siastical organisation do not exhaust the question of religion. “Contact with the eternal world” and kindred ideals are to-day too vague.
War is treated by Mr. Russell as an institution. War, he holds, originates in the blind impulse of aggression and in beliefs appropriate to it (such as that of being the chosen people, of higher race, etc.). He gives Bernhardi, the early Mohamedan conquerors, and the Book of Joshua as examples of the warlike spirit. He does not pretend that war has no good results (he confesses to have learned by this war like everybody else); the wish for the triumph of one’s cause, the sense of solidarity with large bodies of men he deems to be good. He is aware of the fact that the majority of nations enjoy the intensive activity and the display of energy which is afforded by war; he confesses that the pax Romana of the Roman Empire was accompanied by decay, and he acknowledges that “without imagination and love of adventure a society soon becomes stagnant and begins to decay.” “It is only the outcome in death and destruction and hatred that is evil,” and therefore his ultimate wish, sounding like a prayer, is: “Let us come out of this death!”
As we have already seen, Mr. Russell advocates an active pacifism. Such a pacifism, facing as it does the opposition of the great majority of one’s own nation, and willing to incur even danger (this may be taken as a very discreet allusion to his own sad experience), does not, he thinks, lead to passivity; it tends to replace the bellicosity which ends in death, by a bellicosity, or at least a vital energy, which promotes peaceful and healthy activity. Following up his theory of impulse, he thinks that the blind impulses which lead to war and death also lead to art and glory; those impulses must not be weakened or crushed, but directed into other channels.
Mr. Russell hopes that active pacifism will generally prevail; the final substitution of law for force in the relations of men will be achieved either by a world-state or by a federation of states. All disputes are to be settled not by the legal judgment of the Hague tribunal, but in the sense in which they would be actually decided by war.
We cannot accept his theory of war and peace, because its psychological and ethical foundation is wrong.
He thinks the blind impulse of aggression is by nature checked by an equally blind impulse of resistance to aggression, but there is also a moral conviction deepened by experience
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