BISHOP FRASER ON POPULAR OPINION, OLD AND NEW.
TN the lecture delivered yesterday week to the Edinburgh 1 Philosophical Institution by the Bishop of Manchester, on the responsibility attached to the formation of opinion, it was a happy thought to refer us back to the papers of Addison and Sir Richard Steele, in the Spectator of 1712, on the vanity of popular opinion. In the former of these papers, Addison describes a round of visits to the various coffee-houses in London where political gossip then most abounded, on occasion of a false rumour of the death of Louis XIV., and gives us the following specimen of the value of the opinion of coteries on such a political event :—" I then turned on my right hand into Fish Street, when the chief politician of that quarter, upon hearing the news (after having taken a pipe of tobacco and ruminated for some time), 'If,' says he, ' the King of France is certainly dead, we shall have plenty of mackerel this season ; our fishery will not be disturbed by privateers, as it has been for this ten years past.' He afterwards considered how the death of this great man would affect our pilchards, and by several other remarks in- fused a general joy into his whole audience." Steele, in a later essay of the same year, writes in a tone of no less contempt, and much greater moral repulsion, of the misleading influence of popular opinion. It is an account of a vision. " Me thought," be says, "I was transported to a hill, green, flowery, and of easy ascent. Upon the broad top of it resided squint-eyed Error, and Popular Opinion with many heads ; two that dwelt in sorcery, and were.famous for bewitching people with the love of themselves. To them repaired a multitude from every side, by two different paths, which lead towards each of them. Some who had the most assuming air went directly of themselves to Error, without expect- ing a conductor ; others of a softer nature went first to Popular Opinion, from whence, as she influenced and engaged them with their own praises, she delivered them over to his government. When we had ascended to an open part of the summit where Opinion abode, we found her intertaining such who had arrived before us. Her voice was pleasing ; she breathed odours as she spoke. She seemed to have a tongue for every one ; every one thought he heard of something that was valuable in him- self, and expected a paradise that she promised as the reward of his merit. Thus were we drawn to follow her till she should bring us where it was to be bestowed, and it was observable, that all the way we went, the company was either praising themselves for their qualifications or one another for those qualifications which they took to be conspicuous in their own characters, or dispraising others for wanting theirs, or vying in the degrees of them." And so the vision goes on, with a very happy de- scription of the palace of Vanity, and of the Cupid called Self- Conceit, who made Vanity to appear like another Venus, and who had the skill to use darts borrowed from those against whom he had a design:—" The arrow which he shot at the soldier was fledged from his own plume of feathers ; the dart he directed against the man of wit was winged from the quills he wrote with ; and that which he sent against those who presumed upon their riches, was headed with gold out of their treasuries. He made nets for statesmen from their own contrivances ; he took fire from the eyes of ladies, with which he melted their hearts ; and lightning from the tongues of the eloquent, to inflame them with their own glories," Now what strikes us in the papers of both Addison and Steele is the much greater scorn and severity of their contempt for public opinion than is visible in the address of Bishop Fraser. The tendency of the whole address was no doubt to warn his audience against the light and hasty and temporary and some- times even flippant character of what goes by the name of Popular Opinion in our own day ; and no one who knows anything of the Bishop of Manchester doubts for a moment that of all unworldly men who know something of the world, he is perhaps the most simply and strenuously unworldly. Yet through all his warnings runs a certain vein of respect for popular opinion, which is striking enough after the unaffected scorn of Addison and Steele. He was anxious, indeed, to enforce Addison's lesson drawn from the fact that Fish Street always judges political events from a fishmonger's point of view, and Steele's lesson that public opinion—especially the public opinion of fashionable circles and London Clubs—often gains its supremacy over men's minds by flattering their weak- nesses, but he could not help admitting that the widening of the range of criticism, and the multiplication of local centres competing with each other for the respect of the public, had made public opinion a far more potent and far less con- temptible kind of thing than it was a hundred and sixty-five years ago. You may still take up very unworthy opinions on the deepest subjects; if you deliver yourself over to the newspapers, and allow yourself to be drifted by the strongest and most superficial of the temporary currents of thought to be found there ;—but at least the subjects on which you will be misled will be subjects of more dignity, and the ideas which mislead you will be ideas of wider scope. You may form as false a view of the significance of the last news from the East as the Fish-Street politicians formed of the significance of the supposed death of Louis XIV., but the prejudice by which you are led will hardly be of the same insignificant local character. The widening range of public opinion has sifted away the influence of the sillier, vulgarer, and nar- rower prejudices, and left only that of more imposing pre- tensions and higher motives, in their place. The rule of Error may be as mischievous as ever, but at least it is a rule dis- guised by better and less obviously self-interested pretexts, so that even Error itself, to use Burke's phrase, loses half its evil, by losing all its grossness.'
The same thing comes
out by comparing Bishop Butler's esti- mate of the state of opinion on theology in his own day, as quoted by the Bishop of Manchester, with Bishop Fraser's estimate of it now. Bishop Butler described the mental state of the men about him as one which was often in need of ' arguments,' but not in need of proof,' either "for the sake of their own satisfaction of mind, or conduct in life." " Not to mention," said the old Bishop, writing in 1729, "the multitude who read merely for the sake of talking, or to qualify themselves for the world, or some such kind of reasons, there are, even of the few who read for their own entertainment and have a real curiosity to see what is said, several, is is prodigious, who have no
sort of curiosity to see what s true ;—I say, curiosity ; because it is too obvious to be mentioned how much that religious and sacred attention which is due to truth, and to the im- portant question, 'What is the rule of life ?' is lost out of the world," As Bishop Butler said, in his quaint but curiously accurate manner, it was indeed prodigious' that curiosity as to the truth' should have been almost absent from many minds which had a vivid curiosity to know what was said.' But Bishop Fraser would not and does not so describe the state of modern opinion on such subjects. He charges it indeed, and with much reason, with the sort of over-haste, impulsiveness and shallowness, that push us headlong into the arms of the newest hypothesis which, while it explains a good many con- spicuous facts, seems absolutely inconsistent with a great number of other less conspicuous facts, only because the reigning science of the day chooses to ignore them,—but he does not and could not charge it with showing far more curiosity as to
what is said' than as to the truth of what is said. Whatever fault may be found,—and no doubt much may be found,—with the fashionable willingness to accept evolutionary' solvents for the most critical facts of our moral and spiritual being, no one could charge the prevalent thought of the day with
want of curiosity as to the truth. Of course, modern thought is deficient still in that " religious and sacred atten- tion which is due to truth and to the important question, —What is the rule of life." Indeed, if it were not still deficient in that, we should have little to complain of. But the curiosity that does exist is not mere curiosity as to what is said but as to the truth of what is said ; and even of that deeper "religious and sacred attention" of which Bishop Butler speaks, he himself would not now say, as he said then, and assuredly Bishop Fraser does not now say, that it is "lost out of the world." Whether we compare the journalists of the eighteenth century with those of the nineteenth, or the bishop of the eighteenth century with the bishop of the nineteenth, we undoubtedly find a tone of much • sincerer respect for the leading currents of popular opinion now than there was then. And it is quite clear, we think, that that increase of respect is unfeigned and genuine, being, indeed, to a very large extent unconscious, and therefore all the more trustworthy.
But this very fact that it is not now possible to feel the pro- found contempt for the narrowness, emptiness, and vanity of popular opinion, which was evidently felt in the eighteenth century by such men as Addison, Steele, and Bishop Butler, makes, of course, the superficiality and the errors of popular opinion more dangerous to the few who think sincerely for themselves, than they were then. In proportion as the curiosity of the present day rises in its intellectual calibre, and the thought of the day becomes permeated with feelings of a deeper and more serious kind, the convictions of the independent few will be far more gravely influenced by the tendencies of popular opinion, than they would have been when these tendencies were estimated as Addison, Steele, and Bishop Butler estimated them. Frivolous popular opinion leaves genuinely stirred minds un- touched; while popular opinion that is not, in the main, frivo- lous, that has a sincere anxiety to know the truth, and that is not destitute of some deeper feeling in relation to that truth, attracts with a far stronger power the natures of which, in the last century, it would have been said that they were " like a star, and dwelt apart." English opinion as to the probable fate of Marshal Mac- Mahon's Presidency, and of his Administration, is a very different thing from the London opinion described by— adi BOO as to the consequences of Louis XIV.'s death. Popular curiosity as to the significance of the theory of evolution and the theory of " auto- matism" is a very different thing from the popular curiosity described by Bishop Butler as to what was " said " against revelation. And just for that very reason, popular opinion on these and on almost all other subjects sways the more powerful and serious minds far more effectually than the popular opinion of the eighteenth century swayed the more powerful and serious minds of that century. It is far harder now to hold your own against a strong tide of opinion than it was then, because the opinion itself is so much more in earnest and so much less obviously self-interested. And no doubt this makes the responsibility for the formation of opinion a more anxious and more subtle thing than it used to be in such times as those of Addison or Bishop Butler. We do not, however, argue from this that men should, as much as possible, form their opinions on a bare statement of the facts,—the data on which opinion must be founded,—as Bishop Fraser, inclining to agree with Bishop Butler, seems half to wish. The truth is that colourless facts are not the foundation on which just opinion can usually be formed. As some medicinal sub- stances cannot be effectually administered except in solution, so there are very few people who can take in the drift of a great dose of fact, except they first have it dissolved in
some of the feelings to which it ought to give rise. Neither do we quite agree in Bishop Fraser's inference that we ought to beware of " the man of one newspaper." One bad consequence of modern complexity and hurry is that in the multitude of autho- rities, there is no time for real and calm deliberation ; and this is an evil which is rather increased than cured by entering largely into the strife of opinion. But we may say that the man of one newspaper, or of one class of authorities on any subject, who forms his mind by that newspaper or by those authorities, is pretty sure to be untrustworthy. The remedy, however, need not be to familiarise yourself with a multitude of contend- ing critics. For a strong man, the better remedy is to con- sult chiefly the most respectable authority opposed to him- self, and to trust to his own mind to rectify any distort- ing tendency which that may have. If on theology, for instance, the sceptics would consult chiefly the ablest of the believers, and the believers would consult chiefly the ablest of the sceptics ; and if on politics, the thorough-going Liberals would always consult the views of the broadest-minded Conservatives, and the Con- servatives the views of the most candid Liberals,—.we should see a good deal less of that conceit and one-sidedness of opinion against which it was Bishop Fraser's design to guard his audience.
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