It is an important point to observe that most if not all of the specific instinctive reactions and feelings engendered in war, or occurring as an incitement to war, are capable of inducing ecstatic states. There are several of these movements and states, each of which can become, so to speak, a foundation for the development of ecstasy. Combat may and must do this, and probably war could never be carried on at all unless danger and death had qualities which arouse ecstatic moods. There is a joy in fighting, in killing, and in the tumult of battle that becomes one of the most important of military assets, and is one of the main elements of morale in the field. This capacity of human nature to make over that which is intrinsically painful into the pleasurable is one of the paradoxes of human life to be explained and taken into account in the study of the psychology of war. Fear itself may induce an ecstasy, both in the individual, as we know from many reported cases from the late war, and as a social mood in which the fear contributes a quality of intensity and ferocity to patriotism. The gambling mood, which is in part a play with fear, is another ecstatic reaction seen in war, and it is often the means of clearing the way, so to speak, for free and uninhibited action.
Of course all the purely æsthetic elements in the social life have this effect of arousing exalted moods, and indeed that is precisely their function. All social impulses tend in this same direction, and there is induced in all intense social states an intoxication mood. In these social states, the reproductive motive is often clearly discernible, but partly by common consent and convention, and partly because of the composite and fused form of impulses in the social mood, robbed of its specific reactions and converted into a new product, regarded both as conduct and as feeling.
All religious states aroused in war tend to become ecstatic. Their work is to overcome the sense of tragedy of war, and it is only by becoming intense and voluminous, so to speak, that they can accomplish their work at all. Either they must end in a mysticism which includes or takes the form of exalted moods, or they must, as can be accomplished in some temperaments, become dynamic states by inspiring a fatalistic attitude, which is at bottom a sense of throwing oneself unreservedly into the hands of fate.
We may best think of these complex war moods as the forces out of which wars are made, and the spirit in which they are conducted, but not as by their own initiative creating wars. These intoxication moods or ecstasies are forces which contain desires that are general, we say; they are mental processes that act as a means of greatly increasing the volume of all social actions. When we analyze them we find specific desires in them, and evidences of instinct and primitive feeling, but they are not in themselves tendencies toward specific reactions and in fact the motor tendencies they contain more or less inhibit one another.
In general, these war moods of which we speak are precipitated by definite and incisive reactions of fear and anger. These emotions of fear or anger seem to be the necessary positive stimuli to induce the moods of war. Fear and anger, no one can maintain, are the sole causes of war, and they are far from being the sole factors of the war moods, but they are the usual precipitants of war.
Fear and anger as social emotions cannot sustain organized and effectual social activity upon a large scale; we see them always, in war, taken up, transformed, absorbed in moods which are at once more practical, and more exalted and which, as complex processes, can be sustained over long periods of time. But these primitive reactions of anger and fear enter into the ecstatic moods, become associated with or induce æsthetic and religious states of consciousness, gain moral justification or religious exploitation, become aspects of directive and dynamic moods and so give force and efficiency to morale and strategy.
War appears as a breakdown of certain modes of volition. Certain types of conflict are abandoned, and aggressive activities become more simple and powerful, but war is no reversion to primitive instinct, or to any number of instincts. The resulting states of mind are too rational as means, and too exalted and ideal to be thus primitive. New content is introduced into social consciousness and new purposes come to light in these ecstasies, even though the consciously sought objectives may be archaic and conventional and the mental states traceable to more elementary states, and the conduct be similar in purpose and type to the simpler forms of conduct we find in the animal world What we are trying to impress here is the well known truth that the whole of a thing is not necessarily contained in its parts. It is the meaning of the war-mood as a whole, as a summation of many factors of the mental life, and as a direction of social consciousness as a whole that is its most important characteristic.