Can one hesitate to conclude, then, that in all our educational experiences, we must try not only to train these powers that we call aesthetic, but to give opportunity at every point for the exercise of them as selective functions, and as a means of creating and expressing power in the mental life?
In the philosophy of education it is with moods that in our view, we have most of all to deal. Man, we have a right to say, is a creature of _feeling_, not of instinct or of reason. It is not the instinct as a definite reaction to stimulus or as an inner necessity, nor emotion as a subjective response to this stimulus that is the driving force of conduct, but rather the more lasting and deeper and more complex states or processes that we can call by no other name than moods. Since it is in the moods that the most profound longing or tendency or desire is represented, we say that moods are the object of chief concern in a practical philosophy of life. These moods are the repositories, so to speak, of instinct, impulse, tendency, desire, and it is therefore by the control and education of moods that the individual in all his social and in all his personal aspects will be most fundamentally educable if he is educable at all.
It is as the seat of the will to power, we might say, that the moods which are the main sources of human energy are to be conceived. The craving for power, as a generalization of more primitive desires, comes to take the position of the main motive in life. The craving for power is a desire, as we see when we analyze it, that expresses itself as a longing for ecstatic or intense states of consciousness, and an abundant life. It is a craving to be possessed by strong desire and also for the satisfaction of many desires--often vicariously, since the objects desired may be confused and general. So this motive of power and the ecstatic states in which it is expressed or realized is no instinct and no pure emotion. It is an outgrowth and culmination of instincts, a fusion of them into a new product.
It would be going too far afield to try to summarize here the psychology of moods or of the motive of power in the individual and in society, but the main fact needed for the moment seems plain. In this motive and its expression in feeling and conduct there is a very general tendency which is the source of many forms of interest and enthusiasm, of ambition, of the spirit of war, of various kinds of excitement, and to some extent of morbid and criminal tendencies. The spirit of war we think of as a summation of the same forces as those which in other ways appear as the energies behind various enterprises having quite different objectives. War is an anachronism, we may believe, a wrong direction taken by the forces of the social life, an archaic expression now, let us say, of the will to power which might and ought to have different objectives. In the life and the mood of the great city we see a very varied expression of the motive of power. The city life is still a crude life. It satisfies deep desires, but in it desires for we know not what are aroused. It is indeed as the seat of eager, unsatisfied desire that the city is best of all characterized. These desires readily take shape in the city as the spirit of war and as a craving for excitement of various kinds.