A large part of this work of complex co-ordination was apparently in Mr. Gladstone’s case unconscious.  Throughout the chapters one has the feeling—­which any one who has had to make less important political decisions can parallel from his own experience—­that Gladstone was waiting for indications of a solution to appear in his mind.  He was conscious of his effort, conscious also that his effort was being directed simultaneously towards many different considerations, but largely unconscious of the actual process of inference, which went on perhaps more rapidly when he was asleep, or thinking of something else, than when he was awake and attentive.  A phrase of Mr. Morley’s indicates a feeling with which every politician is familiar.  ‘The reader,’ he says,’knows in what direction the main current of Mr. Gladstone’s thought must have been setting’ (p. 236).

That is to say, we are watching an operation rather of art than of science, of long experience and trained faculty rather than of conscious method.

But the history of human progress consists in the gradual and partial substitution of science for art, of the power over nature acquired in youth by study, for that which comes in late middle age as the half-conscious result of experience.  Our problem therefore involves the further question, whether those forms of political thought which correspond to the complexity of nature are teachable or not?  At present they are not often taught.  In every generation thousands of young men and women are attracted to politics because their intellects are keener, and their sympathies wider than those of their fellows.  They become followers of Liberalism or Imperialism, of Scientific Socialism or the Rights of Men or Women.  To them, at first, Liberalism and the Empire, Rights and Principles, are real and simple things.  Or, like Shelley, they see in the whole human race an infinite repetition of uniform individuals, the ‘millions on millions’ who ’wait, firm, rapid, and elate.’[44]

[44] Shelley, Poetical Works (H.B.  Forman), vol. iv. p. 8.

About all these things they argue by the old a priori methods which we have inherited with our political language.  But after a time a sense of unreality grows upon them.  Knowledge of the complex and difficult world forces itself into their minds.  Like the old Chartists with whom I once spent an evening, they tell you that their politics have been ’all talk’—­all words—­and there are few among them, except those to whom politics has become a profession or a career, who hold on until through weariness and disappointment they learn new confidence from new knowledge.  Most men, after the first disappointment, fall back on habit or party spirit for their political opinions and actions.  Having ceased to think of their unknown fellow citizens as uniform repetitions of a simple type, they cease to think of them at all; and content themselves with using party phrases about the mass of mankind, and realising the individual existence of their casual neighbours.