What the others may be he is left to discover for himself; but he is likely to assume that they cannot be the subject of effective scientific thought.

He learns also a few empirical maxims about liberty and caution and the like, and, after he has read a little of the history of institutions, his political education is complete.

It is no wonder that the average layman prefers old politicians, who have forgotten their book-learning, and young doctors who remember theirs.[30] [30] In the winter of 1907-8 I happened, on different occasions, to discuss the method of approaching political science with two young Oxford students.

In each case I suggested that it would be well to read a little psychology.

Each afterwards told me that he had consulted his tutor and had been told that psychology was 'useless' or 'nonsense.' One tutor, a man of real intellectual distinction, was said to have added the curiously scholastic reason that psychology was 'neither science nor philosophy.' A political thinker so trained is necessarily apt to preserve the conception of human nature which he learnt in his student days in a separate and sacred compartment of his mind, into which the facts of experience, however laboriously and carefully gathered, are not permitted to enter.