PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

will be known by the governors. In each theory there is a spot of
blind automatism.
That spot covers up some fact, which if it were taken into account,
would check the vital movement that the stereotype provokes. If the
progressive had to ask himself, like the Chinaman in the joke, what he
wanted to do with the time he saved by breaking the record, if the
advocate of laissez-faire had to contemplate not only free and
exuberant energies of men, but what some people call their human
nature, if the collectivist let the center of his attention be
occupied with the problem of how he is to secure his officials, if the
imperialist dared to doubt his own inspiration, you would find more
Hamlet and less Henry the Fifth. For these blind spots keep away
distracting images, which with their attendant emotions, might cause
hesitation and infirmity of purpose. Consequently the stereotype not
only saves time in a busy life and is a defense of our position in
society, but tends to preserve us from all the bewildering effect of
trying to see the world steadily and see it whole.
CHAPTER IX
CODES AND THEIR ENEMIES
ANYONE who has stood at the end of a railroad platform waiting for a
friend, will recall what queer people he mistook for him. The shape of
a hat, a slightly characteristic gait, evoked the vivid picture in his
mind's eye. In sleep a tinkle may sound like the pealing of a great
bell; the distant stroke of a hammer like a thunderclap. For our
constellations of imagery will vibrate to a stimulus that is perhaps
but vaguely similar to some aspect of them. They may, in
hallucination, flood the whole consciousness. They may enter very
little into perception, though I am inclined to think that such an
experience is extremely rare and highly sophisticated, as when we gaze
blankly at a familiar word or object, and it gradually ceases to be
familiar. Certainly for the most part, the way we see things is a
combination of what is there and of what we expected to find. The
heavens are not the same to an astronomer as to a pair of lovers; a
page of Kant will start a different train of thought in a Kantian and
in a radical empiricist; the Tahitian belle is a better looking person
to her Tahitian suitor than to the readers of the _National
Geographic Magazine_.
Expertness in any subject is, in fact, a multiplication of the number
of aspects we are prepared to discover, plus the habit of discounting
our expectations. Where to the ignoramus all things look alike, and