I have just been working at the "Provincials" of Pascal. They are full of lies, and full of errors. They would not convince the stupidest of readers who should seriously compare them with the original documents which Pascal attacked. But no reader has ever done so. My object in reading Pascal's book was to expose it, and therefore my object on a small stage was to do what Pascal did on a large one, that is, to convince people: with this only difference. Pascal had only to convince those who agreed with him in believing something that was not true, to wit, that Casuistry was immoral. But I set out to convince, of something that was true (to wit, that Casuistry was both moral and necessary) those who heartily, save Maynard and Derome, disagreed with me.

This amiable exercise has set me thinking about the art of convincing people; and I say "of convincing" and not "of persuading," for I think that the two arts stand for two different processes. You can persuade a man to do a thing though he still disapproves of it in conscience and intellect. But conviction is something higher.

It is an appeal to the intelligence and the love of truth. It relies upon the production of proof. Very interested am I in ferreting out the process whereby the thing is done, and in discovering why it will succeed when it is done in one way, and fail when it is done in another.

I must make clearer my distinction between the mere production of a mood, persuading, and conviction.

The mere production of a mood is effected (according to the weakness of your subject) by some form of suggestion. The modern popular press works that way. Its weapon is mere iteration, and its victim is the many-headed beast. For the persuasion of the higher sort the thing must be done by some seductive art, rhetoric, or flattery, or even music. But in either case the end of the process is not a certitude of the intelligence, and therefore your result is not final. Your intended victim may be jerked out of his mood by any shock—especially by a shock of reality.

There is between the mere persuasion and conviction an intermediate thing, very common. It is advocacy: the advancing of selected arguments towards a certain selected end. The victim knows he is being played upon, yet he often succumbs. A man does not want to visit a particular place. The method of suggestion would be merely to repeat the name of the place over and over again, and the command to go there. Such are those advertisements which you see upon the walls of great cities in flaming letters commanding you to enter a dull playhouse. Advocacy would put before the man all the real advantages of the place it wanted him to visit and hide all the real disadvantages. It would act through the intelligence, but also by cheating the intelligence.

Now, conviction is in a different world. When you convince a person you make him really certain. It does not follow that you make him certain of a truth, but you make him certain through the intelligence and not through a mere mood. Nor do you put him, as advocacy does, between two issues, one of which he chooses. You make him wholly at one with the doctrine you give. You implant certitude to the exclusion of every alternative. When you have done that you have created something much more solid and permanent than a mood or even an action; you have achieved a much greater thing than any advocacy or suggestion can. You have established a mind.

I know that in saying this I am going flat against the opinion of my time, for in these days we revere much more the man who can get a mob to think the moon is made of green cheese and then, to-morrow, that it is made of Sapolio, than we do the man who can convince. And the reason we revere the baser method is that for the moment there is more money in it. For the amount of money that a man may get out of his fellows by a trick is our measure of his excellence. Nevertheless, I will maintain that to convince is, even in practical affairs, much the bigger business. For though you convince but a few in a certain time, yet what you do is to plant something durable, and something filled with the power of propagating itself. Conviction breeds.

When it comes to the methods of conviction, however, I hesitate. The great rules are fairly well known: to present an argument fed with concrete example, and in doing so to interest—not to fatigue. If you combine those two things, interest and illustration, you should, according to the rules, succeed. The point about not fatiguing is that however perfect your reasoning, however strong your illustration, both are useless if the mind to which they are addressed cannot receive them. Fatigue interrupts reception. The points about concrete example are, first, that a concrete example alone is vivid (even in mathematics you must have visible symbols); the next, that in the application of any idea, concrete example is the only test of value to man. You will never convince a man, for instance, that protection necessarily impoverishes a nation if he has before his eyes the example of nations becoming suddenly very rich after adopting high tariffs.

It is quite clear that the citation of admirable examples, and even their citation without boredom, is not sufficient. There is something else, some trick of presentation, which lies, I fancy, in the sense of proportion, and which achieves success. In this, by the way, Pascal had genius. A wag rewrote one or two of the "Provincials," substituting Jansenists for Jesuits, and thereby showed that they made just as good reading and were just as convincing in attacking friends as enemies.

Pascal had the art—which is most important in this matter—of leaving his readers under the impression that they had heard the whole case. It can be done honestly by actually stating the opposite case before giving the counter arguments. But it is more often done dishonestly (as Pascal did it) by making your reader think that he has heard all there is to hear, although he has, as a fact, heard hardly anything, or nothing, of the other side. Pascal was, of course, working on very favourable ground. He attacked what was at once powerful and unpopular, and what was not only powerful and unpopular, but sincere and therefore incapable of using poisoned weapons against himself. There is nothing more interesting in literature than to see how the honest men he attacked blundered in trying to refute him. They blundered because they were too honest for controversy. They saw that he was lying, and they took it for granted he was telling simple lies of a childish sort. They accused him of mechanical inaccuracy and misquotation, which was not the way to set to work at all.

Pascal's method was in part what may be called the suppressed alternative. It is a method which you often see used by demagogues also, and by any one of those who ridicule a superior to an inferior. Thus, on one occasion Pascal finds an author saying: "The obligation of a Christian to give alms out of his superfluity rarely arises." The man who wrote this used the technical theological word "obligation," but Pascal quotes him as though he used it in the loosest conversational sense. The man who wrote it decided (with obvious common-sense) that those cases were rare in which you could say that a Christian had done grievous wrong by not giving alms on a particular occasion. Pascal presented the matter so that his reader thought that the writer he was attacking discountenanced giving alms at all.

You very often see the same sort of thing done by people who ridicule the definitions of law. There is nothing easier. The law says, for instance, that a minor, a young giant of twenty years, can avoid payment by pleading "infancy."

It is quite easy to make that appear nonsense. It is not nonsense, but it is made to appear nonsense by using the word "infancy" in two senses. In the same way one could say by strict definition that the law does not forbid you to murder your grandmother. What the law does is to hang you if you murder your grandmother, which is, in strict definition, quite another proposition. Great play one could make before some one who had never heard of courts of justice, by saying: "Just think! The law in this country actually allows one to murder one's grandmother!" leaving discreetly aside the legal consequences of the act, and using the word "allow" positively and negatively in the same breath. The "Provincial letters" are crammed with this trick of presenting a word in two senses: as who should play on the word "take" and denounce the injunction "take your neighbour's money quietly" as meaning "steal it on the sly," when all the author meant was "don't play the fussy and generous refuser over small payments due to you."

There are those who tell you that not only Pascal and a hundred others, but every one who has ever convinced has used dishonest methods, and that no one ever convinced by solid proof alone. There are those who will tell you that the admission of opposing arguments and their honest analysis would be either so dull or so damaging, or both, that those who adopt this, the only sincere method, will necessarily fail.

I do not agree. Thus only is it achieved once and for all. People who are too weak to follow out a close chain of reasoning are at first not affected by strict deduction and probity of evidence. But there is always a minority with brains enough and energy enough to follow an argument, and then at last lead the rest. The quality of such achievement is that it is final: it is never reversed. It is done once and for all. The few who have mastered the proof are fixed and have, henceforward, authority. To produce such final conviction is a very great action indeed. It is the making of the public mind. It is the ultimate direction of the State.

But its first victory is exceedingly restricted. In matters where men have interest against truth, conviction is so rare as to work at first almost imperceptibly. An insignificant body receive a truth. Often they are dispersed. In a century there is a multitude. Soon, the world.