ss of inference, which went on
perhaps more rapidly when he was asleep, or thinking of something else,
than when he was awake and attentive. A phrase of Mr. Morley's indicates
a feeling with which every politician is familiar. 'The reader,' he
says,'knows in what direction the main current of Mr. Gladstone's
thought must have been setting' (p. 236).

That is to say, we are watching an operation rather of art than of
science, of long experience and trained faculty rather than of conscious
method.

But the history of human progress consists in the gradual and partial
substitution of science for art, of the power over nature acquired in
youth by study, for that which comes in late middle age as the
half-conscious result of experience. Our problem therefore involves the
further question, whether those forms of political thought which
correspond to the complexity of nature are teachable or not? At present
they are not often taught. In every generation thousands of young men
and women are attracted to politics because their intellects are keener,
and their sympathies wider than those of their fellows. They become
followers of Liberalism or Imperialism, of Scientific Socialism or the
Rights of Men or Women. To them, at first, Liberalism and the Empire,
Rights and Principles, are real and simple things. Or, like Shelley,
they see in the whole human race an infinite repetition of uniform
individuals, the 'millions on millions' who 'wait, firm, rapid, and
elate.'[44]

[44] Shelley, _Poetical Works_ (H.B. Forman), vol. iv. p. 8.

About all these things they argue by the old _a priori_ methods which we
have inherited with our political language. But after a time a sense of
unreality grows upon them. Knowledge of the complex and difficult world
forces itself into their minds. Like the old Chartists with whom I once
spent an evening, they tell you that their politics have been 'all
talk'--all words--and there are few among them, except those to whom
politics has become a profession or a career, who hold on until through
weariness and disappointment they learn new confidence from new
knowledge. Most men, after the first disappointment, fall back on habit
or party spirit for their political opinions and actions. Having ceased
to think of their unknown fellow citizens as uniform repetitions of a
simple type, they cease to think of them at all; and content themselves
with using party phrases about the mass of mankind, and realising t