[37] Loc. cit., p. xliii.

The next step in the course of political training which I am advocating would be the quantitative study of the inherited variations of individual men when compared with the ‘normal’ or ‘average’ man who had so far served for the study of the type.

How is the student to approach this part of the course?  Every man differs quantitatively from every other man in respect of every one of his qualities.  The student obviously cannot carry in his mind or use for the purposes of thought all the variations even of a single inherited quality which are to be found among the fifteen hundred millions or so of human beings who even at any one moment are in existence.  Much less can he ascertain or remember the inter-relation of thousands of inherited qualities in the past history of a race in which individuals are at every moment dying and being born.

Mr. H.G.  Wells faces this fact in that extremely stimulating essay on ‘Scepticism of the Instrument,’ which he has appended to his Modern Utopia.  His answer is that the difficulty is ’of the very smallest importance in all the practical affairs of life, or indeed in relation to anything but philosophy and wide generalisations.  But in philosophy it matters profoundly.  If I order two new-laid eggs for breakfast, up come two unhatched but still unique avian individuals, and the chances are they serve my rude physiological purpose.’[38]

[38] A Modern Utopia, p. 381.

To the politician, however, the uniqueness of the individual is of enormous importance, not only when he is dealing with ’philosophy and wide generalisations’ but in the practical affairs of his daily activity.  Even the fowl-breeder does not simply ask for ‘two eggs’ to put under a hen when he is trying to establish a new variety, and the politician, who is responsible for actual results in an amazingly complicated world, has to deal with more delicate distinctions than the breeder.  A statesman who wants two private secretaries, or two generals, or two candidates likely to receive equally enthusiastic support from nonconformists and trade-unionists, does not ask for ‘two men.’

On this point, however, most writers on political science seem to suggest that after they have described human nature as if all men were in all respects equal to the average man, and have warned their readers of the inexactness of their description, they can do no more.  All knowledge of individual variations must be left to individual experience.

John Stuart Mill, for instance, in the section on the Logic of the Moral Sciences at the end of his System of Logic implies this, and seems also to imply that any resulting inexactness in the political judgments and forecasts made by students and professors of politics does not involve a large element of error.