38 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
organ through which the amorphous public can make its opinions, sentiments, and desires known and felt. The Royal Academy is not the same as the art public of Great Britain, nor is the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Lands the same as the public interested in foreign missions. Publics are usually passive. Crowds can indeed become active and without the assist- ance of any other agency pursue the object of their will ; but pub- lics proper must accomplish their desires through agents; an active public (using the term now always in the narrow sense) is an impossibility. When desire becomes strong enough, a public throws off dependent organs which voice its demands or senti- ments. Sometimes a public may generate a crowd which takes
I the action desired by the public. j2 The term public opinion is used to describe both the senti-
I ments and desires as well as the opinions proper which prevail among the individuals of a public. It is unfortunate that there is no broader term capable of expressing this general idea. Matters of opinion properly speaking are contrasted with matters of fact. George Cornwall Lewis has defined these terms in an admirable passage which may be summarized as follows:
Matters of fact obtain a conviction from our internal consciousness, or any individual even or phenomenon which is the subject of sensa- tion. To be sure even the simplest sensations involve judgment, but when this is of so simple a kind as to become wholly unconscious and the interpretation of the appearances is a matter of general agreement the object of sensation may be considered a fact. Facts must be limited to individual sensible objects and not extended to general expressions or formulas, de- scriptive of classes of facts, or sequences of phenomena, such as the blood circulates, or the sun attracts the planets. These cannot be grasped by a single sensation, but imply long series of observations and intricate reason- ing. Facts are decided by appeal to our consciousness or sensation or by the testimony of witnesses. Matters of opinion, which are not disputed questions of fact, are general propositions or theorems relating to laws of nature or mind, principles or rules of human conduct, future probabilities, deductions from hypotheses, and the like, about which a doubt may reason- ably exist. All doubtful questions whether of speculation or practice are matters of opinion.
Opinions are either the product of reasoning or adopted from motives of interest or from fear of persecution. But no person
'Essay on the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion, pp. i, 2.
