lf upon
his staff and go upon the streets. So runs the course of legislation in
this land of freemen. We could pile up example upon example, but will
defer the business for the present. Perhaps it may be resumed in a work
one of us is now engaged upon--a full length study of the popular mind
under the republic. But that work will take years....

VII

No doubt we should apologize for writing, even so, so long a preface to
so succinct a book. The one excuse we can think of is that, having read
it, one need not read the book. That book, as we have said, may strike
the superficial as jocular, but in actual fact it is a very serious and
even profound composition, not addressed to the casual reader, but to
the scholar. Its preparation involved a great diligence, and its study
is not to be undertaken lightly. What the psychologist will find to
admire in it, however, is not its learning and painstaking, its
laborious erudition, but its compression. It establishes, we believe, a
new and clearer method for a science long run to turgidity and
flatulence. Perhaps it may be even said to set up an entirely new
science, to wit, that of descriptive sociological psychology. We believe
that this field will attract many men of inquiring mind hereafter and
yield a valuable crop of important facts. The experimental method,
intrinsically so sound and useful, has been much abused by orthodox
psychologists; it inevitably leads them into a trackless maze of
meaningless tables and diagrams; they keep their eyes so resolutely upon
the intellectual process that they pay no heed to the primary
intellectual materials. Nevertheless, it must be obvious that the
conclusions that a man comes to, the emotions that he harbours and the
crazes that sway him are of much less significance than the fundamental
assumptions upon which they are all based.

There has been, indeed, some discussion of those fundamental assumptions
of late. We have heard, for example, many acute discourses upon the
effects produced upon the whole thinking of the German people, peasants
and professors alike, by the underlying German assumption that the late
Kaiser was anointed of God and hence above all ordinary human
responsibility. We have heard talk, too, of the curious Irish axiom
that there is a mysterious something in the nature of things, giving the
Irish people an indefeasible right to govern Ireland as they please,
regardless of the safety of their next-door neighbours.