The Psychology of the Great War Author:Gustave Le Bon Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I THE AFFECTIVE, COLLECTIVE, AND MYSTIC FORCES, AND THE PART THEY PLAY IN THE LIFE OF NATIONS i. The Cycles of Life A Superficial observer of th... more »e European War, seeing the extremely skilful scientific combinations exhibited by the various armies and the weapons they employ, might easily fancy that some quite safe and trustworthy form of rational logic was in sole command of the situation. Nor would this be a false conclusion, were it limited to the technical side of warfare ; but further investigation soon discloses the fact that the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the combatants are under the guidance of superior forces. Material weapons are being utilized in the struggle, to be sure, but they are wielded by psychological forces, which reign supreme over the bloody fields heaped high with the countless dead who, while in life, were docile and often unconscious servitors of the powers which ruled their wills. Immaterial forces are indeed the true leaders of battles, and behind every cannon and every bayonet the discerning eye may discover the invisible masters who have set them in motion. In order to make clear the nature of these forcesI must briefly recapitulate some of the psychological principles which I have already laid down in my preceding works.1 The vital phenomena are enveloped in such mystery that it is impossible to explain them at present. One can only say that matters proceed as though each of the different elements—biological, affective, and the rest—of which a living being is composed, had an independent existence, and were subject to a special form of logic, by which word I mean a determinate succession of phenomena. Biological logic governs the cycle of the organic life and the desires whose satisfaction is necessary to sustain it, affect...« less