I am used to being misrepresented, but not resigned to it. Everyone who has committed himself in relation to the themes I discussed in my Richmond lecture, Two Cultures? – The Significance of C. P. Snow, and taken a line at all like that taken by me there, knows how gross and inconsequent is the misrepresentation that follows, and how impossible it is to get the case one has put attended to. Instead, something quite different is, explicitly and implicitly, associated with one's name and made the target for a routine play of contemptuous and dismissing reference. Of course, this kind of response represents a large element of willed refusal to see and understand – the will not recognizing itself for the thing it is by reason of a flank-rubbing consensus that is its sanction. But this element of refusal is an essential characteristic of the situation that the persuader has to deal with, and therefore, if one thinks the issues are of moment – and I do, one is not resigned.

You see, I am confessing to a touch of embarrassment: I don't want to seem to be attributing any of that unintelligent – or anti-intelligence – set of the will to the present audience as a general characterizing trait, but, in presenting as clearly as I can in positive terms and in a positive spirit (which is what I want to do) my view of the issues raised by the talk about the ‘two cultures’, I am bound to refer to the misrepresentations and misunderstandings that ought not by now to need answering but seem all the same to be the staple enlightenment about these issues so far as the publicity-practitioners, the formers of public opinion, are concerned.