In this chapter I propose to consider the second assumption, and to inquire how far it is true that men, when they do form inferences as to the result of their political actions, always form them by a process of reasoning.

In such an inquiry one meets the preliminary difficulty that it is very hard to arrive at a clear definition of reasoning.  Any one who watches the working of his own mind will find that it is by no means easy to trace these sharp distinctions between various mental states, which seem so obvious when they are set out in little books on psychology.  The mind of man is like a harp, all of whose strings throb together; so that emotion, impulse, inference, and the special kind of inference called reasoning, are often simultaneous and intermingled aspects of a single mental experience.

This is especially true in moments of action and excitement; but when we are sitting in passive contemplation we would often find it hard to say whether our successive states of consciousness are best described as emotions or inferences.  And when our thought clearly belongs to the type of inference it is often hard to say whether its steps are controlled by so definite a purpose of discovering truth that we are entitled to call it reasoning.

Even when we think with effort and with a definite purpose, we do not always draw inferences or form beliefs of any kind.  If we forget a name we say the alphabet over to ourselves and pause at each letter to see if the name we want will be suggested to us.  When we receive bad news we strive to realise it by allowing successive mental associations to arise of themselves, and waiting to discover what the news will mean for us.  A poet broods with intense creative effort on the images which appear in his mind and arranges them, not in order to discover truth, but in order to attain an artistic and dramatic end.  In Prospero’s great speech in The Tempest the connection between the successive images—­the baseless fabric of this vision—­the cloud-capped towers—­the gorgeous palaces—­the solemn temples—­the great globe itself—­is, for instance, one not of inference but of reverie, heightened by creative effort, and subordinated to poetic intention.

Most of the actual inferences which we draw during any day belong, indeed, to a much humbler type of thought than do some of the higher forms of non-inferential association.  Many of our inferences, like the quasi-instinctive impulses which they accompany and modify, take place when we are making no conscious effort at all.  In such a purely instinctive action as leaping backwards from a falling stone, the impulse to leap and the inference that there is danger, are simply two names for a single automatic and unconscious process.  We can speak of instinctive inference as well as of instinctive impulse; we draw, for instance, by an instinctive mental process, inferences as to the distance and solidity of objects from the movements