ought to begin by examining a simpler psychological explanation. Might their attitude not be simply an effect of distraction? They have other things at heart than the little daily duties. The passionate interest they take in the affairs of the Great War-how could they devote this to the minor tasks of the home?

CONCLUSIONS.

In short, on the strength of actual observations, we are brought to the following conclusions.

War enters considerably into the preoccupations of children. It furnishes them abundantly with new images, words, ideas, and feelings, which are immediately assimilated, and which reappear in the different spheres where children are creators-in their drawings, their essays, and their games.

But it would not seem that war particularly stimulates the fighting instinct in them, or that quarrels amongst them are more frequent because peoples are at grips.

This is apparently due to various causes.

In the first place, perhaps, it is due to the rivalry of the fighting and the spectator instincts. Then again, warfare of to-day is something so complex that it makes its appeal to many other instincts than that of the fight -to the instincts of construction (aeroplanes, huts, trenches), as much as to those of destruction, to pity as much as to hatred. What the child of the people has immediately before his eyes leads him, in several countries, to think more often of the bread he is to eat, than of the enemy he is to tear to pieces.

Nor, finally, does the child's reason, any more than that of the generality of adults, compare individual struggles (brawls) with group struggles (wars). It does not grasp the absoluteness of the principle of respect for life. It adjusts itself to the contradictions of our civilisation; and, from the fact that war-which in every country is presented to it as defensive-is permissible, or even holy, it does not conclude that brawls and aggressiveness have thereby become legitimate.

CHAPTER XIV

THE FIGHTING INSTINCT AND PROBLEMS OF EDUCATION

IF example acts in the way we have seen, on the development of the fighting instinct, what are we to say of education? We have dealt so far only with theoretical problems; it is time to consider the practical bearing of our researches.

We observe the existence of the fighting instinct in man, and its persistence throughout the development of the individual and the race. In setting out in parallel lines the successive forms it assumes, in individuals on the one hand, and in societies on the other, we observed two evolutions, pointing in the same direction, but unequally advanced.

The evolution of societies is like that of individuals in witnessing to an intellectualisation of the fighting instinct. Brute force no longer suffices of itself; pugnacity is more and more frequently raised and ennobled by a high moral ideal. But, in the case of political states, this raising of the instinct does not reach as far as sublimation, as it does in an already considerable number of individuals. Further, wars, which in certain individuals determine regressions-in the strict sense of the word-must, in the case of States, be considered as indications of unfinished moral development.

It results from this, that the psychological facts and laws with which we have been dealing give rise to educational applications, which vary not a little, according as we consider only the adaptation of the individual to the state of actual society, whether in peace or war,

or as we envisage that other end, still remote and ideal, the peaceful society of nations.

It is the affair of the philosopher and the moralist to assign each of these aims to its appropriate place in the realm of ends, the hierarchy of human values. That is not our concern. We shall simply take these different aims as given-it is a fact that they do impose themselves, either separately or together, on a large number of minds and wills in society of to-day-and we shall show, by examples, that the methods suggested for the reaching of each of them are nothing but the instinctive application of the laws we have begun to induce.

THREE EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS.

And first of all, let us formulate the three problems with which the educationist is faced, as soon recognises the primordial importance of the fighting instinct, and its persistence.

The first, which I shall call simply the problem of moral education, is presented, in connection with this instinct as in connection with all the others, nearly in these terms: Since the fighting instinct exists in every man, and is capable of being expressed in very different ways, how shall we contrive that it issues in acts which are useful, instead of harmful, to other people? What must be done to utilise the fighting instinct in the individual for the general good? Or-to take up again a word to which we are now accustomed-how shall we contrive the sublimation of the fighting instinct?

But the existence of the fighting instinct raises a second problem in education, a problem of altogether special character. At the point we have reached in social evolution, the political society, the State, has not completely sublimated its collective pugnacity; it still wages armed conflict against its neighbours. It is important, therefore, for the State, that the fighting instinct of its members shall not be wholly deflected and Platonised, but shall rather be canalised, and raised, for the profit of the restricted community to which they

belong. With times of war in view, the State is thus careful over the military education of individuals. It is anxious to turn the individual fighting instinct to the service of collective pugnacity. At times, this anxiety about war dominates the mind of a group to such an extent that the whole problem of civic education is reduced to one of military education; at other times, the idea of war is so remote that civic and moral education become one and the same.

Thirdly, the ideal of a society of nations, a League of Nations to adopt the current term-in which the fighting instinct of each of the political groups would be utilised for the greatest good of all, raises a problem of collective education which we shall call by its most usual name, the problem of pacifist education. How shall we contrive the sublimation of collective pugnacity itself?

It is obvious that the three questions are sharply distinct. They seem to us to be of very unequal difficulty; and this is due, no doubt, to their having been presented to the human mind at moments in its history that are very remote one from another. While the first question, of moral education, was already in process of solution at the time when the earliest of human societies were emerging from the animal state, the third appears still premature to a large number of men of the twentieth century. As for the second, it is like the first in belonging to every period of evolution, but the development of the human mind and of society, by complicating the fighting instinct, changes the modalities of the collective struggle, and, consequently, forces society to be ceaselessly finding fresh solutions for the same problem, as its data are being slowly transformed.

THE EFFECTS OF CHILD'S PLAY.

Before broaching each of these three problems in succession, we must be still further delayed by a preliminary and general question.

Pedagogy can claim to be scientific only by taking its stand as an applied science. In order that the educa

tionist may discover what means will lead him most securely to the aims he sets before himself—and we have just seen that these aims are many and various-he ought to know what laws of human development he can take advantage of. He is well aware of this duty, for, in the absence of propositions methodically laid down for him by the psychologist, he formulates more or less premature generalisations for himself, on the strength of his limited experience and of the children who come under his notice; and on these generalisations, for want of better, he regulates his conduct. The danger in this is, that he attributes an impossible value to these propositions; whereas the psychologist is at pains to discover an impartial method which will enable him to establish definitively the good or ill foundation of these empirical formulas, that vary so much from one practitioner to another.

To solve the educational problems we have indicated --and problems of education in general-nothing is more important to know than the laws which control the expressions of deep-seated instincts in the child. We hope that the facts to which we have drawn attention will help towards the formulation of such laws, but, for the present, it must be admitted, they have not yet been established. It is not yet possible to give an answer, which shall be founded on a methodical induction, to the question, Will a child who likes to fight be more bellicose than another, when he becomes an adult? Three theories on the effects of play are in vogue. If each is considered in isolation, they will lead us to adopt three contradictory attitudes.

Let us first run over them rapidly. After that, we shall say why it is improper to envisage them separately. (i) Child's play may be considered as having no signi ficance for the present day. The instincts expressed through it are essentially survivals, reverberations of a bygone social condition in which they were of marked utility. If the child of to-day climbs trees, this is because his ancestors were formerly men of the woods;