[On War by Carl von Clausewitz]@TWC D-Link book
On War

CHAPTER II
14/31

From an imaginative, flighty, inexperienced head, and from a calm, sagacious understanding, different things are to be expected.
22.

FROM THE DIVERSITY IN MENTAL INDIVIDUALITIES ARISES THE DIVERSITY OF WAYS LEADING TO THE END.
It is this great diversity in mental individuality, the influence of which is to be supposed as chiefly felt in the higher ranks, because it increases as we progress upwards, which chiefly produces the diversity of ways leading to the end noticed by us in the first book, and which gives, to the play of probabilities and chance, such an unequal share in determining the course of events.
23.

SECOND PECULIARITY .-- LIVING REACTION.
The second peculiarity in War is the living reaction, and the reciprocal action resulting therefrom.

We do not here speak of the difficulty of estimating that reaction, for that is included in the difficulty before mentioned, of treating the moral powers as quantities; but of this, that reciprocal action, by its nature, opposes anything like a regular plan.

The effect which any measure produces upon the enemy is the most distinct of all the data which action affords; but every theory must keep to classes (or groups) of phenomena, and can never take up the really individual case in itself: that must everywhere be left to judgment and talent.


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