After a procedure of that sort, a public opinion
in the eulogistic sense of the term [Footnote: As used by Mr. Lowell
in his _Public Opinion and Popular Government_.] can exist.
The value of expert mediation is not that it sets up opinion to coerce
the partisans, but that it disintegrates partisanship. Judge Gary and
Mr. Foster may remain as little convinced as when they started, though
even they would have to talk in a different strain. But almost
everyone else who was not personally entangled would save himself from
being entangled. For the entangling stereotypes and slogans to which
his reflexes are so ready to respond are by this kind of dialectic
untangled.
4
On many subjects of great public importance, and in varying degree
among different people for more personal matters, the threads of
memory and emotion are in a snarl. The same word will connote any
number of different ideas: emotions are displaced from the images to
which they belong to names which resemble the names of these images.
In the uncriticized parts of the mind there is a vast amount of
association by mere clang, contact, and succession. There are stray
emotional attachments, there are words that were names and are masks.
In dreams, reveries, and panic, we uncover some of the disorder,
enough to see how the naive mind is composed, and how it behaves when
not disciplined by wakeful effort and external resistance.
Pages:
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416