Ethical difficulties are often created by the relation between the quickly changing opinions of any individual politician and such slowly changing entities as his reputation, his party name, or the traditional personality of a newspaper which he may control.
_( Chapter III .-- Non-Rational Inference in Politics, page 98)_ Intellectualist political thinkers often assume, not only that political action is necessarily the result of inferences as to means and ends, but that all inferences are of the same 'rational' type.
It is difficult to distinguish sharply between rational and non-rational inferences in the stream of mental experience, but it is clear that many of the half-conscious processes by which men form their political opinions are non-rational.

We can generally trust non-rational inferences in ordinary life because they do not give rise to conscious opinions until they have been strengthened by a large number of undesigned coincidences.

But conjurers and others who study our non-rational mental processes can so play upon them as to make us form absurd beliefs.

The empirical art of politics consists largely in the creation of opinion by the deliberate exploitation of subconscious non-rational inference.

The process of inference may go on beyond the point desired by the politician who started it, and is as likely to take place in the mind of a passive newspaper-reader as among the members of the most excited crowd.
_( Chapter IV .-- The Material of Political Reasoning, page 114)_ But men can and do reason, though reasoning is only one of their mental processes.