Russian
duma will get, if it survives, will be what the people it solidly
represents are strong enough to make it get, and no more and no less,
with bombs and finances, famine and corruption funds alike in the scale.

But the farther we advance among legislatures of the second type, and
the farther we get away from the direct appeal to muscle and weapon, the
more difficult becomes the analysis of the group components, the greater
is the prominence that falls to the process of argumentation, the more
adroitly do the group forces mask themselves in morals, ideals, and
phrases, the more plausible becomes the interpretation of the
legislature's work as a matter of reason, not of pressure, and the more
common it is to hear condemnations of those portions of the process at
which violence shows through the reasoning as though they were per se
perverted, degenerate, and the bearers of ruin. There is, of course, a
strong, genuine group opposition to the technique of violence, which is
an important social fact; but a statement of the whole legislative
process in terms of the discussion forms used by that anti-violence
interest group is wholly inadequate.

4. Idea-Forces[163]

The principle that I assume at the outset is that every idea tends to
act itself out. If it is an isolated idea, or if it is not
counterbalanced by a stronger force, its realization must take place.
Thus the principle of the struggle for existence and of selection,
taking the latter word in its broadest sense, is in my opinion as
applicable to ideas as to individuals and living species; a selection
takes place in the brain to the advantage of the strongest and most
exclusive idea, which is thus able to control the whole organism. In
particular, the child's brain is an arena of conflict for ideas and the
impulses they include; in the brain the new idea is a new force which
encounters the ideas already installed, and the impulses already
developed therein. Assume a mind, as yet a blank, and suddenly introduce
into it the representation of any movement, the idea of any action--such
as raising the arm. This idea being isolated and unopposed, the wave of
disturbance arising in the brain will take the direction of the arm,
because the nerves terminating in the arm are disturbed by the
representation of the arm. The arm will therefore be lifted. Before a
movement begins, we must think of this; now no movement that has taken
place is lost; it is necessarily co