THE MATERIAL OF POLITICAL REASONING But man is fortunately not wholly dependent in his political thinking upon those forms of inference by immediate association which come so easily to him, and which he shares with the higher brutes.

The whole progress of human civilisation beyond its earliest stages has been made possible by the invention of methods of thought which enable us to interpret and forecast the working of nature more successfully than we could if we merely followed the line of least resistance in the use of our minds.
These methods, however, when applied in politics, still represent a difficult and uncertain art rather than a science producing its effects with mechanical accuracy.
When the great thinkers of Greece laid down rules for valid reasoning, they had, it is true, the needs of politics specially in their minds.
After the prisoners in Plato's cave of illusion should be unbound by true philosophy it was to the service of the State that they were to devote themselves, and their first triumph was to be the control of passion by reason in the sphere of government.

Yet if Plato could visit us now, he would learn that while our glass-makers proceed by rigorous and confident processes to exact results, our statesmen, like the glass-makers of ancient Athens, still trust to empirical maxims and personal skill.

Why is it, he would ask us, that valid reasoning has proved to be so much more difficult in politics than in the physical sciences?
Our first answer might be found in the character of the material with which political reasoning has to deal.

The universe which presents itself to our reason is the same as that which presents itself to our feelings and impulses--an unending stream of sensations and memories, every one of which is different from every other, and before which, unless we can select and recognise and simplify, we must stand helpless and unable either to act or think.