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 to individuals or small groups, and when they differ may cancel each other as political forces.  The original human impulses are, with personal variations, common to the whole race, and increase in their importance with an increase in the number of those influenced by them.

It may be worth while, therefore, to attempt a description of some of the more obvious or more important political impulses, remembering always that in politics we are dealing not with such clear-cut separate instincts as we may find in children and animals, but with tendencies often weakened by the course of human evolution, still more often transferred to new uses, and acting not simply but in combination or counteraction.

Aristotle, for instance, says that it is ‘affection’ (or ‘friendship,’ for the meaning of [Greek:  philia] stands half way between the two words) which ‘makes political union possible,’ and ’which law-givers consider more important than justice.’  It is, he says, a hereditary instinct among animals of the same race, and particularly among men.[6] If we look for this political affection in its simplest form, we see it in our impulse to feel ‘kindly’ towards any other human being of whose existence and personality we become vividly aware.  This impulse can be checked and overlaid by others, but any one can test its existence and its prerationality in his own case by going, for instance, to the British Museum and watching the effect on his feelings of the discovery that a little Egyptian girl baby who died four thousand years ago rubbed the toes of her shoes by crawling upon the floor.