More subtle are the difficulties in the way of the deliberate intensification by adult politicians of their own political emotions. A life-long worker for education on the London School Board once told me that when he wearied of his work—when the words of reports become mere words, and the figures in the returns mere figures—he used to go down to a school and look closely at the faces of the children in class after class, till the freshness of his impulse came back. But for a man who is about to try such an experiment on himself even the word 'emotion' is dangerous. The worker in full work should desire cold and steady not hot and disturbed impulse, and should perhaps keep the emotional stimulus of his energy, when it is once formed, for the most part below the level of full consciousness. The surgeon in a hospital is stimulated by every sight and sound in the long rows of beds, and would be less devoted to his work if he only saw a few patients brought to his house. But all that he is conscious of during the working hours is the one purpose of healing, on which the half-conscious impulses of brain and eye and hand are harmoniously concentrated.
Perhaps indeed most adult politicians would gain rather by becoming conscious of new vices than of new virtues. Some day, for instance, the word 'opinion' itself may become the recognised name of the most dangerous political vice. Men may teach themselves by habit and association to suspect those inclinations and beliefs which, if they neglect the duty of thought, appear in their minds they know not how, and which, as long as their origin is not examined, can be created by any clever organiser who is paid to do so. The most easily manipulated State in the world would be one inhabited by a race of Nonconformist business men who never followed up a train of political reasoning in their lives, and who, as soon as they were aware of the existence of a strong political conviction in their minds, should announce that it was a matter of 'conscience' and therefore beyond the province of doubt or calculation.
But, it may be still asked, is it not Utopian to suppose that Plato's conception of the Harmony of the Soul—the intensification both of passion and of thought by their conscious co-ordination—can ever become a part of the general political ideals of a modern nation? Perhaps most men before the war between Russia and Japan would have answered, Yes. Many men would now answer, No. The Japanese are apparently in some respects less advanced in their conceptions of intellectual morality than, say, the French. One hears, for instance, of incidents which seem to show that liberty of thought is not always valued in Japanese universities. But both during the years of preparation for the war, and during the war itself, there was something in what one was told of the combined emotional and intellectual attitude of the Japanese, which to a European seemed wholly new. Napoleon contended against the 'idéologues' who saw things as they wished them to be, and until he himself submitted to his own illusions he ground them to powder. But we associate Napoleon's clearness of vision with personal selfishness. Here was a nation in which every private soldier outdid Napoleon in his determination to see in warfare not great principles nor picturesque traditions, but hard facts; and yet the fire of their patriotism was hotter than Gambetta's. Something of this may have been due to the inherited organisation of the Japanese race, but more seemed to be the effect of their mental environment. They had whole-heartedly welcomed that conception of Science which in Europe, where it was first elaborated, still struggles with older ideals. Science with them had allied, and indeed identified, itself with that idea of natural law which, since they learnt it through China from Hindustan, had always underlain their various religions.[[64]] They had acquired, therefore, a mental outlook which was determinist without being fatalist, and which combined the most absolute submission to Nature with untiring energy in thought and action.
One would like to hope that in the West a similar fusion might take place between the emotional and philosophical traditions of religion, and the new conception of intellectual duty introduced by Science. The political effect of such a fusion would be enormous. But for the moment that hope is not easy. The inevitable conflict between old faith and new knowledge has produced, one fears, throughout Christendom, a division not only between the conclusions of religion and science, but also between the religious and the scientific habit of mind. The scientific men of to-day no longer dream of learning from an English Bishop, as their predecessors learnt from Bishop Butler, the doctrine of probability in conduct, the rule that while belief must never be fixed, must indeed always be kept open for the least indication of new evidence, action, where action is necessary, must be taken as resolutely on imperfect knowledge, if that is the best available, as on the most perfect demonstration. The policy of the last Vatican Encyclical will leave few Abbots who are likely to work out, as Abbot Mendel worked out in long years of patient observation, a new biological basis for organic evolution. Mental habits count for more in politics than do the acceptance or rejection of creeds or evidences. When an English clergyman sits at his breakfast-table reading his Times or Mail, his attitude towards the news of the day is conditioned not by his belief or doubt that he who uttered certain commandments about non-resistance and poverty was God Himself, but by the degree to which he has been trained to watch the causation of his opinions. As it is, Dr. Jameson's prepared manifesto on the Johannesburg Raid stirred most clergymen like a trumpet, and the suggestion that the latest socialist member of Parliament is not a gentleman, produces in them a feeling of genuine disgust and despair.
It may be therefore that the effective influence in politics of new ideals of intellectual conduct will have to wait for a still wider change of mental attitude, touching our life on many sides. Some day the conception of a harmony of thought and passion may take the place, in the deepest regions of our moral consciousness, of our present dreary confusion and barren conflicts. If that day comes much in politics which is now impossible will become possible. The politician will be able not only to control and direct in himself the impulses of whose nature he is more fully aware, but to assume in his hearers an understanding of his aim. Ministers and Members of Parliament may then find their most effective form of expression in that grave simplicity of speech which in the best Japanese State papers rings so strangely to our ears, and citizens may learn to look to their representatives, as the Japanese army looked to their generals, for that unbought effort of the mind by which alone man becomes at once the servant and the master of nature.