All human affairs are mental affairs; the bright ideas of to-day are the realities of to-morrow.The real history of mankind is the history of how ideas have arisen, how they have taken possession of men's minds, how they have struggled, altered, proliferated, decayed.There is nothing in this war at all but a conflict of ideas, traditions, and mental habits.The German Will clothed in conceptions of aggression and fortified by cynical falsehood, struggles against the fundamental sanity of the German mind and the confused protest of mankind.So that the most permanently important thing in the tragic process of this war is the change of opinion that is going on.What are people making of it? Is it producing any great common understandings, any fruitful unanimities?
No doubt it is producing enormous quantities of cerebration, but is it anything more than chaotic and futile cerebration? We are told all sorts of things in answer to that, things without a scrap of evidence or probability to support them.It is, we are assured, turning people to religion, making them moral and thoughtful.It is also, we are assured with equal confidence, turning them to despair and moral disaster.It will be followed by (1) a period of moral renascence, and (2) a debauch.It is going to make the workers (1) more and (2) less obedient and industrious.It is (1) inuring men to war and (2) filling them with a passionate resolve never to suffer war again.And so on.
I propose now to ask what is really happening in this matter? How is human opinion changing? I have opinions of my own and they are bound to colour my discussion.The reader must allow for that, and as far as possible I will remind him where necessary to make his allowance.
Now first I would ask, is any really continuous and thorough mental process going on at all about this war? I mean, is there any considerable number of people who are seeing it as a whole, taking it in as a whole, trying to get a general idea of it from which they can form directing conclusions for the future? Is there any considerable number of people even trying to do that?
At any rate let me point out first that there is quite an enormous mass of people who--in spite of the fact that their minds are concentrated on aspects of this war, who are at present hearing, talking, experiencing little else than the war--are nevertheless neither doing nor trying to do anything that deserves to be called thinking about it at all.They may even be suffering quite terribly by it.But they are no more mastering its causes, reasons, conditions, and the possibility of its future prevention than a monkey that has been rescued in a scorching condition from the burning of a house will have mastered the problem of a fire.It is just happening to and about them.It may, for anything they have learnt about it, happen to them again.
A vast majority of people are being swamped by the spectacular side of the business.It was very largely my fear of being so swamped myself that made me reluctant to go as a spectator to the front.I knew that my chances of being hit by a bullet were infinitesimal, but I was extremely afraid of being hit by some too vivid impression.I was afraid that I might see some horribly wounded man or some decayed dead body that would so scar my memory and stamp such horror into me as to reduce me to a mere useless, gibbering, stop-the-war-at-any-price pacifist.Years ago my mind was once darkened very badly for some weeks with a kind of fear and distrust of life through a sudden unexpected encounter one tranquil evening with a drowned body.But in this journey in Italy and France, although I have had glimpses of much death and seen many wounded men, I have had no really horrible impressions at all.That side of the business has, I think, been overwritten.The thing that haunts me most is the impression of a prevalent relapse into extreme untidiness, of a universal discomfort, of fields, and of ruined houses treated disregardfully....But that is not what concerns us now in this discussion.What concerns us now is the fact that this war is producing spectacular effects so tremendous and incidents so strange, so remarkable, so vivid, that the mind forgets both causes and consequences and simply sits down to stare.
For example, there is this business of the Zeppelin raids in England.It is a supremely silly business; it is the most conclusive demonstration of the intellectual inferiority of the German to the Western European that is should ever have happened.
There was the clearest /a priori/ case against the gas-bag.
I remember the discussions ten or twelve years ago in which it was established to the satisfaction of every reasonable man that ultimately the "heavier than air" machine (as we called it then)must fly better than the gas-bag, and still more conclusively that no gas-bag was conceivable that could hope to fight and defeat aeroplanes.Nevertheless the German, with that dull faith of his in mere "Will," persisted along his line.He knew instinctively that he could not produce aviators to meet the Western European; all his social instincts made him cling to the idea of a great motherly, almost sow-like bag of wind above him.
