of five hundred
millions next morning, and great events like the Battle of the Sea of
Japan begin to produce their effects thousands of miles off within a few
hours of their happening. Enough has already occurred under these new
conditions to show that the unchanging East may to-morrow enter upon a
period of revolution, and that English indifference to ideas or French
military ambition are habits which, under a sufficiently extended
stimulus, nations can shake off as completely as can individual men.

CHAPTER V

THE METHOD OF POLITICAL REASONING

The traditional method of political reasoning has inevitably shared the
defects of its subject-matter. In thinking about politics we seldom
penetrate behind those simple entities which form themselves so easily
in our minds, or approach in earnest the infinite complexity of the
actual world. Political abstractions, such as Justice, or Liberty, or
the State, stand in our minds as things having a real existence. The
names of political species, 'governments,' or 'rights,' or 'Irishmen,'
suggest to us the idea of single 'type specimens'; and we tend, like
medieval naturalists, to assume that all the individual members of a
species are in all respects identical with the type specimen and with
each other.

In politics a true proposition in the form of 'All A is B' almost
invariably means that a number of individual persons or things possess
the quality B in degrees of variation as numerous as are the individuals
themselves. We tend, however, under the influence of our words and the
mental habits associated with them to think of A either as a single
individual possessing the quality B, or as a number of individuals
equally possessing that quality. As we read in the newspaper that 'the
educated Bengalis are disaffected' we either see, in the half-conscious
substratum of visual images which accompanies our reading, a single Babu
with a disaffected expression or the vague suggestion of a long row of
identical Babus all equally disaffected.

These personifications and uniformities, in their turn, tempt us to
employ in our political thinking that method of _a priori_ deduction
from large and untried generalisations against which natural science
from the days of Bacon has always protested. No scientist now argues
that the planets move in circles, because planets are perfect, and the
circle is a perfect figure, or that any newly discovered plant must be a
cure for some disease