Throughout the chapters one has the feeling--which any one who has had to make less important political decisions can parallel from his own experience--that Gladstone was waiting for indications of a solution to appear in his mind.

He was conscious of his effort, conscious also that his effort was being directed simultaneously towards many different considerations, but largely unconscious of the actual process of inference, which went on perhaps more rapidly when he was asleep, or thinking of something else, than when he was awake and attentive.

A phrase of Mr.Morley's indicates a feeling with which every politician is familiar.

'The reader,' he says,'knows in what direction the main current of Mr.Gladstone's thought must have been setting' (p.

236).
That is to say, we are watching an operation rather of art than of science, of long experience and trained faculty rather than of conscious method.
But the history of human progress consists in the gradual and partial substitution of science for art, of the power over nature acquired in youth by study, for that which comes in late middle age as the half-conscious result of experience.