Even when we think with effort and with a definite purpose, we do not always draw inferences or form beliefs of any kind. If we forget a name we say the alphabet over to ourselves and pause at each letter to see if the name we want will be suggested to us. When we receive bad news we strive to realise it by allowing successive mental associations to arise of themselves, and waiting to discover what the news will mean for us. A poet broods with intense creative effort on the images which appear in his mind and arranges them, not in order to discover truth, but in order to attain an artistic and dramatic end. In Prospero's great speech in The Tempest the connection between the successive images—the baseless fabric of this vision—the cloud-capped towers—the gorgeous palaces—the solemn temples—the great globe itself—is, for instance, one not of inference but of reverie, heightened by creative effort, and subordinated to poetic intention.
Most of the actual inferences which we draw during any day belong, indeed, to a much humbler type of thought than do some of the higher forms of non-inferential association. Many of our inferences, like the quasi-instinctive impulses which they accompany and modify, take place when we are making no conscious effort at all. In such a purely instinctive action as leaping backwards from a falling stone, the impulse to leap and the inference that there is danger, are simply two names for a single automatic and unconscious process. We can speak of instinctive inference as well as of instinctive impulse; we draw, for instance, by an instinctive mental process, inferences as to the distance and solidity of objects from the movements of our eye-muscles in focussing, and from the difference between the images on our two retinas. We are unaware of the method by which we arrive at these inferences, and even when we know that the double photograph in the stereoscope is flat, or that the conjurer has placed two converging sheets of looking-glass beneath his table, we can only say that the photograph 'looks' solid, or that we 'seem' to see right under the table.
The whole process of inference, rational or non-rational, is indeed built up from the primary fact that one mental state may call up another, either because the two have been associated together in the history of the individual, or because a connection between the two has proved useful in the history of the race. If a man and his dog stroll together down the street they turn to the right hand or the left, hesitate or hurry in crossing the road, recognise and act upon the bicycle bell and the cabman's shout, by using the same process of inference to guide the same group of impulses. Their inferences are for the most part effortless, though sometimes they will both be seen to pause until they have settled some point by wordless deliberation. It is only when a decision has to be taken affecting the more distant purposes of his life that the man enters on a region of definitely rational thought where the dog cannot follow him, in which he uses words, and is more or less conscious of his own logical methods.
But the weakness of inference by automatic association as an instrument of thought consists in the fact that either of a pair of associated ideas may call up the other without reference to their logical connection. The effect calls up the cause as freely as the cause calls up the effect. A patient under a hypnotic trance is wonderfully rapid and fertile in drawing inferences, but he hunts the scent backward as easily as he does forward. Put a dagger in his hand and he believes that he has committed a murder. The sight of an empty plate convinces him that he has had dinner. If left to himself he will probably go through routine actions well enough. But any one who understands his condition can make him act absurdly.
In the same way when we dream we draw absurd inferences by association. The feeling of discomfort due to slight indigestion produces a belief that we are about to speak to a large audience and have mislaid our notes, or are walking along the Brighton Parade in a night-shirt. Even when men are awake, those parts of their mind to which for the moment they are not giving full attention are apt to draw equally unfounded inferences. A conjurer who succeeds in keeping the attention of his audience concentrated on the observation of what he is doing with his right hand can make them draw irrational conclusions from the movements of his left hand. People in a state of strong religious emotion sometimes become conscious of a throbbing sound in their ears, due to the increased force of their circulation. An organist, by opening the thirty-two foot pipe, can create the same sensation, and can thereby induce in the congregation a vague and half-conscious belief that they are experiencing religious emotion.
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.
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. I have already said that political parties try to give each other bad names by an organised system of mental suggestion. If the word 'Wastrel,' for instance, appears on the contents bills of the Daily Mail one morning as a name for the Progressives during a County Council election, a passenger riding on an omnibus from Putney to the Bank will see it half-consciously at least a hundred times, and will have formed a fairly stable mental association by the end of the journey. If he reflected, he would know that only one person has once decided to use the word, but he does not reflect, and the effect on him is the same as if a hundred persons had used it independently of each other. The contents-bills, indeed, of the newspapers, which were originally short and pithy merely from considerations of space, have developed in a way which threatens to turn our streets (like the advertisement pages of an American magazine) into a psychological laboratory for the unconscious production of permanent associations. 'Another German Insult,' 'Keir Hardie's Crime,' 'Balfour Backs Down,' are intended to stick and do stick in the mind as ready-made opinions.