The ages do their thinking much as the individual does. When considering
a difficult question, we think alternately for several seconds together
of details, even the minutest seeming important, and then of broad
general principles, whereupon even large details become unimportant;
again we have bouts during which rules, logic and technicalities engross
us, followed by others in which the unwritten and unwritable common sense
of grace defies and over-rides the law. That is to say, we have our
inductive fits and our deductive fits, our arrangements according to the
letter and according to the spirit, our conclusions drawn from logic
_secundum artem_ and from absurdity and the character of the arguer.
This heterogeneous mass of considerations forms the mental pabulum with
which we feed our minds. How that pabulum becomes amalgamated, reduced
to uniformity and turned into the growth of complete opinion we can no
more tell than we can say when, how and where food becomes flesh and
blood. All we can say is that the miracle, stupendous as it is and
involving the stultification of every intelligible principle on which
thought and action are based, is nevertheless worked a thousand times an
hour by every one of us.
The formation of public opinion is as mysterious as that of individual,
but, so far as we can form any opinion about that which forms our
opinions in such large measure, the processes appear to resemble one
another much as rain drops resemble one another. There is essential
agreement in spite of essential difference. So that here, as everywhere
else, we no sooner scratch the soil than we come upon the granite of
contradiction in terms and can scratch no further.
As for ourselves, we are passing through an inductive, technical,
speculative period and have gone such lengths in this direction that a
reaction, during which we shall pass to the other extreme, may be
confidently predicted.