THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR 163 



superb and matchless systems of military organization are not perfected 

 without thought and effort. Magnificent cities, fed by a network of 

 smoothly running railroads, are not built without thought and effort. 

 Improved systems of agriculture forcing the earth to produce fourfold 

 more abundantly are not devised without thought and effort. Miracu- 

 lously wonderful cinematographic machines are not invented without 

 thought and effort, nor without thought and effort is every moving thing 

 from the Arctic to the Antarctic in nature and in art photographed and 

 brought in its living and moving similitude to our eyes. Large conti- 

 nental cities are not freed from graft and brought under elaborately 

 perfect systems of municipal government without thought and effort. 

 Great national and international systems of organized labor are not per- 

 fected without thought and effort. The day laborer does not hold him- 

 self hour by hour and day by day and month by month to his highly 

 specialized and fatiguing work without thought and effort. 



These illustrations could be extended indefinitely. In the work of 

 scientific research, in philosophical study, in industrial and mechanical 

 invention, in the building of great systems of schools and universities, 

 in the management of great commercial and industrial enterprises, in 

 journalism, literature and art, we see exhibitions of ceaseless thought and 

 tireless effort. It is an age of hard work and almost without exception 

 it is mental work of a highly specialized kind and involves stress of the 

 highest and most recently developed brain centers. 



It was inevitable that disaster of some kind, or a reaction of some 

 kind, should follow upon this high-tension and one-sided life. Some- 

 thing was bound to snap and something has snapped. Nature has over- 

 reached herself in her new discovery of the survival value of intelligence. 

 Intelligence, to be sure, has a survival value of almost limitless degree, 

 but intelligence is, as it happens, linked inseparably to a brain, a highly 

 complex, delicate and unstable mechanism, which was originally intended 

 as a motor center for hand, foot and somatic muscles, and not as a center 

 for thought and sustained effort. Furthermore, the brain itself is or- 

 ganically dependent upon stomach, heart and lungs, whose parallel de- 

 velopment Nature in her haste to develop her new discovery has neg- 

 lected. 



The form that the reaction has taken in this case is the form which 

 the psychologist sees it must inevitably take, namely, the temporary 

 reassertion of primitive human impulses. The world has had a think- 

 ing spasm of unusual severity ; it must have a fling. In America, where 

 conditions were much the same as in Europe, the reaction has taken 

 the milder form of amusement crazes. The dance, the moving-picture 

 show, the automobile, the diamond and the gridiron have helped to re- 

 lieve the tension. The dancing mania, which has swept over the whole 

 western continent like an obsession, is a good illustration of Nature's 



