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Lippmann, Walter, 1889-1974

"Public Opinion"


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.


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