Page:The Psychology of Jingoism.djvu/96

But carried away by a dramatic frenzy, and wishing to emphasize the compulsion of this sway upon the individual, he places the motive-power outside the will alike of individual and collective man, and so plunges into the doctrine of the Inevitable.

But surely, it will be said, a sound scientific view of conduct does legitimize the doctrine of the inevitable;' there are 'laws' and 'forces' of which philosophic historians must rightly take account. And this is true. The mistake consists in regarding the 'laws' and 'forces' as powers external to the mind of man. The only direct efficient forces in history are human motives. How, then, arises this inhuman, or suprahuman, conception of 'the inevitable'? It arises in the following way: A number of different persons, groups, or classes – princes, politicians, soldiers, etc. – each seeking some particular end, form, by co-operation and interaction, a complicated plan of policy, the whole of which is not visible or conscious to any one of the participants. The historian, seeing the resultant line of action, and the clear-cut pattern which it takes, abstracts this design, and, knowing that it does not proceed from the full conscious agreement of the agents, places it wholly outside