The fact that impulse is not always the result of conscious foresight is most clearly seen in the case of children. The first impulses of a baby to suck, or to grasp, are obviously 'instinctive.' But even when the unconscious or unremembered condition of infancy has been succeeded by the connected consciousness of childhood, the child will fly to his mother and hide his face in her skirts when he sees a harmless stranger. Later on he will torture small beasts and run away from big beasts, or steal fruit, or climb trees, though no one has suggested such actions to him, and though he may expect disagreeable results from them.
We generally think of 'instinct' as consisting of a number of such separate tendencies, each towards some distinct act or series of acts. But there is no reason to suppose that the whole body of inherited impulse even among non-human animals has ever been divisible in that way. The evolutionary history of impulse must have been very complicated. An impulse which survived because it produced one result may have persisted with modifications because it produced another result; and side by side with impulses towards specific acts we can detect in all animals vague and generalised tendencies, often overlapping and contradictory, like curiosity and shyness, sympathy and cruelty, imitation and restless activity. It is possible, therefore, to avoid the ingenious dilemma by which Mr. Balfour argues that we must either demonstrate that the desire, e.g. for scientific truth, is lineally descended from some one of the specific instincts which teach us 'to fight, to eat, and to bring up children,' or must admit the supernatural authority of the Shorter Catechism.[[5]]
The pre-rational character of many of our impulses is, however, disguised by the fact that during the lifetime of each individual they are increasingly modified by memory and habit and thought. Even the non-human animals are able to adapt and modify their inherited impulses either by imitation or by habits founded on individual experience. When telegraph wires, for instance, were first put up many birds flew against them and were killed. But although the number of those that were killed was obviously insufficient to produce a change in the biological inheritance of the species, very few birds fly against the wires now. The young birds must have imitated their elders, who had learnt to avoid the wires; just as the young of many hunting animals are said to learn devices and precautions which are the result of their parents' experience, and later to make and hand down by imitation inventions of their own.
Many of the directly inherited impulses, again, appear both in man and other animals at a certain point in the growth of the individual, and then, if they are checked, die away, or, if they are unchecked, form habits; and impulses, which were originally strong and useful, may no longer help in preserving life, and may, like the whale's legs or our teeth and hair, be weakened by biological degeneration. Such temporary or weakened impulses are especially liable to be transferred to new objects, or to be modified by experience and thought.
With all these complicated facts the schoolmaster has to deal. In Macaulay's time he used to be guided by his 'common-sense,' and to intellectualise the whole process. The unfortunate boys who acted upon an ancient impulse to fidget, to play truant, to chase cats, or to mimic their teacher, were asked, with repeated threats of punishment,'why' they had done so. They, being ignorant of their own evolutionary history, were forced to invent some far-fetched lie, and were punished for that as well. The trained schoolmaster of to-day takes the existence of such impulses as a normal fact; and decides how far, in each case, he shall check them by relying on that half-conscious imitation which makes the greater part of class-room discipline, and how far by stimulating a conscious recognition of the connection, ethical or penal, between acts and their consequences. In any case his power of controlling instinctive impulse is due to his recognition of its non-intellectual origin. He may even be able to extend this recognition to his own impulses, and to overcome the conviction that his irritability during afternoon school in July is the result of an intellectual conclusion as to the need of special severity in dealing with a set of unprecedentedly wicked boys.
The politician, however, is still apt to intellectualise impulse as completely as the schoolmaster did fifty years ago. He has two excuses, that he deals entirely with adults, whose impulses are more deeply modified by experience and thought than those of children, and that it is very difficult for any one who thinks about politics not to confine his consideration to those political actions and impulses which are accompanied by the greatest amount of conscious thought, and which therefore come first into his mind. But the politician thinks about men in large communities, and it is in the forecasting of the action of large communities that the intellectualist fallacy is most misleading. The results of experience and thought are often confined to individuals or small groups, and when they differ may cancel each other as political forces. The original human impulses are, with personal variations, common to the whole race, and increase in their importance with an increase in the number of those influenced by them.
It may be worth while, therefore, to attempt a description of some of the more obvious or more important political impulses, remembering always that in politics we are dealing not with such clear-cut separate instincts as we may find in children and animals, but with tendencies often weakened by the course of human evolution, still more often transferred to new uses, and acting not simply but in combination or counteraction.
Aristotle, for instance, says that it is 'affection' (or 'friendship,' for the meaning of ριλία stands half way between the two words) which 'makes political union possible,' and 'which law-givers consider more important than justice.' It is, he says, a hereditary instinct among animals of the same race, and particularly among men.[[6]] If we look for this political affection in its simplest form, we see it in our impulse to feel 'kindly' towards any other human being of whose existence and personality we become vividly aware. This impulse can be checked and overlaid by others, but any one can test its existence and its prerationality in his own case by going, for instance, to the British Museum and watching the effect on his feelings of the discovery that a little Egyptian girl baby who died four thousand years ago rubbed the toes of her shoes by crawling upon the floor.
The tactics of an election consist largely of contrivances by which this immediate emotion of personal affection may be set up. The candidate is advised to 'show himself continually, to give away prizes, to 'say a few words' at the end of other people's speeches—all under circumstances which offer little or no opportunity for the formation of a reasoned opinion of his merits, but many opportunities for the rise of a purely instinctive affection among those present. His portrait is periodically distributed, and is more effective if it is a good, that is to say, a distinctive, than if it is a flattering likeness. Best of all is a photograph which brings his ordinary existence sharply forward by representing him in his garden smoking a pipe or reading a newspaper.
A simple-minded supporter whose affection has been so worked up will probably try to give an intellectual explanation of it. He will say that the man, of whom he may know really nothing except that he was photographed in a Panama hat with a fox-terrier, is 'the kind of man we want,' and that therefore he has decided to support him; just as a child will say that he loves his mother because she is the best mother in the world,[[7]] or a man in love will give an elaborate explanation of his perfectly normal feelings, which he describes as an intellectual inference from alleged abnormal excellences in his beloved. The candidate naturally intellectualises in the same way. One of the most perfectly modest men I know once told me that he was 'going round' a good deal among his future constituents 'to let them see what a good fellow I am.' Unless, indeed, the process can be intellectualised, it is for many men unintelligible.