Hardly an epoch in the life of suf-fering man is free of a period over which death hangs and destruc-tion, torment, and homelessness spread. As though it were written for man to shed a tear with every smile and heave a sigh with every melody — when, had he willed it, he could have made of his life bliss, of his misery happiness, of his funerals weddings and feasts. But such is man — that strange man who searches out happiness only to dissolve it in sorrow, and rest only to set it in a frame of anxiety; it is as though his hap-piness lay in this long, perpetual struggle between happiness and misery, rest and toil, thirst and quenching, hunger and satiety.

What, then, is the cause — and why war?

A riddle that has occupied the thought of humanity from the day man came into being, and occupies it still, without his being granted any solution to it or furnished any justification for it. No sooner does he devise solu-tions and remedies for it than out of these spring causes that had never crossed his mind, reaching to that pent-up dam until it bursts and sweeps everything before it — even man himself. The disease is in his own soul, yet he searches for it outside; did he but know, he would find it within himself and destroy it forever.

Strange! Can the seed of war lie in man, and he not root it out? It is in his soul like the bramble in the garden: if he neglects it, turn-ing to the rose and the jasmine, lavishing on them all his care and all his effort, it grows and spreads and strangles the rose and the jasmine and everything

else. How well he would do to destroy the bramble and turn to the rose to nurture it, and to the jasmine to strengthen it.

The First Stage of the Idea of War

The first man came into being and refused to die: in him is a desire for life, because he is life; and for a life sovereign and respected, because he is man. His existence disclosed to him a first truth: if you would endure, think of yourself and of every way that guarantees your endurance. So his feeling began to sense, his mind to manage, and his hands to execute; and reality led him to confront nature, and his philosophy to resist man and beast with everything his mind and his hands could produce. Thus he crossed two stages of life: survival, which is a natural desire; and sovereign survival, which is an invented one.

The desire for survival is a nat-ural phenomenon, imposed upon man by his natural condition and the necessity of laboring to con-front it in nature's violent forces — hurricanes, earthquakes, beasts of prey striving, like man, driven only by an insistent desire to survive. At this stage man stands in one rank with his brother man, both gathered under one banner by a common struggle for a common goal and against a common foe. Efforts are unified, forces, wills, and methods are massed, and man emerges from the battle of annihilation — the battle of death or life — with the banners of victory fluttering above his head and wreaths of laurel on his brow. And behold: the animal runs in his train,

obedient and submissive, on its lips the smile of contentment, pride, and swagger. And behold: nature yields to his palm and his forearm, casts down the staff of obedience before his mind, and opens to his feeling and imagina-tion a wide field for contemplation and thought — so that a cast of melancholy, awe, and questioning spreads over his face, and his lips close in the set of concern and perplexity. He tries to penetrate to the depths of nature and existence and their secret, and is bewildered. He looks upon what his mind has planned and his hands have built within his domain: he is the creator of this building for warding off storms, the tamer of the animal for his service, the maker of the sword, the knife, the axe — all these are of his making. But this maker — who is he, and what is his secret? And this mighty nature that has spent his strength — whose making is she, and what is her secret? Why did nature come to exist — and why did he?

Many insistent questions, born of his contemplation and his think-ing upon existence and nature, that must be answered. And behold: man thinks of a power above his power, a will above his will, a director beyond the reach of his mind — and for the first time man thinks of the Creator, and strives to understand Him and to reach Him as his feeling and imagination suggest Him, and as his mind sets Him forth to the people around him.

As for the desire for mastery, it is a second stage; for survival is not the first and last goal of man, who stops at no limit, and who