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.
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