But however anxious we are to see the facts of our existence without illusion, and to hope nothing without cause, we can still draw some measure of comfort from the recollection that during the few thousand years through which we can trace political history in the past, man, without changing his nature, has made enormous improvements in his polity, and that those improvements have often been the result of new moral ideals formed under the influence of new knowledge.
The ultimate and wider effect on our conduct of any increase in our knowledge may indeed be very different from, and more important than, its immediate and narrower effect. We each of us live our lives in a pictured universe, of which only a small part is contributed by our own observation and memory, and by far the greater part by what we have learnt from others. The changes in that mental picture of our environment made for instance by the discovery of America, or the ascertainment of the true movements of the nearer heavenly bodies, exercised an influence on men's general conception of their place in the universe, which proved ultimately to be more important than their immediate effect in stimulating explorers and improving the art of navigation. But none of the changes of outlook in the past have approached in their extent and significance those which have been in progress during the last fifty years, the new history of man and his surroundings, stretching back through hitherto unthought-of ages, the substitution of an illimitable vista of ever changing worlds for the imagined perfection of the ordered heavens, and above all the intrusion of science into the most intimate regions of ourselves. The effects of such changes often come, it is true, more slowly than we hope. I was talking not long ago to one of the ablest of those who were beginning their intellectual life when Darwin published the Origin of Species. He told me how he and his philosopher brother expected that at once all things should become new, and how unwillingly as the years went on they had accepted their disappointment. But though slow, they are far-reaching.
To myself it seems that the most important political result of the vast range of new knowledge started by Darwin's work may prove to be the extension of the idea of conduct so as to include the control of mental processes of which at present most men are either unconscious or unobservant. The limits of our conscious conduct are fixed by the limits of our self-knowledge. Before men knew anger as something separable from the self that knew it, and before they had made that knowledge current by the invention of a name, the control of anger was not a question of conduct. Anger was a part of the angry man himself, and could only be checked by the invasion of some other passion, love, for instance, or fear, which was equally, while it lasted, a part of self. The man survived to continue his race if anger or fear or love came upon him at the right time, and with the right intensity. But when man had named his anger, and could stand outside it in thought, anger came within the region of conduct, Henceforth, in that respect, man could choose either the old way of half-conscious obedience to an impulse which on the whole had proved useful in his past evolution, or the new way of fully conscious control directed by a calculation of results.
A man who has become conscious of the nature of fear, and has acquired the power of controlling it, if he sees a boulder bounding towards him down a torrent bed, may either obey the immediate impulse to leap to one side, or may substitute conduct for instinct, and stand where he is because he has calculated that at the next bound the course of the boulder will be deflected. If he decides to stand he may be wrong. It may prove by the event that the immediate impulse of fear was, owing to the imperfection of his powers of conscious inference, a safer guide than the process of calculation. But because he has the choice, even the decision to follow impulse is a question of conduct. Burke was sincerely convinced that men's power of political reasoning was so utterly inadequate to their task, that all his life long he urged the English nation to follow prescription, to obey, that is to say, on principle their habitual political impulses. But the deliberate following of prescription which Burke advocated was something different, because it was the result of choice, from the uncalculated loyalty of the past. Those who have eaten of the tree of knowledge cannot forget.
In other matters than politics the influence of the fruit of that tree is now spreading further over our lives. Whether we will or not, the old unthinking obedience to appetite in eating is more and more affected by our knowledge, imperfect though that be, of the physiological results of the quantity and kind of our food. Mr. Chesterton cries out, like the Cyclops in the play, against those who complicate the life of man, and tells us to eat 'caviare on impulse,' instead of 'grape nuts on principle.'[[59]] But since we cannot unlearn our knowledge, Mr. Chesterton is only telling us to eat caviare on principle. The physician, when he knows the part which mental suggestion plays in the cure of disease, may hate and fear his knowledge, but he cannot divest himself of it. He finds himself watching the unintended effects of his words and tones and gestures, until he realises that in spite of himself he is calculating the means by which such effects can be produced. After a time, even his patients may learn to watch the effect of 'a good bedside manner' on themselves.
So in politics, now that knowledge of the obscurer impulses of mankind is being spread (if only by the currency of new words), the relation both of the politician and the voter to those impulses is changing. As soon as American politicians called a certain kind of specially paid orator a 'spell-binder,' the word penetrated through the newspapers from politicians to audiences. The man who knows that he has paid two dollars to sit in a hall and be 'spell-bound,' feels, it is true, the old sensations, but feels them with a subtle and irrevocable difference. The English newspaper reader who has once heard the word 'sensational,' may try to submit every morning the innermost sanctuary of his consciousness to the trained psychologists of the halfpenny journals. He may, according to the suggestion of the day, loathe the sixty million crafty scoundrels who inhabit the German Empire, shudder at a coming comet, pity the cowards on the Government Front Bench, or tremble lest a pantomime lady should throw up her part. But he cannot help the existence in the background of his consciousness of a self which watches, and, perhaps, is a little ashamed of his 'sensations.' Even the rapidly growing psychological complexity of modern novels and plays helps to complicate the relation of the men of our time to their emotional impulses. The young tradesman who has been reading either Evan Harrington, or a novel by some writer who has read Evan Harrington, goes to shake hands with a countess at an entertainment given by the Primrose League, or the Liberal Social Council, conscious of pleasure, but to some degree critical of his pleasure. His father, who read John Halifax, Gentleman, would have been carried away by a tenth part of the condescension which is necessary in the case of the son. A voter who has seen John Bull's Other Island at the theatre, is more likely than his father, who only saw The Shaughraun, to realise that one's feelings on the Irish question can be thought about as well as felt.
In so far as this change extends, the politician may find in the future that an increasing proportion of his constituents half-consciously 'see through' the cruder arts of emotional exploitation.
But such an unconscious or half-conscious extension of self-knowledge is not likely of itself to keep pace with the parallel development of the political art of controlling impulse. The tendency, if it is to be effective, must be strengthened by the deliberate adoption and inculcation of new moral and intellectual conceptions—new ideal entities to which our affections and desires may attach themselves.
'Science' has been such an entity ever since Francis Bacon found again, without knowing it, the path of Aristotle's best thought. The conception of 'Science,' of scientific method and the scientific spirit, was built up in successive generations by a few students. At first their conception was confined to themselves. Its effects were seen in the discoveries which they actually made; but to the mass of mankind they seemed little better than magicians. Now it has spread to the whole world. In every class-room and laboratory in Europe and America the conscious idea of Science forms the minds and wills of thousands of men and women who could never have helped to create it. It has penetrated, as the political conceptions of Liberty or of Natural Right never penetrated, to non-European races. Arab engineers in Khartoum, doctors and nurses and generals in the Japanese army, Hindoo and Chinese students make of their whole lives an intense activity inspired by absolute submission to Science, and not only English or American or German town working men, but villagers in Italy or Argentina are learning to respect the authority and sympathise with the methods of that organised study which may double at any moment the produce of their crops or check a plague among their cattle.
'Science,' however, is associated by most men, even in Europe, only with things exterior to themselves, things that can be examined by test-tubes and microscopes. They are dimly aware that there exists a science of the mind, but that knowledge suggests to them, as yet, no ideal of conduct.