The new-born chicken cowers beneath the shadow of the hawk, because one
hawk is like another. Animals wake at sunrise, because one sunrise is
like another; and find nuts or grass for food, because each nut and
blade of grass is like the rest.

But the recognition of likeness is not in itself a sufficient stimulus
to action. The thing recognised must also be _significant_, must be felt
in some way to matter to us. The stars reappear nightly in the heavens,
but, as far as we can tell, no animals but men are stimulated to action
by recognising them. The moth is not stimulated by recognising a
tortoise, nor the cow by a cobweb.

Sometimes this significance is automatically indicated to us by nature.
The growl of a wild beast, the sight of blood, the cry of a child in
distress, stand out, without need of experience or teaching, from the
stream of human sensations, just as, to a hungry fox-cub, the movement
or glimpse of a rabbit among the undergrowth separates itself at once
from the sounds of the wind and the colours of the leaves and flowers.
Sometimes the significance of a sensation has to be learned by the
individual animal during its own life, as when a dog, who recognises the
significance of a rat by instinct, learns to recognise that of a whip
(provided it looks like the whip which he saw and felt before) by
experience and association.

In politics man has to make like things as well as to learn their
significance. Political tactics would indeed be a much simpler matter if
ballot-papers were a natural product, and if on beholding a ballot-paper
at about the age of twenty-one a youth who had never heard of one before
were invariably seized with a desire to vote.