necessity a sense of communion between two persons is concerned with the minds and spirits of those persons. And it is at least worth asking if the wisdom of the past was any help.
Psychology is the study of the mind, and the science of any systematic knowledge about it. Now there is a body of men for whom morale is everything, but for whom morale must never be divorced from the experience of the past, nor from the means available to deliver results in the future. In other words their morale (which is a state of mind) is inspired by the past, but firmly rooted in the commonsense of the present. I refer of course to professional soldiers. And I admit without apology that the only textbook on psychology that I have found of any use in the practical world is Clausewitz's On War. It was he who made sense for me of what I daily saw happening in the Law Courts; and as he says himself there is a lot in common between war and litigation. He discusses at length the sometimes agonising decision the army commander must make: to throw in his last reserves in the hope of winning the battle, or to disengage whilst he can extricate his army as a coherent fighting unit in order to preserve it for another day. As a lawyer I have been faced with a similar decision. He is more interesting when he talks about the friction of the army: the tendency of even disciplined men to do nothing if orders are ambiguous. What a lesson that is on the need to give clear instructions. However I think the heart of his message about the workings of the human mind, which he expounded in great detail, is that rules, whether they are the outward rules of conventional theory or the inner rules of habitual thought, exist to guide and influence judgment and discretion, not to control them. In other words he accepts the supreme gift of judgment or wisdom, and in contrast regards the slavish observance of outward convention, of laws, of holy writ, or the slavish obedience to the inner compulsion of conscience, as the…