ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how greatly our old ideas about the fixity of personality must be modified. The aggregate of equilibria of which personality is composed owes its stability, merely to social environment and the necessities of every-day life. The spirit of the race is the real combatant in war, and the more its existence is threatened the more vigorously it defends itself. Patriotism is an inherited quality of a mystic for any one who is a patriot by virtue of reason alone is a poor patriot. Patriotism is one of those supreme forces which are created by long ancestral accumulations, and whose strength is revealed at critical moments. Love of danger is a part of human nature, and reveals itself in various ways, such as gambling, hunting dangerous game, fighting, exploring, and so forth. In France the war has brought about mystic manifestations which are very unlike those that have resulted from the political mysticism of Germany.
