[58] Isolated passages are sometimes quoted from Kant in support of a theory that the present treatise is at least half ironical[A] and that his views on the question of perpetual peace did not essentially differ from those of Leibniz. “Even war,” he says, (Kritik d. Urteilskraft, I. Book ii. § 28.) “when conducted in an orderly way and with reverence for the rights of citizens has something of the sublime about it, and the more dangers a nation which wages war in this manner is exposed to and can courageously overcome, the nobler does its character grow. While, on the other hand, a prolonged peace usually has the effect of giving free play to a purely commercial spirit, and side by side with this, to an ignoble self-seeking, to cowardice and effeminacy; and the result of this is generally a degradation of national character.”
This is certainly an admission that war which does not violate the Law of Nations has a good side as well as a bad. We could look for no less in so clear-sighted and unprejudiced a thinker. Kant would have been the first to admit that under certain conditions a nation can have no higher duty than to wage war. War is necessary, but it is in contradiction to reason and the spirit of right. The “scourge of mankind,” “making more bad men than it takes away,” the “destroyer of every good,” Kant calls it elsewhere. (Theory of Ethics, Abbott’s trans., 4th ed., p. 341, note.)
[A] Cf. K. v. Stengel: Der Ewige Friede, Munich, 1899; also Vaihinger: Kantstudien, Vol. IV., p. 58.
[59] Cf. Idea for a Universal History, Prop. 8; Perpetual Peace, pp. 142, 157.
[60] The immediate stimulus to Kant’s active interest in this subject as a practical question was the Peace of Basle (1795) which ended the first stage in the series of wars which followed the French Revolution.
[61] It is eine unausführbare Idee. See the passage quoted from the Rechtslehre, p. 129, note.
[62] Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, (4th ed., 1899), Vol. V., I. Ch. 12, p. 168 seq.