enactment, or that one who decries intervention in Mexico is clearly
wrong, or that big advertising is essential to big business and that
big business is the pride of the land. As godlike beings why should we
not rejoice in our omniscience?

It is clear, in any case, that our convictions on important matters
are not the result of knowledge or critical thought, nor, it may be
added, are they often dictated by supposed self-interest. Most of them
are _pure prejudices_ in the proper sense of that word. We do not form
them ourselves. They are the whisperings of "the voice of the herd".
We have in the last analysis no responsibility for them and need
assume none. They are not really our own ideas, but those of others no
more well informed or inspired than ourselves, who have got them in
the same careless and humiliating manner as we. It should be our pride
to revise our ideas and not to adhere to what passes for respectable
opinion, for such opinion can frequently be shown to be not respectable
at all. We should, in view of the considerations that have been
mentioned, resent our supine credulity. As an English writer has
remarked:

"If we feared the entertaining of an unverifiable opinion with the
warmth with which we fear using the wrong implement at the dinner
table, if the thought of holding a prejudice disgusted us as does a
foul disease, then the dangers of man's suggestibility would be turned
into advantages."[9]

The purpose of this essay is to set forth briefly the way in which the
notions of the herd have been accumulated. This seems to me the best,
easiest, and least invidious educational device for cultivating a
proper distrust for the older notions on which we still continue to