Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/638

620 and absurdity so deeply intrenched as in law and law administration, while the acutest and most powerful of the professions forms the bodyguard and bulwark of the system. But of this we are little disposed to complain. To conserve the good we must tolerate the concomitant evil; and there is neither intelligence, wisdom, nor honesty enough in the country to make a better system. If we are ever to get out of it, we must slowly grow out; and nothing will facilitate this more than such a shaking up and exposure of our judicial doings before the world as this remarkable trial has just effected.

But, aside from its personal issues, the case has chiefly interested us as a test of popular intelligence, and as affording an instructive illustration of the way people form opinions. The opinions of the multitude are commonly inherited or adopted; they are rarely "formed" by rational processes, and whenever the attempt to form them is made under proper circumstances, we get the best possible measure of mental capacity, integrity, and the efficacy of education. The Beecher case was well suited to be an ordeal of popular judgment. It was a fresh question, without precedents, and had to be accepted upon its merits. Then it was an open question, or early so regarded by the public, and so entertained by the court. Besides, it was a complex question, well fitted to task mental effort, and it dealt with human motives, conduct, and character, elements belonging to the common experience of mankind. The situation was thus favorable for fair and intelligent judgment; and yet, under these conditions, we get one of the most unexampled lessons as to how little of rationality there is in human thinking, and how little evidence has to do with the formation of popular convictions. Our concern is not here with the issue involved in the trial and which preceded it, but with the way the public approached and dealt with it.

We shall be helped by reference to a rudimentary bit of the science of mind. When men are called rational creatures, if it is meant that they have a capacity of reason by which they can arrive at the truth, the idea is correct; if it is meant that they are characteristically rational or controlled by reason, the idea is quite erroneous. Men are habitually creatures of emotion rather than of intellect. The emotions are the motors or driving forces of our nature; in a few they are guided and governed by the intellect; in the many they are lawless agencies, dominating the intellect; enslaving the rational nature. It is therefore of immensely greater importance to know how men feel than what they think; in fact, the last is generally the consequence of the first. That which lies beyond the reason and the will in the mental constitution, and gets vent continually under the pressure of sentiment, impulse, passion, love, hate, habit, and prejudice, is of immensely greater volume and mount than all that is said or done under the influence of intelligent volition. The perverting influence of passion is well known; but it is equally true that emotions of every kind and degree disturb the intellectual balance. Sympathies and antipathies hates and admirations, blind the reason, distort the judgment, and reduce the mental experience to the grade of emotional automatism. Men carry on their mental intercourse in terms of reason and delude themselves with the fancy that they are logical, when in fact they are only venting their preferences or dislikes, or giving excuses for their prepossessions, or exploding their inveterate prejudices.

Now, probably no man has appeared in this country who has stirred up so much adverse feeling of all kinds as Henry Ward Beecher. For twenty-five years he has been more heard and more read than any other person, and has stamped his personality deep in the national mind. From the first he has