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Updated: May 24, 2025
It is the meaning of the war-mood as a whole, as a summation of many factors of the mental life, and as a direction of social consciousness as a whole that is its most important characteristic. That experiences and motives which belong to the field of the aesthetic play an important part in war can hardly be doubted.
Let us for a moment imagine Thucydides face to face with the problems of our post-war world of to-day. We have only to read his immortal analysis of the war-mood of Greece, and of the nervous and emotional phenomena which accompanied it, to realize that his first effort would have been to explain us to ourselves.
It is the war-mood, then, that must be explained, if we wish to understand the motives and causes of war. And this war mood, so it appears, is related to all the other great ecstasies of art, religion, intoxication, love. It is, of course, then, a psychological problem, and one having many radiations and deep roots.
We have found that the essential, and we might say, primary psychological datum of war is a war-mood, that the central motive of this war-mood is a general impulse which we called the intoxication motive, and that this intoxication motive, considered generically, and in regard to its specific meaning is a craving for power and for the experience of exerting and feeling power.
The war-mood is not a mere collection of instincts; it is a new product, in which instincts and emotions have a place. There are several reasons, practical and theoretical, for regarding it as a highly important problem to discover what the actual content of this war-mood is.
'The war-mood brought with it many and terrible symptoms such as have occurred and will always continue to occur, so long as human nature remains what it is; though in a severer or milder form, according to the variety of the particular cases. Thucydides would have had eyes for it in all its forms, mild or severe, simple or complex, pitiful or repulsive.
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