GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

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POLITICS
Mill was essentially a rationalist, the word "rational*
1st" being here used in its popular sense. His belief, derived
from his father, was that human beings are reasonable in
the sense that, if the arguments in favour of a course of
action or a set of opinions are presented to them with
sufficient forte and frequency, and if the course of action
is right and the opinions true, then they will in the end
follow the one and adhere to the other. Of his father,
James Mill, he tells us, "so complete was my father's
reliance on the influence of reason over the minds of
mankind, whenever it is allowed to reach them, that he
felt as if all would be gained if the whole population
were taught to read, if all sorts of opinions were allowed
to be addressed to them by word and in writing, and if by
means of a suffrage they could nominate a legislature to
give effect to the opinions they adopted". Of himself and
of those who, with him, set themselves in the early part
of the nineteenth century the task of propagating the
doctrines of Utilitarianism he writes that what "we
principally thought of, was to alter other people's opinions ;
to make them believe according to evidence, and know
what was their real interest, which, when they once knew,
they would, we thought, by the instrument of opinion,
enforce a regard to it upon one another".
If you could persuade a man's reason, then you could
determine his actions for, Mill averred, "it is what men
think which determines how they act". Now those who
in the last resort are responsible for what men think, are
those who control the avenues of propaganda through which
their minds are reached. They are our teachers, spiritual
pastors and masters in our youth; they are the writers of
books and newspapers which we read in manhood. There
is no doubt a sense in which the more popular newspapers
follow public taste rather than lead it, but 'the general
influence of the controllers of the press on public opinion
is not open to question. Now Mill would have agreed with
the modern dictators that die controllers of propaganda
and, therefore, of opinion, were the real sovereign* in a