Now the multiplicity of human motives has always been a source of embarrassment to people who wanted to manage men or merely to understand them. The clumsy machinery of judicial administration has been worked out along certain lines in the hope of introducing some degree of uniformity into adjudication by limiting the consideration of the motives which operate in a particular case. The judge is thus supposed to limit himself to the determination of the existence of a particular state of facts, and to act in a particular way if these facts can be established according to a prescribed procedure. The movement toward the standardization of the discretion of public officers expresses itself in this general pattern of thought: An act is prohibited by the state. Certain prescribed “externals” shall establish the fact of the act having been committed. The actor shall be dealt with in certain specified ways. This crusade against the subjective element in the mind of the public officer is in some measure determined by the desire of the judge or civil servant to avoid responsibility.[83] The psychopathological approach precipitates something very like a panic among those who have tried to box the manifestations of human life into conventional common-sense categories. A dozen motives seem to bloom where but one was found to bud before. Let us see what this does for political theory. The prolonged study of individuals enables us to discern the details of the process by which the political pattern, as we meet it in adult life, comes to be achieved by individuals. When X runs for office or passes judgment, his behavior is overdetermined by motives, conscious and unconscious, which were organized in successive patterns during infancy, childhood and youth. The recognition of belonging to a communal order never functions in isolation, and the comparison of life-histories shows that this is implanted in the child on the basis of meanings which he has elaborated in his struggle, first against inhibitory factors in the environment, and presently, when he has introjected the demands of the environment, against his own antisocial impulses. The early restrictions which the environment imposes upon a child are important in that they are met by reactions on his part which predispose him to meet subsequent limitations in certain ways. These early restrictions are imposed upon the child by inflicting pain or by distracting attention to pleasurable stimuli. Inhibition is thus established in the organism by _force majeur_ on the part of the environment, since the infant is simply overpowered or outgeneraled by the environment.