Another way in which Germany's cause was frequently stated was that Germany was a pure, virile and young race which was fighting the older civilizations of the world. Vigor was assured of victory in any case, but young life had a duty to perform--that of clearing the way for new growth. This has found numerous forms of expression among German writers, some of them highly dramatic and exaggerated; as, for example, that the human race is divided into two species or kinds, the male and the female, assuming that the German is the male among the national spirits.
With these views of the nature of the German ideal or cause there have gone, of course, interpretations of the conscious motives and principles of other nations. In general other nations had no principle. German writers have tended to believe that both England and America were hypocritical and that their pretended democratic cause was at heart only party and political aspiration. These nations, they said, claimed to desire the world to enjoy the rights of democracy, but each country assumed that it itself must be the controller of that democratic principle. Another frequently expressed view of the purposes of England and America is that they have purely sordid interests, that they are capable of fighting only for advantage and material gain.
Many of these German views of the war imply a principle that runs through many fields of German thought--that values are something to be determined objectively. It is a scientific principle. Its conclusions rest upon proof, rather than upon subjective principles of valuation. There is another argument which is in part based upon an interpretation of scientific principles, but is in part also a fatalistic doctrine--confidence in the issues of battle as a means of testing the right and the validity of culture. The right will prevail, on this theory, because the right is the stronger or because in some sense strength _is_ the right, and because the method of selection of the best by struggle is a basic principle, and may be applied to everything that is living or is a product of life.
If the German interpretation of the German cause has been dominated by an ideal of objective proof, we hear on the other side much about subjective rights and subjective evaluations--the right, for example, of every people to determine its own life, to have its own culture, to decide upon its own nationality. The Allies have believed that they were fighting to establish this principle throughout the world, and that this principle is diametrically opposed to the German principle. The thought of centralization, of a hierarchy of nations and the like, is wholly foreign to this democratic principle. Bergson (17) finds in the idea of industry the cause of the war and the principle of opposition in it. The Allies, he says, have been fighting against materialism with the forces of the spirit. Germany's forces are material. A mechanism is fighting against a self-renewing spirit. The ideal of force is met by the force of the ideal.