capable of dealing with the
abstractions of mathematics, so are the socialists men who, in virtue of
their constitutions or temperaments, are incapable of comprehending
accurately the concrete facts of life, and are consequently as unable
with any practical accuracy, to reason about them as a professor of
mathematics would be to reason about the value of strawberries, if he
knew only their weights or numbers, but had no expert judgment with
regard to their condition or quality.

To ascertain how the socialistic temperament thus debilitates the
faculties, it will be enough to note certain characteristics distinctive
of those possessing it. Such persons are all distinguished, though
naturally in various degrees, by an undue preponderance of the emotional
over the critical faculties, whence there arises in them what, to borrow
a phrase of President Roosevelt's, we may aptly call an _inflammation_
of the social sympathies. This makes such persons magnify into
intolerable wrongs all sorts of pains and inconveniences which most men
accept as part of the "rough and tumble" of life; and it thus renders
them abnormally impatient of the actual, and abnormally preoccupied with
the ideal. The ideal vision which they see arising out of the actual is
for them so illuminated, as though by a kind of limelight, that the
details of the actual, thrown into comparative obscurity, either cannot
be minutely distinguished by them, or, like the words of an unwelcome
talker, cannot fix their attention. Without habitual concentration of
the attention on the subject-matter with which reason deals, no
reasoning can deal with it to any practical purpose; and men of that
class from which socialists of the higher kind are recruited, are men
who fail to understand the modern industrial process, because they are
hindered by their temperament from giving a sufficient attention to its
details. They derive from them vivid impressions, but no practical
knowledge, like Turner when he painted a train swathed in its own
vapour, and flushing the wet air with the fires of its lamps and
furnace. From a study of Turner's picture of "Rain, Steam, and Speed,"
it would be impossible for any human being to conjecture how a
locomotive was constructed. It would be still more impossible to form
any judgment as to how its slide-valves, or its blast, or the tubes of
its boiler might be improved. It is similarly impossible for men of the
socialistic temperament to understa