Public Opinion | Page 6

him cast
the first stone who did not believe in the Russian army that passed
through England in August, 1914, did not accept any tale of atrocities
without direct proof, and never saw a plot, a traitor, or a spy where
there was none. Let him cast a stone who never passed on as the real
inside truth what he had heard someone say who knew no more than he
did.
In all these instances we must note particularly one common factor. It
is the insertion between man and his environment of a
pseudo-environment. To that pseudo-environment his behavior is a
response. But because it is behavior, the consequences, if they are acts,
operate not in the pseudo-environment where the behavior is stimulated,

but in the real environment where action eventuates. If the behavior is
not a practical act, but what we call roughly thought and emotion, it
may be a long time before there is any noticeable break in the texture of
the fictitious world. But when the stimulus of the pseudo-fact results in
action on things or other people, contradiction soon develops. Then
comes the sensation of butting one's head against a stone wall, of
learning by experience, and witnessing Herbert Spencer's tragedy of the
murder of a Beautiful Theory by a Gang of Brutal Facts, the discomfort
in short of a maladjustment. For certainly, at the level of social life,
what is called the adjustment of man to his environment takes place
through the medium of fictions.
By fictions I do not mean lies. I mean a representation of the
environment which is in lesser or greater degree made by man himself.
The range of fiction extends all the way from complete hallucination to
the scientists' perfectly self-conscious use of a schematic model, or his
decision that for his particular problem accuracy beyond a certain
number of decimal places is not important. A work of fiction may have
almost any degree of fidelity, and so long as the degree of fidelity can
be taken into account, fiction is not misleading. In fact, human culture
is very largely the selection, the rearrangement, the tracing of patterns
upon, and the stylizing of, what William James called "the random
irradiations and resettlements of our ideas." [Footnote: James,
Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, p. 638] The alternative to the use of
fictions is direct exposure to the ebb and flow of sensation. That is not
a real alternative, for however refreshing it is to see at times with a
perfectly innocent eye, innocence itself is not wisdom, though a source
and corrective of wisdom. For the real environment is altogether too
big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not
equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many
permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that
environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we
can manage with it. To traverse the world men must have maps of the
world. Their persistent difficulty is to secure maps on which their own
need, or someone else's need, has not sketched in the coast of Bohemia.
4
The analyst of public opinion must begin then, by recognizing the
triangular relationship between the scene of action, the human picture

of that scene, and the human response to that picture working itself out
upon the scene of action. It is like a play suggested to the actors by
their own experience, in which the plot is transacted in the real lives of
the actors, and not merely in their stage parts. The moving picture often
emphasizes with great skill this double drama of interior motive and
external behavior. Two men are quarreling, ostensibly about some
money, but their passion is inexplicable. Then the picture fades out and
what one or the other of the two men sees with his mind's eye is
reënacted. Across the table they were quarreling about money. In
memory they are back in their youth when the girl jilted him for the
other man. The exterior drama is explained: the hero is not greedy; the
hero is in love.
A scene not so different was played in the United States Senate. At
breakfast on the morning of September 29, 1919, some of the Senators
read a news dispatch in the Washington Post about the landing of
American marines on the Dalmatian coast. The newspaper said:
FACTS NOW ESTABLISHED
"The following important facts appear already established. The orders
to Rear Admiral Andrews commanding the American naval forces in
the Adriatic, came from the British Admiralty via the War Council and
Rear Admiral Knapps in London. The approval or disapproval of the
American Navy Department was not asked....
WITHOUT DANIELS' KNOWLEDGE
"Mr. Daniels was admittedly placed in a peculiar position when cables