236 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



until the cultural inheritance of civilization imposed 

 on each generation from childhood onwards under 

 the influence of the emotion of the ideal renders it 

 as impossible for a nation to engage in war and lose 

 that principal motive of self-respect which makes 

 life worth living as it is now impossible for the 

 normal civilized man, apart from any question 

 whatever of material loss or gain or punishment, to 

 engage in robbery or murder. 



It is one of the most remarkable facts of human 

 nature that the emotion of the ideal, which is the 

 sum and highest form of the other-regarding emo- 

 tions, is hardly represented at all in the male mind 

 when the wide and particularly the future interests 

 of civilization are concerned. Alike in the history 

 of its external State policy and in the history written 

 in its own statute books, nearly every Western 

 country bears witness to this fact. The spirit of the 

 saying noted by Durkheim as attributed to the 

 Emperor of Germany, that, " For me, humanity 

 ends at the Vosges," x is not peculiar to any country. 

 It is the true inborn spirit of the heredity of the 

 fighting male of the West coming down from ages 

 before the dawn of history. 



The inability to subordinate the present to the 

 future is a pronounced characteristic of civilization 



1 Germany above All, p. 23. 



