ey had made that knowledge current
by the invention of a name, the control of anger was not a question of
conduct. Anger was a part of the angry man himself, and could only be
checked by the invasion of some other passion, love, for instance, or
fear, which was equally, while it lasted, a part of self. The man
survived to continue his race if anger or fear or love came upon him at
the right time, and with the right intensity. But when man had named his
anger, and could stand outside it in thought, anger came within the
region of conduct, Henceforth, in that respect, man could choose either
the old way of half-conscious obedience to an impulse which on the whole
had proved useful in his past evolution, or the new way of fully
conscious control directed by a calculation of results.

A man who has become conscious of the nature of fear, and has acquired
the power of controlling it, if he sees a boulder bounding towards him
down a torrent bed, may either obey the immediate impulse to leap to one
side, or may substitute conduct for instinct, and stand where he is
because he has calculated that at the next bound the course of the
boulder will be deflected. If he decides to stand he may be wrong. It
may prove by the event that the immediate impulse of fear was, owing to
the imperfection of his powers of conscious inference, a safer guide
than the process of calculation. But because he has the choice, even the
decision to follow impulse is a question of conduct. Burke was sincerely
convinced that men's power of political reasoning was so utterly
inadequate to their task, that all his life long he urged the English
nation to follow prescription, to obey, that is to say, on principle
their habitual political impulses. But the deliberate following of
prescription which Burke advocated was something different, because it
was the result of choice, from the uncalculated loyalty of the past.
Those who have eaten of the tree of knowledge cannot forget.

In other matters than politics the influence of the fruit of that tree
is now spreading further over our lives. Whether we will or not, the old
unthinking obedience to appetite in eating is more and more affected by
our knowledge, imperfect though that be, of the physiological results of
the quantity and kind of our food. Mr. Chesterton cries out, like the
Cyclops in the play, against those who complicate the life of man, and
tells us to eat 'caviare on impulse,' instead of 'grape nuts