Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - Militant Pacifism (International Journal of Ethics, 1917-10-01).pdf/6

Rh “wrestling with the ungainly knots, with red face and wrathful eyes, till he had conquered them, when he exulted and marched off with an armful of oakwood in triumph.” The pointer whose instinct to kill is checked by his instinct to return to his master illustrates the modification of one instinct by subordination to another. And, similarly, the shyness of a little child may be wholly neutralized by the curiosity which drives him nearer with every puff of the red balloon which the strange person holds out to him. There is no reason to suppose that these practical, psychological methods, so constantly employed in the education of animals and human beings, are inapplicable in the self-discipline of nations.

The outcome of our study of pugnacity is, thus, the assurance that war is not the inevitable result of unmodifiable instinct. But this conclusion leaves us with our ethical problem still on our hands. We have still to examine the ethical doctrine that war is morally, if not psychically, inevitable—that war must be cherished as an awful but necessary human experience which purges men’s souls of cowardice and selfishness and fans to a flame the fires of courage and devotion. That war may—nay, always does—create and invigorate daring and sacrifice no student of history will deny. And the world has need of these human qualities. We would not if we could blot out of the great book of human history the names of the warriors: David and Hector, Leonidas and Cesar, Richard of the Lion Heart and Henry of Navarre, Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus, Drake and Farragut, Sir Philip Sidney and Rupert Brooke. And we could not press forward in the struggle toward a righteous social order unless men were nerved to fight in the great causes of truth and justice. In the words of William James, the “martial virtues … intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command must still remain the rock upon which states are built.”

The bold ideal of militant pacificism is, however, to