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