(Chapter II.—­Political Entities, page:  59)

Political acts and impulses are the result of the contact between human nature and its environment.  During the period studied by the politician, human nature has changed very little, but political environment has changed with ever-increasing rapidity.

Those facts of our environment which stimulate impulse and action reach us through our senses, and are selected from the mass of our sensations and memories by our instinctive or acquired knowledge of their significance.  In politics the things recognised are, for the most part, made by man himself, and our knowledge of their significance is not instinctive but acquired.

Recognition tends to attach itself to symbols, which take the place of more complex sensations and memories.  Some of the most difficult problems in politics result from the relation between the conscious use in reasoning of the symbols called words, and their more or less automatic and unconscious effect in stimulating emotion and action.  A political symbol whose significance has once been established by association, may go through a psychological development of its own, apart from the history of the facts which were originally symbolised by it.  This may be seen in the case of the names and emblems of nations and parties; and still more clearly in the history of those commercial entities—­’teas’ or ’soaps’—­which are already made current by advertisement before any objects to be symbolised by them have been made or chosen.  Ethical difficulties are often created by the relation between the quickly changing opinions of any individual politician and such slowly changing entities as his reputation, his party name, or the traditional personality of a newspaper which he may control.

(Chapter III.—­Non-Rational Inference in Politics, page 98)

Intellectualist political thinkers often assume, not only that political action is necessarily the result of inferences as to means and ends, but that all inferences are of the same ‘rational’ type.

It is difficult to distinguish sharply between rational and non-rational inferences in the stream of mental experience, but it is clear that many of the half-conscious processes by which men form their political opinions are non-rational.  We can generally trust non-rational inferences in ordinary life because they do not give rise to conscious opinions until they have been strengthened by a large number of undesigned coincidences.  But conjurers and others who study our non-rational mental processes can so play upon them as to make us form absurd beliefs.  The empirical art of politics consists largely in the creation of opinion by the deliberate exploitation of subconscious non-rational inference.  The process of inference may go on beyond the point desired by the politician who started it, and is as likely to take place in the mind of a passive newspaper-reader as among the members of the most excited crowd.