We must decide upon this point, for we can say nothing trustworthy on the plan of war until we have made up our minds whether war should only be of this kind, or whether it may be of another kind.

If we give an affirmative to the first, then our theory will be, in all respects, nearer to the necessary, it will be a clearer and more settled thing. But what should we say then of all wars since those of Alexander up to the time of Bonaparte, if we except some campaigns of the Romans? We should have to reject them in a lump and yet we cannot, perhaps, do so without being ashamed of our presumption. But an additional evil is, that we must say to ourselves, that in the next ten years there may perhaps be a war of that same kind again, in spite of our theory; and that this theory, with a rigorous logic, is still quite powerless against the force of circumstances. We must, therefore, decide to construe war as it is to be, and not from pure conception, but by allowing room for everything of a foreign nature which mixes up with it and fastens itself upon it -- all the natural inertia and friction of its parts, the whole of the inconsistency, the vagueness and hesitation (or timidity) of the human mind: we shall have to grasp the idea that war, and the form which we give it, proceeds from ideas, feelings, and circumstances which dominate for the moment; indeed, if we would be perfectly candid we must admit that this has even been the case where it has taken it absolute character, that is, under Bonaparte.

If we must do so, if we must grant that war originates and takes its form not from a final adjustment of the innumerable relations with which it is connected, but from some amongst them which happen to predominate, then it follows, as a matter of course, that it rests upon a play of possibilities, probabilities, good fortune and bad, in which rigorous logical deduction often gets lost, and in which it is in general a useless, inconvenient instrument for the head; then it also follows that war may be a thing which is sometimes war in a greater, sometimes in a lesser degree.

All this, theory must admit, but it is its duty to give the foremost place to the absolute form of war, and to use that form as a general point of direction, that whoever wishes to learn something from theory, may accustom himself never to lose sight of it, to regard it as the natural measure of all his hopes and fears, in order to approach it where he can, or where he must.
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