upon their audiences. The hearers will applaud measures and ideas which, after

individual reflection, they will repudiate unless such reflection brings the

conviction that the first impression is correct.

 

A second important principle is that _our feelings, thoughts and wills tend to

follow the line of least resistance_. Once open the mind to the sway of one

feeling and it requires a greater power of feeling, thought, or will--or even

all three--to unseat it. Our feelings influence our judgments and volitions much

more than we care to admit. So true is this that it is a superhuman task to get

an audience to reason fairly on a subject on which it feels deeply, and when

this result is accomplished the success becomes noteworthy, as in the case of

Henry Ward Beecher's Liverpool speech. Emotional ideas once accepted are soon

cherished, and finally become our very inmost selves. Attitudes based on

feelings alone are prejudices.

 

What is true of our feelings, in this respect, applies to our ideas: All

thoughts that enter the mind tend to be accepted as truth unless a stronger and

contradictory thought arises.

 

The speaker skilled in moving men to action manages to dominate the minds of his

audience with his thoughts by subtly prohibiting the entertaining of ideas

hostile to his own. Most of us are captured by the latest strong attack, and if

we can be induced to act while under the stress of that last insistent thought,

we lose sight of counter influences. The fact is that almost all our

decisions--if they involve thought at all--are of this sort: At the moment of