is a vale of tears, to be 
 denied as much as possible, and, finally, 
 when we die we shall disappear, the 
 minority to " heaven," the majority 
 to eternal hell to please God. 
 
 He cannot communicate with most 
 men direct, but must have intermediaries, 
 priests, visionaries and German Em- 
 perors. 
 
 And to prevent you forming an un 
 126
 
 Conceptions of God 
 
 favourable opinion of the Christian con- 
 ception of God from His supposed acts, 
 you are finally informed that He is 
 Almighty, All-loving, All-merciful, All- 
 wise, and that if you think that this is 
 not apparent in His acts the fault is 
 yours. You are trusting to the devil's 
 gift of common sense. 
 
 But it is sometimes asserted that 
 even if this particular idea of God is 
 wrong, the belief in God is a true thing, 
 and, therefore, if so far it has produced 
 no civilization, it is necessary to civiliza-^ 
 tion. It has a spontaneous and natural 
 origin. It is part of man and man 
 cannot divest himself of it. Therefore, 
 it must be the basis of any civilization. 
 
 Let us see how far this is true. 
 
 There are two explanations usually 
 given. Theologians of all creeds assert 
 that a knowledge of God is innate in all 
 
 people, and that its development depends 
 
 127
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 on revelations, dreams, visions, and 
 teachings by priests. 
 
 The scientific explanation is some- 
 thing as follows : Early man and savage 
 man was not as we are. He did not think 
 like we do, his mental processes being 
 different, not merely in degree, but in 
 kind. He had an Aryan or an Early 
 or an Oriental mind, which acted in the 
 most extraordinary way. No civilized 
 or educated, or even modern man would 
 imagine thunder to be a God, or the 
 voice of God, mountains and streams 
 and trees and boughs and charms to be 
 God. But the savage did, and does so. 
 Our ancestors did so, and hence arose 
 our notions of God, which subsequently 
 grew and expanded as our intelligence 
 grew, until finally God became an 
 abstraction in an imaginary heaven. 
 
 Let us, therefore, consider these two 
 
 explanations. 
 
 128
 
 Conceptions of God 
 
 Theologians of all creeds and religions 
 maintain that the belief in God is 
 innate in all men. If by God is meant 
 a power without the world, apart from 
 the world, interfering occasionally but 
 not often, sending revelations by priests 
 and accessible to prayer, it may be 
 quite confidently asserted that no man, 
 civilized or uncivilized, has any such 
 instinctive thought. What lies outside 
 phenomena is unknown to all men, and 
 man is too much concerned trying to 
 understand phenomena to speculate 
 about what he cannot possibly know. 
 The natural man of all ages knows 
 that there is something within pheno- 
 mena, for he is conscious of this. He 
 has frequently expressed this ; in fact, 
 all sacred books were in the beginning 
 an expression of what he saw and felt. 
 What is outside phenomena cannot be 
 
 appreciated by the senses, and what is 
 129 9
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 not evident to our senses does not exist 
 for us. It must, therefore, be " be- 
 lieved in." " Do you beheve in God ? " 
 is a current question. Could anything 
 be more absurd or better evidence that 
 the God of religions is purely imaginary ? 
 You don't require to believe in real 
 things. You see them. 
 
 In the beginning, the spirit of God, 
 Zeus, Venus, Brahma, Vishnu, Odin, 
 Thor, Osiris, Ormuzd and the others, 
 were terms applied to things felt and 
 appreciated by the makers of the sacred 
 books. They were realities which could 
 be observed and required no proof, 
 whose attributes could be studied in 
 actual life as they still can be. What 
 these all mean comes in a later chapter ; 
 all I want now is to emphasize that 
 they were realities and not the result of 
 imagination. 
 
 The God of religion is quite different. 
 130
 
 Conceptions of God 
 
 He is outside the world, and cannot be 
 appreciated by any of our senses. You 
 cannot study him in the world because 
 he isn't there. You have to believe 
 what priests tell you, and you can in no 
 way verify their tales. 
 
 Yet nothing can be more true than 
 the statement that whatever does not 
 affect us in some way through our 
 senses does not exist for us. Even if 
 He actually were somewhere in space, 
 if He affected us in no way, if we could 
 touch Him in no way, it would make 
 no difference to us if He were not there 
 at all. 
 
 Yet in the very phrase, " Do you 
 believe in God ? " this is conceded. 
 We do not have to " believe " in 
 realities, because we are sensible of their 
 effect on us. 
 
 The idea seems to be " things seen." You 
 
 can only see things with your senses, and 
 131J 9*
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 God cannot ex hypothesi be appreciated 
 by the senses ; therefore, there is no 
 idea of God possible. No man, civilized 
 or uncivilized, ever had such an idea. 
 As to " seeing with the eye of faith," 
 men have eyes, but how can an abstrac- 
 tion like faith have one ? It is only a 
 play upon words. 
 
 No one ever had an idea of a God like 
 this, and everyone knows that what 
 he is told about God is not true. 
 
 Every one of our children resents at 
 first as unnatural and unreasonable the 
 tales priests or parents tell him about 
 God. They jeer at it. They ask ques- 
 tions which probe its absurdity. All 
 who are acquainted with children know 
 this. But by dint of constant teaching, 
 punishment and persuasion, they are 
 forced to put their instinctive repulsion 
 to this belief down into their subcon- 
 sciousness, where, however, it always 
 132
 
 Conceptions of God 
 
 remains. Its belief is spread over the 
 top. 
 
 This will become clearer later. I 
 simply summarize it now that the reader 
 may see the conclusions to which he 
 will arrive in this matter. 
 
 Then we come to the " scientific " 
 derivation of the conception of God. 
 
 This is even more absurd than that 
 of the theologians. 
 
 I have myself lived most of my life 
 in close intercourse, not with one savage 
 or semi-civilized people, but with several 
 totally different races in widely separated 
 localities. I have become friendly with 
 them, and have discussed all these 
 matters, not once but hundreds of times, 
 with them. I have done so with a 
 complete absence of bias, because I did 
 not want to support any particular 
 thesis, but only to ascertain the absolute 
 facts. I have learnt how to make these 
 133
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 people speak freely and openly, which 
 is a difficult acquirement. It needs a 
 command of their languages, a complete 
 confidence on their part, that you will 
 never sneer nor laugh at what they tell 
 you, and that you will never repeat 
 their confidences to others. Further, 
 they must be absolutely certain that 
 you are only seeking for knowledge, and 
 have no wish to convert them to anything. 
 Otherwise, in their necessity they will 
 protect themselves by saymg all sorts 
 of nonsense just like a civilized man 
 will. And, therefore, from long experi- 
 ence I may assert confidently that there 
 is no difference of kind between the 
 way a savage thinks and the way an 
 Oxford Don or a Heidelberg professor 
 thinks. If it were declared that a 
 savage man had a different kind of 
 eyesight, touch, hearing, smell or taste, 
 from civilized man, the absurdity would 
 134
 
 Conceptions of God 
 
 be manifest. If it were said that his 
 methods of digestion and assimilation 
 were different, everyone would laugh. 
 Why, then, should his process of thought 
 differ ? Thought is only a mental 
 digestion of food brought by the senses. 
 The observation and mental digestion 
 of a savage differs, indeed, in degree 
 from that of civilized man, but not in the 
 least in kind. In observation of certain 
 facts he is better, in most other matters 
 he is inferior. Both, also, are liable to 
 the same mistakes, those of the civilized 
 man being the bigger in size. There is 
 no absurdity of reasoning a savage 
 commits that you cannot equal in civi- 
 lized man. Their perceptions and pro- 
 cesses are absolutely the same. There 
 is a wide difference in degree, but none 
 in kind. 
 
 Therefore, if a civilized man never 
 naturally personifies the elements, if 
 135
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 he never sees God in the storm, the 
 
 thunder, the waterfall, the mountain, 
 
 neither could the savage. 
 
 As a matter of fact, he never does, nor 
 
 has done. In all my experience I have 
 
 never found any one who did not, when 
 
 it was safe, laugh at such a statement. 
 
 He has a perception of a First Cause 
 
 in Nature, as I shall show later, but of a 
 
 personal God in the elements, or using 
 
 the elements as weapons, or a God 
 
 outside in Heaven, he has no idea at 
 
 all. When he personifies the elements, 
 
 he does so for exactly the same reason 
 
 that civilized man accepts the personal 
 
 God of the religions namely, because he 
 
 has been made to believe it. That is to 
 
 say, it has been dinned into him by 
 
 authority from his childhood and 
 
 although he knows it isn't true. This 
 
 knowledge of its untruth has been driven 
 
 down into his subconsciousness, and he 
 136
 
 Conceptions of God 
 
 is made to keep it there by belief 
 enforced on him in childhood by 
 authority. The following experience of 
 mine will illustrate what I mean. 
 
 I was far away beyond the frontier 
 amid mountains, wherein numerous 
 wild tribes lived. I was reconnoitring 
 for a path for troops, and I had with 
 me as guide a man from one of the 
 tribes. 
 
 We halted at the entrance of a valley 
 at the further end of which some ten 
 or fifteen miles away was a large village, 
 and above it on the mountain side was 
 a huge image in the rock. Apparently 
 the image was partly natural, but it had 
 been improved by art. I had heard of 
 it before. I sat down on a stone, and 
 after talking to my guide for a little 
 about paths, fords and so on, I asked : 
 
 " And that image what is that ? " 
 
 " That," he said, " is our God." 
 137
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 " Indeed ! " I said. " What does he 
 do?" 
 
 " He protects the village." 
 
 " How do you know that ? " I asked. 
 
 He stared at me and fumbled about 
 in his mind a good deal, and then 
 answered : " The priests say so." 
 
 " It seems to me," I answered, " to 
 be just stone. I don't see how it could 
 do anything. What do you think ? " 
 
 He smiled, then pulled himself to- 
 gether. " The priests say," he whis- 
 pered, " that it is a God, and will destroy 
 the village or anyone who offends him." 
 
 " How offended ? " I asked. 
 
 " He requires offerings," the man ex- 
 plained ; " goats, money. If he doesn't 
 get these things he avenges himself." 
 
 " What does he do with these things ? 
 Eat them ? " 
 
 I spoke taking the greatest care not 
 to show any sarcasm or disbelief. I 
 
 138
 
 Conceptions of God 
 
 asked exactly in the same tone and with 
 the same manner as just before I had 
 been asking about fords and roads. I 
 asked to acquire knowledge. My guide 
 answered half in fear at talking about 
 the deity, half in amused recognition of 
 the hidden absurdity of his beliefs. No 
 one was near enough to hear us. 
 
 " They say ^the priests say ^that God 
 eats them," he answered. " But the 
 villagers whisper to each other that 
 the priests eat them." 
 
 " What do you think ? " 
 
 He looked at me and shook his head. 
 He wasn't going to express an opinion. 
 It might be dangerous. People who 
 offended the priests never lived long. 
 
 " What do you know about this God 
 yourself ? " I asked. 
 
 This time he was quite ready with his 
 answer : "I don't know anything, of 
 course. No one does except the priests 
 139
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 They tell us all about God, and what he 
 does and what he wants." 
 
 " How do they know ? " I asked. 
 
 " The God appears to them in visions 
 and tells them. Also, they go up the 
 mountain in stormy weather, and they 
 say that the thunder is God's voice 
 and that they can understand it." 
 
 " There is lots of thunder," I said, " all 
 over the world. Is it all the voice of 
 God, or what ? " 
 
 He only shook his head and laughed. 
 It was perfectly clear that the idea of 
 thunder being God's voice amused him. 
 No one, civilized or savage, but knows 
 quite well that thunder is a natural 
 phenomenon, and no one has ever 
 instinctively deified it. That is a belief, 
 not an idea. 
 
 " Well," I continued, '' the priests are 
 told things by God." 
 
 He nodded. 
 
 140
 
 Conceptions of God 
 
 " And you believe ? " 
 
 " Of course we must," he answered. 
 
 *' It seems to me," I said presently, 
 " just like any other rock, only that it 
 has been carved." 
 
 " Yes," he assented. " So it seems 
 to us, too." 
 
 Now that, mutatis mutandis^ is a con- 
 versation I have had many times with 
 many different kinds of uncivilized people 
 about images, charms, rocks, natural 
 forces, and other things worshipped as 
 gods. Once I had acquired the art of 
 getting them to talk naturally, I never 
 found any difficulty nor any difference 
 in what they said. It was a difficult 
 art to acquire. If your witness imagines 
 for a moment, either from the form of 
 your questions, or your tone of voice, 
 or even from your expression, that you 
 are sneering at his beliefs, there is an 
 
 end at once to all confidences. He will 
 141
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 assert that all he believes is true. The 
 more absurd it is, the more vehemently 
 will he assert that it is true. For men 
 savage or civilized, there is no difference 
 only vehemently defend the obviously 
 false. The obviously true needs no 
 defence, and even if the truth be not 
 obvious, but is, nevertheless, certain to 
 a man, he sees little necessity to defend 
 it. It is beliefs which, though he is 
 committed to them, he knows have no 
 sense in them, or are not true, that he 
 so vigorously asserts. Falsehood re- 
 quires defence ; truth does not. 
 
 It will be seen, then, that the beliefs 
 that there are gods in natural objects 
 or in elemental forces are forced on 
 mankind. They are not ideas, that is 
 to say, things perceived by any sense. 
 They are contrary to all natural sense. 
 That there is life of various degrees in 
 
 all things, and that there is intelligence 
 
 142
 
 Conceptions of God 
 
 behind all living things, is quite a different 
 matter. That can be perceived by the 
 sense ; but God, no ! The priests who 
 invent them, in the first place, know 
 that they are not true, and the people 
 do the same. Both force themselves 
 to accept these beliefs, the priests because 
 it suits them, the people because they are 
 helpless. The people are blinded by 
 beliefs so that they should not per- 
 ceive the truth which is in them. 
 
 That is the way that the belief in 
 God outside the world originated. It 
 was invented by priests, and, like a 
 poisonous mistletoe, it was grafted on 
 to the universal idea of a First Cause 
 within the world, which all of us can 
 see when we look. To make a civiliza- 
 tion here on earth we must see our 
 First Cause here and our future here, 
 and no religions do that. 
 
 143
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE PURPOSE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 10
 
 T will be seen, therefore, that we 
 * have been able to make no enduring 
 and satisfactory civilization because we 
 have never studied to see how alone 
 such a civilization could be made. We 
 have never had any true base to build 
 on, and we have never had any know- 
 ledge of what sort of building we 
 required. Our civilizations have been 
 at best like that of Rome empiricisms 
 based on the past, with no knowledge 
 of what is wanted in the future. They 
 have never shown any understanding of 
 life. Even the simplest and most ob- 
 vious qualities of life were ignored by 
 them as they are now. And if it be 
 asked why for five or six thousand 
 
 years no true study of life has evei* 
 147 10*
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 been made, the answer is simple : be- 
 cause of religions. Even the civilizations 
 of Athens and Rome could not progress, 
 because behind them were religious 
 theories about the world which were not 
 only not true, but which prevented any 
 real attempt to see the truth. For five 
 thousand years at least children have 
 been, from their birth, first educated 
 to believe certain things about life and 
 human nature which are not only not 
 true, but which every man knows in his 
 consciousness are not true. Yet these 
 beliefs being there prevented any search 
 for the truth. Even when in early days 
 philosophers, and in later days scientific 
 men, turned aside from religion, and 
 tried to look life in the face, they were 
 unable to do so. Their eyesight had 
 been injured in youth, and between them 
 and Nature there always floated phan- 
 tasms of the beliefs impressed on them 
 148
 
 The Purpose of Evolution 
 
 as children. You will see even to-day 
 in a thousand ways the enormous hold 
 that " religious " imaginings have on 
 men who would, if asked, deny that 
 they had any religious obsessions. For 
 instance, the false teleologies of all 
 religions have so affected scientific men 
 that they will have nothing to do with 
 any teleology. They have found out 
 that all they have been taught is untrue, 
 and they are driven to the other extreme. 
 Yet life is in its essence teleological, 
 as anyone who looks at it clearly will 
 see. 
 
 Again, because they have come to 
 see that the God of religions is not 
 merely a phantom of the imagination, 
 but of a very evil imagination, they 
 have swung to the other extreme, and 
 declared that there could be no First 
 Cause in Life. Their minds are afraid 
 
 of falling back into old beliefs, and 
 
 149
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 either with their myopic eyes they can- 
 not see what is before them, or they 
 dare not acknowledge what they see for 
 fear of supporting reUgion which they 
 know is false. They, equally with the 
 supporters of religion, remain the victims 
 of false teleologies, although they deny 
 they have any. While ecclesiastics look 
 at the world with the purpose of seeing 
 only what may help their religions, 
 scientific men too often see only what 
 will help them to upset religion. But 
 you do not get at truth by either of these 
 ways. 
 
 The inability of scientific men to 
 shake themselves free from the influences 
 of religion is nowhere more manifest 
 than in discussing human nature. 
 
 It has, as I have already said, 
 
 become recently a common-place of 
 
 scientific men to suppose that there are 
 
 a great many different ways of thinking, 
 
 150
 
 The Purpose of Evolution 
 
 different minds. There is, for instance, 
 the "" Oriental mind " and the " Aryan 
 mind." Scientific men will argue in this 
 way. A Hindu, for instance, will 
 worship Siva. But Siva means Death, 
 and only a mind very different from 
 the Occidental mind could worship 
 Death whom we fear ; therefore, Hindus 
 have Oriental minds. But the true 
 explanation is quite different. In early 
 days men looking clearly upon the 
 world saw that death was not in itself 
 an aid, because, though terrible in itself, 
 it was the only escape from something 
 still more terrible. Without death there 
 could be no youth and no progress. 
 Without death the world would grow 
 rapidly into an old age that would 
 become clearly an everlasting death. 
 Death is the return to youth, the for- 
 getting of mistakes and cares, the new 
 beginning which can be attained no 
 151
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 other way. Therefore is death essential 
 to life, because without death we should 
 all voyage forward into an eternal Death. 
 It is the great regenerative agent. That 
 everyone can see for himself now as well 
 as then. 
 
 But such an idea would not help 
 priests, so they perverted it, and made 
 Death or Siva into a destroying goddess, 
 to be worshipped and propitiated through 
 them with presents and offerings the 
 Thugs murdered in Siva's name ; over 
 the true idea was spread a false un- 
 natural belief which is religion. But 
 the scientific man could not see the true 
 idea of death, and so he had to invent 
 another explanation, which again he 
 finds in his early religious teaching. 
 Ie was taught as a boy that there were 
 " chosen people " ; as a man, he still 
 clings to the belief, only in another form. 
 The civilized man, of which he is the 
 152
 
 The Purpose of Evolution 
 
 representative, has a " chosen " mind ; 
 the natural man has not. 
 
 Thus, quite as much as the church- 
 man, the scientific man is apt to misread 
 Nature, to mistake beliefs, besides being 
 ready to adopt explanations that are 
 imaginary. You will continually see 
 this, and in the bitterness of scientific 
 controversy you will see reproduced the 
 bitterness of religious controversy, 
 which can have no conclusion because 
 neither is based on any clear view of 
 life. When you come to the funda- 
 mentals underlying each, you find not 
 understanding, but blindness, which, 
 because it cannot see, must resort to 
 belief. But beliefs are not part of 
 human nature, they are false, unnatural 
 things engrafted on a child's mind in 
 youth, and very hard afterwards to 
 shake off, although they are always 
 known to have no foundation in fact. 
 153
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 In a study of humanity this must always 
 be borne in mind. A belief is no more 
 part of humanity than a mistletoe is 
 part of an oak tree. The naturalist 
 who calmly discussed the mistletoe 
 berries and leaves as part of the oak 
 would be laughed at. But scientific 
 men continually accept beliefs as part 
 of human nature. Their own eyes have 
 been so blinded in youth by other 
 beliefs that they rarely see humanity 
 truly. 
 
 Now this has been the case ever since 
 before history. Beliefs about life have 
 been hammered into children, till they, 
 even though they knew they were not 
 true, were blinded by them, and would 
 not look truly at life to see it clearly 
 and see it whole. They went either to 
 the extreme of acceptance or refusal. 
 They either accepted the religious 
 accounts of the nature of the world, 
 154
 
 The Purpose of Evolution 
 
 of God and of teleology, or they denied 
 any teleology, or any purpose or First 
 Cause at all, not because they would 
 not see it, but because they daren't 
 see it. 
 
 It is as foolish to deny or refuse to 
 see the purpose in life, as scientific 
 men do, as to attribute that purpose 
 to some imaginary God, or Devil, or 
 both, residing in some imaginary Heaven 
 or Hell, as the Churches do. In either 
 case, the cause is blindness, a blindness 
 partly the result of education, partly 
 wilful, and in either case the result is 
 disastrous. 
 
 One basis of any civilization must be 
 the looking forward to, and the helping 
 forward of, a state of things that is in 
 accordance with the purpose of evolu- 
 tion. Either to refuse to see this pur- 
 pose, as scientific men do, or to place 
 this purpose in some place in space, is 
 155
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 simply to deny any base for civilization 
 at all. It is a choice between a material 
 chaos and a religious despair. 
 
 Life demands an objective in the 
 future, and for a true theory of life 
 and conduct that objective must be a 
 true one, or the life you live in pursuing 
 it will be a failure. 
 
 All civilizations have failed because 
 they had no true objective, and because 
 they had no true understanding of 
 humanity and its necessities. They have 
 been blind and they have ill-treated 
 humanity. They have tried to bind it 
 in rigid laws which had no true sanction, 
 because they were framed either on 
 generalizations from the past or imagi- 
 nary revelations. But humanity will 
 not be strangled to death like this, and 
 so it has from time to time thrown off 
 its fetters in sanguinary wars, internal 
 and external. Without this we should 
 156
 
 The Purpose of Evolution 
 
 have died long ago. Wars have saved 
 us. To be able to do without war we 
 must have a true civilization, and for 
 that we must have as a beginning a true 
 view of life and its purpose and a true 
 view of humanity and its needs. We 
 must see the world as it is, and our- 
 selves as we are. 
 
 That is not difficult if you will put 
 all beliefs out of your mind and look 
 the world in the face. In fact up to a 
 certain point it is quite simple and 
 obvious to anyone who cares to look, 
 who wishes to see life clearly and see 
 it whole. 
 
 Look on the world about you and what 
 do you see ? 
 
 You see an infinity of living things, 
 plants, fish, insects, reptiles, birds, animals 
 and man. The variety is so amazing and 
 bewildering, and the detail so confusing, 
 that no general idea is possible. You 
 157
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 * cannot see the wood for the trees.' Retire, 
 however, a httle mentally, go up to some 
 peak where the detail is too far off to 
 be apparent, and you can see more 
 clearly. It is a world of matter instinct 
 with life. 
 
 Further, although when you are close 
 to them, the life of a tree and the life 
 of a man may seem utterly different 
 from this distance, it is not so. The 
 differences are those of elaboration and 
 detail. Life in its essentials is one. 
 There is a difference of degree, an enor- 
 mous difference of degree, but not of 
 kind. Looked at broadly and compre- 
 hensively, there is one great life animating 
 and moving matter in myriads of different 
 ways. Every living thing, from the low- 
 liest fern to man, come into this descrip- 
 tion. They are matter instinct with life ; 
 when the organism dies the matter 
 remains, but the life disappears. 
 158
 
 The Purpose of Evolution 
 
 Again, every living thing begins in 
 the same way. It originates as a tiny 
 speck of protoplasm, which grows by 
 accreting matter to itself and arranging 
 that matter on a system of its own, and 
 then occupying that extension with life. 
 It grows to maturity and old age, the 
 life departs, and the organism again 
 breaks up. 
 
 Life is one, and the world is matter 
 inhabited by life. This is true of all 
 living things, and hence an apparent 
 dualism life and matter. 
 
 It will be understood, I hope, that 
 nowhere as I go am I making decided and 
 final statements about the nature of 
 things. That we have to work out step 
 by step and shall never completely know. 
 I am not, for instance, now asserting that 
 life and matter are two different things. 
 I have, later on, much more to say about 
 them. But in any view of the world, 
 159
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 or, indeed, of tlie simplest thing in the 
 world, you must begin at the beginning 
 with the obvious. There can be no 
 greater folly, though a common folly, 
 than rejecting the obvious because it is 
 not the whole truth. We must take what 
 we see and then try what more we can 
 see to modify our first view. To reject 
 what we see because it may not be the 
 whole truth is simply to stop dead. We 
 must take our steps slowly but surely. 
 
 Life and matter, therefore, appear to 
 be different things, because, though we 
 know nothing of life apart from matter, 
 we do know matter a man's corpse 
 apart from the life which animated it. 
 Viewing the world as a whole, you do not 
 note the individual, but only the mass of 
 animated nature wherein life is con- 
 tinuous, transforming and animating 
 matter ; but, nevertheless, they seem 
 
 to be separable, or at least different. 
 i6o
 
 The Purpose of Evolution 
 
 Let us take it for the present that they 
 are different, and consider each as far as 
 we can. 
 
 What does Hfe consist of ? Is it 
 divisible ? 
 
 It certainly is divisible. Life consists 
 of emotions. Every activity of life is 
 the exhibition of an emotion. There are 
 a great many emotions. They are always 
 in pairs, for the positive could not exist 
 without the negative. 
 
 Take, for instance, the simplest form 
 
 of life we know, the protoplasm of a seed, 
 
 whether of plant or insect, fish or animal ; 
 
 what is its first sign of life ? It attracts to 
 
 itself food and absorbs it ; that is to say, it 
 
 grows. That is an elementary form of 
 
 the emotion of love which is attraction and 
 
 absorption. It does not, however, absorb 
 
 everything about it, but only what it needs. 
 
 The unsuitable material is rejected. That 
 
 is hate, which is division from and rejec- 
 i6i II
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 tion. Again, as it grows it eliminates 
 effete matter, and that again is hate. 
 Both emotions are necessary to growth. 
 
 This is, of course, a very primitive 
 condition of love and hate, which later 
 become manifested in more complicated 
 forms. More emotions, too, become mani- 
 fest in action, and in the highest organism 
 there are very many. Some of these are 
 hope and fear, patience and revolt, sorrow 
 and joy, sense of beauty and ugliness, 
 harmony and discord, desire for change 
 and fear of change, and many others, 
 and as life grows higher, these emotions 
 are keener and more varied. 
 
 Life, then, consists of emotions. What 
 is the nature of an emotion ? 
 
 It is like the natural forces in that it 
 is a-moral. Gravity draws down the stone 
 tower whose foundations have given quite 
 irrespective of whether it kills men stand- 
 ing below or not. The lightning strikes 
 162
 
 The Purpose of Evolution 
 
 according to the laws that govern it, which 
 are not concerned with any human right 
 or wrong. 
 
 In the same way the emotions either 
 are awakened and react to stimulus, like 
 pity, or they slowly accumulate, like 
 hunger or desire, till they can satisfy 
 themselves with appropriate relief. In 
 either case they are a-moral. A hungry 
 man's appetite is not less excited by the 
 appearance of food because the food may 
 not be his to eat, and desire is not de- 
 creased by the fact that its only outlet 
 may be " unlawful." 
 
 A man may restrain the satisfaction of 
 emotions and so die partly or completely, 
 but he cannot create or destroy an 
 emotion at will. They exist indepen- 
 dently of his will, and they are not 
 subject to any morality. 
 
 All organisms are not only created and 
 
 built up by emotions, but their only 
 163 II*
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 purpose is to give expression to the 
 emotions. All phenomena of life are the 
 exhibition of emotions. Everything you 
 do or suffer is the result of one or many 
 emotions. 
 
 Further, these emotions are universal 
 and the same everywhere. There is no 
 difference in kind between the love mani- 
 fested by " flower feeling after flower " 
 and male pursuing female. The mani- 
 festation takes different forms according 
 to the organism in which it is exhibited, 
 but it is the same emotion. 
 
 As an analogy to help you to see this 
 take electricity. With the electricity laid 
 on to your house you can light a lamp, 
 turn a machine, cook a meal. It is the 
 same electricity, and its manifestation is 
 varied by the machine it passes through. 
 Again, the electricity we have here and 
 that they have in Russia, France, Aus- 
 tralia are the same. The generating 
 164
 
 The Purpose of Evolution 
 
 plant may differ ; the quantity, the 
 methods of manifestation and their effi- 
 ciency may differ, and do differ, from 
 place to place. But no one asserts that 
 the electricity in one place or one lamp 
 or one train is different from that else- 
 where. Electricity is a thing in itself, 
 like light, heat, and so on. We look at 
 it in broad terms apart from its mani- 
 festation. 
 
 It is the same with the emotions. As 
 we say that the energy in the world is 
 composed of light, heat, electricity and 
 others, so we can say that life is com- 
 posed of the emotions. They are uni- 
 versal, impersonal and a-moral, just as 
 are the energies. Living nature is matter 
 built up into organisms and animated 
 by emotions, and all life is the manifesta- 
 tion of emotion in matter. 
 
 Now, of course, this is not all that we 
 can see at first sight even about life. 
 165
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 The principal and controUing influence has 
 as yet not been mentioned. But it will 
 be more convenient, for the moment, to 
 turn from life to matter and see what 
 we can see in that. The phenomena of 
 Nature are caused by emotions working 
 in matter. What is matter ? 
 
 Let us begin at the beginning that is 
 to say, with that which is nearest to us, 
 namely, our bodies and see what they 
 are composed of. 
 
 They are made up from the food we 
 eat and the liquid we drink, together with 
 what we absorb from the air. What we 
 eat is the flesh of animals or plants, and 
 what we drink besides water is the juice 
 of plants. The flesh we eat was made 
 out of plants, so that either in the first 
 or second remove our flesh is made from 
 plants and water. There may be a little 
 mineral, such as salt. 
 
 But this flesh of plants was made 
 i66
 
 The Purpose of Evolution 
 
 by the plant out of either the remains 
 of former plants, mould, or the detritus 
 of rocks, and what is absorbed from the 
 air. 
 
 So that eventually you get back to 
 this ^that all living matter is formed out 
 of air, water and rocks. The rocks again 
 can be analysed, and you finally come 
 to this ^that all the innumerable varieties 
 of matter, living or dead, are composed 
 of a very few elements. I say " finally," 
 because that is as far as we have proved ; 
 but there is, and there has always been, 
 a conviction that when we really get back 
 to the beginning, we shall find only one 
 original form of matter, and that all 
 the varieties we see were formed out of 
 that. 
 
 How formed ? What is there in matter 
 besides matter that gives it so many 
 different forms and qualities ? It is life 
 of sojne sort. 
 
 167
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 For consider this to begin with. There 
 is inherent in all matter whatever a force 
 we call gravity. No matter is without 
 it. And what is gravity but attraction, 
 and attraction but love, the simplest 
 form of love. Now love is an elementary 
 form of life. It is not an energy, and 
 has nothing in common with what we 
 call energies. It is love, and that is 
 what is inherent in all matter, and holds 
 the world together. Were matter life- 
 less the world would dissipate itself 
 through space in cosmic dust, and no 
 progress be possible. All matter, there- 
 fore, is imbued with this elementary form 
 of life, and it seems probable that every 
 advance in variety of matter is caused 
 by the addition to it of more life. Life 
 that is, emotion is imprisoned to a 
 greater or less extent in all matter, and 
 the higher the matter the stronger the 
 
 life. The qualities of steel, for instance, 
 
 i68
 
 The Purpose of Evolution 
 
 its sharpness, its ductihty, are due to the 
 kind of Hfe that holds its particles to- 
 gether. Chalk was made by minute sea 
 creatures, and can be made in no other 
 way. Yet its components are universal. 
 What could those things have put into 
 their shells but life ? And as you pro- 
 gress up the scale you see the evidence 
 accumulate. Have you ever seen a salt 
 crystallize ? That is life of a sort ; it 
 is growth of a lower degree than with 
 the spore and the fern, but still life, 
 acting on a known design. And time 
 will not destroy or lessen this life. If, 
 however, the salt be treated in a certain 
 way by heat, it loses one part of its life. 
 It can no longer crystallize. What be- 
 comes of the life the salt has lost ? No 
 one knows. It cannot be destroyed ; 
 nothing can be taken from, or added to, 
 the universe. What, then, becomes of 
 
 it ? Well, try this next experiment, and 
 169
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 see if it does not give you food for 
 thought. I observed it once by accident, 
 but have since repeated it many times. 
 Sometimes it fails, I don't yet know why. 
 I think because the coal was different. 
 
 Coal is, as we know, the fossil remains 
 of forests composed, not of trees like ours, 
 but of mosses, ferns, and other crypto- 
 gameous plants. The plants died millions 
 of years ago. 
 
 Take a small quantity of suitable coal, 
 and with paper and sticks build a small 
 fire in a grate that has an overhanging 
 fire-brick back, such as are common 
 nowadays. The back should be clean 
 and red. As soon as the fire begins to 
 smoke, watch the firebrick back. You 
 will see at first the smoke drift over it 
 without catching. Then a particle of 
 soot will catch, and suddenly from this 
 centre a fern will grow. It grows very 
 rapidly, and in appearance exactly like 
 170
 
 The Purpose of Evolution 
 
 a creeping moss with leaves and joints. 
 It sends out branches, it clings to the 
 brick with roots, it creeps about the 
 brick back, avoiding excrescences exactly 
 as a fern does. Other neighbouring 
 plants meet it ; they overgrow each other, 
 and in a short time the back is covered 
 with what we call flocculent soot, but 
 which is really composed of ferns grown 
 up out of the refuse of the coal. 
 
 What is the explanation of this ? The 
 full explanation I don't know, but it 
 looks as if the life imprisoned in the coal 
 millions of years ago had been liberated 
 by the fire, but again set to work to 
 build up a semblance of its former shape 
 from the only material available to it, 
 the carbon in the smoke. 
 
 However that may be, it is life that 
 
 builds up those soot ferns, life and nothing 
 
 else. 
 
 There are innumerable other ways by 
 171
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 which you can see that there is a sort of 
 life in what we are accustomed to call 
 lifeless matter. There is the effect that 
 bromide of potassium has in slackening 
 and ammonia in accelerating the develop- 
 ing of a photographic plate. They have 
 the same effect on the heart-beats. It is 
 life that makes the heart beat ; what else 
 can it be that makes the photographic 
 image appear ? And, in fact, science 
 has recently begun to admit what it 
 knew, and forgot, many thousands of 
 years ago ^that there is no division 
 between organic and inorganic matter. 
 
 All matter, therefore, owes its form and 
 qualities to some kind of life within it. 
 There seem to be infinite gradations of 
 life, from the simplest known form, 
 gravity, up to its most complicated form 
 in man's organism. 
 
 But there is also another way in which 
 
 the life that is in all things can be shown. 
 172
 
 The Purpose of Evolution 
 
 Suppose there were no life in what we 
 call dead matter that is, in the rocks, 
 the air, the water, the sun, the moon, 
 in fact, in all and every part of our 
 universe. Suppose it were, as it was 
 commonly conceived to be, inert matter 
 controlled by energies alone, could it 
 exist ? Certainly it could not. The in- 
 variable attributes of energy are that it 
 acts equally all round, and that it dissi- 
 pates itself. Energies alone could achieve 
 nothing, even if we suppose they had been 
 created in full force at some remote time 
 or other. And they would have rapidly 
 dissipated themselves, so that the world 
 would be without energy, without heat 
 or light or movement at all. Yet that 
 is not so. Even what we call the inor- 
 ganic world shows no sign of gradual 
 death. After innumerable ages the sun 
 still shines, the water flows, the seas are 
 not stagnant. What keeps the energies 
 173
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 from dissipation but life in some way we 
 do not understand yet. 
 
 There are only two things that are 
 eternal. The cosmic dust, out of which 
 all matter was formed, and the innumer- 
 able grades and degrees and qualities 
 of life that have built up this cosmic dust 
 into the forms of matter as we see it. 
 
 As to energies, they are not eternal. 
 They are continually being created, and 
 they die very rapidly, dissipating them- 
 selves. What captures and reconcen- 
 trates them is life. An instance everyone 
 can see of this is in coal, the same coal 
 that I spoke of a while ago. When you 
 burnt it the coal liberated heat. Where 
 did this heat come from ? The sun, 
 millions of years ago. What was it 
 captured and held that heat till now ? 
 The life in the plant. So it is with all 
 things. They are instinct with life or 
 they could not exist. 
 174
 
 The Purpose of Evolution 
 
 Therefore, our first view that life and 
 matter were two distinct things is now 
 modified. Emotion and matter do not 
 seem to be separable. In fact, matter 
 depends for its existence, for its form 
 and qualities, on the life that it contains. 
 Therefore, our first generalization that 
 life and matter are different seems to be 
 too sweeping. That must not, however, 
 blind us to what we observed first. 
 Generally speaking, though life and matter 
 are inseparable, yet there seem to be 
 higher forms of life, or higher manifesta- 
 tions of life, that are separable. When a 
 man is dead something has left his body. 
 The emotions no longer function. Even 
 granted that the capacity for function 
 still remains in the body, something which 
 instigated and controlled those functions, 
 those emotions, has gone. That is plainly 
 visible to our eyes. What then can it be ? 
 
 175
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 HE PHENOMENA OF LIFE 
 
 12
 
 ET us go back to what we dis- 
 *^ covered about life. We found 
 that life consisted of emotion, that the 
 whole form and functions of living things 
 were the creation of, and the manifesta- 
 tions of, emotions. So far well. 
 
 But we also discovered some other 
 things : that emotions were general forces, 
 that emotions were unintelligent, and 
 that every emotion has its complement. 
 Now what results from this ? Directly 
 we come to consider these as attributes 
 of the emotions, we see that emotions 
 alone, working in matter, could not have 
 produced the forms of life we see. Emo- 
 tions themselves could, in fact, produce 
 nothing. It is not only that they are 
 a-moral, that is to say, with no intelligence 
 179 12*
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 and no objective, but they are contra- 
 dictory. Every emotion has its equal 
 and opposite. Were all the emotions 
 released together, they would simply 
 neutralize each other, and there would 
 be no life. The phenomena of life result 
 from the action and reaction of emotions 
 towards a desired result. Love and hate, 
 fear and joy, anger and sorrow, construc- 
 tion and destruction, and so on, produce the 
 organisms and the phenomena of life by 
 acting each in its appropriate place. They 
 are unintelligent and react to stimuli, but 
 the stimuli are not applied all together. 
 There is, to a certain extent, a selection 
 of the most appropriate at the time for 
 the purpose required. This understand- 
 ing of the object to be achieved and the 
 means of achieving it is not an attribute 
 of the emotions, and must come from 
 elsewhere. 
 
 Again, take this consideration. The 
 
 i8o
 
 The Phenomena of Life 
 
 emotions, which are Hfe, are general. 
 Love in one place does not differ from 
 love in another similar organism. Matter, 
 too, is general. Between one cell and 
 another there is no difference. Yet no 
 living organism was, or is, ever exactly 
 the same as another. No blade of grass 
 is the same as another, no bird exactly 
 like another bird, no man exactly like 
 another man. What is this difference, 
 this personality, due to ? Every living 
 thing has a personality of its own, differ- 
 ing, if even in a very slight degree, from 
 all others. What causes this ? Not the 
 emotions which form life, nor the matter 
 of which it is built, for they are general. 
 There is an intelligence somewhere that 
 does this. Take, for instance, the growth 
 of a plant or an animal from the speck of 
 protoplasm which is its origin ; there is 
 nothing haphazard nor mechanical about 
 
 it. The germplasm knows exactly what 
 
 i8i
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 it is about. It selects its food and builds 
 it up into tissue on a scheme that is per- 
 fectly clear to it. It knows what it 
 wants to achieve, and it does achieve it 
 as far as it can. This can only be the 
 result of intelligence. It will, of course, 
 be understood that I am not speaking of 
 our individual intelligence such as the 
 humble intelligence which writes these 
 words, or the, I hope, brighter intelligence 
 which will not be content with my words, 
 but will try to see the world as it is and 
 judge it for itself. 
 
 We do not make ourselves. We each 
 began to elaborate from a germplasm all 
 this marvellous organism of our bodies 
 long before we had any consciousness, 
 much less intelligence. And when our 
 intelligence did come, it still had but 
 little to do with it. Our hearts beat, 
 hunger comes, suitable food is demanded, 
 eaten, digested, eliminated, with no help 
 182
 
 The Phenomena of Life 
 
 from our consciousness. We get hurt, 
 and the skin heals, not by our intelligence ; 
 we catch a microbe and our temperature 
 rises to kill the intruder not by our design. 
 We know nothing of how these things are 
 done. Doctors can at best observe the 
 stages of processes. They do not know 
 how nor by what all these things are done. 
 They cannot themselves do them. Not 
 one glimpse of knowledge has come to us. 
 We learn by observation that B follows 
 A, and C follows B, but we don't know 
 why. You can see, therefore, for your- 
 self that in the growth and life, and even 
 to the death of any living organism there 
 is an intelligence manifested. And how 
 great an intelligence. Have you looked 
 at even the simplest living thing, a leaf, 
 an insect, a feather, under a microscope, 
 and seen the delicate beauty of the work- 
 manship ? Look at the dust from a 
 moth's wings, or the intricate mechanism 
 183
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 of the human eye, or the shell of a sea- 
 urchin. Even in simple construction, 
 apart from the life in them, they so far 
 excel even the finest human work as to 
 belong to another category altogether. 
 Their beauty, their delicacy, their adapt- 
 ability to the purpose which they fulfil, 
 is not comparable with anything we can 
 do. The difference is too great. 
 
 And these things are living. They 
 have organs which first make emotions 
 as a dynamo does electricity, and then 
 these emotions are turned on and off as 
 is necessary to life. No unintelligent 
 mechanism can do these things. Take 
 the very finest mechanism man has in- 
 vented, a loom, or a battleship, or a 
 motor-car, and you see the difference at 
 once. A machine, no matter what 
 machine, simply repeats an action, simple 
 or elaborate, over and over again. It 
 cannot construct itself, cannot feed itself, 
 184
 
 The Phenomena of Life 
 
 cannot change to meet unforeseen emer- 
 gencies, cannot cure itself, cannot mend 
 itself, cannot produce children. Even 
 for its limited capabilities it must be 
 guided by intelligence. A ship must be 
 steered and lubricated and fed. But 
 living things can do all this, and most of 
 it, the growth and nourishment and 
 reproduction, they do with little or no 
 aid from the active self, often in spite 
 of it, simply by awaking the necessary 
 emotions. 
 
 It is an intelligence that does these 
 things, an intelligence so far above our 
 own that we cannot comprehend it. 
 That need not trouble us. We cannot 
 comprehend our neighbour, for that 
 matter, but we can learn a great deal 
 about him by observing what he does 
 and how he does it and so with this 
 intelligence ; we can know a great deal 
 about it if we like. 
 
 185
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 Let us look back at the history of the 
 world as we know it. I have, of course, 
 no intention of recapitulating the main 
 facts of evolution, so far as they are 
 known, not very much. The reader is no 
 doubt well aware of them. What I want 
 to do is to draw attention to certain facts 
 from which we may make deductions as 
 to this intelligence that we see working in 
 the world. 
 
 In the first place, the mere fact that 
 there has been evolution shows that an 
 intelligence caused it. The energies and 
 the emotions are not teleological, nor is 
 matter. Neither life nor the substance 
 of which its organisms are built have 
 any objective or purpose. Even if in some 
 way they were set a-swinging, they would 
 not progress, but would gradually fall 
 back into immobility, into nothing. That 
 there has been for millions of years a 
 
 steady evolution towards a fixed ob- 
 
 i86
 
 The Phenomena of Life 
 
 jective shows the control of intelHgence. 
 Chance can accompHsh nothing, for chance 
 always equalizes itself in the long run. 
 If one chance propelled an atom one way 
 the next would propel it a different way, 
 until it had been equally propelled in 
 all ways and so be at rest. But the 
 phenomena of life have progressed, and 
 only intelligence could cause that, intelli- 
 gence which knew its purpose. And the 
 intelligence is within the organisms. It 
 could not from without have started an 
 organism as a clock is wound up, and 
 then left it, for even if it went at all, it 
 would then only go as a machine does ; 
 but our organisms do more than this, 
 they change and progress always. There 
 is a mechanism of the body, of course, 
 but the mechanism alone could not do 
 this. A motor-car is a mechanism, but 
 without a driver it could not adapt itself 
 
 even to the simplest curve in a road. On 
 
 187
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 the other hand, the driver would not 
 accomplish much without the car. 
 
 This intelligence, then, is omnipresent 
 in living things ; in fact, it is what 
 causes life. It keeps up, in some way 
 that we have no idea of, that oscillation 
 between extremes which is life. It is 
 in life ; it has always been in life ; it is 
 the cause of life and its maintenance. 
 Did it withdraw itself, the world would 
 disappear into dust. It is the only thing 
 that is self-existent, because it alone 
 creates form. Matter and the emotions 
 are universal and amorphous ; this intel- 
 ligence works them into the forms it 
 requires. Let us now see what more we 
 can learn of it. 
 
 It is an intelligence infinitely beyond 
 our conception, but apparently* it is not 
 
 I say apparently because it certainly is apparent 
 from the facts. But our view of facts and purposes 
 is very limited. 
 
 i88
 
 The Phenomena of Life 
 
 All Wise. As evolution shows, it has 
 not always known how to progress upon 
 its objective ; it has had to make experi- 
 ments and find out by experience the 
 way to go. It has tried this way and 
 that till it found its method. It has 
 taken millions of years to get the world 
 as far as it is, and the world is yet a 
 long way from being a complete success. 
 Neither apparently is it All Mighty. 
 Even when it saw the way, it had to find 
 out how to build up the organisms it 
 needed, and it did this by controlling the 
 emotions. It seems to have no power 
 in itself ; it performs no miracles, but it 
 can in some way control the emotions, so 
 that they within their laws obey it just 
 as electricity within its laws obeys us. It 
 cannot create either matter or emotions, it 
 has to use what are ; but it finds them 
 sufficient, and it finds their laws and limi- 
 tations an advantage and not a drawback. 
 189
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 But it has always had a clear percep- 
 tion of what it wanted to achieve, and 
 a certainty of achieving it. Evolution 
 did not proceed at random. Living or- 
 ganisms do not, as Darwin thought, vary 
 in every direction, they vary towards one 
 general direction, a little this side or that, 
 trying which way is the easiest. And if 
 you look at the course of evolution, you 
 will see quite clearly what this general 
 direction was. It was towards greater 
 variety, greater freedom, finer, stronger 
 and more varied emotions, towards 
 organisms capable of being themselves 
 inhabited by a second intelligence. 
 
 And here I will have to select another 
 
 term for the intelligence working in the 
 
 world, because I must have a distinction 
 
 between this hidden, higher intelligence 
 
 and the intellect of man, or confusion 
 
 may arise. I have, however, to be careful 
 
 about choosing a word that it should no^ 
 190
 
 The Phenomena of Life 
 
 be one that already has a meaning to the 
 reader. If I, for instance, called this 
 intelligence God, their thoughts would 
 immediately fly off to heaven and hell 
 and other imaginings. If I called it the 
 First Cause, I would be again in danger 
 of the reader giving it attributes he has 
 already endowed these words with. I 
 must choose a term that has not so far 
 been degraded by ill-use. I will, there- 
 fore, call it the Atman, which is an 
 Indian term, and in the Upanishads. 
 It will be new to the reader, and therefore 
 not liable to mislead. 
 
 The Atman, therefore, working through 
 the emotions built up all living organisms, 
 but it had no sooner brought the or- 
 ganisms a little way on their road, than 
 it developed in them an intelligence of 
 their own. How this was done we don't 
 know, nor whether this brain intelligence, 
 
 fts I may call it, is really part of the 
 191
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 At man or separate. It appears at present 
 to be quite a separate intelligence and of 
 an inconceivably lower grade. It is really 
 the ego. Nevertheless, it was necessary, or 
 evolution could not have progressed. The 
 vegetable seems to need little of it, but all 
 fauna have it more or less pronounced. 
 
 Its position and powers are interesting. 
 In the lower creatures it has control over 
 the organism in which it lives, but only 
 in certain ways, and it is obviously at first, 
 as it should always be at any time, the 
 servant of the organism. The organism 
 says, " I am hungry ; get me food," and 
 the intelligence uses its power over the 
 organism, makes the legs run, the eyes 
 see, the hands collect, and so obey. 
 The organism says, "I must continue 
 my species ; find a mate," and the 
 intelligence again obeys. It has no other 
 power over the organism than to use it 
 to carry out its commands. 
 192
 
 The Phenomena of Life 
 
 Birds and animals are still in this state. 
 They have intelligence, a very keen in- 
 telligence sometimes, and it is all sub- 
 servient to the necessity of the organism 
 and species. None of the animals or birds 
 seem to be capable of independent thought 
 directed towards altering or improving 
 their condition. They seem quite con- 
 tented and desirous of nothing more. 
 Their intelligence is entirely the servant 
 of the organism ; that is to say, the 
 Atman who controls it. Apparently their 
 evolution has ceased. Since the appear- 
 ance of man in any stage of civilization 
 natural evolution among the flora and 
 fauna seems to have stopped. As far 
 as they are concerned, the Atman has 
 gained its purpose. Such further evolu- 
 tion as has occurred has been the result 
 of man's interference. He has seized on 
 certain animals and plants, and culti- 
 vated them to serve his own needs. The 
 193 13
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 result of his work has been an increase 
 in size, with a decrease in intelligence 
 and constitution. He wants a horse, 
 for instance, to obey him and not to 
 think for itself. It is to be a machine to 
 carry him. A cow is to be a machine to 
 produce calves and milk, a hen to produce 
 eggs. All the necessary thinking is done 
 by man, who provides food and shelter 
 and protection. Plants and animals have, 
 therefore, been degraded by him in every 
 way except mechanical. When he ceases 
 to care for them, they, if they do not dis- 
 appear, revert to their original type, 
 into greater intelligence. But they do 
 not go beyond that. 
 
 Evolution towards the desired purpose 
 has continued only in man, and it has 
 gone some way. Directly we come to 
 man, even to earliest man, we find a con- 
 siderable increase in intelligence. He 
 
 thinks not merely how to satisfy the call 
 194
 
 The Phenomena of Life 
 
 of the emotion, how to obey the Atman, 
 but he thinks, or tries to think, for him- 
 self. He is discontented, which no wild 
 animal ever is, and he wants progress. 
 The purpose of the Atman, which in all 
 lower life is hidden now, comes dimly 
 into his upper intelligence. He becomes 
 conscious of a distinct objective, not what 
 it is, but that there is one. He becomes 
 conscious very dimly of what to do and 
 what not, which is his conscience. His 
 intelligence does not understand these, 
 but is aware of them. It is this that 
 makes him, for instance, reject proverbs ; 
 his own poor intelligence makes them ; the 
 intrusion of the Atman into his conscious- 
 ness makes him reject them. 
 
 For, fortunately his intelligence is still 
 greatly subordinate to the Atman in the 
 organism. He must still obey it in a 
 great many ways, and its demands are 
 always increasing. He must get it food, 
 195 13*
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 clothes, safety, change, a mate, a house, 
 books, music, a motor-car if he can, and 
 so on. All these are demands made, not 
 by the intelligence, but by the organism. 
 They are emotions, like hunger. Some, 
 the most necessary to us, we have little 
 or no control over, fortunately ; others 
 are more under our command. But still, 
 generally speaking, even in the most 
 developed races, some of the demands of 
 the organism are imperative, and all are 
 incentives to progress. They are really, 
 of course, demands of the Atman. 
 
 Thus, you see, that although an intel- 
 ligence has gradually dawned in man and 
 increased, the Atman has not allowed it 
 much power. The Atman still retains 
 command and enforces its will. Whether 
 we consciously will it or not, the Atman 
 forces us still along the path of evolution 
 towards the attainment of its purpose. 
 
 Our organisms still continue to develop 
 
 196
 
 The Phenomena of Life 
 
 towards greater emotional power and 
 greater possibihty of intelhgence, greater 
 freedom, and consequently greater hap- 
 piness. 
 
 This has been done by the Atman, not 
 by us. It has been done by the Atman 
 despite us, generally. As you will see in 
 the later chapters, our civilizations made 
 by our intelligence have been mainly 
 intended to injure our organism, to 
 denounce it as evil, and to strangle it as 
 much as possible. Because no one would 
 look at life to understand it. All civiliza- 
 tions have had as a base false views of 
 life, false views of God, and so in the name 
 of imaginary gods, the product of evil 
 imaginings, they have denied and sought 
 to thwart the true God, the Atman, who 
 is so obvious in this world if we only look 
 at it truly. Hence the necessity of wars 
 to free us again. 
 
 
 
 197
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 Now the value of the view of life given 
 above lies in the fact that each man can 
 see it for himself, and is, therefore, 
 dependent on no priests or other teachers. 
 It is the book of life itself. 
 
 But in case any reader may think at 
 first sight that such a view of life is diffi- 
 cult and is new, I may say that it is 
 neither. It is very simple and easy, so 
 simple and easy, that many thousands of 
 years ago, when men's intellects were 
 not so developed as to-day, a great many 
 people saw it. For instance, all the 
 writers of what are called the sacred books 
 of mankind, the Vedas, the Upanishads, 
 the Zendavesta, the Eddas, the legends 
 in Genesis and many others. 
 
 And in later days, Laotze, Jesus, 
 
 Mahommed, Averroes, Spinoza, Bacon, 
 
 Shakespeare and Goethe, saw the world 
 
 exactly in this way. Wordsworth, too, 
 
 and Shelley, and, in fact, every great 
 198
 
 The Phenomena of Life 
 
 poet, has had ghmpses of it or he would 
 not have been great. 
 
 Everyone who chooses can verify this 
 for himself, and I need not prove it here. 
 I will but give some quotations : 
 
 " The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." Jesus. 
 
 " God is the immanent idea." -Spinoza. 
 
 " He is present in the heart of all things." 
 
 Averroes. 
 
 " The earth is the living garment of God." Goethe. 
 
 " One impulse from a vernal wood 
 Will teach you more of man, 
 Of moral evil and of good 
 Than all the sages can." Wordsworth. 
 
 And if you will think over these quota- 
 tions, you will see that what I say is true. 
 They are a recognition of the Atman in 
 matter. 
 
 199
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE
 
 TVTOW go back to our general view 
 ^ ^ and what do we see ? An intel- 
 ligence that we call the Atman has 
 gradually obtained more and more control 
 over the earth, building it up into a 
 newer and more complicated organism. 
 The work has been done very slowly. 
 Innumerable forms have been created, 
 and when their usefulness had passed, 
 allowed to disappear, only the higher 
 organism remaining. How exactly this 
 was effected we don't know. One method, 
 and probably the most potent, was the 
 struggle for existence the fitter destroy- 
 ing the unfit. It seems as if the Atman 
 took as its test of fitness, or one test of 
 fitness, the power of an organism or 
 genus, or species to maintain itself against 
 203
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 others, and that if it could not do so, 
 it was evidently unfit. That form was, 
 therefore, abandoned and died out, and 
 the intelligence and effort that had grown 
 to it went into new forms, just as when a 
 man discovers a better engine, or a more 
 efficient lamp, he scraps the old. Nothing, 
 of course, is lost. The energy and 
 material go into the new and more effi- 
 cient forms, and, further, even if the 
 organism were in itself suitable, the con- 
 stant struggle was necessary to keep it 
 fit and increase its fitness, or it would 
 soon deteriorate. So did evolution con- 
 tinue until man appeared ; the unfit 
 died and disappeared. 
 
 With man, however, a change came in. 
 In the first place, man's nature differs 
 from that of the lower animals in that he 
 has an intelligence which, like that of the 
 Atman, is dissatisfied with the present 
 and seeks improvement in the future ; 
 204
 
 The Struggle for Existence 
 
 and his evolution has differed so much 
 that, as far as we can see, the struggle 
 for existence between individuals and 
 between races is composed of other 
 considerations besides mere combatant 
 ability. This is manifest in a hundred 
 ways, but the particular point to em- 
 phasize is that combatant ability alone 
 is no longer a test of fitness. As the 
 nature of man is infinitely complicated 
 and has great wants, any quality which 
 ministers to a true want of his nature 
 indicates a fitness quite apart from its 
 ability to fight its way by force. Artists 
 of all kinds are cases in point. More- 
 over, races do not usually tend to dis- 
 appear entirely. I doubt if history 
 records the disappearance of any type of 
 mankind. Conquests, massacre, plagues, 
 never seem to do more than thin out a 
 race, which again revives. 
 
 It is extraordinary how races maintain 
 205
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 themselves. I do not, of course, mean 
 that they remain pure ; probably no 
 race has done that, but that the charac- 
 teristics of a race settled in a certain 
 locality continue against all persecution. 
 Look at the turmoil in Europe, for twenty 
 centuries, ever since it began to settle 
 down after the waves of immigration 
 and migration had passed over it, and 
 how little effect this continual murder, 
 and massacre, and conquest, and stan- 
 dardization has had. Danes, Dutch, 
 Portuguese, Spaniards, and all the others, 
 retain their nationalities subject to 
 evolution. 
 
 It is the same in India. Invaders 
 come and conquer, impose their civiliza- 
 tion, and settle and become absorbed 
 and disappear into the nation. Poles, 
 though divided between Prussia, Austria 
 and Russia, remain Poles ; the Irish have 
 remained Irish. It would seem as if each 
 206
 
 The Struggle for Existence 
 
 race had its place and its use in the world, 
 and that no attempts to destroy it would 
 succeed. That seems to be becoming 
 true of the North American Indians. 
 Nature ^that is, the Atman will maintain 
 his variety. 
 
 The struggle has been, and is, not so 
 much between races as between civiliza- 
 tions. What has succeeded has not been 
 any race, but whichever race at the time 
 had the best idea of life ; and that as 
 long as it held to that idea it did well, 
 and when it abandoned it it failed. 
 There has been no chosen people who 
 were favourites, no matter what they did, 
 and there has been no enduring civiliza- 
 tion, because even where a nation was 
 right at the time, its righteousness seems 
 to have been accidental and soon passed 
 into wrongness again. It had no true 
 foundation for conduct, no test as to 
 
 real right and wrong. ; . 
 
 207
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 I do not know that you could find a 
 more striking instance of this mind- 
 petrification and entire absence of any 
 guide to right judgment than the dis- 
 cussions about the present war. Every 
 nation engaged in it is profoundly con- 
 vinced that it is right, and can, as it 
 declares, prove its righteousness without 
 difficulty. And yet, of course, there is 
 no proof. We do not convince Germany, 
 nor Germany convince us. The neutral 
 nations remain neutral because they also 
 are in doubt. All this is because in 
 matters of war, as in all other matters, 
 there is no standard whatever of right 
 and wrong. Were there such a standard, 
 those who broke it would be convinced 
 of their error, and neutral nations would 
 not remain neutral, but attach them- 
 selves to the right side. There is, how- 
 ever, no such standard, and so every 
 
 nation strives for power or wealth or 
 208
 
 The Struggle for Existence 
 
 both ; that is their only test of right and 
 wrong, and they are surprised that even 
 when they attain their ends they are as 
 unhappy as ever. 
 
 Now civilizations are made by man. 
 They are a product of his intelligence. 
 They are not products of the Atman at 
 all. One would suppose that as soon as 
 man began to see and think, and as soon 
 as he perceived the inevitable purpose 
 in life and the Atman in life, he would 
 have set his intelligence to its end, grasp 
 the purpose of the Atman, and so help 
 the Atman towards his objective. He 
 would realize how incredibly wiser than 
 he the Atman was, and would endeavour 
 to follow his objective ; he would also 
 realize how incredibly more powerful than 
 man the Atman was, and that any con- 
 flict between the two would be absurd, 
 and could only result in disaster to man- 
 kind. He would strive to discover the 
 209 14
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 Atman's will and assist it. And at first 
 so he did apparently. There are hints 
 in the old writings of free communities 
 who certainly to some extent did under- 
 stand the purpose of life and try to attain 
 to it. But they perished very long ago, 
 and the constant ehort of mankind since 
 then has been to build up civilizations 
 which were a denial of the Atman and his 
 purpose in the world. 
 
 Let us consider the two. What are 
 the objectives pursued by the Atman as 
 far as we can see, and what ends has 
 civilization pursued ? 
 
 Now, of course, as to the first we know 
 very little. The purpose of the Atman is, 
 without doubt, much greater and wider 
 than we can see. That need not trouble 
 us. Let us see what we can see for the 
 present, and when we can see that we 
 shall be able, later, to see more. 
 
 What, then, has been the trend of 
 
 210
 
 The Struggle for Existence 
 
 evolution from the beginning ? It has 
 been towards the production of even 
 more complicated organisms and mons 
 variety of organisms attaining even a 
 greater emotional capacity and a greater 
 intellectual capacity. This is not only 
 manifested in evolution up to the appear- 
 ance of man, but in the evolution of 
 mankind itself. There has been a con- 
 tinual production of new types of men, 
 by the mixture of people due to migration 
 and to the influence of new sects and 
 climates. The inhabitants of even a little 
 island like ours tend naturally to differ, 
 county and county, and even in divisions 
 of countries. There is a great difference 
 between a Northumbrian and an Essex 
 man, between a man of Kent and a 
 Comishman. Each develops qualities of 
 body and mind the other lacks. And so 
 it is all over the world. Even within 
 these divisions individuals differ more and 
 211 14*
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 more. The difference between one wild 
 animal and another of the same species 
 is small compared to the difference 
 between individual man and man. 
 
 In the same way emotional power is 
 seen to increase steadily, and with it 
 brain-power and ability, for the two are 
 intimately connected. Early man was, 
 by his weakness, much under the domina- 
 tion of the natural forces, but with 
 increased ability he has acquired dominion 
 over them, and, therefore, greater freedom 
 from hunger, danger and disease and 
 death. 
 
 With the increase of his brain he has 
 also acquired the capacity for greater 
 freedom, because he is more capable of 
 judging for himself. He has also acquired 
 ability to feed his emotions, the higher 
 as well as the lower, his love of beauty as 
 well as his desire for food and children. 
 His emotions, whilst becoming keener, 
 
 212
 
 The Struggle for Existence 
 
 have become more varied and more 
 compHcated. 
 
 Love, for instance, which first is shown 
 as physical attraction alone, afterwards, 
 while retaining this as the necessary base, 
 adds thereto innumerable finer com- 
 plementary emotions. All these emotions 
 tend to the increase and variety of life 
 and they must be satisfied, in reason, or 
 atrophy. 
 
 Further, in every race and every 
 individual the emotions differ. There are 
 no two races alike, nor any two individuals 
 absolutely alike in their emotional needs. 
 There is variety again. 
 
 If you will look at mankind as far as 
 we can understand it, from the histories 
 of, say, three thousand years ago, and 
 the state of mankind now, you will see 
 very closely the process of evolution and 
 the great progress that has been made 
 towards these three objectives. There 
 213
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 can be no doubt that variety, freedom 
 aiiil ability, are three of the objectives 
 pursued by the Atman. And if you 
 wonder why it should be these three, 
 the answer is, simply, that these constitute 
 happiness. To be able to see the right 
 thing to do for yourself, to have the 
 freedom to attempt it, to have the ability 
 to succeed more or less in your endeavour, 
 because you have a nature so emotional 
 and yet so under control as to give you 
 power, do constitute happiness. There 
 is no other definition of happiness that 
 will stand compared with this. 
 
 Further, continual variety and change 
 are necessary to happiness, because did 
 mankind become standardized, all novelty 
 in life would be lost for all of us. 
 If every man was the same as every 
 other man and every woman the same as 
 every other woman, we should have 
 fallen to the level of automata, and 
 214
 
 The Struggle for Existence 
 
 all necessity for judgment would be 
 gone. 
 
 Further, it is manifest in this evolution 
 that though it is, looking at it in one 
 sense, a continual fight wherein every 
 man is enemy to every other man, the 
 opposite is equally true that every man 
 is necessary to every other man. 
 
 This is true also of the lower animals 
 and of plant life. The victory of one 
 plant over the rest of the vegetation would 
 be disastrous to the victor himself; if 
 carnivorous animals destroyed all the 
 species on which they prey, they, too, 
 would die ; and were all carnivorous 
 beasts destroyed, the species on which 
 they used to prey would deteriorate 
 owing to want of impulse to effort. Each 
 and every living thing is at once the 
 enemy and the friend of all others. 
 
 To return to our simile of a cricket 
 match, our opponents are also our friends. 
 215
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 It is as necessary for your happiness as 
 theirs that they play well and are happy. 
 We want a worthy opponent, or the game 
 is not worth playing. 
 
 Such are the objectives of the Atman, 
 to increase our happiness by increasing 
 our ability, our variety and our freedom. 
 
 What has the intellect of man in his 
 civilization sought to do ? I know of no 
 civilization that has even theoretically 
 pursued any one of them, let alone all 
 three ; and yet you cannot have one 
 without the other two. I know of no 
 teacher of civilization, of no kings, nor 
 statesmen, nor religions, that have ever 
 seen the necessity for them. Civilization 
 has sought after very different things. 
 
 Let us take the civilization of Athens. 
 
 What were the ruling principles of its 
 
 short brilliancy ? Well, in the beginning 
 
 a certain liberty was one of them, as it 
 
 has been of every state that has succeeded 
 216
 
 The Struggle for Existence 
 
 at all. But it was only political liberty 
 that is to say, liberty to frame their own 
 constitution and it was a liberty that 
 extended only to part of the population, 
 many of whom were slaves. And having 
 attained the political liberty, they used 
 it not to enable freedom to increase and 
 extend to all men and in all things, but 
 they framed a new slavery of laws and 
 religious observances for themselves, and 
 a political slavery for their neighbours. 
 
 They, like all nations since, found life 
 subject to their laws and conventions too 
 narrow for their natures, and so they 
 sought relief in war and in the subjection 
 of other peoples. They cramped indivi- 
 dual freedom in order to support the 
 State, and they used the strength of 
 the State, not in increasing liberty and 
 variety abroad, but in reducing free cities 
 to be vassal states, and trying to stan- 
 dardize them after the Athenian model. 
 217
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 They dishked free thought at home, and 
 so destroyed Socrates, the wisest of their 
 philosophers, and they drove Alcibiades 
 into rebelhon because he had neglected 
 some religious rite. So they fell. 
 
 The history of Rome and her civiliza- 
 tion has already been mentioned. There 
 very similar things happened. Her first 
 and, indeed, main principle was the rule 
 of the Senate over Rome, and the rule 
 of Rome over the world. If she could, 
 she would never have allowed the people 
 any power or voice, because, as she said, 
 they were too ignorant to have a voice. 
 Therefore, they must remain in subjection. 
 The idea of educating the people to take 
 an intelligent interest in the State never 
 occurred to them. Had it occurred to 
 them, they would have rejected it. The 
 desire of the Senate was not freedom, nor 
 variety, nor intelligence, but power. They 
 
 thought power gave happiness, and found 
 
 218
 
 The Struggle for Existence 
 
 it does not. They extended their rule 
 
 out of sheer despair of finding any other 
 
 way of moving their energies, and when 
 
 nothing remained to conquer, they were 
 
 in despair. Their empire flourished at 
 
 first, because the Roman rule gave to 
 
 the conquered a personal freedom their 
 
 own debased tyrannies did not give. 
 
 But that was merely temporary. Rome 
 
 tried to standardize the world, to kill 
 
 variety and freedom and all intelligence 
 
 and views of life save its own, and 
 
 fell. 
 
 Take, again, the French Revolution. 
 
 It was a revolt from the deadly slaveries 
 
 of king, nobles and priests, who stilted 
 
 and destroyed the country. Its principles 
 
 were Liberty and Equality, Fraternity, 
 
 good things in themselves, but not the 
 
 true objective. You cannot have freedom 
 
 without the intelligence to rightly use 
 
 that freedom, and the intelligence was 
 219
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 wanting. It was wanting even in the 
 leaders who had so Httle idea at all of 
 the needs of humanity ; it was still more 
 wanting in the mass. You cannot take 
 a people educated in slavery and give it 
 freedom at once, because, not knowing 
 how to use that freedom, it simply 
 achieves anarchy, as France did. 
 
 Fraternity is true, and is an admirable 
 sentiment in place, but it must be 
 reciprocal and have some meaning and 
 objective. The French soon found that 
 the Austrians' idea of fraternity with 
 France was to subject it. Now you can't 
 have fraternity with people who are 
 pursuing aims disastrous to you. 
 
 And what is equality ? There is a true 
 equality. Did the French know wherein 
 it consisted ? Is it equality, for instance, 
 to allow, as they did at one time, any 
 mob of ignorant people to rule the State ? 
 Therefore, the French Revolution in great 
 
 220
 
 The Struggle for Existence 
 
 part failed. It welcomed Napoleon as its 
 master, and he, with France, sought to 
 enslave the world. He had exactly the 
 same motives that every other people 
 have had in grasping for power, because 
 he saw no other way of employing his 
 energies. Life at home was too dull, 
 flat, and unprofitable to be worth living. 
 
 And our civilizations of to-day, what 
 objectives have they ? Peace and wealth 
 are all that I have ever heard of. Free- 
 dom is quite forgotten. The aim of all 
 civilizations I know is to bind men more 
 and more in laws and conventions, and 
 so reduce freedom as much as possible. 
 All the great resources of our material 
 progress and of our organization are 
 devoted to the imposition of absolute 
 rules of life, to the standardization of 
 humanity. Take a few instances at 
 random. A hundred years ago each 
 locality had its own speech and its own 
 
 221
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 dress. The dialect was good because 
 pithy and expressive of the ideas of 
 the people ; the dress was distinctive 
 and picturesque. Nowadays all this is 
 swept away. Speech and dress is stan- 
 dardized and so becomes representative 
 of nothing. It will be understood that 
 I do not mean that old-fashioned dresses 
 and dialects should have been preserved, 
 but that they should have been allowed 
 to evolve in their own way. But they 
 have been killed. 
 
 Intellect, too, has been standardized 
 as much as possible by the system of 
 education ; all originality has been killed. 
 It is as much as a man's reputation and 
 happiness are worth to disagree with 
 accepted shibboleths. 
 
 The relative life of the sexes has been 
 standardized. Every man or woman 
 must either accept one of the other sex 
 for life, an impossibility to many natures 
 
 222
 
 The Struggle for Existence 
 
 of men and women, or entirely remain 
 without any of the stimulus of sex 
 attractions. And because even so nature 
 cannot be standardized, illegitimate 
 children are denied every consideration 
 as human beings, and so are often driven 
 into crime and nearly always into despair. 
 The tendency is the same as regards 
 alcohol. Because a few abuse it, gener- 
 ally owing simply to the want of any 
 other and better emotional stimulant, 
 the majority who know when to use and 
 when to refrain are punished and harried 
 towards a forced abstinence. The educa- 
 tion of the individual to enable and help 
 him to make what his constitution finds 
 to be a right and proper use of alcohol 
 is never thought of, never has been 
 thought of. Freedom is the last thought 
 of every modern civilization. Its cry is 
 always prohibition, punishment, force, 
 standardization, until life is unendurable, 
 223
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 The ideal of all civilizations has been 
 wealth and power, and the methods of all 
 civilization that we have known have 
 been the same that underlies a prison or 
 a reformatory. Human nature is weak 
 if not evil, and the only way to manage 
 it is to withdraw its freedom as much 
 as possible, and keep it in servitude to 
 castes or classes or " leaders," who rule 
 it according to fixed laws which the whole 
 people must obey. The strongest instance 
 of this in modern life is Germany, where 
 each and all of the people must be born, 
 be educated, be doctored, be insured, 
 light their fires, be married, order their 
 households, die and be buried, on fixed 
 and absolute lines. But although Ger- 
 man Kultur has carried out this ideal 
 with more method than elsewhere, the 
 principles are the same everywhere. All 
 civilizations are a denial of freedom, 
 
 variety, and intelligence, and so little do 
 
 224
 
 The Struggle for Existence 
 
 people know what objective to aim at, 
 that, when they revolt against tyrannies, 
 their one thought is not to aim at freedom, 
 but to substitute a new tyranny for the 
 old one. Thus an autocracy is replaced 
 by an aristocracy, that by a bourgeoisie, 
 that by an ochlocracy, and then gener- 
 ally da capo. Women dissatisfied, and 
 rightly dissatisfied, with their position and 
 the relationship of the sexes, never think 
 of studying what it really is they desire 
 and that their sex fits them for ; never 
 consider in what their happiness may 
 lie, but strive to replace what they call 
 man's tyranny over women by women's 
 tyranny over men. They think, as do 
 all people, that progress is to be obtained 
 by changing masters, by still more 
 abridging freedom and denying nature. 
 And people think this because all their 
 education makes them think it. From 
 the time they are babies they are taught 
 225 15
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 1^ despise life, to obey not because a 
 reasonable obedience is good for them- 
 selves, but because obedience is a duty. 
 They are taught to have fixed principles 
 on all matters which they must never 
 change, or they will become unprincipled. 
 A child educated as a Radical, Tory, 
 Home Ruler, Ulsterman, or the rest, must 
 to remain till he die. To allow your 
 mind to remain open is a crime. It must 
 be shut, banged and barred, or you will 
 be a traitor isand be ostracized. 
 
 From Children all classes above the 
 lowest have it dinned into them that to 
 be respectable they must have certain 
 prejudices. Their minds must be 
 atrophied, so that in most matters the 
 only people who really retain free will 
 to form their own opinions and adapt 
 them to circumstances are the unedu- 
 cated, who rule the state by fluctuating 
 
 from side to side as they think thei^ 
 226
 
 The Struggle for Existence 
 
 interest demands. They keep the state 
 ahve, otherwise it would be a petrifica- 
 tion. And unfortunately their power is 
 small ; it is only to choose between 
 Codlin and Short. Now less than ever 
 are freedom, intelligence, variety culti- 
 vated, and so nature revolts into the most 
 terrible war ever known. It is the only 
 relief. 
 
 Man does not attain happiness because 
 he does not pursue happiness ; he pursues 
 slavery and misery, and naturally attains 
 it. 
 
 227 15*
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE OBJECTIVES OF CIVILIZATION
 
 IF, therefore, we are to do without war, 
 * we must have civihzations that are 
 in accordance with the demands of our 
 natures, that do not cramp them nor 
 deny them, but which work gradually 
 and wisely towards the same end as 
 evolution does : greater intelligence, greater 
 freedom and greater variety. They must 
 be civilizations which, within just and 
 proper limits, allow us to develop our 
 faculties and all our emotions, not nation- 
 ally only, but individually. Our objec- 
 tive must not be power, nor wealth, but 
 happiness ; and, as I have already said, 
 happiness whether of the individual or 
 the nation, consists in ever-increasing 
 emotional capacity, which is power, and 
 of intelligence and freedom to rightly use 
 the particular qualities with which we 
 231
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 are born. These alone are happiness, 
 these alone are righteousness, because 
 in accordance with the will of the Atman ; 
 these alone can succeed. 
 
 How very far we are from any such 
 civilization. 
 
 For consider : what objectives have 
 our civilizations ever had ? I think you 
 will find it hard to show that, taking the 
 people as a whole, there ever was a 
 clearly defined and permanent objective 
 at all. There have been temporary 
 objectives usually connected with war. 
 The objective of France for the last forty 
 years has been to make herself strong 
 enough to defend herself against Ger- 
 many ; the objective of Germany has 
 been to so strengthen herself as to be 
 able to grasp at universal empire. The 
 aim of Italy has been to consolidate 
 herself into a nation and make conquests 
 in Africa. The aim of Great Britain a 
 hundred years ago was to fight France 
 232
 
 The Objectives of Civilization 
 
 and acquire empire, then to recover from 
 the strain, and for the last eighty years 
 simply to have peace and wax rich. If 
 you will look to the various reports and 
 estimates of our Colonies and of other 
 countries, their prosperity and happiness 
 has been gauged by their trade, their 
 exports, and imports, and so on. Even 
 social legislation is always directed to the 
 same point money, and any and every 
 bond placed on freedom has been con- 
 sidered justified if it resulted in a little 
 extra money. The deadly industrialism 
 of so many countries, which is, in fact, 
 for many of the workers a complete 
 slavery, is justified as necessary to the 
 production of wealth. And religion in 
 its place assisted this procedure by tell- 
 ing the workers that this life was but 
 a passing show, and if they submitted 
 patiently to the yokes of industrialism 
 and the churches they would be all right 
 when they were dead. 
 233
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 That material comfort, even could it 
 be obtained, would not bring happiness 
 was ignored, and it cannot be so obtained. 
 A rise in the material condition of all can 
 only be obtained through freedom for all 
 and happiness for all. The wealth that 
 has been accumulated has been that of a 
 few, and destitution has increased, not 
 decreased. The bulk of the nation is 
 cramped in all its development. 
 
 A very strong instance of this is seen 
 at this very moment as regards recruiting 
 for the war. 
 
 There are inherent in our childhood's 
 nature, when it is born, two very notable 
 qualities : the delight in fighting for a 
 good cause, and the intense joy of self- 
 sacrifice for a good cause ; that is to say, 
 a cause the individual himself or herself 
 sees is good. 
 
 At the present moment our national 
 existence is at stake, the inviolability of 
 oiu: country, our homes |; there is a 
 234
 
 The Objectives of Civilization 
 
 deadly threat to our freedom. In such 
 a case the normal young man, he in 
 whom these emotions had not been 
 destroyed, would not have to be asked to 
 join the colours, but would have to be 
 forcibly kept away from them lest the 
 country be drained of men. He would 
 delight in such an opportunity of exer- 
 cising the two emotions which cause the 
 greatest pleasure. Government would 
 have to reject and expel, not urge. It 
 would make a favour of taking a man. 
 
 But what has happened ? Well, per- 
 haps one-fifth of the young men who have 
 answered are more or less normal in this 
 particular, and the rest are not, so that 
 they have to be more or less forced to 
 volunteer. It is necessary to replace the 
 stifled emotion by urging or even forcing 
 men into the ranks, because their nature 
 has been so dwarfed and cramped by our 
 civilization that the emotional power 
 within them is wanting. And they are 
 235
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 blamed, whereas the blame is not with 
 them at all, but with the civilization 
 which made them what they are. 
 
 But it must not be supposed that we 
 are worse than most nations in this way ; 
 probably we are much better, and that no 
 other country could have shown such a 
 proportion. 
 
 So as a nation at war do we pay bitterly 
 for our civilization. 
 
 Again, consider another point. 
 
 As far as we are concerned, what 
 brought us into the present war ? And, 
 being in it, what makes our difficulty in 
 ending it satisfactorily and rapidly with 
 the minimum of suffering ? Our unpre- 
 paredness for war. And what was the 
 cause of that ? 
 
 It certainly was not that most of the 
 statesmen on both sides, and, indeed, the 
 greater bulk of the richer classes did not 
 know of the danger that threatened us. 
 That has been a commonplace for many 
 236
 
 The Objectives of Civilization 
 
 years, and even the occasional denials 
 did not sound more than half-hearted. 
 It was that the nation could not be 
 brought to face the truth, and that states- 
 men on both sides, though aware of our 
 great danger, dare not prepare for it 
 because the country would have refused 
 the means. We all know that. 
 
 And why would the country at large 
 refuse the means to maintain its freedom ? 
 Partly because to the great masses of the 
 people it did not seem that there was any 
 freedom to protect, partly because they 
 were too stupid to see the danger, and 
 partly because they were afraid that such 
 a state of preparedness as would ensure 
 our protection against Germany would 
 mean our surrender of what freedom we 
 had to a militarism that might rival or 
 exceed that of Germany itself. And, in 
 fact, these fears and thoughts were not 
 imaginary, but real. Our civilization has 
 never aimed at freedom, nor does it now. 
 237
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 We have seen in England in the last 
 century a great many changes, but they 
 have been mainly changes in masters and 
 methods not approaches to freedom. 
 Would anyone say that the ordinary 
 working man to-day was more free than 
 a hundred years ago ? Then he was 
 subject to an aristocracy, now he is 
 subject to an iron industrial system. 
 Materially he has benefited by the 
 advances of science, but in freedom to 
 develop in his own way he has not 
 advanced. Maybe he has retrograded. 
 Think of how the bulk of the people live 
 in rows on rows of dwellings all the same 
 pattern, doing every day the same mono- 
 tonous work, with the same monotonous 
 amusements, bound in every direction 
 by laws and conventions. Think of their 
 drab, grey lives, without any outlook at 
 all towards freedom. And as bad are the 
 lives of the middle classes and all but 
 the very rich. What pleasure have the 
 238
 
 The Objectives of Civilization 
 
 bulk of the people in life to make it worth 
 defending at heavy cost ? Power was 
 theoretically descending to the working 
 classes, but it was in theory only. They 
 could change their masters, they could 
 not change their lives ; and whichever 
 master they took promised them only 
 more money or more power, not more 
 freedom nor more happiness. They had 
 no real control over the State. Whatever 
 party they put in power made little differ- 
 ence to them ; there was only an increase 
 of laws and prohibitions. Why should 
 they surrender what little freedom they 
 had left in order to rivet about their necks 
 a militarism which, however it might 
 protect them against one slavery, did so 
 at the price of another ? 
 
 True, the foreign danger might be the 
 worse, but they had not been so educated 
 as to be able to appreciate this foreign 
 danger, its severity or its imminence. 
 The talk of danger might be merely 
 239
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 blague to get them to agree to a mihtarism 
 which would be a slavery. It was so in 
 Germany. 
 
 So they would not agree, and the 
 party who had suggested any great exten- 
 sion of military service would have dis- 
 appeared at the polls. They all knew 
 that. A proper military preparation 
 could have only proceeded from a people 
 which was absolutely convinced of its 
 necessity, which had a freedom and a 
 prospect of ever increasing freedom worth 
 defending, and which was absolutely sure 
 that a great army so created would never 
 be used to abridge its home freedom, or 
 lead it into adventures abroad of which 
 it did not approve. 
 
 But none of these conditions existed, 
 because our civilization has never pursued 
 these ideals. 
 
 And even now, when we are involved 
 in a war for existence, only a small part 
 of the nation is capable of realizing it or 
 240
 
 The Objectives of Civilization 
 
 willing to suffer to maintain its freedom. 
 The onus is thrown upon a comparatively 
 small section a section that embraces 
 all classes, be it said who, unless com- 
 pulsion be resorted to, must fight for the 
 whole country. 
 
 And the same is to be said about all 
 countries. There is in no country in the 
 world such a condition of freedom and 
 intelligence that the universal manhood 
 will intelligently see danger coming, will 
 prepare for it voluntarily and gladly, 
 certain that the preparation and readiness 
 will increase its home freedom and not 
 abridge it. 
 
 Take another case in point, the Irish 
 Question, in abeyance just now, but 
 which will have to be settled some time 
 or another by civil war or otherwise. 
 What is the difficulty ? 
 
 Well, the difficulty is this, that Great 
 Britain ruled Ireland for some hundreds 
 of years, and spent all that time trying 
 241 16
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 to turn Irishmen into English and Pro- 
 testants. They were bulHed, harried, per- 
 secuted, to become what they could not 
 possibly become, people of another race, 
 so now they demand to rule themselves 
 and the majority of Great Britain agrees, 
 but Ulster objects. 
 
 And what is Ulster's objection ? It is 
 this : that whereas when England ruled 
 Ireland it tried to turn the Irish into 
 English, now that the Irish are to have 
 Home Rule, they will try and turn Ulster- 
 men by force into Irishmen and Catholics. 
 
 It is probable that they are mistaken, 
 but how can you convince them they are 
 wrong ? What are the principles of all 
 governments ? To make the people fitter 
 for freedom and to give it them as they 
 become fit ? Not at all. The object of 
 all governments and all educated classes 
 has been to establish tyrannies, to stan- 
 dardize men as much as possible, to turn 
 them all out of the same mould, to stifle 
 242
 
 ./' ' 
 
 The Objectives of Civilization 
 
 I i ' c 
 
 freedom. They do this on the pretext 
 of civihzation, because civiHzation V has 
 never meant freedom. They never study 
 human hfe in order to understand it and 
 develop it ; they never try to understand 
 wherein happiness consists and pursue it. 
 They take as an axiom that human nature 
 is evil ; they then retire into their inner 
 consciousness and imagine a *' perfect 
 man," and having done this, they use 
 every power they have to reduce humanity 
 to that standard. And because freedom 
 revolts they try to reduce freedom as much 
 as possible, especially by education, so 
 that no man should think for himself 
 but blindly and dumbly accept them as 
 masters. The world grows pnore unhappy 
 and restless in consequence, and the 
 remedy is always more and more coercion. 
 That is the ideal of all classes from th^ 
 highest to the lowest, from the hereditary 
 legislator to the socialist and syndicalist. 
 It is exactly the same thing with the 
 243 16*
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 social trouble and the sex trouble. They 
 all arise from a lack of freedom and a 
 lack of intelligence, and the cure proposed 
 is less freedom than there is now and less 
 intelligence. In fact, all the ideas that 
 people have in the face of trouble is to 
 change masters and still further reduce 
 freedom. A country, a class, a sex, is 
 discontented. What is the proposed 
 cure ? Freedom for each sex, class or 
 country, to manage its own affairs, and 
 wider freedom for individuals in each, 
 a wider understanding of differences ? 
 Not in the least. " Change the governing 
 class and make the laws more stringent 
 yet," is the cry. Socialism is the " cure " 
 to aristocracy, and to hand over the 
 government to women the " cure " of 
 the sex trouble. " Human nature is evil ; 
 repress it," is the motto of modern 
 civilizations even more than of old ones. 
 Can you wonder, then, that human nature 
 
 revolts in wars ? 
 
 244
 
 The Objectives of Civilization 
 
 If, then, we are to avoid war, we must 
 therefore make new civilizations, whose 
 objective is the same as that of evolution, 
 namely, an ever-increasing freedom, 
 variety and intelligence, not in or for a 
 class or classes, but for everyone and for 
 all humanity. Everyone has an equal 
 right to this, and it is for the benefit of 
 the whole that no part of the nation, no 
 individual even in the nation, nor in any 
 other nation, should be deprived of his 
 just development, and his proper freedom. 
 A nation, like a human body, is one 
 organism, and if only one cell out of the 
 myriads in our body be diseased, the 
 whole suffers. Now all nations are part 
 of humanity. The objective is simple 
 and desirable, and as we shall never fully 
 accomplish it, our pleasure and happiness 
 will lie in using all our efforts to con- 
 tinually approach it. 
 
 And when men see that their govern- 
 ment and their civilization really have 
 245
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 this in view, and try to realize it, then 
 they will suffer much in patience, because 
 there is always hope for the future. 
 Now there is no hope. I don't think 
 there could ever have been such a marked 
 degree of despondency in the world as 
 there was before this war. From the 
 millionaire down, everyone said, and said 
 truly, that life was not worth living, 
 that there was no prospect and no hope. 
 And now that the war has come, they 
 console themselves by saying, ** The war 
 will change all that." But the war will 
 change nothing. War is destructive only. 
 It will create nothing. It can at best 
 give an opportunity for a fresh start. 
 But if hereafter, as always before, civiliza- 
 tion and government pursue the same 
 objectives, how has the .war helped us ? 
 Not in the least. ; ^ ^ 
 
 246
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 A "GREATER FREEDOM.'
 
 npHEREFORE, we have found our 
 ^ true objective. But what of the 
 methods we are to employ to reahze it ? 
 For, as we have already seen, the choice 
 of a true objective is but one step towards 
 a Isrue civilization. The value of life lies 
 not so much in the approach to the 
 objective as the life we live in approach- 
 ing. What are the rules ? 
 
 Well, as we have seen, there can be no 
 fixed rules. There is no Absolute. There 
 are now innumerable difficulties in the 
 way, and as time goes on, and we more 
 or less overcome these difficulties new 
 ones will arise. The value and pleasure 
 of life lies in meeting these difficulties, 
 and the increase of intelligence could not 
 
 take place without these difficulties to 
 249
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 stimulate it. We shall never be able to 
 lay down our arms and say, " There ! 
 we have achieved all we want," or " Now 
 we know exactly how to act,*' because life 
 then would lose all its savour. We shall 
 always have to use our judgment. 
 
 But there are, nevertheless, certain 
 rules that seem to be nearly, if not quite, 
 fixed. The value of life lies in the living, 
 and anything that tends to deteriorate 
 life, even if it seems to lead in the right 
 direction, is wrong. I have already illus- 
 trated this by reference to a game ; let 
 us take a present case. 
 
 Germany began this war by attacking 
 Belgium, and there was no grievance 
 that Germany had against Belgium to 
 give any sort of excuse for this. She has 
 herself admitted this. Take it even that 
 Germany had an excuse for attacking 
 France she had no excuse for attacking 
 Belgium. She had no quarrel with Bel- 
 250
 
 A " Greater Freedom " 
 
 gium, she incurred no danger from Bel- 
 gium, and the civilization of Belgium was 
 as high as hers. Therefore, her attack 
 on Belgium was a piece of gratuitous 
 wickedness. It deteriorated national life, 
 and therefore it could not help in the 
 defeat of France, but would stop it. 
 And, in fact, that has been the case. 
 No one doubts that Germany would 
 have had a better chance if she had 
 attacked the French frontier directly. 
 She has lost, and though, as her aim was 
 not a true aim but a wrong one, she was 
 bound to fail in the end in any case, the 
 penalty now will be to her the greater and 
 more costly. 
 
 You cannot attain a good end by 
 wrong means. If the only means of 
 attaining an end be wrong, then the end 
 is wrong. That seems to be inherent 
 in life. 
 
 The question is, What is wrong ? 
 251
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 Now, as we have seen in Chapter II. 
 there is no fixed code of right and wrong, 
 there is no Absolute in conduct. We 
 cannot lay down for the Absolute that 
 we must never tell an untruth, never 
 use force, or any other strict code. There 
 are times when all these are justified 
 and right, and the question is what 
 makes justification. We all know that 
 these things are wrong in themselves ; 
 how can they become right ? 
 
 Well, the only test we have ever found 
 is in our consciences. We know in- 
 stinctively sometimes the right and wrong 
 of these things. Our nature tells us. 
 And as it is better that we should help 
 our instincts with our reason than fight 
 against them, let us see if we cannot 
 detect the test our conscience uses. 
 
 I think we can, and I take it to be this. 
 Every evil thing is evil, but it is justifiable 
 when it prevents a greater evil, or does a 
 252
 
 A " Greater Freedom " 
 
 good that is greater than the evil of the 
 act. 
 
 Now see whether this definition does 
 not explain our examples. Take the case 
 of Kant, quoted in a previous chapter, 
 where a man sees a fugitive hide himself, 
 and, being questioned by the would-be 
 murderer, tells an untruth. The untruth 
 was evil, but there was no way of pre- 
 venting the murder save by an untruth ; 
 therefore, the untruth was justified. 
 Take another case. Where is it justifiable 
 to kill a man not in war ? To kill is 
 evil ; when can it be justified ? Only 
 when it prevents a greater evil, when it 
 is the only way to prevent the death, or 
 injury almost equivalent to death, of an 
 innocent person or persons. 
 
 When, then, is war justified ? War is 
 
 a horrible thing ; when can it be justified ? 
 
 What is there more horrible than war ? 
 
 Only one thing slavery. War, then, is 
 
 253
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 only justifiable when it is the only way 
 to freedom for one or both. Freedom 
 is the test, always the test, because it is 
 the end towards which nature strives. 
 
 But even here we have arrived at no 
 Absolute because we have no absolute 
 definition of freedom ; that also being a 
 relative and not an absolute state. For 
 there are two sorts of freedom, that of 
 the state and that of the individual, and 
 they are not always identical. 
 
 Take, for instance, the Soudan under 
 the Mahdi. The State was free, but 
 the Mahdi' s rule meant slavery to every- 
 one who was under it. The condition of 
 the Soudanese was terrible. While the 
 State was free the individual was not. 
 
 Now in the ultimate resort the freedom 
 of the individual is the higher. A State 
 and a Government exists not for itself, 
 but for its people, to give them an ever- 
 increasing freedom. And if it does not 
 254
 
 A " Greater Freedom " 
 
 do this, but the reverse, and if a change 
 to an increased freedom can only come of 
 foreign rule, then foreign aggression is 
 justified in the cause of that humanity 
 of which we are all a part. Foreign rule 
 is justified as long as it means progress 
 towards freedom, so long and no longer. 
 
 But, again, we must be careful what 
 meaning we put to the word " freedom." 
 It does not mean anarchy. It does not 
 mean an unlimited liberty to do wrong 
 to our neighbours, because that abridges 
 our neighbours' freedom. You cannot, 
 therefore, divide freedom from intelligence. 
 Freedom can only increase as intelligence 
 increases, because without intelligence 
 freedom becomes anarchy. 
 
 On the other side, it is equally true 
 that, without freedom, intelligence cannot 
 increase, for one is dependent on the 
 other. Nay, even more ; they are really 
 one, in this way, that freedom means 
 255
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 freedom to do the right thing, and in- 
 telHgence includes freedom to think the 
 right thing, to discover it for yourself 
 and to know that it is true. And both 
 freedom and intelligence are dependent 
 on a limited liberty to do the wrong 
 thing, because unless you practise your 
 intelligence it will atrophy, and because 
 no one is exactly the same as another man. 
 
 But, again, the temporary must not be 
 mistaken for the permanent. It does not 
 follow that because our ultimate aim is 
 freedom, that therefore every step must 
 be a direct approach to freedom or be 
 wrong. That would again be to create 
 an absolute which cannot exist. To 
 attain a greater ultimate freedom we may 
 at times have to submit to a temporary 
 decrease of freedom, because we had 
 abused the freedom we had owing to want 
 of intelligence and ability. 
 
 Take the case of Russia and vodka, the 
 256
 
 A " Greater Freedom " 
 
 government sale of which has now been 
 prohibited. If this prohibition be in- 
 tended to be a permanent dragooning of 
 the people into an enforced, not tem- 
 perance, but abstinence, it can but do 
 evil and fail, because it is a form of slavery. 
 It will be evaded wholesale, and the latter 
 end of Russia will be worse than at 
 present. If, however, the argument is 
 as follows, it is different : " The Russian 
 peasant leads a very dull life in which 
 amusement or emotion has no part. The 
 only resource he has had to forget the 
 present and stimulate himself has been 
 vodka. It has been very cheap, and so 
 he has acquired a custom of drunkenness 
 which stands in the way of all improve- 
 ment. In order to progress, we must 
 first stop his drunkenness, and there is 
 no way to do this except by prohibition. 
 But this prohibition is only temporary. 
 We intend so to improve his life, that 
 257 17
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 he will find it worth living ; he will have 
 other emotional stimulants ; he will be 
 educated in the habit of judgment and 
 self-control. And as we succeed in this 
 we shall gradually withdraw the prohibi- 
 tion of alcohol, because he can be trusted 
 to discover, each for himself, what, if any, 
 he may use rightly and properly, and to 
 refrain from all misuse." Then the pro- 
 hibition would be a step towards greater 
 liberty, and not merely a substitution of 
 a slavery of forced abstinence in place 
 of a slavery of excess. It would succeed, 
 because the majority of the people would 
 see its wisdom, and that though a step 
 backward from freedom, it was from a 
 misused freedom, and that it was the 
 only way to a greater freedom. 
 
 And this principle is true of all laws 
 and restrictions, they should be but steps 
 to a greater freedom. 
 
 258
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE PREVENTION OF WAR
 
 DO not know that there is much 
 * more to say. It was not intended 
 in this book to do more than show the 
 nature, the cause and the prevention of 
 war, and this has been done. War is 
 destruction ; its cause is the poison in 
 all civilization we have as yet known, 
 and its cure is a true civilization not 
 merely of one nation, but of all nations. 
 A fuller discussion of the guide to conduct 
 shown here and the effect of its recog- 
 nition on all natural and social life would 
 be without the scope of a book on war. 
 We are in the midst of war, and war 
 must end before we can do anything else. 
 It is no use trying to rebuild or consider 
 how to rebuild until destruction has 
 
 ceased, and we do not yet know how far 
 
 261
 
 The Nature of War and its Causes 
 
 destruction will go. It may not end with 
 the signing of peace with Germany. 
 
 But there is one more point I would like 
 to emphasize. The tendency of evolu- 
 tion is, as I have shown, towards ever 
 greater variety, freedom and intelligence ; 
 and nature that is, the Atman who made 
 and is in nature will have his way. 
 Right is Might. 
 
 And also Might is Right, because the 
 two statements are equivalent one to the 
 other. 
 
 But a mere temporary ability like 
 that of Germany to overrun Belgium is 
 not might. It and similar acts, Whether 
 of Germany or other Powers, or of indi- 
 viduals, can but end in disaster. There 
 is only one way that either a nation or 
 an individual can be sure in the long run 
 of attaining Might, and that is by doing 
 Right. 
 
 And the key to Right is in our natures 
 
 262
 
 The Prevention of War 
 
 when they have not been cramped and 
 ruined by our education. It is, therefore, 
 at present more evident in that of the 
 poorer classes than in that of the edu- 
 cated, because their education has warped 
 their natures. 
 
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