. Once open the mind to the
sway of one feeling and it requires a greater power of feeling, thought,
or will--or even all three--to unseat it. Our feelings influence our
judgments and volitions much more than we care to admit. So true is this
that it is a superhuman task to get an audience to reason fairly on a
subject on which it feels deeply, and when this result is accomplished
the success becomes noteworthy, as in the case of Henry Ward Beecher's
Liverpool speech. Emotional ideas once accepted are soon cherished, and
finally become our very inmost selves. Attitudes based on feelings alone
are prejudices.

What is true of our feelings, in this respect, applies to our ideas: All
thoughts that enter the mind tend to be accepted as truth unless a
stronger and contradictory thought arises.

The speaker skilled in moving men to action manages to dominate the
minds of his audience with his thoughts by subtly prohibiting the
entertaining of ideas hostile to his own. Most of us are captured by the
latest strong attack, and if we can be induced to act while under the
stress of that last insistent thought, we lose sight of counter
influences. The fact is that almost all our decisions--if they involve
thought at all--are of this sort: At the moment of decision the course
of action then under contemplation usurps the attention, and conflicting
ideas are dropped out of consideration.

The head of a large publishing house remarked only recently that ninety
per cent of the people who bought books by subscription never read them.
They buy because the salesman presents his wares so skillfully that
every consideration but the attractiveness of the book drops out of the
mind, and that thought prompts action. _Every_ idea that enters the
mind will result in action unless a contradictory thought arises to
prohibit it. Think of singing the musical scale and it will result in
your singing it unless the counter-thought of its futility or absurdity
inhibits your action. If you bandage and "doctor" a horse's foot, he
will go lame. You cannot think of swallowing, without the muscles used
in that process being affected. You cannot think of saying "hello,"
without a slight movement of the muscles of speech. To warn children
that they should not put beans up their noses is the surest method of
getting them to do it. Every thought called up in the mind of your
audience will work either for or against you. Thoughts are not dead
matter; they radi