Occasionally perhaps we enter a building which is composed and
spacious; we go to a theatre where modern stagecraft has cut away
distraction, or go to sea, or into a quiet place, and we remember how
cluttered, how capricious, how superfluous and clamorous is the
ordinary urban life of our time. We learn to understand why our addled
minds seize so little with precision, why they are caught up and
tossed about in a kind of tarantella by headlines and catch-words, why
so often they cannot tell things apart or discern identity in apparent
differences.
5
But this external disorder is complicated further by internal.
Experiment shows that the speed, the accuracy, and the intellectual
quality of association is deranged by what we are taught to call
emotional conflicts. Measured in fifths of a second, a series of a
hundred stimuli containing both neutral and hot words may show a
variation as between 5 and 32 or even a total failure to respond at
all. [Footnote: Jung, _Clark Lectures_.] Obviously our public
opinion is in intermittent contact with complexes of all sorts; with
ambition and economic interest, personal animosity, racial prejudice,
class feeling and what not. They distort our reading, our thinking,
our talking and our behavior in a great variety of ways.
And finally since opinions do not stop at the normal members of
society, since for the purposes of an election, a propaganda, a
following, numbers constitute power, the quality of attention is still
further depressed.
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