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.

The whole ritual of social and political organisation among savages, therefore, illustrates the process of creating artificial and easily recognisable political likenesses.  If the chief is to be recognised as a chief he must, like the ghost of Patroclus, ’be exceedingly like unto himself.’  He must live in the same house, wear the same clothes, and do the same things year by year; and his successor must imitate him.  If a marriage or an act of sale is to be recognised as a contract, it must be carried out in the customary place and with the customary gestures.  In some few cases the thing thus artificially brought into existence and made recognisable still produces its impulsive effect by acting on those biologically inherited associations which enable man and other animals to interpret sensations without experience.  The scarlet paint and wolfskin headdress of a warrior, or the dragon-mask of a medicine man, appeal, like the smile of a modern candidate, directly to our instinctive nature.  But even in very early societies the recognition of artificial political entities must generally have owed its power of stimulating impulse to associations acquired during life.  A child who had been beaten by the herald’s rod, or had seen his father bow down before the king, or a sacred stone, learned to fear the rod, or the king, or the stone by association.

Recognition often attaches itself to certain special points (whether naturally developed or artificially made) in the thing recognised.  Such points then become symbols of the thing as a whole.  The evolutionary facts of mimicry in the lower animals show that to some flesh-eating insects a putrid smell is a sufficiently convincing symbol of carrion to induce them to lay their eggs in a flower, and that the black and yellow bands of the wasp if imitated by a fly are a sufficient symbol to keep off birds.[11] In early political society