although the opening sentence of Graham Wallas's Human Nature in Politics has been frequently cited, it could hardly be said that those who have used it for their own purposes have displayed any clear sense, or indeed much curiosity, about what its author meant by it. There is, of course, no dispute that what he had in mind, generally speaking, was the need, in attempting to understand the realities of democratic political behaviour, to take account of the non-rational and irrational springs of human action, especially as revealed by post-Darwinian psychology; and it was the failure of his predecessors to attend to this dimension which made their treatment of the subject unsatisfactory. Still, what, in any more precise terms, he thought constituted the study of politics at that date remains to be specified. Again, the answer in general terms might seem too obvious to need stating. His book is notoriously a criticism of the intellectualism of nineteenth-century English political theory, the chief example of which is always taken to be Benthamite Utilitarianism.