One might argue from this that the cure of war consists in eternal watchfulness to see that the match does not touch the powder, that we must watch these events that precipitate wars and safeguard peoples from being affected by them. This, of course, is more or less the method of diplomacy; to some minds the league of nations is a device for doing this on a larger and more systematic scale. But when we study history and see what these war-causing incidents are, how numerous and how variable, we can see that diplomacy and statesmanship undertake an impossible task when they try to steer the world along its narrow historical course, with only historical landmarks for guides.
The war that is so vividly in mind now furnishes us with an illustration of the complexity of the causes of war, and allows us to see clearly contrasting views of the causal factors in great wars in general. We see here a closely fitting series of events, each in itself having but little reference to the great crisis, all fitting together, and for want of any one of which, if one takes the purely historical view, we might suppose the war would never have happened, or might have been postponed indefinitely. If Venezelos, to go back no further than that, had remained in Crete and had been content to be an island politician, would not the course of events in the Balkans have been very different? Out of his course came events which no one could have foreseen, but which, without similar actions on the part of individuals producing other links in the chain, would not have taken place. If some diplomat or some foreign office had made a decision slightly different from what was actually decided; if the three emperors had had a little more reliable information about one another; if the statisticians of the German service had computed a little better England's resources, and had put the moral factor into the sum—would the war have happened at all?
In this direction, of course, lies the chaos of history and its madness—and also its philosophy. We may be driven on the one hand to think of all history as a matter of the chance relations of individuals and of detached particular events, having significance as a series but never planned or controlled as a whole, or we may resort to the opposite way of thinking, and say that all of history, in every particular and detail, is divinely planned and prearranged, and each event fits into a rational whole. This, of course, is our final problem of history, we say, as it is the final problem of every question that considers life as concrete events having value precisely as the particular sequence that it is—when we view life historically, in a word, rather than by the methods of the quantitative sciences, or by the genetic methods such as are used mainly in the psychological sciences, and which we may say stand between history and the sciences of matter.
CHAPTER XI[ToC]
THE SYNTHESIS OF CAUSES
It appears to be no very difficult matter to discover causes of war, and indeed a considerable number of causes. In fact the problem seems to yield an embarrassment of riches, especially if our chief interest happens to be a practical one, and we wish to find the causes of war in order to see how they may be controlled. We might even have discovered all the causes of war and still be as far as before from any real understanding of the cause of war. Unless one can know the relative importance of the causes, and the manner in which the causes combine to produce wars; unless the results give in some way a synthetic view of the causes of war, show dominating causes, or reveal a total cause which is not merely a summation of stimuli, but is both a necessary and a sufficient situation for the production of war; unless we have shown some fundamental cause and movement in the social order, we are still left in search of the cause of war.
We have, indeed, found a number of causes of war, but at the same time the causes have not appeared to exist as separate causes. We are always catching sight of a movement in the development of nations and of the world—of certain fundamental motives, the most basic of all, the most general, being the motive of power. These causes of war do not appear, however, to be of the nature of a chain, giving us the impression that in order to break the habit of war, all we need do is to discover the weakest link in the chain of causes, break the chain there, and so interrupt the whole mechanism of war-making in the world. Above all, although fortuitous events as causes of war must not be overlooked, war is not continually being made anew by the appearance again and again of accidental situations, which are thus to be regarded as the cause of war.