His version of
the truth is only his version. How can he demonstrate the truth as he
sees it? He cannot demonstrate it, any more than Mr. Sinclair Lewis
can demonstrate that he has told the whole truth about Main Street.
And the more he understands his own weaknesses, the more ready he is
to admit that where there is no objective test, his own opinion is in
some vital measure constructed out of his own stereotypes, according
to his own code, and by the urgency of his own interest. He knows that
he is seeing the world through subjective lenses. He cannot deny that
he too is, as Shelley remarked, a dome of many-colored glass which
stains the white radiance of eternity.
And by this knowledge his assurance is tempered. He may have all kinds
of moral courage, and sometimes has, but he lacks that sustaining
conviction of a certain technic which finally freed the physical
sciences from theological control. It was the gradual development of
an irrefragable method that gave the physicist his intellectual
freedom as against all the powers of the world. His proofs were so
clear, his evidence so sharply superior to tradition, that he broke
away finally from all control. But the journalist has no such support
in his own conscience or in fact. The control exercised over him by
the opinions of his employers and his readers, is not the control of
truth by prejudice, but of one opinion by another opinion that it is
not demonstrably less true.
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