If the student of politics followed such an arrangement, he would at least begin his course by mastering a treatise on psychology, containing all those facts about the human type which have been shown by experience to be helpful in politics, and so arranged that the student’s knowledge could be most easily recalled when wanted.

At present, however, the politician who is trained for his work by reading the best-known treatises on political theory is still in the condition of the medical student trained by the study of Hippocrates or Galen.  He is taught a few isolated, and therefore distorted, facts about the human type, about pleasure and pain, perhaps, and the association of ideas, or the influence of habit.  He is told that these are selected from the other facts of human nature in order that he may think clearly on the hypothesis of there being no others.  What the others may be he is left to discover for himself; but he is likely to assume that they cannot be the subject of effective scientific thought.  He learns also a few empirical maxims about liberty and caution and the like, and, after he has read a little of the history of institutions, his political education is complete.  It is no wonder that the average layman prefers old politicians, who have forgotten their book-learning, and young doctors who remember theirs.[30]

[30] In the winter of 1907-8 I happened, on different occasions, to discuss the method of approaching political science with two young Oxford students.  In each case I suggested that it would be well to read a little psychology.  Each afterwards told me that he had consulted his tutor and had been told that psychology was ‘useless’ or ‘nonsense.’  One tutor, a man of real intellectual distinction, was said to have added the curiously scholastic reason that psychology was ’neither science nor philosophy.’

A political thinker so trained is necessarily apt to preserve the conception of human nature which he learnt in his student days in a separate and sacred compartment of his mind, into which the facts of experience, however laboriously and carefully gathered, are not permitted to enter.  Professor Ostrogorski published, for instance, in 1902, an important and extraordinarily interesting book on Democracy and the Organisation of Political Parties, containing the results of fifteen years’ close observation of the party system in America and England.  The instances given in the book might have been used as the basis of a fairly full account of those facts in the human type which are of importance to the politician—­the nature of our impulses, the necessary limitations of our contact with the external world, and the methods of that thinking brain which was evolved in our distant past, and which we have now to put to such new and strange uses.  But no indication was given that Professor Ostrogorski’s experience had altered in the least degree the conception of human nature with which he started.  The facts observed are