PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

time, and sampling. We must note now that with this initial taint,
public opinions are still further beset, because in a series of events
seen mostly through stereotypes, we readily accept sequence or
parallelism as equivalent to cause and effect.
This is most likely to happen when two ideas that come together arouse
the same feeling. If they come together they are likely to arouse the
same feeling; and even when they do not arrive together a powerful
feeling attached to one is likely to suck out of all the corners of
memory any idea that feels about the same. Thus everything painful
tends to collect into one system of cause and effect, and likewise
everything pleasant.
"IId IIm (1675) This day I hear that G[od] has shot an arrow into the
midst of this Town. The small pox is in an ordinary ye sign of the
Swan, the ordinary Keepers name is Windsor. His daughter is sick of
the disease. It is observable that this disease begins at an alehouse,
to testify God's displeasure agt the sin of drunkenness & yt of
multiplying alehouses!" [Footnote: _The Heart of the Puritan_, p.
177, edited by Elizabeth Deering Hanscom.]
Thus Increase Mather, and thus in the year 1919 a distinguished
Professor of Celestial Mechanics discussing the Einstein theory:
"It may well be that.... Bolshevist uprisings are in reality the
visible objects of some underlying, deep, mental disturbance,
world-wide in character.... This same spirit of unrest has invaded
science." [Footnote: Cited in _The New Republic_, Dec. 24, 1919,
p. 120.]
In hating one thing violently, we readily associate with it as cause
or effect most of the other things we hate or fear violently. They may
have no more connection than smallpox and alehouses, or Relativity and
Bolshevism, but they are bound together in the same emotion. In a
superstitious mind, like that of the Professor of Celestial Mechanics,
emotion is a stream of molten lava which catches and imbeds whatever
it touches. When you excavate in it you find, as in a buried city, all
sorts of objects ludicrously entangled in each other. Anything can be
related to anything else, provided it feels like it. Nor has a mind in
such a state any way of knowing how preposterous it is. Ancient fears,
reinforced by more recent fears, coagulate into a snarl of fears where
anything that is dreaded is the cause of anything else that is
dreaded.
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Generally it all culminates in the fabrication of a system of all
evil, and of another which is the system of all good. Then our love of