Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/169

Rh are old friends to the human mind. The nation was at war but it was at rest. A certain strange harmony settled down upon the people. The war was hardly two months old when we began to hear of a new Russia, a new France, a new England and a new Germany, all regenerated by the baptism of blood, full of high aspirations, purified visions and noble resolutions.

To those acquainted with the psychology of play and sport, war is more easily understood. The high tension of the modern work-a-day life must be periodically relieved by a return to primitive forms of behavior, as in football, baseball, hunting, fishing, horseracing, the circus, the arena, the cock-fight, the prize-fight, and the countless forms of outing. Man must once again use his arms, his legs, his larger muscles, his lower brain centers. He must live again in the open, by the camp-fire, by the stream, in the forest. He must kill something, be it fish or bird or deer, as his ancestors did in times remote. Thereafter come peace and harmony and he is ready once more to return to the life of the intellect and will, to the life of "efficiency."

Periodically, however, man seems to need a deeper plunge into the primeval and this is war. War has always been the release of nations from the tension of progress. Man is a fighting animal; at first from necessity, afterwards from habit. In former centuries when the contrast between peace and war was not so great, it was undertaken with more ease and less apology, almost as a matter of course. Life was less intense then and the reaction of war less extreme. Now in the face of an advanced public sentiment, of peace societies and arbitration boards, the tension has to become very great, the potential very high before the spark is struck and, when this happens, we have the ludicrous spectacle of the warring nations apologizing and explaining to an astonished world.

War, therefore, seems to act as a kind of katharsiscatharsis [sic]. The warring nation is purified by war and thereafter with a spirit chastened and purged enters again upon the upward way to attain still greater heights of progress. In strictness, however, the katharsiscatharsis [sic] figure is misleading. The situation is not one of gross emotions to be purged away, as Aristotle implied. It is rather merely a question of fatigue and rest. Our demand for an ever-increasing efficiency has brought too great a strain upon those cerebral functions associated with the peculiar mental powers upon which efficiency depends. Efficiency demands great powers of attention, concentration, analysis, self-control, inhibition, sustained effort, all of which are extremely fatiguing and demand frequent intervals of rest and relaxation. When this rest and relaxation are lacking, we may always expect cataclysmic reactions which shall restore the balance.

In war, society sinks back to the primitive type, the primitive mortal combat of man with man, the primitive religious conception of God as