constituted authority--not only of affairs in this life
but in the ordering of all the future existences that man has
conceived--is Public Opinion. Public opinion is the decree of human
nature determined in impenetrable secrecy, enforced with ceremonious
and bewildering circumlocution. It is thus double-natured. The
organized public opinion that we see, hear, feel and obey is the
costumed officialism of human nature, through ages of custom charged
with enforcing upon individuals the demands of the many. The other is
that tacit and nearly always unconscious understanding among men and
women, which binds them in mysterious cohesion through a belief in or
a dread of something that they can not understand, because they can
not feel it with their hands, control it with their strength or
disturb it with their threats. The myriads of mankind in this secret
tribunal are silent because they are ignorant of speech. They are dull
of brain and low in nervous organization, so that perception with them
is a cerebral agony and even feeling responds only to the shock of
actual physical suffering. Organized public opinion, when compared
with this unnameable and resistless silent force of human instinct is
like a small body of the police in the presence of a vast sullen mob.
If the mob is determined and throws capable leaders forward, the
police either desert to the mob or disappear. If the mob does not
understand itself and produces no leaders the police rule it. It is
fair to speak of this tacit common instinct as ignorant, because the
world always has been shared between Ignorance and his twin brother,
Indolence. Knowledge is the rarest coin that circulates among men. No
one can accumulate knowledge unless he possesses the broad catholicity
of purpose to labor ceaselessly for truth, to accept it from
whatsoever source it comes, in whatsoever guise, with whatsoever
message it brings him, and to abide whatsoever results may follow. If
he expects an angel and a devil comes, it is still the truth he is
seeing, it is still knowledge he is gaining. The genius of
knowledge-seeking was glorified in that obscure German chemist who,
experimenting upon himself with a new solution into which a fatal
wrong ingredient had entered, cried in the agony of death to his
assistant: "Note my symptoms carefully and make an autopsy--I am sure
it is a new poison we have liberated!" If the vast majority of men
shrink from and evade irksome labor with their mu