The Psychology of Nations / A Contribution to the Philosophy of History

by G. E. Partridge

Another way in which Germany's cause was frequently stated was that Germany was a pure, virile and young race which was fighting the older civilizations of the world. Vigor was assured of victory in any case, but young life had a duty to perform—that of clearing the way for new growth. This has found numerous forms of expression among German writers, some of them highly dramatic and exaggerated; as, for example, that the human race is divided into two species or kinds, the male and the female, assuming that the German is the male among the national spirits.

With these views of the nature of the German ideal or cause there have gone, of course, interpretations of the conscious motives and principles of other nations. In general other nations had no principle. German writers have tended to believe that both England and America were hypocritical and that their pretended democratic cause was at heart only party and political aspiration. These nations, they said, claimed to desire the world to enjoy the rights of democracy, but each country assumed that it itself must be the controller of that democratic principle. Another frequently expressed view of the purposes of England and America is that they have purely sordid interests, that they are capable of fighting only for advantage and material gain.

Many of these German views of the war imply a principle that runs through many fields of German thought—that values are something to be determined objectively. It is a scientific principle. Its conclusions rest upon proof, rather than upon subjective principles of valuation. There is another argument which is in part based upon an interpretation of scientific principles, but is in part also a fatalistic doctrine—confidence in the issues of battle as a means of testing the right and the validity of culture. The right will prevail, on this theory, because the right is the stronger or because in some sense strength is the right, and because the method of selection of the best by struggle is a basic principle, and may be applied to everything that is living or is a product of life.

If the German interpretation of the German cause has been dominated by an ideal of objective proof, we hear on the other side much about subjective rights and subjective evaluations—the right, for example, of every people to determine its own life, to have its own culture, to decide upon its own nationality. The Allies have believed that they were fighting to establish this principle throughout the world, and that this principle is diametrically opposed to the German principle. The thought of centralization, of a hierarchy of nations and the like, is wholly foreign to this democratic principle. Bergson (17) finds in the idea of industry the cause of the war and the principle of opposition in it. The Allies, he says, have been fighting against materialism with the forces of the spirit. Germany's forces are material. A mechanism is fighting against a self-renewing spirit. The ideal of force is met by the force of the ideal.

Boutroux (13) says that France, in the war, has had before her eyes the idea of humanity; France was fighting for the recognition of the rights of personality—rights of each nation to its own existence. France is a champion of freedom; she wants all the legitimate aspirations of peoples to be realized. Germanism, with its ideal of force, is contrasted with the ideal of Greek and Christian culture and philosophy. A cult of justice and modesty is contrasted with the cult of power; in the former, sentiment and feeling have a place as criteria of values; in the latter the appeal is to science and to reason.

Hobhouse (34) says that the war is a conflict of the spirit of the West against the spirit of the East (precisely the same as the German view, we see, but with a very different identification of the champions). Germany has never felt the spirit of the West. The war is for something far deeper than national freedom; it is a war to justify the primary rules of right. Burnet (18) thinks that the great conflict was a conflict between Kultur as nationalistic, and humanism as something international—that Germany, in recent years, had abandoned an ideal of culture for that of specialization in the service of the State. England's answer to the call was not to the specific need and appeal of Belgium, but because England felt that there was something in Germany incompatible with Western civilization.

Le Bon (42) says that we must always remember that the Teuton is the irreconcilable enemy of the civilization of the French and of all it stands for, and that he must always be kept at a distance. Durkheim's view is that Germany's ambition and energy and will antagonize the freedom of the rest of the world, and the rest of the world felt this and the war was the consequence. Dillon (55) says that the future for which Germany has been striving is a future incompatible with those ideals which our race cherishes and reveres, and that we must make a definite choice between our philosophy and religion and our code on one side and those of the German on the other. Drawbridge (19) says that the war has been a conflict between the ideals of gentleness and tact, on one side, and of brutality and ruthlessness on the other. It is the Christian spirit against the Nietzschean.

Again we have been told that the war was simply a war of autocracy against democracy, of mediævalism against modern life, of progress against stagnation, of militarism and war against peace, of the Napoleonic against the Christian spirit. Occasionally we hear more personal and subjective notes. Redier (30) says that France was fighting solely to retain mastery of her own genius, in order to draw from it noble joys and just profits.

The American point of view has been expressed in several forms by the President of the United States. For example, he has said that we are one of the champions of the rights of mankind. The world must be made safe for democracy. And again, that America is fighting for no selfish purpose, but for the liberation of peoples everywhere from the aggression of autocratic powers. This view that the war was remedial, that it was in the interest of progress, to prevent that which is belated in civilization from gaining the upper hand, and that it is on the part of America a war of participation and aid in a cause which though supremely good might otherwise be lost, is the prevailing idea. That this spirit of the championship of causes and of justice to other nations is a stronger motive in the Anglo-Saxon peoples than in others appears to be an opinion that history on the whole can confirm.

It is relatively easy to obtain the opinion of philosophers about the "causes" represented in the war; it would be of interest also to know what the millions of men in the field think. Data are not altogether wanting, but there appear to be no general studies. That many men, in more than one army, have no clear knowledge of any cause for which they have fought, except as these causes are nationalistic is certain. That there is ignorance even among the men of our own army in regard to the causes and purposes of the war has been made evident. Knowledge and enlightenment can hardly have been greater elsewhere. German soldiers are credited with believing that they are defending Germany from attack. The French soldier was fighting for France. The invasion of his country left him no doubt and no choice. The English soldier has often said that he was doing it for the women and the children, and one writer says that the deepest motive of two thirds of the British army was to make this war the last. The American soldier, from the nature of the circumstances under which he himself entered the war has been more conscious of a motive of helpfulness and of comradeship with other peoples who are in distress and danger. Probably the idea of America's honor, and the more abstract idea still of the cause of freedom, even though this idea has been, so to speak, our watchword, have not been the most influential motives in the mind of the individual. Germany was attacking people who were in distress, and the American soldier went over to make the scales turn in the direction of victory for the oppressed.