Such a conscious change is already taking place in the work of Royal Commissions, International Congresses, and other bodies and persons who have to arrange and draw conclusions from large masses of specially collected evidence.  Their methods and vocabulary, even when not numerical, are nowadays in large part quantitative.

In parliamentary oratory, however, the old tradition of over-simplification is apt to persist.

(PART II.—­Chapter I.—­Political Morality, page 167)

But in what ways can such changes in political science affect the actual trend of political forces?

In the first place, the abandonment by political thinkers and writers of the intellectualist conception of politics will sooner or later influence the moral judgments of the working politician.  A young candidate will begin with a new conception of his moral relation to those whose will and opinions he is attempting to influence.  He will start, in that respect, from a position hitherto confined to statesmen who have been made cynical by experience.

If that were the only result of our new knowledge, political morality might be changed for the worse.  But the change will go deeper.  When men become conscious of psychological processes of which they have been unconscious or half-conscious, not only are they put on their guard against the exploitation of those processes in themselves by others, but they become better able to control them from within.

If, however, a conscious moral purpose is to be strong enough to overcome, as a political force, the advancing art of political exploitation, the conception of control from within must be formed into an ideal entity which, like ‘Science,’ can appeal to popular imagination, and be spread by an organised system of education.  The difficulties in this are great (owing in part to our ignorance of the varied reactions of self-consciousness on instinct), but a wide extension of the idea of causation is not inconsistent with an increased intensity of moral passion.

(Chapter II.—­Representative Government, page 199)

The changes now going on in our conception of the psychological basis of politics will also re-open the discussion of representative democracy.

Some of the old arguments in that discussion will no longer be accepted as valid, and it is probable that many political thinkers (especially among those who have been educated in the natural sciences) will return to Plato’s proposal of a despotic government carried on by a selected and trained class, who live apart from the ‘ostensible world’; though English experience in India indicates that even the most carefully selected official must still live in the ‘ostensible world,’ and that the argument that good government requires the consent of the governed does not depend for its validity upon its original intellectualist associations.

Our new way of thinking about politics will, however, certainly change the form, not only of the argument for consent, but also of the institutions by which consent is expressed.  An election (like a jury-trial) will be, and is already beginning to be, looked upon rather as a process by which right decisions are formed under right conditions, than as a mechanical expedient by which decisions already formed are ascertained.