formed out of the blending of many colors. Where superficial harmony is the aim and conflict the fact, obscurantism in a public appeal is the usual result. Almost always vagueness at a crucial point in public debate is a symptom of cross-purposes.
3
But how is it that a vague idea so often has the power to unite deeply felt opinions? These opinions, we recall, however deeply they may be felt, are not in continual and pungent contact with the facts they profess to treat. On the unseen environment, Mexico, the European war, our grip is slight though our feeling may be intense. The original pictures and words which aroused it have not anything like the force of the feeling itself. The account of what has happened out of sight and hearing in a place where we have never been, has not and never can have, except briefly as in a dream or fantasy, all the dimensions of reality. But it can arouse all, and sometimes even more emotion than the reality. For the trigger can be pulled by more than one stimulus.
The stimulus which originally pulled the trigger may have been a series of pictures in the mind aroused by printed or spoken words. These pictures fade and are hard to keep steady; their contours and their pulse fluctuate. Gradually the process sets in of knowing what you feel without being entirely certain why you feel it. The fading pictures are displaced by other pictures, and then by names or symbols. But the emotion goes on, capable now of being aroused by the substituted images and names. Even in severe
