At present, however, the politician who is trained for his work by reading the best-known treatises on political theory is still in the condition of the medical student trained by the study of Hippocrates or Galen. He is taught a few isolated, and therefore distorted, facts about the human type, about pleasure and pain, perhaps, and the association of ideas, or the influence of habit. He is told that these are selected from the other facts of human nature in order that he may think clearly on the hypothesis of there being no others. 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.'