DISCOVERY 



193 



development, for it is an urge not towards life but towards 

 death. Freud conjectures that the first living material 

 that appeared upon the globe retained its vital properties 

 for but a short time, quickly relapsing into the chemical 

 stability of inanimate matter, to be vitalised anew by the 

 action of whatever external force it may have been that 

 was effecting so momentous a change in a hitherto life- 

 less world. But as the living structure became more 

 complex and more different from the non-living, the 

 path back to the inanimate became longer and more 

 circuitous, so that the living organism of to-day is com- 

 pelled to go through a varied life-cycle before it can 

 return to the inanimate from which it started. Since 

 it is rigidly dominated by the repetition compulsion, it is 

 unable to short-cut the path and is compelled to reach 

 its goal of death by retracing the coniplicated course of 

 its evolution. 



This tendency to go back to the beginning, bound up, 

 according to Freud, in the very stuff of life, is antagonised 

 by the sexual instincts, and it would seem legitimate to 

 consider it (though Freud does not apparently go so 

 far as this) to have been overcome by them, for repro- 

 duction ensures a potential immortality for part at least 

 of the organism (the germ-plasm) and has brought about 

 the continuity of living matter. 



Here we may note a further modification of Freud's 

 theories ; he now groups together " sexual instincts " 

 and the " ego-instincts" (i.e. fear, hunger, and the self- 

 protective instincts generally) as "life instincts," retain- 

 ing the dualism of his psychology by this conception of 

 a deeper, more primitive, regressive impulse or " death 

 instinct'" in opposition to them. 



Evidence of the conservative and repetitive aspect of 

 the regressive impulse is easy to find in human psychology, 

 but the manifestation of its deeper aspect as a hidden 

 but universal striving for death is, Freud admits, very 

 obscure and difficult to detect, and he cites only one 

 example of it. 



Even if the supporting evidence were less slender, we 

 should find a temperamental difficulty in accepting a 

 pessimism so profound and unequivocal ; Freud himself 

 seems to have done his best to escape his own conclusions, 

 and he will not admit that they are, as yet, much more 

 than speculation, " often far-fetched, which each will, 

 according to his particular attitude, acknowledge or 

 neglect. Or one may call it the exploitation of an idea 

 out of curiosity to see how far it will lead." Yet the 

 conclusions themselves, if we consider them apart from 

 the way by which they were reached, are not so very 

 unfamiUar nor so very different from the pessimistic 

 philosophy of Buddha \vith its goal in Nirvana that can 

 only be reached when the compulsion to rebirth has been 

 overcome, or the pessimism of all the poets who have 

 sung of their weariness of life and the desirability of 

 death to an unconvinced world. But whether we accept 

 the theory or no, there is not likely to be much tendency 

 to neglect, as their author pessimistically foreshadows, 

 the work of a profound and original thinker, however 

 uncomfortable may be the conclusions to which an 

 unflinching intellectual courage may lead him. 



Great pains have evidently been taken with the trans- 

 lation, and Miss Hubback may be congratulated on the 

 way in which she has accomplished a very difficult task. 



F. A. Hampton. 



A FORECAST OF FUTURE WARFARE 



Reformation of War. Bv R. de la Bere. (Hutchinson, 

 i6s.) 



This is the title of an imaginative and brilliantly 

 written treatise on future wars. The author is a heretic 

 and "tears up forcibly the old testament of war." In 

 his own words, he believes in original thoughts and 

 " spews out like a nauseous draught the mental drug 

 called imitation." He divides human beings into two 

 classes, the masters (the supermen) and the slaves (the 

 supermonkeys), the creators and the imitators. 



In his opinion there are too many imitators in the 

 three services. The world has changed, and so, he 

 considers, has the true art of war. " The brass bottle 

 of scientific warfare has been fished up " ; its seal has 

 been broken : and no contempt for science and no 

 reaction to the tactics of the stone hammer, the arquebus, 

 or the matchlock will coax back the Jinn. 



Since '70 the art of war has advanced in seven-league 

 boots, and yet, he says, here are soldiers still forming 

 fours and making goose steps. He is out against tra- 

 ditionalism ; he is out to slay the dragon of armies 

 and fleets and air services spellbound by the past. 



His argument proceeds to practice through biology and 

 ethics. " The law of life is war " ; " life lives upon life " ; 

 and war in one form or another is inevitable. He has 

 no truck with the League of Nations. War. he thinks, 

 will always be. It is a national tonic — a useful purge. 



But to him the art of war is to keep the bulk of your 

 men alive. 



To keep your men alive, you must keep your move- 

 ments, your weapons, and your morale alive. Further- 

 more, you must hit your enemy from a safe distance or 

 you must hit fiim at safe close quarters. For he claims 

 that there are two great fallacies in the modern theory 

 of war : (i) that in war a nation's will is best enforced by 

 destruction, and (2) that victory is based on numbers. 

 These fallacies, he says, led to the slaughter-houses of 

 the Somme and Ypres : whereas, he says, the supreme 

 duty of the soldier is to fight and not to die. 



Fighting in future is to be short and safe. He points 

 out that at the preliminary bombardment of the Hooge, 

 the Somme, Arras, Ypres, we fired nine million shells, 

 that is, 100,000 tons of shell, estimated at twenty-two 

 million pounds sterling. If it had resulted in victory, it 

 would have been cheap at the price ; but it did not 

 result in victory. Roads, lanes, tracks vanished under 

 the earthquake ; impassable craters were formed. It 

 was not modem war. It was, he says, like beginning a 

 big-game shoot with a fortnight's solo on a bassoon. 



The writer has no use, then, for shell bludgeoning, e.g. 

 at Gallipoli ; or for Brusilov's shock tactics which cost 

 him 375,000 casualties in twenty-seven days; and he 

 thinks that Germany wisely broke from tradition when 



