Human Nature in Politics: Third EditionWallas, Graham
Science
Human Nature in Politics: Third Edition
Wallas, Graham
Political ethics; Politics, Practical
At this point it is already difficult not to intellectualise the whole
process. Our own 'common-sense' and the systematised common-sense of the
eighteenth-century philosophers would alike explain the fear of tribal
man for a royal staff by saying that he was reminded thereby of the
original social contract between ruler and ruled, or of the pleasure and
pain which experience had shown to be derived from royal leadership and
royal punishments, and that he therefore decided by a process of
reasoning on seeing the staff to fear the king.
When the symbol by which our impulse is stimulated is actual language,
it is still more difficult not to confuse acquired emotional association
with the full process of logical inference. Because one of the effects
of those sounds and signs which we call language is to stimulate in us a
process of deliberate logical thought we tend to ignore all their other
effects. Nothing is easier than to make a description of the logical use
of language, the breaking up by abstraction of a bundle of
sensations--one's memory, for instance, of a royal person; the selection
of a single quality--kingship, for instance--shared by other such
bundles of sensations, the giving to that quality the name king, and the
use of the name to enable us to repeat the process of abstraction. When
we are consciously trying to reason correctly by the use of language all
this does occur, just as it would occur if we had not evolved the use of
voice-language at all, and were attempting to construct a valid logic of
colours and models and pictures. But any text-book of psychology will
explain why it errs, both by excess and defect, if taken as a
description of that which actually happens when language is used for the
purpose of stimulating us to action.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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