Americans call their land God's country. But what would they say to this, where everything is still as it was at the beginning of creation and no human being has put its mark?" Drawing liberally on Carlyle and Nietzsche as well as on the vitalistic philosophy of Henri Bergson, the propagandists of imperialism depicted the colonizer as a superman, the embodiment of vital force. According to Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, and Ernest Seillière, Europeans had lived too long in the mind and forgotten the value of tribal solidarity, unthinking loyalty, and violence. In Italy, F. T. Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto of 1909 announced a new art that would "sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness," and galvanize a population enfeebled by an overabundance of material comforts. "We want to glorify war—the only cure for the world—militarism, patriotism.... We will sing of great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt."

It was in this feverish atmosphere that the young Mussolini began to dream of restoring Italy to her former glory. In an interview in 1924, Mussolini cited among the formative influences on his fascist ideology not only Georges Sorel, the French syndicalist, but William James, who had taught him "to judge actions from their results." James could not have conceived such an heir; but his advent, however illegitimate, disclosed more possibilities than were dreamed of in the philosophy of wonder.

This last statement needs to be qualified. James did not live long enough to see the coming of fascism, but he saw its premonitory expression in the turn-of-the-century ideology of imperialism, and he promptly disowned it. In one of his last writings, "The Moral Equivalent of War," he singled out Homer Lea as a spokesman for the same cult of vital excitement that he had earlier criticized in Holmes. But James was not content merely to condemn the warlike temper of the times—which had reached the point, he said, that " 'peace' and 'war' mean the same thing" in "military mouths"—or to declare himself a member of the "anti-militarist party." It was not enough to condemn the horrors of war, when the very horrors

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