in the growth of the individual, and
then, if they are checked, die away, or, if they are unchecked, form
habits; and impulses, which were originally strong and useful, may no
longer help in preserving life, and may, like the whale's legs or our
teeth and hair, be weakened by biological degeneration. Such temporary
or weakened impulses are especially liable to be transferred to new
objects, or to be modified by experience and thought.

With all these complicated facts the schoolmaster has to deal. In
Macaulay's time he used to be guided by his 'common-sense,' and to
intellectualise the whole process. The unfortunate boys who acted upon
an ancient impulse to fidget, to play truant, to chase cats, or to mimic
their teacher, were asked, with repeated threats of punishment,'why'
they had done so. They, being ignorant of their own evolutionary
history, were forced to invent some far-fetched lie, and were punished
for that as well. The trained schoolmaster of to-day takes the existence
of such impulses as a normal fact; and decides how far, in each case, he
shall check them by relying on that half-conscious imitation which makes
the greater part of class-room discipline, and how far by stimulating a
conscious recognition of the connection, ethical or penal, between acts
and their consequences. In any case his power of controlling instinctive
impulse is due to his recognition of its non-intellectual origin. He may
even be able to extend this recognition to his own impulses, and to
overcome the conviction that his irritability during afternoon school
in July is the result of an intellectual conclusion as to the need of
special severity in dealing with a set of unprecedentedly wicked boys.

The politician, however, is still apt to intellectualise impulse as
completely as the schoolmaster did fifty years ago. He has two excuses,
that he deals entirely with adults, whose impulses are more deeply
modified by experience and thought than those of children, and that it
is very difficult for any one who thinks about politics not to confine
his consideration to those political actions and impulses which are
accompanied by the greatest amount of conscious thought, and which
therefore come first into his mind. But the politician thinks about men
in large communities, and it is in the forecasting of the action of
large communities that the intellectualist fallacy is most misleading.
The results of experience and thought are often confined