It is of these new political entities that this chapter will treat. They must have first reached us through our senses, and in this case almost entirely through the senses of seeing and hearing. But man, like other animals, lives in an unending stream of sense impressions, of innumerable sights and sounds and feelings, and is only stirred to deed or thought by those which he recognises as significant to him. How then did the new impressions separate themselves from the rest and become sufficiently significant to produce political results? The first requisite in anything which is to stimulate us toward impulse or action is that it should be recognisable--that it should be like itself when we met it before, or like something else which we have met before. If the world consisted of things which constantly and arbitrarily varied their appearance, if nothing was ever like anything else, or like itself for more than a moment at a time, living beings as at present constituted would not act at all. They would drift like seaweed among the waves. The new-born chicken cowers beneath the shadow of the hawk, because one hawk is like another. Animals wake at sunrise, because one sunrise is like another; and find nuts or grass for food, because each nut and blade of grass is like the rest. But the recognition of likeness is not in itself a sufficient stimulus to action. The thing recognised must also be _significant_, must be felt in some way to matter to us. The stars reappear nightly in the heavens, but, as far as we can tell, no animals but men are stimulated to action by recognising them. The moth is not stimulated by recognising a tortoise, nor the cow by a cobweb. Sometimes this significance is automatically indicated to us by nature. The growl of a wild beast, the sight of blood, the cry of a child in distress, stand out, without need of experience or teaching, from the stream of human sensations, just as, to a hungry fox-cub, the movement or glimpse of a rabbit among the undergrowth separates itself at once from the sounds of the wind and the colours of the leaves and flowers. Sometimes the significance of a sensation has to be learned by the individual animal during its own life, as when a dog, who recognises the significance of a rat by instinct, learns to recognise that of a whip (provided it looks like the whip which he saw and felt before) by experience and association. In politics man has to make like things as well as to learn their significance. Political tactics would indeed be a much simpler matter if ballot-papers were a natural product, and if on beholding a ballot-paper at about the age of twenty-one a youth who had never heard of one before were invariably seized with a desire to vote.