The political importance of all this consists in the fact that most of the political opinions of most men are the result, not of reasoning tested by experience, but of unconscious or half-conscious inference fixed by habit.  It is indeed mainly in the formation of tracks of thought that habit shows its power in politics.  In our other activities habit is largely a matter of muscular adaptation, but the bodily movements of politics occur so seldom that nothing like a habit can be set up by them.  One may see a respectable voter, whose political opinions have been smoothed and polished by the mental habits of thirty years, fumbling over the act of marking and folding his ballot paper like a child with its first copybook.

Some men even seem to reverence most those of their opinions whose origin has least to do with deliberate reasoning.  When Mr. Barrie’s Bowie Haggart said:  ’I am of opeenion that the works of Burns is of an immoral tendency.  I have not read them myself, but such is my opeenion,’[20] he was comparing the merely rational conclusion which might have resulted from a reading of Burns’s works with the conviction about them which he found ready-made in his mind, and which was the more sacred to him and more intimately his own, because he did not know how it was produced.

[20] Auld Licht Idylls, p. 220.

Opinion thus unconsciously formed is a fairly safe guide in the affairs of our daily life.  The material world does not often go out of its way to deceive us, and our final convictions are the resultant of many hundreds of independent fleeting inferences, of which the valid are more numerous and more likely to survive than the fallacious.  But even in our personal affairs our memory is apt to fade, and we can often remember the association between two ideas, while forgetting the cause which created that association.  We discover in our mind a vague impression that Simpson is a drunkard, and cannot recollect whether we ever had any reason to believe it, or whether some one once told us that Simpson had a cousin who invented a cure for drunkenness.  When the connection is remembered in a telling phrase, and when its origin has never been consciously noticed, we may find ourselves with a really vivid belief for which we could, if cross-examined, give no account whatever.  When, for instance, we have heard an early-Victorian Bishop called ‘Soapy Sam’ half a dozen times we get a firm conviction of his character without further evidence.

Under ordinary circumstances not much harm is done by this fact; because a name would not be likely to ‘catch on’ unless a good many people really thought it appropriate, and unless it ‘caught on’ we should not be likely to hear it more than once or twice.  But in politics, as in the conjuring trade, it is often worth while for some people to take a great deal of trouble in order to produce such an effect without waiting for the idea to enforce itself by merely accidental repetition.