It is this greater immediate effect of pure and artificial as compared
with mixed and concrete emotion which explains the traditional maxim of
political agents that it is better that a candidate should not live in
his constituency. It is an advantage that he should be able to represent
himself as a 'local candidate,' but his local character should be _ad
hoc_, and should consist in the hiring of a large house each year in
which he lives a life of carefully dramatised hospitality. Things in no
way blameworthy in themselves--his choice of tradesmen, his childrens'
hats and measles, his difficulties with his relations--will be, if he is
a permanent resident, 'out of the picture,' and may confuse the
impression which he produces. If one could, by the help of a
time-machine, see for a moment in the flesh the little Egyptian girl who
wore out her shoes, one might find her behaving so charmingly that one's
pity for her death would be increased. But it is more probable that,
even if she was, in fact, a very nice little girl, one would not.

This greater immediate facility of the emotions set up by artistic
presentment, as compared with those resulting from concrete observation
has, however, to be studied in its relation to another fact--that
impulses vary, in their driving force and in the depth of the nervous
disturbance which they cause, in proportion, not to their importance in
our present life, but to the point at which they appeared in our
evolutionary past. We are quite unable to resist the impulse of mere
vascular and nervous reaction, the watering of the mouth, the jerk of
the limb, the closing of the eye which we share with some of the
simplest vertebrates. We can only with difficulty resist the instincts
of sex and food, of anger and fear, which we share with the higher
animals. It is, on the other hand, difficult for us to obey consistently
the impulses which attend on the mental images formed by inference and
association. A man may be convinced by a long train of cogent reasoning