4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of mind is again displayed at the card-table, by the opinion that So- 

 and-so is always lucky or unlucky that influences are at work which, 

 on the average, determine more good cards to one person than to 

 another. Clearly, those, in whom the consciousness of causation in 

 these simple cases is so vague, may be expected to have the wildest 

 notions of social causation. Whoever even entertains the supposition 

 that a poker put across the fire can make it burn, proves himself to 

 have neither a qualitative nor a quantitative idea of physical causation ; 

 and if, during his life, his experiences of material objects and actions 

 have failed to give him an idea so accessible and so simple, it is not 

 likely that they have given him ideas of the qualitative and quantita- 

 tive relations of cause and effect holding throughout society. Hence, 

 there is nothing to exclude irrational interpretations and dispropor- 

 tioned hopes. 



Where other superstitions flourish, political superstitions will take 

 root. A consciousness in which there lives the idea that spilling salt 

 will be followed by some evil, obviously allied as it is to the conscious- 

 ness of the savage filled with belief in omens and charms, gives a 

 home to other beliefs like those of the savage. It may not have faith 

 in the potency of medicine-bags and idols, and may even wonder how 

 any being can reverence a thing shaped with his own hands ; and yet 

 it readily entertains subtler forms of the same feelings. For, in those 

 whose modes of thought we have been contemplating, there is a tacit 

 supposition that a government moulded by themselves has some effi- 

 ciency beyond that naturally possessed by a certain group of citizens 

 subsidized by the rest of the citizens. True, if you ask them, they 

 may not deliberately assert that a legislative and administrative appa- 

 ratus can exert power, either mental or material, beyond the power 

 proceeding from the nation itself. They are compelled to admit, when 

 cross-examined, that the energies moving a governmental machine are 

 energies which would cease were citizens to cease working and fur- 

 nishing the supplies. But, nevertheless, their projects imply an un- 

 expressed belief in some store of force that is not measured by taxes. 

 When there arises the question Why does not Government do this 

 for us? there is not the accompanying thought Why does not 

 Government put its hands in our pockets, and, with the proceeds, pay 

 officials to do this, instead of leaving us to do it ourselves ; but the 

 accompanying thought is Why does not Government, out of its in- 

 exhaustible resources, yield us this benefit ? 



Such modes of political thinking, then, naturally go along with 

 such conceptions of physical phenomena as are current. Just as the 

 perpetual-motion schemer hopes, by a cunning arrangement of parts, 

 to get from one end of his machine more energy than he puts in at 

 the other ; so the ordinary political schemer is convinced that out of a 

 legislative apparatus, properly devised and worked with due dexterity, 

 may be had beneficial State-action without some corresponding detri- 



