Miscellaneous Pamphlets1910 - Philosophy |
Common terms and phrases
American Association ANDREW CARNEGIE anti-militarist army Association for International Athenians Baron d'Estournelles believe bestial side blood-tax BOSTON CHARLES civic civilized Co-operation conscription contempt d'Estournelles de Constant degeneration discipline duty economy EDWARD CARY Elihu Root enemy esthetic and ethical Factor in International fear feel feminism feriority GEORGE BLUMENTHAL honour horror human nature ideals of hardihood imagination inferiority intellectual International Conciliation island James Brown Scott JAMES SPEYER Japan killed LAKE MOHONK live forever loot love of glory LYMAN ABBOTT manent mankind manliness Martial virtues Meleans mili militarist military character military party military temper mind MORAL EQUIVALENT newspaper NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER pacific Pacificists Patriot PAUL MORTON plunder pride and shame pugnacity pure reason RICHARD BARTHOLDT says Second Hague Conference seems Senate SETH LOW slaves socialistic Stanford Steinmetz Sub-Station 84 thing Thucydides tion to-day toil unwillingnesses utopian Valor of Ignorance war-function war-party war's whole WILLIAM JAMES women world's values YORK
Popular passages
Page 12 - ; and, secondly, unwillingness to see the supreme theatre of human strenuousness closed, and the splendid military aptitudes of men doomed to keep always in a state of latency and never show themselves in action. These insistent unwillingnesses, no less than other aesthetic and ethical insistencies, have, it seems to me, to be listened to and respected. One cannot meet them effectively by mere counterinsistency on war's expensiveness and horror. The horror makes the thrill; and when the question...
Page 13 - So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.
Page 15 - And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the sciences of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity.
Page 19 - Nothing is more striking than to compare the progress of civil conveniences which has been left almost entirely to the trader, to the progress in military apparatus during the last few decades. The house-appliances of today, for example, are little better than they were fifty years ago. A house of today is still almost as ill-ventilated, badly heated by wasteful fires, clumsily arranged and furnished as the house of 1858. Houses a couple of hundred years old are still satisfactory places of residence,...
Page 7 - It may even reasonably be said that the intensely sharp competitive preparation for war by the nations is the real war, permanent, unceasing; and that the battles are only a sort of public verification of the mastery gained during the
Page 11 - The virtues that prevail, it must be noted, are virtues anyhow, superiorities that count in peaceful as well as in military competition; but the strain on them, being infinitely intenser in the latter case, makes war infinitely more searching as a trial. No ordeal is comparable to its winnowings. Its dread hammer is the welder of men into cohesive states, and nowhere but in such states can human nature adequately develop its capacity. The only alternative is "degeneration.
Page 16 - Patriotic pride and ambition in their military form are, after all, only specifications of a more general competitive passion. They are its first form, but that is no reason for supposing them to be its last form. Men now are proud of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off subjection. But who can be sure that other aspects of one's country may not, with time and education and suggestion enough, come to...
Page 15 - We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built — unless, indeed, we wish for dangerous reactions against commonwealths fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a centre of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed...
Page 20 - Japanese. Great indeed is Fear; but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy. The amount of alteration in public opinion which my utopia postulates is vastly less than the difference between the mentality of those black warriors who pursued Stanley's party on the Congo with their cannibal war cry of "Meat! Meat!" and that of the General Staff of any civilized nation.
Page 17 - The military ideals of hardihood and discipline would be wrought into the growing fibre of the people; no one would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life.