That connexions among social phenomena should be so little understood, need not surprise us if we note the ideas which prevail respecting the connexions among much simpler phenomena. Minds left ignorant of physical causation, are unlikely to appreciate clearly, if at all, that causation so much more subtle and complex, which runs through the actions of incorporated men. In almost every house, servants and those who employ them, alike believe that a poker leaned up in front of the bars, or across them, makes the fire burn; and you will be told, very positively, that experience proves the efficacy of the device – the experience being that the poker has been repeatedly so placed and the fire has repeatedly burned; and no comparisons having been made with cases in which the poker was absent, and all other conditions as before. In the same circles the old prejudice against sitting down thirteen to dinner still
survives: there actually exists among ladies who have been at finishing schools of the highest character, and among some gentlemen who pass as intelligent, the conviction that adding or subtracting one from a number of people who eat together, will affect the fates of some among them. And this state 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 beliefs 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