d pain, perhaps, and the association of
ideas, or the influence of habit. He is told that these are selected
from the other facts of human nature in order that he may think clearly
on the hypothesis of there being no others. What the others may be he is
left to discover for himself; but he is likely to assume that they
cannot be the subject of effective scientific thought. He learns also a
few empirical maxims about liberty and caution and the like, and, after
he has read a little of the history of institutions, his political
education is complete. It is no wonder that the average layman prefers
old politicians, who have forgotten their book-learning, and young
doctors who remember theirs.[30]

[30] In the winter of 1907-8 I happened, on different occasions, to
discuss the method of approaching political science with two young
Oxford students. In each case I suggested that it would be well to read
a little psychology. Each afterwards told me that he had consulted his
tutor and had been told that psychology was 'useless' or 'nonsense.' One
tutor, a man of real intellectual distinction, was said to have added
the curiously scholastic reason that psychology was 'neither science nor
philosophy.'

A political thinker so trained is necessarily apt to preserve the
conception of human nature which he learnt in his student days in a
separate and sacred compartment of his mind, into which the facts of
experience, however laboriously and carefully gathered, are not
permitted to enter. Professor Ostrogorski published, for instance, in
1902, an important and extraordinarily interesting book on _Democracy
and the Organisation of Political Parties_, containing the results of
fifteen years' close observation of the party system in America and
England. The instances given in the book might have been used as the
basis of a fairly full account of those facts in the human type which
are of importance to the politician--the nature of our impulses, the
necessary limitations of our contact with the external world, and the
methods of that thinking brain which was evolved in our distant past,
and which we have now to put to such new and strange uses. But no
indication was given that Professor Ostrogorski's experience had altered
in the least degree the conception of human nature with which he
started. The facts observed are throughout regretfully contrasted with
'free reason,'[31] 'the general idea of liberty,'[32] 'the sentiments
which inspi