As a result of the war the attitude ot the human mind toward niaay things has changer' radically. The selations of life. and death —life's value and death's meaning—are con sidered to-day much as primitive men con sidered them. The. world as a whole felt a sense of disappointment as the war m-ogressed Our disappointment was not, however, justified, for the reason that it was based on the destruc tion of an illusion. Before the war began, illusions as to the nations soon to be at war, commended themselves to the world at large because an illusion saVes us pain and elbows us to enjoy pleasure whkh a true appreciation of our position would tend to destroy. The SCI)Se of disappointment brought about by the war came into existence with die Shock which fol lowed when our illusions collided with reality — thie reality, namelY, that civilized nations are still capable of reverting to what we have been wont to regard as savagery.
Many phases of the mystical spirit glided into our ken as the war progressed. We be held the odd trehavlor of sovereigns appealing to their god; and rendering them thanks for victories put down to their credit.' A tsar held np an ikon to be gazed at by his leneeling scptadrons, as they worshipped. A kaiser made speeches and issued proclamations about the motives and purposes of the god of the Father land and of his royal house. And even George V we find to have retained sonie of his sacred war functions. He vowed not to touch a drop of liquor during the war; and this vow is an act of religion.
A few considerations will heti) to state the relations which such behavior bears to piety. Piety is unconcerned about human relations tr themselves Put, as the sense of union with deity is imme-stirably strengthened by the sense of commimity in worship, the pious are in fact concerned about the body of the faithful as well. Consider Christianity. It arose lonely in a lonely land. It developed the dogma of the (brotherhood* of man, quite as mystical a dogma as (nationality) or any other principle of kinship or union. But after two or three centuries, when Christianity was adopted as a (state) religion, the Christian's gregarious in stinct was satisfied in another way. His sense of participation with mankind became super flnous. It began to atrophy. One with his 4state-church)) the Christian rose up against the (heretic* anci the ginfidel*— his pristine breth ren! Warfare with the enemies of the Chris tian Church but intensified his sense of the participation with the Father of Mankind.
With the Crusades came the movements his torians call inationalistic)— a series of move ments which subordinates church to state, the faithful to the patriotic; a movement, in short, which made of God at most a National hero, A nation's god grows with a nation. ((National* groups came into existence with common triumphs and common sufferings— in a word, by sharing a common experience. A nation's god
is thus the synthetic personality of a whole peo ple. taken from its beginning to its end. This god is thus the attribute of a specific nationality; and thus a people is the body of a god. With such information one can easily enough under stand the anachronism in the behavior of the aforementioned sovereigns.
(This war is queer,) wrote Wells the Eng lish sociologist on his return from the front. All have remarked the silence of many returned men who experienced some of the most awful things witnessed in the war. In France one beheld an impressionable, volatile and undis ciplined nation suddenly transformed into a resolute and tenacious body of rnen, exposed for months together to an underground existence in cruel trenches and to the constant menace of an obscure and awful death. From English shores men saw boys go off blithely to experience the storm for themselves; these came back sobered, which is intelligible; and silent, which is unin telligible. That they and their French and Bel gian brethren spoke modestly of their deeds was not unnatural. But that they should be so strangely reticent in speaking of the grim total fact and of their minor reactions was unnatural. They had been willing to communicate a few items of their adventures; but of their total experience they would not and could not speak.
Wells saw them in the trenches; and found them °weary, rather sullen, itsturned)) with shoulders drooped. Their very outline was, as it were, a mark of interrogation: on their faces they wore the expression of puzzled men — thought f ul. How strangely they inh ibited thought and speech. these men of the Front! Puzzled, thoughtful, speculative inturned: a mind as yet unable to grapple with the domi nance of an ineffable fact. Such men feel them selves conscious of some new spiritual fact When one meets one of these returned men, mud, shrapnel, rats, gas and the like will no doubt figure prominently in the story he tells. Beyond that —he can only intimate by silence that life at the Front has qualities which may not be told. Such an one is a transformed personality: he has lost his original self. Wil Earn James notes (ineffability) as the handiest of marks to classify a state of mind, which as mystical, is negative. The subject of it im mediately says that it defies expression; no ade quate report of its contents can be communi cated in words. It follows from all this that its quality must be directly experienced to be understood. It cannot be imparted; not trans ferred to others. And thus we are to explain the strange thoughtful silence of returned men by supposing that a touch of the ((ineffable) seemed to have entered into the fabric of their lives with their experience at the Front, how ever brief, or humble, that experience may have been.