But the more deeply the ground is rent the more fundamental are the truths revealed. A conflict that destroys accepted principles almost certainly brings to light others that are more general and permanent, because after all life is rational, it seems, and the social mind, when pushed to it, has usually been able to discover as much of this rationality as it really needed. As regards religious belief we can already see that ideas of a scope and depth that few could have attained fifty years ago are now becoming domesticated in every-day thought. The conflict in this field has resulted in the perception that none of the contending creeds and forms is essential, but that the permanently human and divine reality, not confined in any formulation, creates new expression for itself along with the general growth of life. Indeed it would seem that the struggles of the age have given us at least one principle which change cannot easily overthrow; the principle, namely, that life itself is a process rather than a state; so that we no longer expect anything final, but look to discover in the movement itself sufficient matter for reason and faith. CHAPTER XXXI PUBLIC OPINION AS PROCESS[80] PUBLIC OPINION AN ORGANIC PROCESS RATHER THAN A CONSENSUS—DECISION—THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MINORITIES Public opinion, if we wish to see it as it is, should be regarded as an organic process, and not merely as a state of agreement about some question of the day. It is, in truth, a complex growth, always continuous with the past, never becoming simple, and only partly unified from time to time for the sake of definite action. Like other phases of intelligence, it is of the nature of a drama, many characters taking part in a variegated unity of action. The leaders of the day, not only in politics but in every field, the class groups—capitalists, socialists, organized labor, professional men, farmers and the like—the various types of radicals and reactionaries; all these are members of an intricate, progressing whole. And it is a whole for the same reason that a play is, because the characters, though divergent and often conflicting, interact upon one another and create a total movement which the mind must follow by a total process. For practical uses as well as for adequate thinking this conception is better than the idea of public opinion as agreement. It aims to see the real thing, the developing thought of men, in its genesis and tendencies, and with a view to its probable operation.