TEE PSYCEOLOGY OF WAR 167 



You may perhaps recall Professor James's astonishing picture of his 

 visit to a Chautauqua. Here he found modern culture at its best, no 

 poverty, no drunkenness, no zymotic diseases, no crime, no police, only 

 polite and refined and harmless people. Here was a middle-class para- 

 dise, kindergarten, and model schools, lectures and classes, and music, 

 bicycling and swimming, and culture and kindness and elysian peace. 

 But at the end of a week, he came out into the real world, and he said, 



Ouf ! what a relief! Now for something primordial and savage, even though 

 it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance straight again. 

 This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninspir- 

 ing. This human drama, without a villain or a pang; this community so refined 

 that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost offering it can make to the brute 

 animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious 

 harmlessness of all things, — I can not abide with them. 



What men want, he says, is something more precipitous, something 

 with more zest in it, with more adventure. Nearly all the Utopias paint 

 the life of the future as a kind of giant Chautauqua, in which every man 

 and woman is at work, all are well fed, satisfied and cultivated. But 

 as man is now constituted he would probably find such a life flat, stale 

 and unprofitable. 



Man is not originally a working animal. Civilization has imposed 

 work upon man, and if you work him too hard, he will quit work and 

 go to war. Nietzsche says man wants two things — danger and play. 

 War represents danger. 



It follows that all our social Utopias are wrongly conceived. They 

 are all based on a theory of pleasure economy. But history and evolu- 

 tion show that man has come up from the lower animals through a pain 

 economy. He has struggled up — fought his way up through never- 

 ceasing pain and effort and struggle and battle. The Utopias picture a 

 society in which man has ceased to struggle. He works his eight hours 

 a day — everybody works — and he sleeps and enjoys himself the other 

 hours. But man is not a working animal; he is a fighting animal. 

 The Utopias are ideal — but they are not psychological. The citizens for 

 such an ideal social order are lacking. Human beings will not serve. 



Our present society tends more and more in its outward form in time 

 of peace toward the Chautauqua plan, but meanwhile striving and pas- 

 sion burn in the brain of the human units, till the time comes when 

 they find this insipid life unendurable. They resort to amusement 

 crazes, to narcotic drugs, to political strife, to epidemics of crime and 

 finally to war. The alcohol question well illustrates the tendencies we 

 are pointing out. Science and hygiene have at last shown beyond all 

 question that alcohol, whether in large or smaller doses, exerts a dam- 

 aging effect upon both mind and body. It lessens physical and mental 

 efficiency, shortens life and encourages social disorder. In spite of this 

 fact and what is still more amazing, in spite of the colossal effort now 



