Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/14

4 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 quantitative relations of cause and effect holding throughout society. Hence, there is nothing to exclude irrational interpretations and disproportioned 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 consciousness 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 efficiency 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 apparatus 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 furnishing the supplies. But, nevertheless, their projects imply an unexpressed 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 inexhaustible 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