facts of human nature is likely to result in error. The study of history
cannot be assimilated to that of biology.

_(Chapter V.--The Method of Political Reasoning, page 138)_

The method of political reasoning has shared the traditional
over-simplification of its subject-matter.

In Economics, where both method and subject-matter were originally
still more completely simplified, 'quantitative' methods have since
Jevons's time tended to take the place of 'qualitative'. How far is a
similar change possible in politics?

Some political questions can obviously be argued quantitatively. Others
are less obviously quantitative. But even on the most complex political
issues experienced and responsible statesmen do in fact think
quantitatively, although the methods by which they reach their results
are often unconscious.

When, however, all politicians start with intellectualist assumptions,
though some half-consciously acquire quantitative habits of thought,
many desert politics altogether from disillusionment and disgust. What
is wanted in the training of a statesman is the fully conscious
formulation and acceptance of those methods which will not have to be
unlearned.

Such a conscious change is already taking place in the work of Royal
Commissions, International Congresses, and other bodies and persons who
have to arrange and draw conclusions from large masses of specially
collected evidence. Their methods and vocabulary, even when not
numerical, are nowadays in large part quantitative.

In parliamentary oratory, however, the old tradition of
over-simplification is apt to persist.

_(PART II.--Chapter I.--Political Morality, page 167)_

But in what ways can such changes in political science affect the actual
trend of political forces?

In the first place, the abandonment by political thinkers and writers of
the intellectualist conception of politics will sooner or later
influence the moral judgments of the working politician. A young
candidate will begin with a new conception of his moral relation to
those whose will and opinions he is attempting to influence. He will
start, in that respect, from a position hitherto confined to statesmen
who have been made cynical by experience.

If that were the only result of our new knowledge, political morality
might be changed for the worse. But the change will go deeper. When men
become conscious of psychological processes of which they have been
unconscious or half