But time, no less than space, fares badly. A common example is that of

the man who tries by making an elaborate will to control his money

long after his death. "It had been the purpose of the first William

James," writes his great-grandson Henry James, [Footnote: _The

Letters of William James_, Vol. I, p. 6.] "to provide that his

children (several of whom were under age when he died) should qualify

themselves by industry and experience to enjoy the large patrimony

which he expected to bequeath to them, and with that in view he left a

will which was a voluminous compound of restraints and instructions.

He showed thereby how great were both his confidence in his own

judgment and his solicitude for the moral welfare of his descendants."

The courts upset the will. For the law in its objection to

perpetuities recognizes that there are distinct limits to the

usefulness of allowing anyone to impose his moral stencil upon an

unknown future. But the desire to impose it is a very human trait, so

human that the law permits it to operate for a limited time after

death.

The amending clause of any constitution is a good index of the

confidence the authors entertained about the reach of their opinions

in the succeeding generations. There are, I believe, American state

constitutions which are almost incapable of amendment. The men who

made them could have had but little sense of the flux of time: to them

the Here and Now was so brilliantly certain, the Hereafter so vague or

so terrifying, that they had the courage to say how life should run

after they were gone. And then because constitutions are difficult to

amend, zealous people with a taste for mortmain have loved to write on

this imperishable brass all kinds of rules and restrictions that,

given any decent humility about the future, ought to be no more

permanent than an ordinary statute.

A presumption about time enters widely into our opinions. To one

person an institution which has existed for the whole of his conscious

life is part of the permanent furniture of the universe: to another it

is ephemeral. Geological time is very different from biological time.

Social time is most complex. The statesman has to decide whether to

calculate for the emergency or for the long run. Some decisions have

to be made on the basis of what will happen in the next two hours;

others on what will happen in a week, a month, a season, a decade,

when the children have grown up, or their children's children. An

important part of wisdom is the ability to distinguish the

time-conception that properly belongs to the thing in hand. The person

who uses the wrong time-conception ranges from the dreamer who ignores

the present to the philistine who can see nothing else. A true scale

of values has a very acute sense of relative time.

Distant time, past and future, has somehow to be conceived. But as

James says, "of the longer duration we have no direct 'realizing'

sense." [Footnote: _Principles of Psychology_, Vol. I, p. 638.]

The longest duration which we immediately feel is what is called the

"specious present." It endures, according to Titchener, for about six

seconds. [Footnote: Cited by Warren, _Human Psychology_, p. 255.]

"All impressions within this period of time are present to us _at

once_. This makes it possible for us to perceive changes and events

as well as stationary objects. The perceptual present is supplemented

by the ideational present. Through the combination of perceptions with

memory images, entire days, months, and even years of the past are

brought together into the present."

In this ideational present, vividness, as James said, is proportionate

to the number of discriminations we perceive within it. Thus a

vacation in which we were bored with nothing to do passes slowly while

we are in it, but seems very short in memory. Great activity kills

time rapidly, but in memory its duration is long. On the relation

between the amount we discriminate and our time perspective James has

an interesting passage: [Footnote: _Op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 639.]

"We have every reason to think that creatures may possibly differ

enormously in the amounts of duration which they intuitively feel, and

in the fineness of the events that may fill it. Von Baer has indulged

in some interesting computations of the effect of such differences in

changing the aspect of Nature. Suppose we were able, within the length

of a second, to note 10,000 events distinctly, instead of barely 10 as

now; [Footnote: In the moving picture this effect is admirably produced

by the ultra-rapid camera.] if our life were then destined to hold the

same number of impressions, it might be 1000 times as short. We should

live less than a month, and personally know nothing of the change of

seasons. If born in winter, we should believe in summer as we now

believe in the heats of the carboniferous era. The motions of organic

beings would be so slow to our senses as to be inferred, not seen. The

sun would stand still in the sky, the moon be almost free from change,

and so on. But now reverse the hypothesis and suppose a being to get

only one 1000th part of the sensations we get in a given time, and

consequently to live 1000 times as long. Winters and summers will be

to him like quarters of an hour. Mushrooms and the swifter growing

plants will shoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous

creations; annual shrubs will rise and fall from the earth like

restless boiling water springs; the motions of animals will be as

invisible as are to us the movements of bullets and cannon-balls; the

sun will scour through the sky like a meteor, leaving a fiery trail

behind him, etc."

5

In his Outline of History Mr. Wells has made a gallant effort to

visualize "the true proportions of historical to geological time"

[Footnote: 1 Vol. II, p. 605. See also James Harvey Robinson, _The

New History,_ p. 239.] On a scale which represents the time from

Columbus to ourselves by three inches of space, the reader would have

to walk 55 feet to see the date of the painters of the Altamara caves,

550 feet to see the earlier Neanderthalers, a mile or so to the last

of the dinosaurs. More or less precise chronology does not begin until

after 1000 B.C., and at that time "Sargon I of the Akkadian-Sumerian

Empire was a remote memory,... more remote than is Constantine the

Great from the world of the present day.... Hammurabi had been dead a

thousand years... Stonehedge in England was already a thousand years

old."

Mr. Wells was writing with a purpose. "In the brief period of ten

thousand years these units (into which men have combined) have grown

from the small family tribe of the early neolithic culture to the vast

united realms--vast yet still too small and partial--of the present

time." Mr. Wells hoped by changing the time perspective on our present

problems to change the moral perspective. Yet the astronomical measure

of time, the geological, the biological, any telescopic measure which

minimizes the present is not "more true" than a microscopic. Mr.

Simeon Strunsky is right when he insists that "if Mr. Wells is

thinking of his subtitle, The Probable Future of Mankind, he is

entitled to ask for any number of centuries to work out his solution.

If he is thinking of the salvaging of this western civilization,

reeling under the effects of the Great War, he must think in decades

and scores of years." [Footnote: In a review of _The Salvaging of

Civilization, The Literary Review of the N. Y. Evening Post_, June

18, 1921, p. 5.] It all depends upon the practical purpose for which

you adopt the measure. There are situations when the time perspective

needs to be lengthened, and others when it needs to be shortened.

The man who says that it does not matter if 15,000,000 Chinese die of

famine, because in two generations the birthrate will make up the

loss, has used a time perspective to excuse his inertia. A person who

pauperizes a healthy young man because he is sentimentally

overimpressed with an immediate difficulty has lost sight of the

duration of the beggar's life. The people who for the sake of an

immediate peace are willing to buy off an aggressive empire by

indulging its appetite have allowed a specious present to interfere

with the peace of their children. The people who will not be patient

with a troublesome neighbor, who want to bring everything to a

"showdown" are no less the victims of a specious present.

6

Into almost every social problem the proper calculation of time

enters. Suppose, for example, it is a question of timber. Some trees

grow faster than others. Then a sound forest policy is one in which

the amount of each species and of each age cut in each season is made

good by replanting. In so far as that calculation is correct the

truest economy has been reached. To cut less is waste, and to cut more

is exploitation. But there may come an emergency, say the need for

aeroplane spruce in a war, when the year's allowance must be exceeded.

An alert government will recognize that and regard the restoration of

the balance as a charge upon the future.

Coal involves a different theory of time, because coal, unlike a tree,

is produced on the scale of geological time. The supply is limited.

Therefore a correct social policy involves intricate computation of

the available reserves of the world, the indicated possibilities, the

present rate of use, the present economy of use, and the alternative

fuels. But when that computation has been reached it must finally be

squared with an ideal standard involving time. Suppose, for example,

that engineers conclude that the present fuels are being exhausted at

a certain rate; that barring new discoveries industry will have to

enter a phase of contraction at some definite time in the future. We

have then to determine how much thrift and self-denial we will use,

after all feasible economies have been exercised, in order not to rob

posterity. But what shall we consider posterity? Our grandchildren?

Our great grandchildren? Perhaps we shall decide to calculate on a

hundred years, believing that to be ample time for the discovery of

alternative fuels if the necessity is made clear at once. The figures

are, of course, hypothetical. But in calculating that way we shall be

employing what reason we have. We shall be giving social time its

place in public opinion. Let us now imagine a somewhat different case:

a contract between a city and a trolley-car company. The company says

that it will not invest its capital unless it is granted a monopoly of

the main highway for ninety-nine years. In the minds of the men who

make that demand ninety-nine years is so long as to mean "forever."

But suppose there is reason to think that surface cars, run from a

central power plant on tracks, are going out of fashion in twenty

years. Then it is a most unwise contract to make, for you are

virtually condemning a future generation to inferior transportation.

In making such a contract the city officials lack a realizing sense of

ninety-nine years. Far better to give the company a subsidy now in

order to attract capital than to stimulate investment by indulging a

fallacious sense of eternity. No city official and no company official

has a sense of real time when he talks about ninety-nine years.

Popular history is a happy hunting ground of time confusions. To the

average Englishman, for example, the behavior of Cromwell, the

corruption of the Act of Union, the Famine of 1847 are wrongs suffered

by people long dead and done by actors long dead with whom no living

person, Irish or English, has any real connection. But in the mind of

a patriotic Irishman these same events are almost contemporary. His

memory is like one of those historical paintings, where Virgil and

Dante sit side by side conversing. These perspectives and

foreshortenings are a great barrier between peoples. It is ever so

difficult for a person of one tradition to remember what is

contemporary in the tradition of another.

Almost nothing that goes by the name of Historic Rights or Historic

Wrongs can be called a truly objective view of the past. Take, for

example, the Franco-German debate about Alsace-Lorraine. It all

depends on the original date you select. If you start with the Rauraci

and Sequani, the lands are historically part of Ancient Gaul. If you

prefer Henry I, they are historically a German territory; if you take

1273 they belong to the House of Austria; if you take 1648 and the

Peace of Westphalia, most of them are French; if you take Louis XIV

and the year 1688 they are almost all French. If you are using the

argument from history you are fairly certain to select those dates in

the past which support your view of what should be done now.

Arguments about "races" and nationalities often betray the same

arbitrary view of time. During the war, under the influence of

powerful feeling, the difference between "Teutons" on the one hand,

and "Anglo-Saxons" and French on the other, was popularly believed to

be an eternal difference. They had always been opposing races. Yet a

generation ago, historians, like Freeman, were emphasizing the common

Teutonic origin of the West European peoples, and ethnologists would

certainly insist that the Germans, English, and the greater part of

the French are branches of what was once a common stock. The general

rule is: if you like a people to-day you come down the branches to the

trunk; if you dislike them you insist that the separate branches are

separate trunks. In one case you fix your attention on the period

before they were distinguishable; in the other on the period after

which they became distinct. And the view which fits the mood is taken

as the "truth."

An amiable variation is the family tree. Usually one couple are

appointed the original ancestors, if possible, a couple associated

with an honorific event like the Norman Conquest. That couple have no

ancestors. They are not descendants. Yet they were the descendants of

ancestors, and the expression that So-and-So was the founder of his

house means not that he is the Adam of his family, but that he is the

particular ancestor from whom it is desirable to start, or perhaps the

earliest ancestor of which there is a record. But genealogical tables

exhibit a deeper prejudice. Unless the female line happens to be

especially remarkable descent is traced down through the males. The

tree is male. At various moments females accrue to it as itinerant

bees light upon an ancient apple tree.

7

But the future is the most illusive time of all. Our temptation here

is to jump over necessary steps in the sequence; and as we are

governed by hope or doubt, to exaggerate or to minimize the time

required to complete various parts of a process. The discussion of the

role to be exercised by wage-earners in the management of industry is

riddled with this difficulty. For management is a word that covers

many functions. [Footnote: Cf. Carter L. Goodrich, The Frontier of

Control.] Some of these require no training; some require a little

training; others can be learned only in a lifetime. And the truly

discriminating program of industrial democratization would be one

based on the proper time sequence, so that the assumption of

responsibility would run parallel to a complementary program of

industrial training. The proposal for a sudden dictatorship of the

proletariat is an attempt to do away with the intervening time of

preparation; the resistance to all sharing of responsibility an

attempt to deny the alteration of human capacity in the course of

time. Primitive notions of democracy, such as rotation in office, and

contempt for the expert, are really nothing but the old myth that the

Goddess of Wisdom sprang mature and fully armed from the brow of Jove.

They assume that what it takes years to learn need not be learned at

all.

Whenever the phrase "backward people" is used as the basis of a

policy, the conception of time is a decisive element. The Covenant of

the League of Nations says, [Footnote: Article XIX.] for example, that

"the character of the mandate must differ according to the stage of

the development of the people," as well as on other grounds. Certain

communities, it asserts, "have reached a stage of development" where

their independence can be provisionally recognized, subject to advice

and assistance "until such time as they are able to stand alone." The

way in which the mandatories and the mandated conceive that time will

influence deeply their relations. Thus in the case of Cuba the

judgment of the American government virtually coincided with that of

the Cuban patriots, and though there has been trouble, there is no

finer page in the history of how strong powers have dealt with the

weak. Oftener in that history the estimates have not coincided. Where

the imperial people, whatever its public expressions, has been deeply

convinced that the backwardness of the backward was so hopeless as not

to be worth remedying, or so profitable that it was not desirable to

remedy it, the tie has festered and poisoned the peace of the world.

There have been a few cases, very few, where backwardness has meant to

the ruling power the need for a program of forwardness, a program with

definite standards and definite estimates of time. Far more

frequently, so frequently in fact as to seem the rule, backwardness

has been conceived as an intrinsic and eternal mark of inferiority.

And then every attempt to be less backward has been frowned upon as

the sedition, which, under these conditions, it undoubtedly is. In our

own race wars we can see some of the results of the failure to realize

that time would gradually obliterate the slave morality of the Negro,

and that social adjustment based on this morality would begin to break

down.

It is hard not to picture the future as if it obeyed our present

purposes, to annihilate whatever delays our desire, or immortalize

whatever stands between us and our fears.

8

In putting together our public opinions, not only do we have to

picture more space than we can see with our eyes, and more time than

we can feel, but we have to describe and judge more people, more

actions, more things than we can ever count, or vividly imagine. We

have to summarize and generalize. We have to pick out samples, and

treat them as typical.

To pick fairly a good sample of a large class is not easy. The problem

belongs to the science of statistics, and it is a most difficult

affair for anyone whose mathematics is primitive, and mine remain

azoic in spite of the half dozen manuals which I once devoutly

imagined that I understood. All they have done for me is to make me a

little more conscious of how hard it is to classify and to sample, how

readily we spread a little butter over the whole universe.

Some time ago a group of social workers in Sheffield, England, started

out to substitute an accurate picture of the mental equipment of the

workers of that city for the impressionistic one they had. [Footnote:

_The Equipment of the Worker_.] They wished to say, with some

decent grounds for saying it, how the workers of Sheffield were

equipped. They found, as we all find the moment we refuse to let our

first notion prevail, that they were beset with complications. Of the

test they employed nothing need be said here except that it was a

large questionnaire. For the sake of the illustration, assume that the

questions were a fair test of mental equipment for English city life.

Theoretically, then, those questions should have been put to every

member of the working class. But it is not so easy to know who are the

working class. However, assume again that the census knows how to

classify them. Then there were roughly 104,000 men and 107,000 women

who ought to have been questioned. They possessed the answers which

would justify or refute the casual phrase about the "ignorant workers"

or the "intelligent workers." But nobody could think of questioning

the whole two hundred thousand.

So the social workers consulted an eminent statistician, Professor

Bowley. He advised them that not less than 408 men and 408 women would

prove to be a fair sample. According to mathematical calculation this

number would not show a greater deviation from the average than 1 in

22. [Footnote: _Op. cit._, p. 65.] They had, therefore, to

question at least 816 people before they could pretend to talk about

the average workingman. But which 816 people should they approach? "We

might have gathered particulars concerning workers to whom one or

another of us had a pre-inquiry access; we might have worked through

philanthropic gentlemen and ladies who were in contact with certain

sections of workers at a club, a mission, an infirmary, a place of

worship, a settlement. But such a method of selection would produce

entirely worthless results. The workers thus selected would not be in

any sense representative of what is popularly called 'the average run

of workers;' they would represent nothing but the little coteries to

which they belonged.

"The right way of securing 'victims,' to which at immense cost of time

and labour we rigidly adhered, is to get hold of your workers by some

'neutral' or 'accidental' or 'random' method of approach." This they

did. And after all these precautions they came to no more definite

conclusion than that on their classification and according to their

questionnaire, among 200,000 Sheffield workers "about one quarter"

were "well equipped," "approaching three-quarters" were "inadequately

equipped" and that "about one-fifteenth" were "mal-equipped."

Compare this conscientious and almost pedantic method of arriving at

an opinion, with our usual judgments about masses of people, about the

volatile Irish, and the logical French, and the disciplined Germans,

and the ignorant Slavs, and the honest Chinese, and the untrustworthy

Japanese, and so on and so on. All these are generalizations drawn

from samples, but the samples are selected by a method that

statistically is wholly unsound. Thus the employer will judge labor by

the most troublesome employee or the most docile that he knows, and

many a radical group has imagined that it was a fair sample of the

working class. How many women's views on the "servant question" are

little more than the reflection of their own treatment of their

servants? The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble

upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to

make it the representative of a whole class.

A great deal of confusion arises when people decline to classify

themselves as we have classified them. Prophecy would be so much

easier if only they would stay where we put them. But, as a matter of

fact, a phrase like the working class will cover only some of the

truth for a part of the time. When you take all the people, below a

certain level of income, and call them the working class, you cannot

help assuming that the people so classified will behave in accordance

with your stereotype. Just who those people are you are not quite

certain. Factory hands and mine workers fit in more or less, but farm

hands, small farmers, peddlers, little shop keepers, clerks, servants,

soldiers, policemen, firemen slip out of the net. The tendency, when

you are appealing to the "working class," is to fix your attention on

two or three million more or less confirmed trade unionists, and treat

them as Labor; the other seventeen or eighteen million, who might

qualify statistically, are tacitly endowed with the point of view

ascribed to the organized nucleus. How very misleading it was to

impute to the British working class in 1918-1921 the point of view

expressed in the resolutions of the Trades Union Congress or in the

pamphlets written by intellectuals.

The stereotype of Labor as Emancipator selects the evidence which

supports itself and rejects the other. And so parallel with the real

movements of working men there exists a fiction of the Labor Movement,

in which an idealized mass moves towards an ideal goal. The fiction

deals with the future. In the future possibilities are almost

indistinguishable from probabilities and probabilities from

certainties. If the future is long enough, the human will might turn

what is just conceivable into what is very likely, and what is likely

into what is sure to happen. James called this the faith ladder, and

said that "it is a slope of goodwill on which in the larger questions

of life men habitually live." [Footnote: William James, _Some

Problems of Philosophy_, p. 224.]

"1. There is nothing absurd in a certain view of the world being true,

nothing contradictory;

2. It _might_ have been true under certain conditions;

3. It _may_ be true even now;

4. It is _fit_ to be true;

5. It _ought_ to be true;

6. It _must_ be true;

7. It _shall_ be true, at any rate true for me."

And, as he added in another place, [Footnote: _A Pluralistic

Universe_, p. 329.] "your acting thus may in certain special cases

be a means of making it securely true in the end." Yet no one would

have insisted more than he, that, so far as we know how, we must avoid

substituting the goal for the starting point, must avoid reading back

into the present what courage, effort and skill might create in the

future. Yet this truism is inordinately difficult to live by, because

every one of us is so little trained in the selection of our samples.

If we believe that a certain thing ought to be true, we can almost

always find either an instance where it is true, or someone who

believes it ought to be true. It is ever so hard when a concrete fact

illustrates a hope to weigh that fact properly. When the first six

people we meet agree with us, it is not easy to remember that they may

all have read the same newspaper at breakfast. And yet we cannot send

out a questionnaire to 816 random samples every time we wish to

estimate a probability. In dealing with any large mass of facts, the

presumption is against our having picked true samples, if we are

acting on a casual impression.

9

And when we try to go one step further in order to seek the causes and

effects of unseen and complicated affairs, haphazard opinion is very

tricky. There are few big issues in public life where cause and effect

are obvious at once. They are not obvious to scholars who have devoted

years, let us say, to studying business cycles, or price and wage

movements, or the migration and the assimilation of peoples, or the

diplomatic purposes of foreign powers. Yet somehow we are all supposed

to have opinions on these matters, and it is not surprising that the

commonest form of reasoning is the intuitive, post hoc ergo propter

hoc.

The more untrained a mind, the more readily it works out a theory that

two things which catch its attention at the same time are causally

connected. We have already dwelt at some length on the way things

reach our attention. We have seen that our access to information is

obstructed and uncertain, and that our apprehension is deeply

controlled by our stereotypes; that the evidence available to our

reason is subject to illusions of defense, prestige, morality, space,

time, and sampling. We must note now that with this initial taint,

public opinions are still further beset, because in a series of events

seen mostly through stereotypes, we readily accept sequence or

parallelism as equivalent to cause and effect.

This is most likely to happen when two ideas that come together arouse

the same feeling. If they come together they are likely to arouse the

same feeling; and even when they do not arrive together a powerful

feeling attached to one is likely to suck out of all the corners of

memory any idea that feels about the same. Thus everything painful

tends to collect into one system of cause and effect, and likewise

everything pleasant.

"IId IIm (1675) This day I hear that G[od] has shot an arrow into the

midst of this Town. The small pox is in an ordinary ye sign of the

Swan, the ordinary Keepers name is Windsor. His daughter is sick of

the disease. It is observable that this disease begins at an alehouse,

to testify God's displeasure agt the sin of drunkenness & yt of

multiplying alehouses!" [Footnote: _The Heart of the Puritan_, p.

177, edited by Elizabeth Deering Hanscom.]

Thus Increase Mather, and thus in the year 1919 a distinguished

Professor of Celestial Mechanics discussing the Einstein theory:

"It may well be that.... Bolshevist uprisings are in reality the

visible objects of some underlying, deep, mental disturbance,

world-wide in character.... This same spirit of unrest has invaded

science." [Footnote: Cited in _The New Republic_, Dec. 24, 1919,

p. 120.]

In hating one thing violently, we readily associate with it as cause

or effect most of the other things we hate or fear violently. They may

have no more connection than smallpox and alehouses, or Relativity and

Bolshevism, but they are bound together in the same emotion. In a

superstitious mind, like that of the Professor of Celestial Mechanics,

emotion is a stream of molten lava which catches and imbeds whatever

it touches. When you excavate in it you find, as in a buried city, all

sorts of objects ludicrously entangled in each other. Anything can be

related to anything else, provided it feels like it. Nor has a mind in

such a state any way of knowing how preposterous it is. Ancient fears,

reinforced by more recent fears, coagulate into a snarl of fears where

anything that is dreaded is the cause of anything else that is

dreaded.

10

Generally it all culminates in the fabrication of a system of all

evil, and of another which is the system of all good. Then our love of

the absolute shows itself. For we do not like qualifying

adverbs. [Footnote: _Cf_. Freud's discussion of absolutism in

dreams, _Interpretation of Dreams_, Chapter VI, especially pp.

288, _et seq_.] They clutter up sentences, and interfere with

irresistible feeling. We prefer most to more, least to less, we

dislike the words rather, perhaps, if, or, but, toward, not quite,

almost, temporarily, partly. Yet nearly every opinion about public

affairs needs to be deflated by some word of this sort. But in our

free moments everything tends to behave absolutely,--one hundred

percent, everywhere, forever.

It is not enough to say that our side is more right than the enemy's,

that our victory will help democracy more than his. One must insist

that our victory will end war forever, and make the world safe for

democracy. And when the war is over, though we have thwarted a greater

evil than those which still afflict us, the relativity of the result

fades out, the absoluteness of the present evil overcomes our spirit,

and we feel that we are helpless because we have not been

irresistible. Between omnipotence and impotence the pendulum swings.

Real space, real time, real numbers, real connections, real weights

are lost. The perspective and the background and the dimensions of

action are clipped and frozen in the stereotype.

PART IV

INTERESTS

CHAPTER 11. THE ENLISTING OF INTEREST

" 12. SELF-INTEREST RECONSIDERED

CHAPTER XI

THE ENLISTING OF INTEREST

I

BUT the human mind is not a film which registers once and for all each

impression that comes through its shutters and lenses. The human mind

is endlessly and persistently creative. The pictures fade or combine,

are sharpened here, condensed there, as we make them more completely

our own. They do not lie inert upon the surface of the mind, but are

reworked by the poetic faculty into a personal expression of

ourselves. We distribute the emphasis and participate in the action.

In order to do this we tend to personalize quantities, and to

dramatize relations. As some sort of allegory, except in acutely

sophisticated minds, the affairs of the world are represented. Social

Movements, Economic Forces, National Interests, Public Opinion are

treated as persons, or persons like the Pope, the President, Lenin,

Morgan or the King become ideas and institutions. The deepest of all

the stereotypes is the human stereotype which imputes human nature to

inanimate or collective things.

The bewildering variety of our impressions, even after they have been

censored in all kinds of ways, tends to force us to adopt the greater

economy of the allegory. So great is the multitude of things that we

cannot keep them vividly in mind. Usually, then, we name them, and let

the name stand for the whole impression. But a name is porous. Old

meanings slip out and new ones slip in, and the attempt to retain the

full meaning of the name is almost as fatiguing as trying to recall

the original impressions. Yet names are a poor currency for thought.

They are too empty, too abstract, too inhuman. And so we begin to see

the name through some personal stereotype, to read into it, finally to

see in it the incarnation of some human quality.

Yet human qualities are themselves vague and fluctuating. They are

best remembered by a physical sign. And therefore, the human qualities

we tend to ascribe to the names of our impressions, themselves tend to

be visualized in physical metaphors. The people of England, the

history of England, condense into England, and England becomes John

Bull, who is jovial and fat, not too clever, but well able to take

care of himself. The migration of a people may appear to some as the

meandering of a river, and to others like a devastating flood. The

courage people display may be objectified as a rock; their purpose as

a road, their doubts as forks of the road, their difficulties as ruts

and rocks, their progress as a fertile valley. If they mobilize their

dread-naughts they unsheath a sword. If their army surrenders they are

thrown to earth. If they are oppressed they are on the rack or under

the harrow.

When public affairs are popularized in speeches, headlines, plays,

moving pictures, cartoons, novels, statues or paintings, their

transformation into a human interest requires first abstraction from

the original, and then animation of what has been abstracted. We

cannot be much interested in, or much moved by, the things we do not

see. Of public affairs each of us sees very little, and therefore,

they remain dull and unappetizing, until somebody, with the makings of

an artist, has translated them into a moving picture. Thus the

abstraction, imposed upon our knowledge of reality by all the

limitations of our access and of our prejudices, is compensated. Not

being omnipresent and omniscient we cannot see much of what we have to

think and talk about. Being flesh and blood we will not feed on words

and names and gray theory. Being artists of a sort we paint pictures,

stage dramas and draw cartoons out of the abstractions.

Or, if possible, we find gifted men who can visualize for us. For

people are not all endowed to the same degree with the pictorial

faculty. Yet one may, I imagine, assert with Bergson that the

practical intelligence is most closely adapted to spatial

qualities. [Footnote: _Creative Evolution_, Chs. III, IV.] A

"clear" thinker is almost always a good visualizer. But for that same

reason, because he is "cinematographic," he is often by that much

external and insensitive. For the people who have intuition, which is

probably another name for musical or muscular perception, often

appreciate the quality of an event and the inwardness of an act far

better than the visualizer. They have more understanding when the

crucial element is a desire that is never crudely overt, and appears

on the surface only in a veiled gesture, or in a rhythm of speech.

Visualization may catch the stimulus and the result. But the

intermediate and internal is often as badly caricatured by a

visualizer, as is the intention of the composer by an enormous soprano

in the sweet maiden's part.

Nevertheless, though they have often a peculiar justice, intuitions

remain highly private and largely incommunicable. But social

intercourse depends on communication, and while a person can often

steer his own life with the utmost grace by virtue of his intuitions,

he usually has great difficulty in making them real to others. When he

talks about them they sound like a sheaf of mist. For while intuition

does give a fairer perception of human feeling, the reason with its

spatial and tactile prejudice can do little with that perception.

Therefore, where action depends on whether a number of people are of

one mind, it is probably true that in the first instance no idea is

lucid for practical decision until it has visual or tactile value. But

it is also true, that no visual idea is significant to us until it has

enveloped some stress of our own personality. Until it releases or

resists, depresses or enhances, some craving of our own, it remains

one of the objects which do not matter.

2

Pictures have always been the surest way of conveying an idea, and

next in order, words that call up pictures in memory. But the idea

conveyed is not fully our own until we have identified ourselves with

some aspect of the picture. The identification, or what Vernon Lee has

called empathy, [Footnote: _Beauty and Ugliness_.] may be almost

infinitely subtle and symbolic. The mimicry may be performed without

our being aware of it, and sometimes in a way that would horrify those

sections of our personality which support our self-respect. In

sophisticated people the participation may not be in the fate of the

hero, but in the fate of the whole idea to which both hero and villain

are essential. But these are refinements.

In popular representation the handles for identification are almost

always marked. You know who the hero is at once. And no work promises

to be easily popular where the marking is not definite and the choice

clear. [Footnote: A fact which bears heavily on the character of news.

_Cf_. Part VII.] But that is not enough. The audience must have

something to do, and the contemplation of the true, the good and the

beautiful is not something to do. In order not to sit inertly in the

presence of the picture, and this applies as much to newspaper stories

as to fiction and the cinema, the audience must be exercised by the

image. Now there are two forms of exercise which far transcend all

others, both as to ease with which they are aroused, and eagerness

with which stimuli for them are sought. They are sexual passion and

fighting, and the two have so many associations with each other, blend

into each other so intimately, that a fight about sex outranks every

other theme in the breadth of its appeal. There is none so engrossing

or so careless of all distinctions of culture and frontiers.

The sexual motif figures hardly at all in American political imagery.

Except in certain minor ecstasies of war, in an occasional scandal, or

in phases of the racial conflict with Negroes or Asiatics, to speak of

it at all would seem far-fetched. Only in moving pictures, novels, and

some magazine fiction are industrial relations, business competition,

politics, and diplomacy tangled up with the girl and the other woman.

But the fighting motif appears at every turn. Politics is interesting

when there is a fight, or as we say, an issue. And in order to make

politics popular, issues have to be found, even when in truth and

justice, there are none,--none, in the sense that the differences of

judgment, or principle, or fact, do not call for the enlistment of

pugnacity. [Footnote: _Cf_. Frances Taylor Patterson, _Cinema

Craftsmanship_, pp. 31-32. "III. If the plot lacks suspense: 1. Add

an antagonist, 2. Add an obstacle, 3. Add a problem, 4. Emphasize one

of the questions in the minds of the spectator.,.."]

But where pugnacity is not enlisted, those of us who are not directly

involved find it hard to keep up our interest. For those who are

involved the absorption may be real enough to hold them even when no

issue is involved. They may be exercised by sheer joy in activity, or

by subtle rivalry or invention. But for those to whom the whole

problem is external and distant, these other faculties do not easily

come into play. In order that the faint image of the affair shall mean

something to them, they must be allowed to exercise the love of

struggle, suspense, and victory.

Miss Patterson [Footnote: _Op. cit._, pp. 6-7.] insists that

"suspense... constitutes the difference between the masterpieces in

the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the pictures at the Rivoli or the

Rialto Theatres." Had she made it clear that the masterpieces lack

either an easy mode of identification or a theme popular for this

generation, she would be wholly right in saying that this "explains

why the people straggle into the Metropolitan by twos and threes and

struggle into the Rialto and Rivoli by hundreds. The twos and threes

look at a picture in the Art Museum for less than ten minutes--unless

they chance to be art students, critics, or connoisseurs. The hundreds

in the Rivoli or the Rialto look at the picture for more than an hour.

As far as beauty is concerned there can be no comparison of the merits

of the two pictures. Yet the motion picture draws more people and

holds them at attention longer than do the masterpieces, not through

any intrinsic merit of its own, but because it depicts unfolding

events, the outcome of which the audience is breathlessly waiting. It

possesses the element of struggle, which never fails to arouse

suspense."

In order then that the distant situation shall not be a gray flicker

on the edge of attention, it should be capable of translation into

pictures in which the opportunity for identification is recognizable.

Unless that happens it will interest only a few for a little while. It

will belong to the sights seen but not felt, to the sensations that

beat on our sense organs, and are not acknowledged. We have to take

sides. We have to be able to take sides. In the recesses of our being

we must step out of the audience on to the stage, and wrestle as the

hero for the victory of good over evil. We must breathe into the

allegory the breath of our life.

3

And so, in spite of the critics, a verdict is rendered in the old

controversy about realism and romanticism. Our popular taste is to

have the drama originate in a setting realistic enough to make

identification plausible and to have it terminate in a setting

romantic enough to be desirable, but not so romantic as to be

inconceivable. In between the beginning and the end the canons are

liberal, but the true beginning and the happy ending are landmarks.

The moving picture audience rejects fantasy logically developed,

because in pure fantasy there is no familiar foothold in the age of

machines. It rejects realism relentlessly pursued because it does not

enjoy defeat in a struggle that has become its own.

What will be accepted as true, as realistic, as good, as evil, as

desirable, is not eternally fixed. These are fixed by stereotypes,

acquired from earlier experiences and carried over into judgment of

later ones. And, therefore, if the financial investment in each film

and in popular magazines were not so exorbitant as to require instant

and widespread popularity, men of spirit and imagination would be able

to use the screen and the periodical, as one might dream of their

being used, to enlarge and to refine, to verify and criticize the

repertory of images with which our imaginations work. But, given the

present costs, the men who make moving pictures, like the church and

the court painters of other ages, must adhere to the stereotypes that

they find, or pay the price of frustrating expectation. The

stereotypes can be altered, but not in time to guarantee success when

the film is released six months from now.

The men who do alter the stereotypes, the pioneering artists and

critics, are naturally depressed and angered at managers and editors

who protect their investments. They are risking everything, then why

not the others? That is not quite fair, for in their righteous fury

they have forgotten their own rewards, which are beyond any that their

employers can hope to feel. They could not, and would not if they

could, change places. And they have forgotten another thing in the

unceasing war with Philistia. They have forgotten that they are

measuring their own success by standards that artists and wise men of

the past would never have dreamed of invoking. They are asking for

circulations and audiences that were never considered by any artist

until the last few generations. And when they do not get them, they

are disappointed.

Those who catch on, like Sinclair Lewis in "Main Street," are men who

have succeeded in projecting definitely what great numbers of other

people were obscurely trying to say inside their heads. "You have said

it for me." They establish a new form which is then endlessly copied

until it, too, becomes a stereotype of perception. The next pioneer

finds it difficult to make the public see Main Street any other way.

And he, like the forerunners of Sinclair Lewis, has a quarrel with the

public.

This quarrel is due not only to the conflict of stereotypes, but to

the pioneering artist's reverence for his material. Whatever the plane

he chooses, on that plane he remains. If he is dealing with the

inwardness of an event he follows it to its conclusion regardless of

the pain it causes. He will not tag his fantasy to help anyone, or cry

peace where there is no peace. There is his America. But big audiences

have no stomach for such severity. They are more interested in

themselves than in anything else in the world. The selves in which

they are interested are the selves that have been revealed by schools

and by tradition. They insist that a work of art shall be a vehicle

with a step where they can climb aboard, and that they shall ride, not

according to the contours of the country, but to a land where for an

hour there are no clocks to punch and no dishes to wash. To satisfy

these demands there exists an intermediate class of artists who are

able and willing to confuse the planes, to piece together a

realistic-romantic compound out of the inventions of greater men, and,

as Miss Patterson advises, give "what real life so rarely does-the

triumphant resolution of a set of difficulties; the anguish of virtue

and the triumph of sin... changed to the glorifications of virtue and

the eternal punishment of its enemy." [Footnote: _Op. cit._, p.

46. "The hero and heroine must in general possess youth, beauty,

goodness, exalted self-sacrifice, and unalterable constancy."]

4

The ideologies of politics obey these rules. The foothold of realism

is always there. The picture of some real evil, such as the German

threat or class conflict, is recognizable in the argument. There is a

description of some aspect of the world which is convincing because it

agrees with familiar ideas. But as the ideology deals with an unseen

future, as well as with a tangible present, it soon crosses

imperceptibly the frontier of verification. In describing the present

you are more or less tied down to common experience. In describing

what nobody has experienced you are bound to let go. You stand at

Armageddon, more or less, but you battle for the Lord, perhaps.... A

true beginning, true according to the standards prevailing, and a

happy ending. Every Marxist is hard as nails about the brutalities of

the present, and mostly sunshine about the day after the dictatorship.

So were the war propagandists: there was not a bestial quality in

human nature they did not find everywhere east of the Rhine, or west

of it if they were Germans. The bestiality was there all right. But

after the victory, eternal peace. Plenty of this is quite cynically

deliberate. For the skilful propagandist knows that while you must

start with a plausible analysis, you must not keep on analyzing,

because the tedium of real political accomplishment will soon destroy

interest. So the propagandist exhausts the interest in reality by a

tolerably plausible beginning, and then stokes up energy for a long

voyage by brandishing a passport to heaven.

The formula works when the public fiction enmeshes itself with a

private urgency. But once enmeshed, in the heat of battle, the

original self and the original stereotype which effected the junction

may be wholly lost to sight.

CHAPTER XII

SELF-INTEREST RECONSIDERED

1

THEREFORE, the identical story is not the same story to all who hear

it. Each will enter it at a slightly different point, since no two

experiences are exactly alike; he will reenact it in his own way, and

transfuse it with his own feelings. Sometimes an artist of compelling

skill will force us to enter into lives altogether unlike our own,

lives that seem at first glance dull, repulsive, or eccentric. But

that is rare. In almost every story that catches our attention we

become a character and act out the role with a pantomime of our own.

The pantomime may be subtle or gross, may be sympathetic to the story,

or only crudely analogous; but it will consist of those feelings which

are aroused by our conception of the role. And so, the original theme

as it circulates, is stressed, twisted, and embroidered by all the

minds through which it goes. It is as if a play of Shakespeare's were

rewritten each time it is performed with all the changes of emphasis

and meaning that the actors and audience inspired.

Something very like that seems to have happened to the stories in the

sagas before they were definitively written down. In our time the

printed record, such as it is, checks the exuberance of each

individual's fancy. But against rumor there is little or no checks and

the original story, true or invented, grows wings and horns, hoofs and

beaks, as the artist in each gossip works upon it. The first

narrator's account does not keep its shape and proportions. It is

edited and revised by all who played with it as they heard it, used it

for day dreams, and passed it on. [Footnote: For an interesting

example, see the case described by C. J. Jung, _Zentralblatt für

Psychoanalyse_, 1911, Vol. I, p. 81. Translated by Constance Long,

in _Analytical Psychology_, Ch. IV.]

Consequently the more mixed the audience, the greater will be the

variation in the response. For as the audience grows larger, the

number of common words diminishes. Thus the common factors in the

story become more abstract. This story, lacking precise character of

its own, is heard by people of highly varied character. They give it

their own character.

2

The character they give it varies not only with sex and age, race and

religion and social position, but within these cruder classifications,

according to the inherited and acquired constitution of the

individual, his faculties, his career, the progress of his career, an

emphasized aspect of his career, his moods and tenses, or his place on

the board in any of the games of life that he is playing. What reaches

him of public affairs, a few lines of print, some photographs,

anecdotes, and some casual experience of his own, he conceives through

his set patterns and recreates with his own emotions. He does not take

his personal problems as partial samples of the greater environment.

He takes his stories of the greater environment as a mimic enlargement

of his private life.

But not necessarily of that private life as he would describe it to

himself. For in his private life the choices are narrow, and much of

himself is squeezed down and out of sight where it cannot directly

govern his outward behavior. And thus, beside the more average people

who project the happiness of their own lives into a general good will,

or their unhappiness into suspicion and hate, there are the outwardly

happy people who are brutal everywhere but in their own circle, as

well as the people who, the more they detest their families, their

friends, their jobs, the more they overflow with love for mankind.

As you descend from generalities to detail, it becomes more apparent

that the character in which men deal with their affairs is not fixed.

Possibly their different selves have a common stem and common

qualities, but the branches and the twigs have many forms. Nobody

confronts every situation with the same character. His character

varies in some degree through the sheer influence of time and

accumulating memory, since he is not an automaton. His character

varies, not only in time, but according to circumstance. The legend of

the solitary Englishman in the South Seas, who invariably shaves and

puts on a black tie for dinner, bears witness to his own intuitive and

civilized fear of losing the character which he has acquired. So do

diaries, and albums, and souvenirs, old letters, and old clothes, and

the love of unchanging routine testify to our sense of how hard it is

to step twice in the Heraclitan river.

There is no one self always at work. And therefore it is of great

importance in the formation of any public opinion, what self is

engaged. The Japanese ask the right to settle in California. Clearly

it makes a whole lot of difference whether you conceive the demand as

a desire to grow fruit or to marry the white man's daughter. If two

nations are disputing a piece of territory, it matters greatly whether

the people regard the negotiations as a real estate deal, an attempt

to humiliate them, or, in the excited and provocative language which

usually enclouds these arguments, as a rape. For the self which takes

charge of the instincts when we are thinking about lemons or distant

acres is very different from the self which appears when we are

thinking even potentially as the outraged head of a family. In one

case the private feeling which enters into the opinion is tepid, in

the other, red hot. And so while it is so true as to be mere tautology

that "self-interest" determines opinion, the statement is not

illuminating, until we know which self out of many selects and directs

the interest so conceived.

Religious teaching and popular wisdom have always distinguished

several personalities in each human being. They have been called the

Higher and Lower, the Spiritual and the Material, the Divine and the

Carnal; and although we may not wholly accept this classification, we

cannot fail to observe that distinctions exist. Instead of two

antithetic selves, a modern man would probably note a good many not so

sharply separated. He would say that the distinction drawn by

theologians was arbitrary and external, because many different selves

were grouped together as higher provided they fitted into the

theologian's categories, but he would recognize nevertheless that here

was an authentic clue to the variety of human nature.

We have learned to note many selves, and to be a little less ready to

issue judgment upon them. We understand that we see the same body, but

often a different man, depending on whether he is dealing with a

social equal, a social inferior, or a social superior; on whether he

is making love to a woman he is eligible to marry, or to one whom he

is not; on whether he is courting a woman, or whether he considers

himself her proprietor; on whether he is dealing with his children,

his partners, his most trusted subordinates, the boss who can make him

or break him; on whether he is struggling for the necessities of life,

or successful; on whether he is dealing with a friendly alien, or a

despised one; on whether he is in great danger, or in perfect

security; on whether he is alone in Paris or among his family in

Peoria.

People differ widely, of course, in the consistency of their

characters, so widely that they may cover the whole gamut of

differences between a split soul like Dr. Jekyll's and an utterly

singleminded Brand, Parsifal, or Don Quixote. If the selves are too

unrelated, we distrust the man; if they are too inflexibly on one

track we find him arid, stubborn, or eccentric. In the repertory of

characters, meager for the isolated and the self-sufficient, highly

varied for the adaptable, there is a whole range of selves, from that

one at the top which we should wish God to see, to those at the bottom

that we ourselves do not dare to see. There may be octaves for the

family,--father, Jehovah, tyrant,--husband, proprietor, male,--lover,

lecher,--for the occupation,--employer, master, exploiter,--competitor,

intriguer, enemy,--subordinate, courtier, snob. Some never come out

into public view. Others are called out only by exceptional circumstances.

But the characters take their form from a man's conception of the

situation in which he finds himself. If the environment to which he

is sensitive happens to be the smart set, he will imitate the character

he conceives to be appropriate. That character will tend to act as

modulator of his bearing, his speech, his choice of subjects, his

preferences. Much of the comedy of life lies here, in the way people

imagine their characters for situations that are strange to them: the

professor among promoters, the deacon at a poker game, the

cockney in the country, the paste diamond among real diamonds.

3

Into the making of a man's characters there enters a variety of

influences not easily separated. [Footnote: For an interesting sketch

of the more noteworthy early attempts to explain character, see the

chapter called "The Antecedents of the Study of Character and

Temperament," in Joseph Jastrow's _The Psychology of Conviction_.]

The analysis in its fundamentals is perhaps still as doubtful as it

was in the fifth century B. C. when Hippocrates formulated the

doctrine of the humors, distinguished the sanguine, the

melancholic, the choleric, and the phlegmatic dispositions, and

ascribed them to the blood, the black bile, the yellow bile, and the

phlegm. The latest theories, such as one finds them in Cannon,

[Footnote: _Bodily Changes in Pleasure, Pain and Anger_.] Adler,

[Footnote: _The Neurotic Constitution_.] Kempf, [Footnote: _The

Autonomic Functions and the Personality; Psychopathology. Cf_. also

Louis Berman: _The Glands Regulating Personality_.] appear to

follow much the same scent, from the outward behavior and the inner

consciousness to the physiology of the body. But in spite of an

immensely improved technique, no one would be likely to claim that

there are settled conclusions which enable us to set apart nature from

nurture, and abstract the native character from the acquired. It is

only in what Joseph Jastrow has called the slums of psychology that

the explanation of character is regarded as a fixed system to be

applied by phrenologists, palmists, fortune-tellers, mind-readers, and

a few political professors. There you will still find it asserted that

"the Chinese are fond of colors, and have their eyebrows much vaulted"

while "the heads of the Calmucks are depressed from above, but very

large laterally, about the organ which gives the inclination to

acquire; and this nation's propensity to steal, etc., is admitted."

[Footnote: _Jastrow, op. cit._, p. 156.]

The modern psychologists are disposed to regard the outward behavior

of an adult as an equation between a number of variables, such as the

resistance of the environment, repressed cravings of several

maturities, and the manifest personality. [Footnote: Formulated by

Kempf, _Psychopathology_, p. 74, as follows:

Manifest wishes }

over }

Later Repressed Wishes }

Over } opposed by the resistance of the

Adolescent Repressed Wishes } environment=Behavior

Over }

Preadolescent Repressed Wishes }

] They permit us to suppose, though I have not seen the notion

formulated, that the repression or control of cravings is fixed not in

relation to the whole person all the time, but more or less in respect

to his various selves. There are things he will not do as a patriot

that he will do when he is not thinking of himself as a patriot. No

doubt there are impulses, more or less incipient in childhood, that

are never exercised again in the whole of a man's life, except as they

enter obscurely and indirectly into combination with other impulses.

But even that is not certain, since repression is not irretrievable.

For just as psychoanalysis can bring to the surface a buried impulse,

so can social situations. [Footnote: _Cf._ the very interesting

book of Everett Dean Martin, _The Behavior of Crowds_.

Also Hobbes, _Leviathan_, Part II, Ch. 25. "For the passions of

men, which asunder are moderate, as the heat of one brand, in an

assembly are like many brands, that inflame one another, especially

when they blow one another with orations...."

LeBon, _The Crowd_, elaborates this observation of Hobbes's.] It

is only when our surroundings remain normal and placid, when what is

expected of us by those we meet is consistent, that we live without

knowledge of many of our dispositions. When the unexpected occurs, we

learn much about ourselves that we did not know.

The selves, which we construct with the help of all who influence us,

prescribe which impulses, how emphasized, how directed, are

appropriate to certain typical situations for which we have learned

prepared attitudes. For a recognizable type of experience, there is a

character which controls the outward manifestations of our whole

being. Murderous hate is, for example, controlled in civil life.

Though you choke with rage, you must not display it as a parent,

child, employer, politician. You would not wish to display a

personality that exudes murderous hate. You frown upon it, and the

people around you also frown. But if a war breaks out, the chances are

that everybody you admire will begin to feel the justification of

killing and hating. At first the vent for these feelings is very

narrow. The selves which come to the front are those which are attuned

to a real love of country, the kind of feeling that you find in Rupert

Brooke, and in Sir Edward Grey's speech on August 3,1914, and in

President Wilson's address to Congress on April 2, 1917. The reality

of war is still abhorred, and what war actually means is learned but

gradually. For previous wars are only transfigured memories. In that

honeymoon phase, the realists of war rightly insist that the nation is

not yet awake, and reassure each other by saying: "Wait for the

casualty lists." Gradually the impulse to kill becomes the main

business, and all those characters which might modify it,

disintegrate. The impulse becomes central, is sanctified, and

gradually turns unmanageable. It seeks a vent not alone on the idea of

the enemy, which is all the enemy most people actually see during the

war, but upon all the persons and objects and ideas that have always

been hateful. Hatred of the enemy is legitimate. These other hatreds

have themselves legitimized by the crudest analogy, and by what, once

having cooled off, we recognize as the most far-fetched analogy. It

takes a long time to subdue so powerful an impulse once it goes loose.

And therefore, when the war is over in fact, it takes time and

struggle to regain self-control, and to deal with the problems of

peace in civilian character.

Modern war, as Mr. Herbert Croly has said, is inherent in the

political structure of modern society, but outlawed by its ideals. For

the civilian population there exists no ideal code of conduct in war,

such as the soldier still possesses and chivalry once prescribed. The

civilians are without standards, except those that the best of them

manage to improvise. The only standards they possess make war an

accursed thing. Yet though the war may be a necessary one, no moral

training has prepared them for it. Only their higher selves have a

code and patterns, and when they have to act in what the higher

regards as a lower character profound disturbance results.

The preparation of characters for all the situations in which men may

find themselves is one function of a moral education. Clearly then, it

depends for its success upon the sincerity and knowledge with which

the environment has been explored. For in a world falsely conceived,

our own characters are falsely conceived, and we misbehave. So the

moralist must choose: either he must offer a pattern of conduct for

every phase of life, however distasteful some of its phases may be, or

he must guarantee that his pupils will never be confronted by the

situations he disapproves. Either he must abolish war, or teach people

how to wage it with the greatest psychic economy; either he must

abolish the economic life of man and feed him with stardust and dew,

or he must investigate all the perplexities of economic life and offer

patterns of conduct which are applicable in a world where no man is

self-supporting. But that is just what the prevailing moral culture so

generally refuses to do. In its best aspects it is diffident at the

awful complication of the modern world. In its worst, it is just

cowardly. Now whether the moralists study economics and politics and

psychology, or whether the social scientists educate the moralists is

no great matter. Each generation will go unprepared into the modern

world, unless it has been taught to conceive the kind of personality

it will have to be among the issues it will most likely meet.

4

Most of this the naive view of self-interest leaves out of account. It

forgets that self and interest are both conceived somehow, and that

for the most part they are conventionally conceived. The ordinary

doctrine of self-interest usually omits altogether the cognitive

function. So insistent is it on the fact that human beings finally

refer all things to themselves, that it does not stop to notice that

men's ideas of all things and of themselves are not instinctive. They

are acquired.

Thus it may be true enough, as James Madison wrote in the tenth paper

of the Federalist, that "a landed interest, a manufacturing interest,

a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests,

grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into

different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views." But if

you examine the context of Madison's paper, you discover something

which I think throws light upon that view of instinctive fatalism,

called sometimes the economic interpretation of history. Madison was

arguing for the federal constitution, and "among the numerous

advantages of the union" he set forth "its tendency to break and

control the violence of faction." Faction was what worried Madison.

And the causes of faction he traced to "the nature of man," where

latent dispositions are "brought into different degrees of activity,

according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for

different opinions concerning religion, concerning government and many

other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to

different leaders ambitiously contending for preeminence and power, or

to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting

to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties,

inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more

disposed to vex and oppress each other, than to coöperate for their

common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into

mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents

itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been

sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most

violent conflicts. But the _most common_ and _durable_ source

of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property."

Madison's theory, therefore, is that the propensity to faction may be

kindled by religious or political opinions, by leaders, but most

commonly by the distribution of property. Yet note that Madison claims

only that men are divided by their relation to property. He does not

say that their property and their opinions are cause and effect, but

that differences of property are the causes of differences of opinion.

The pivotal word in Madison's argument is "different." From the

existence of differing economic situations you can tentatively infer a

probable difference of opinions, but you cannot infer what those

opinions will necessarily be.

This reservation cuts radically into the claims of the theory as that

theory is usually held. That the reservation is necessary, the

enormous contradiction between dogma and practice among orthodox

socialists bears witness. They argue that the next stage in social

evolution is the inevitable result of the present stage. But in order

to produce that inevitable next stage they organize and agitate to

produce "class consciousness." Why, one asks, does not the economic

situation produce consciousness of class in everybody? It just

doesn't, that is all. And therefore the proud claim will not stand

that the socialist philosophy rests on prophetic insight into destiny.

It rests on an hypothesis about human nature. [Footnote: _Cf._

Thorstein Veblen, "The Socialist Economics of Karl Marx and His

Followers," in _The Place of Science in Modern Civilization,_

esp. pp. 413-418.]

The socialist practice is based on a belief that if men are

economically situated in different ways, they can then be induced to

hold certain views. Undoubtedly they often come to believe, or can be

induced to believe different things, as they are, for example,

landlords or tenants, employees or employers, skilled or unskilled

laborers, wageworkers or salaried men, buyers or sellers, farmers or

middle-men, exporters or importers, creditors or debtors. Differences

of income make a profound difference in contact and opportunity. Men

who work at machines will tend, as Mr. Thorstein Veblen has so

brilliantly demonstrated, [Footnote: _The Theory of Business

Enterprise_.] to interpret experience differently from handicraftsmen

or traders. If this were all that the materialistic conception of politics

asserted, the theory would be an immensely valuable hypothesis that

every interpreter of opinion would have to use. But he would often

have to abandon the theory, and he would always have to be on

guard. For in trying to explain a certain public opinion, it is rarely

obvious which of a man's many social relations is effecting a particular

opinion. Does Smith's opinion arise from his problems as a landlord,

an importer, an owner of railway shares, or an employer? Does

Jones's opinion, Jones being a weaver in a textile mill, come from

the attitude of his boss, the competition of new immigrants, his wife's

grocery bills, or the ever present contract with the firm which is

selling him a Ford car and a house and lot on the instalment plan?

Without special inquiry you cannot tell. The economic determinist

cannot tell.

A man's various economic contacts limit or enlarge the range of his

opinions. But which of the contacts, in what guise, on what theory,

the materialistic conception of politics cannot predict. It can

predict, with a high degree of probability, that if a man owns a

factory, his ownership will figure in those opinions which seem to

have some bearing on that factory. But how the function of being an

owner will figure, no economic determinist as such, can tell you.

There is no fixed set of opinions on any question that go with being

the owner of a factory, no views on labor, on property, on management,

let alone views on less immediate matters. The determinist can predict

that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the owner will resist

attempts to deprive him of ownership, or that he will favor

legislation which he thinks will increase his profits. But since there

is no magic in ownership which enables a business man to know what

laws will make him prosper, there is no chain of cause and effect

described in economic materialism which enables anyone to prophesy

whether the owner will take a long view or a short one, a competitive

or a cooperative.

Did the theory have the validity which is so often claimed for it, it

would enable us to prophesy. We could analyze the economic interests

of a people, and deduce what the people was bound to do. Marx tried

that, and after a good guess about the trusts, went wholly wrong. The

first socialist experiment came, not as he predicted, out of the

culmination of capitalist development in the West, but out of the

collapse of a pre-capitalist system in the East. Why did he go wrong?

Why did his greatest disciple, Lenin, go wrong? Because the Marxians

thought that men's economic position would irresistibly produce a

clear conception of their economic interests. They thought they

themselves possessed that clear conception, and that what they knew

the rest of mankind would learn. The event has shown, not only that a

clear conception of interest does not arise automatically in everyone,

but that it did not arise even in Marx and Lenin themselves. After all

that Marx and Lenin have written, the social behavior of mankind is

still obscure. It ought not to be, if economic position alone

determined public opinion. Position ought, if their theory were

correct, not only to divide mankind into classes, but to supply each

class with a view of its interest and a coherent policy for obtaining

it. Yet nothing is more certain than that all classes of men are in

constant perplexity as to what their interests are. [Footnote: As a

matter of fact, when it came to the test, Lenin completely abandoned

the materialistic interpretation of politics. Had he held sincerely to

the Marxian formula when he seized power in 1917, he would have said

to himself: according to the teachings of Marx, socialism will develop

out of a mature capitalism... here am I, in control of a nation that

is only entering upon a capitalist development... it is true that I am

a socialist, but I am a scientific socialist... it follows that for

the present all idea of a socialist republic is out of the question...

we must advance capitalism in order that the evolution which Marx

predicted may take place. But Lenin did nothing of the sort. Instead

of waiting for evolution to evolve, he tried by will, force, and

education, to defy the historical process which his philosophy

assumed.

Since this was written Lenin has abandoned communism on the ground

that Russia does not possess the necessary basis in a mature

capitalism. He now says that Russia must create capitalism, which will

create a proletariat, which will some day create communism. This is at

least consistent with Marxist dogma. But it shows how little

determinism there is in the opinions of a determinist.]

This dissolves the impact of economic determinism. For if our economic

interests are made up of our variable concepts of those interests,

then as the master key to social processes the theory fails. That

theory assumes that men are capable of adopting only one version of

their interest, and that having adopted it, they move fatally to

realize it. It assumes the existence of a specific class interest.

That assumption is false. A class interest can be conceived largely or

narrowly, selfishly or unselfishly, in the light of no facts, some

facts, many facts, truth and error. And so collapses the Marxian

remedy for class conflicts. That remedy assumes that if all property

could be held in common, class differences would disappear. The

assumption is false. Property might well be held in common, and yet

not be conceived as a whole. The moment any group of people failed to

see communism in a communist manner, they would divide into classes on

the basis of what they saw.

In respect to the existing social order Marxian socialism emphasizes

property conflict as the maker of opinion, in respect to the loosely

defined working class it ignores property conflict as the basis of

agitation, in respect to the future it imagines a society without

property conflict, and, therefore, without conflict of opinion. Now in

the existing social order there may be more instances where one man

must lose if another is to gain, than there would be under socialism,

but for every case where one must lose for another to gain, there are

endless cases where men simply imagine the conflict because they are

uneducated. And under socialism, though you removed every instance of

absolute conflict, the partial access of each man to the whole range

of facts would nevertheless create conflict. A socialist state will

not be able to dispense with education, morality, or liberal science,

though on strict materialistic grounds the communal ownership of

properties ought to make them superfluous. The communists in Russia

would not propagate their faith with such unflagging zeal if economic

determinism were alone determining the opinion of the Russian people.

5

The socialist theory of human nature is, like the hedonistic calculus,

an example of false determinism. Both assume that the unlearned

dispositions fatally but intelligently produce a certain type of

behavior. The socialist believes that the dispositions pursue the

economic interest of a class; the hedonist believes that they pursue

pleasure and avoid pain. Both theories rest on a naive view of

instinct, a view, defined by James, [Footnote: _Principles of

Psychology_, Vol. II, p. 383.] though radically qualified by him,

as "the faculty of acting in such a way as to produce certain ends,

without foresight of the ends and without previous education in the

performance."

It is doubtful whether instinctive action of this sort figures at all

in the social life of mankind. For as James pointed out: [Footnote:

_Op. cit._, Vol. II, p. 390.] "every instinctive act in an animal

with memory must cease to be 'blind' after being once repeated."

Whatever the equipment at birth, the innate dispositions are from

earliest infancy immersed in experience which determines what shall

excite them as stimulus. "They become capable," as Mr. McDougall

says, [Footnote: Introduction to _Social Psychology_, Fourth

Edition, pp. 31-32.] "of being initiated, not only by the perception

of objects of the kind which directly excite the innate disposition,

the natural or native excitants of the instinct, but also by ideas of

such objects, and by perceptions and by ideas of objects of other

kinds." [Footnote: "Most definitions of instincts and instinctive

actions take account only of their conative aspects... and it is a

common mistake to ignore the cognitive and affective aspects of the

instinctive mental process." Footnote _op. cit._, p. 29.]

It is only the "central part of the disposition" [Footnote: p. 34.]

says Mr. McDougall further, "that retains its specific character and

remains common to all individuals and all situations in which the

instinct is excited." The cognitive processes, and the actual bodily

movements by which the instinct achieves its end may be indefinitely

complicated. In other words, man has an instinct of fear, but what he

will fear and how he will try to escape, is determined not from birth,

but by experience.

If it were not for this variability, it would be difficult to conceive

the inordinate variety of human nature. But when you consider that all

the important tendencies of the creature, his appetites, his loves,

his hates, his curiosity, his sexual cravings, his fears, and

pugnacity, are freely attachable to all sorts of objects as stimulus,

and to all kinds of objects as gratification, the complexity of human

nature is not so inconceivable. And when you think that each new

generation is the casual victim of the way a previous generation was

conditioned, as well as the inheritor of the environment that

resulted, the possible combinations and permutations are enormous.

There is no prima facie case then for supposing that because persons

crave some particular thing, or behave in some particular way, human

nature is fatally constituted to crave that and act thus. The craving

and the action are both learned, and in another generation might be

learned differently. Analytic psychology and social history unite in

supporting this conclusion. Psychology indicates how essentially

casual is the nexus between the particular stimulus and the particular

response. Anthropology in the widest sense reinforces the view by

demonstrating that the things which have excited men's passions, and

the means which they have used to realize them, differ endlessly from

age to age and from place to place.

Men pursue their interest. But how they shall pursue it is not fatally

determined, and, therefore, within whatever limits of time this planet

will continue to support human life, man can set no term upon the

creative energies of men. He can issue no doom of automatism. He can

say, if he must, that for his life there will be no changes which he

can recognize as good. But in saying that he will be confining his

life to what he can see with his eye, rejecting what he might see with

his mind; he will be taking as the measure of good a measure which is

only the one he happens to possess. He can find no ground for

abandoning his highest hopes and relaxing his conscious effort unless

he chooses to regard the unknown as the unknowable, unless he elects

to believe that what no one knows no one will know, and that what

someone has not yet learned no one will ever be able to teach.

PART V

THE MAKING OF A COMMON WILL

CHAPTER 13. THE TRANSFER OF INTEREST

" 14. YES OR NO

" 15. LEADERS AND THE RANK AND FILE

CHAPTER XIII

THE TRANSFER OF INTEREST

This goes to show that there are many variables in each man's

impressions of the invisible world. The points of contact vary, the

stereotyped expectations vary, the interest enlisted varies most

subtly of all. The living impressions of a large number of people are

to an immeasurable degree personal in each of them, and unmanageably

complex in the mass. How, then, is any practical relationship

established between what is in people's heads and what is out there

beyond their ken in the environment? How in the language of democratic

theory, do great numbers of people feeling each so privately about so

abstract a picture, develop any common will? How does a simple and

constant idea emerge from this complex of variables? How are those

things known as the Will of the People, or the National Purpose, or

Public Opinion crystallized out of such fleeting and casual imagery?

That there is a real difficulty here was shown by an angry tilt in the

spring of 1921 between the American Ambassador to England and a very

large number of other Americans. Mr. Harvey, speaking at a British

dinner table, had assured the world without the least sign of

hesitancy what were the motives of Americans in 1917. [Footnote: _New

York Times_, May 20, 1921.] As he described them, they were not the

motives which President Wilson had insisted upon when _he_

enunciated the American mind. Now, of course, neither Mr. Harvey nor

Mr. Wilson, nor the critics and friends of either, nor any one else,

can know quantitatively and qualitatively what went on in thirty or

forty million adult minds. But what everybody knows is that a war was

fought and won by a multitude of efforts, stimulated, no one knows in

what proportion, by the motives of Wilson and the motives of Harvey

and all kinds of hybrids of the two. People enlisted and fought,

worked, paid taxes, sacrificed to a common end, and yet no one can

begin to say exactly what moved each person to do each thing that he

did. It is no use, then, Mr. Harvey telling a soldier who thought this

was a war to end war that the soldier did not think any such thing.

The soldier who thought that _thought that_. And Mr. Harvey, who

thought something else, thought _something else_.

In the same speech Mr. Harvey formulated with equal clarity what the

voters of 1920 had in their minds. That is a rash thing to do, and, if

you simply assume that all who voted your ticket voted as you did,

then it is a disingenuous thing to do. The count shows that sixteen

millions voted Republican, and nine millions Democratic. They voted,

says Mr. Harvey, for and against the League of Nations, and in support

of this claim, he can point to Mr. Wilson's request for a referendum,

and to the undeniable fact that the Democratic party and Mr. Cox

insisted that the League was the issue. But then, saying that the

League was the issue did not make the League the issue, and by

counting the votes on election day you do not know the real division

of opinion about the League. There were, for example, nine million

Democrats. Are you entitled to believe that all of them are staunch

supporters of the League? Certainly you are not. For your knowledge of

American politics tells you that many of the millions voted, as they

always do, to maintain the existing social system in the South, and

that whatever their views on the League, they did not vote to express

their views. Those who wanted the League were no doubt pleased that

the Democratic party wanted it too. Those who disliked the League may

have held their noses as they voted. But both groups of Southerners

voted the same ticket.

Were the Republicans more unanimous? Anybody can pick Republican

voters enough out of his circle of friends to cover the whole gamut of

opinion from the irreconcilability of Senators Johnson and Knox to the

advocacy of Secretary Hoover and Chief Justice Taft. No one can say

definitely how many people felt in any particular way about the

League, nor how many people let their feelings on that subject

determine their vote. When there are only two ways of expressing a

hundred varieties of feeling, there is no certain way of knowing what

the decisive combination was. Senator Borah found in the Republican

ticket a reason for voting Republican, but so did President Lowell.

The Republican majority was composed of men and women who thought a

Republican victory would kill the League, plus those who thought it

the most practical way to secure the League, plus those who thought it

the surest way offered to obtain an amended League. All these voters

were inextricably entangled with their own desire, or the desire of

other voters to improve business, or put labor in its place, or to

punish the Democrats for going to war, or to punish them for not

having gone sooner, or to get rid of Mr. Burleson, or to improve the

price of wheat, or to lower taxes, or to stop Mr. Daniels from

outbuilding the world, or to help Mr. Harding do the same thing.

And yet a sort of decision emerged; Mr. Harding moved into the White

House. For the least common denominator of all the votes was that the

Democrats should go and the Republicans come in. That was the only

factor remaining after all the contradictions had cancelled each other

out. But that factor was enough to alter policy for four years. The

precise reasons why change was desired on that November day in 1920

are not recorded, not even in the memories of the individual voters.

The reasons are not fixed. They grow and change and melt into other

reasons, so that the public opinions Mr. Harding has to deal with are

not the opinions that elected him. That there is no inevitable

connection between an assortment of opinions and a particular line of

action everyone saw in 1916. Elected apparently on the cry that he

kept us out of war, Mr. Wilson within five months led the country into

war.

The working of the popular will, therefore, has always called for

explanation. Those who have been most impressed by its erratic working

have found a prophet in M. LeBon, and have welcomed generalizations

about what Sir Robert Peel called "that great compound of folly,

weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy and

newspaper paragraphs which is called public opinion." Others have

concluded that since out of drift and incoherence, settled aims do

appear, there must be a mysterious contrivance at work somewhere over

and above the inhabitants of a nation. They invoke a collective soul,

a national mind, a spirit of the age which imposes order upon random

opinion. An oversoul seems to be needed, for the emotions and ideas in

the members of a group do not disclose anything so simple and so

crystalline as the formula which those same individuals will accept as

a true statement of their Public Opinion.

2

But the facts can, I think, be explained more convincingly without the

help of the oversoul in any of its disguises. After all, the art of

inducing all sorts of people who think differently to vote alike is

practiced in every political campaign. In 1916, for example, the

Republican candidate had to produce Republican votes out of many

different kinds of Republicans. Let us look at Mr. Hughes' first

speech after accepting the nomination. [Footnote: Delivered at Carnegie

Hall, New York City, July 31, 1916.] The context is still clear enough

in our minds to obviate much explanation; yet the issues are no longer

contentious. The candidate was a man of unusually plain speech, who

had been out of politics for several years and was not personally

committed on the issues of the recent past. He had, moreover, none of

that wizardry which popular leaders like Roosevelt, Wilson, or Lloyd

George possess, none of that histrionic gift by which such men

impersonate the feelings of their followers. From that aspect of

politics he was by temperament and by training remote. But yet he knew

by calculation what the politician's technic is. He was one of those

people who know just how to do a thing, but who can not quite do it

themselves. They are often better teachers than the virtuoso to whom

the art is so much second nature that he himself does not know how he

does it. The statement that those who can, do; those who cannot,

teach, is not nearly so much of a reflection on the teacher as it

sounds.

Mr. Hughes knew the occasion was momentous, and he had prepared his

manuscript carefully. In a box sat Theodore Roosevelt just back from

Missouri. All over the house sat the veterans of Armageddon in various

stages of doubt and dismay. On the platform and in the other boxes the

ex-whited sepulchres and ex-second-story men of 1912 were to be seen,

obviously in the best of health and in a melting mood. Out beyond the

hall there were powerful pro-Germans and powerful pro-Allies; a war

party in the East and in the big cities; a peace party in the middle

and far West. There was strong feeling about Mexico. Mr. Hughes had to

form a majority against the Democrats out of people divided into all

sorts of combinations on Taft vs. Roosevelt, pro-Germans vs.

pro-Allies, war vs. neutrality, Mexican intervention vs.

non-intervention.

About the morality or the wisdom of the affair we are, of course, not

concerned here. Our only interest is in the method by which a leader

of heterogeneous opinion goes about the business of securing a

homogeneous vote.

"This _representative_ gathering is a happy augury. It means the

strength of _reunion._ It means that the party of _Lincoln_

is restored...."

The italicized words are binders: _Lincoln_ in such a speech has

of course, no relation to Abraham Lincoln. It is merely a stereotype

by which the piety which surrounds that name can be transferred to the

Republican candidate who now stands in his shoes. Lincoln reminds the

Republicans, Bull Moose and Old Guard, that before the schism they had

a common history. About the schism no one can afford to speak. But it

is there, as yet unhealed.

The speaker must heal it. Now the schism of 1912 had arisen over

domestic questions; the reunion of 1916 was, as Mr. Roosevelt had

declared, to be based on a common indignation against Mr. Wilson's

conduct of international affairs. But international affairs were also

a dangerous source of conflict. It was necessary to find an opening

subject which would not only ignore 1912 but would avoid also the

explosive conflicts of 1916. The speaker skilfully selected the spoils

system in diplomatic appointments. "Deserving Democrats" was a

discrediting phrase, and Mr. Hughes at once evokes it. The record

being indefensible, there is no hesitation in the vigor of the attack.

Logically it was an ideal introduction to a common mood.

Mr. Hughes then turns to Mexico, beginning with an historical review.

He had to consider the general sentiment that affairs were going badly

in Mexico; also, a no less general sentiment that war should be

avoided; and two powerful currents of opinion, one of which said

President Wilson was right in not recognizing Huerta, the other which

preferred Huerta to Carranza, and intervention to both. Huerta was the

first sore spot in the record...

"He was certainly in fact the head of the Government in Mexico."

But the moralists who regarded Huerta as a drunken murderer had to be

placated.

"Whether or not he should be recognized was a question to be

determined in the exercise of a sound discretion, but according to

correct principles."

So instead of saying that Huerta should have been recognized, the

candidate says that correct principles ought to be applied. Everybody

believes in correct principles, and everybody, of course, believes he

possesses them. To blur the issue still further President Wilson's

policy is described as "intervention." It was that in law, perhaps,

but not in the sense then currently meant by the word. By stretching

the word to cover what Mr. Wilson had done, as well as what the real

interventionists wanted, the issue between the two factions was to be

repressed.

Having got by the two explosive points "_Huerta_" and

"_intervention_" by letting the words mean all things to all men,

the speech passes for a while to safer ground. The candidate tells the

story of Tampico, Vera Cruz, Villa, Santa Ysabel, Columbus and

Carrizal. Mr. Hughes is specific, either because the facts as known

from the newspapers are irritating, or because the true explanation

is, as for example in regard to Tampico, too complicated. No contrary

passions could be aroused by such a record. But at the end the

candidate had to take a position. His audience expected it. The

indictment was Mr. Roosevelt's. Would Mr. Hughes adopt his remedy,

intervention?

"The nation has no policy of aggression toward Mexico. We have no

desire for any part of her territory. We wish her to have peace,

stability and prosperity. We should be ready to aid her in binding up

her wounds, in relieving her from starvation and distress, in giving

her in every practicable way the benefits of our disinterested

friendship. The conduct of this administration has created

difficulties which we shall have to surmount.... _We shall have to

adopt a new policy,_ a policy of _firmness_ and consistency

through which alone we can promote an enduring _friendship._"

The theme friendship is for the non-interventionists, the theme "new

policy" and "firmness" is for the interventionists. On the

non-contentious record, the detail is overwhelming; on the issue

everything is cloudy.

Concerning the European war Mr. Hughes employed an ingenious formula:

"I stand for the unflinching maintenance of _all_ American rights

on land and sea."

In order to understand the force of that statement at the time it was

spoken, we must remember how each faction during the period of

neutrality believed that the nations it opposed in Europe were alone

violating American rights. Mr. Hughes seemed to say to the pro-Allies:

I would have coerced Germany. But the pro-Germans had been insisting

that British sea power was violating most of our rights. The formula

covers two diametrically opposed purposes by the symbolic phrase

"American rights."

But there was the Lusitania. Like the 1912 schism, it was an

invincible obstacle to harmony.

"... I am confident that there would have been no destruction of

American lives by the sinking of the Lusitania."

Thus, what cannot be compromised must be obliterated, when there is a

question on which we cannot all hope to get together, let us pretend

that it does not exist. About the future of American relations with

Europe Mr. Hughes was silent. Nothing he could say would possibly

please the two irreconcilable factions for whose support he was

bidding.

It is hardly necessary to say that Mr. Hughes did not invent this

technic and did not employ it with the utmost success. But he

illustrated how a public opinion constituted out of divergent opinions

is clouded; how its meaning approaches the neutral tint formed out of

the blending of many colors. Where superficial harmony is the aim and

conflict the fact, obscurantism in a public appeal is the usual

result. Almost always vagueness at a crucial point in public debate is

a symptom of cross-purposes.

3

But how is it that a vague idea so often has the power to unite deeply

felt opinions? These opinions, we recall, however deeply they may be

felt, are not in continual and pungent contact with the facts they

profess to treat. On the unseen environment, Mexico, the European war,

our grip is slight though our feeling may be intense. The original

pictures and words which aroused it have not anything like the force

of the feeling itself. The account of what has happened out of sight

and hearing in a place where we have never been, has not and never can

have, except briefly as in a dream or fantasy, all the dimensions of

reality. But it can arouse all, and sometimes even more emotion than

the reality. For the trigger can be pulled by more than one stimulus.

The stimulus which originally pulled the trigger may have been a

series of pictures in the mind aroused by printed or spoken words.

These pictures fade and are hard to keep steady; their contours and

their pulse fluctuate. Gradually the process sets in of knowing what

you feel without being entirely certain why you feel it. The fading

pictures are displaced by other pictures, and then by names or

symbols. But the emotion goes on, capable now of being aroused by the

substituted images and names. Even in severe thinking these

substitutions take place, for if a man is trying to compare two

complicated situations, he soon finds exhausting the attempt to hold

both fully in mind in all their detail. He employs a shorthand of

names and signs and samples. He has to do this if he is to advance at

all, because he cannot carry the whole baggage in every phrase through

every step he takes. But if he forgets that he has substituted and

simplified, he soon lapses into verbalism, and begins to talk about

names regardless of objects. And then he has no way of knowing when

the name divorced from its first thing is carrying on a misalliance

with some other thing. It is more difficult still to guard against

changelings in casual politics.

For by what is known to psychologists as conditioned response, an

emotion is not attached merely to one idea. There are no end of things

which can arouse the emotion, and no end of things which can satisfy

it. This is particularly true where the stimulus is only dimly and

indirectly perceived, and where the objective is likewise indirect.

For you can associate an emotion, say fear, first with something

immediately dangerous, then with the idea of that thing, then with

something similar to that idea, and so on and on. The whole structure

of human culture is in one respect an elaboration of the stimuli and

responses of which the original emotional capacities remain a fairly

fixed center. No doubt the quality of emotion has changed in the

course of history, but with nothing like the speed, or elaboration,

that has characterized the conditioning of it.

People differ widely in their susceptibility to ideas. There are some

in whom the idea of a starving child in Russia is practically as vivid

as a starving child within sight. There are others who are almost

incapable of being excited by a distant idea. There are many

gradations between. And there are people who are insensitive to facts,

and aroused only by ideas. But though the emotion is aroused by the

idea, we are unable to satisfy the emotion by acting ourselves upon

the scene itself. The idea of the starving Russian child evokes a

desire to feed the child. But the person so aroused cannot feed it. He

can only give money to an impersonal organization, or to a

personification which he calls Mr. Hoover. His money does not reach

that child. It goes to a general pool from which a mass of children

are fed. And so just as the idea is second hand, so are the effects of

the action second hand. The cognition is indirect, the conation is

indirect, only the effect is immediate. Of the three parts of the

process, the stimulus comes from somewhere out of sight, the response

reaches somewhere out of sight, only the emotion exists entirely

within the person. Of the child's hunger he has only an idea, of the

child's relief he has only an idea, but of his own desire to help he

has a real experience. It is the central fact of the business, the

emotion within himself, which is first hand.