乌合之众《the humiliating limitations of our intelligence !》

BOOK I.

THE MIND OF CROWDS.

CHAPTER I.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CROWDS. -- PYSCHOLOGICAL

LAW OF THEIR MENTAL UNITY.

What constitutes a crowd from the psychological point of view -- A numerically strong agglomeration of individuals does not suffice to form a crowd -- Special characteristics of psychological crowds -- The turning in a fixed direction of the ideas and sentiments of individuals composing such a crowd and the disappearance of their personality -- The crowd is always dominated by considerations of which it is unconscious -- The disappearance of brain activity and the predominance of medullar activity -- The lowering of the intelligence and the complete transformation of the sentiments -- The transformed sentiments may be better or worse than those of the individuals of which the crowd is composed -- A crowd is as easily heroic as criminal.

IN its ordinary sense the word "crowd" means a gathering of individuals of whatever nationality profession or sex and whatever be the chances that have brought them together. From the psychological point of view the expression "crowd" assumes quite a different signification. Under certain given circumstances and only under those circumstances an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed doubtless transitory but presenting very clearly defined characteristics. The gathering has thus become what in the absence of a better expression I will call an organised crowd or if the term is considered preferable a psychological crowd. It forms a single being and is subjected to the law of the mental unity of crowds.

It is evident that it is not by the mere fact of a number of individuals finding themselves accidentally side by side that they acquire the character of an organised crowd. A thousand individuals accidentally gathered in a public place without any determined object in no way constitute a crowd from the psychological point of view. To acquire the special characteristics of such a crowd the influence is necessary of certain predisposing causes of which we shall have to determine the nature.

The disappearance of conscious personality and the turning of feelings and thoughts in a definite direction which are the primary characteristics of a crowd about to become organised do not always involve the simultaneous presence of a number of individuals on one spot. Thousands of isolated individuals may acquire at certain moments and under the influence of certain violent emotions -- such for example as a great national event -- the characteristics of a psychological crowd. It will be sufficient in that case that a mere chance should bring them together for their acts to at once assume the characteristics peculiar to the acts of a crowd. At certain moments half a dozen men might constitute a psychological crowd which may not happen in the case of hundreds of men gathered together by accident. On the other hand an entire nation though there may be no visible agglomeration may become a crowd under the action of certain influences.

A psychological crowd once constituted it acquires certain provisional but determinable general characteristics. To these general characteristics there are adjoined particular characteristics which vary according to the elements of which the crowd is composed and may modify its mental constitution. Psychological crowds then are susceptible of classification; and when we come to occupy ourselves with this matter we shall see that a heterogeneous crowd -- that is a crowd composed of dissimilar elements -- presents certain characteristics in common with homogeneous crowds -- that is with crowds composed of elements more or less akin (sects castes and classes) -- and side by side with these common characteristics particularities which permit of the two kinds of crowds being differentiated.

But before occupying ourselves with the different categories of crowds we must first of all examine the characteristics common to them all. We shall set to work like the naturalist who begins by describing the general characteristics common to all the members of a family before concerning himself with the particular characteristics which allow the differentiation of the genera and species that the family includes.

It is not easy to describe the mind of crowds with exactness because its organisation varies not only according to race and composition but also according to the nature and intensity of the exciting causes to which crowds are subjected. The same difficulty however presents itself in the psychological study of an individual. It is only in novels that individuals are found to traverse their whole life with an unvarying character. It is only the uniformity of the environment that creates the apparent uniformity of characters. I have shown elsewhere that all mental constitutions contain possibilities of character which may be manifested in consequence of a sudden change of environment. This explains how it was that among the most savage members of the French Convention were to be found inoffensive citizens who under ordinary circumstances would have been peaceable notaries or virtuous magistrates. The storm past they resumed their normal character of quiet law-abiding citizens. Napoleon found amongst them his most docile servants.

It being impossible to study here all the successive degrees of organisation of crowds we shall concern ourselves more especially with such crowds as have attained to the phase of complete organisation. In this way we shall see what crowds may become but not what they invariably are. It is only in this advanced phase of organisation that certain new and special characteristics are superposed on the unvarying and dominant character of the race; then takes place that turning already alluded to of all the feelings and thoughts of the collectivity in an identical direction. It is only under such circumstances too that what I have called above the psychological law of the mental unity of crowds comes into play.

Among the psychological characteristics of crowds there are some that they may present in common with isolated individuals and others on the contrary which are absolutely peculiar to them and are only to be met with in collectivities. It is these special characteristics that we shall study first of all in order to show their importance.

The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it however like or unlike be their mode of life their occupations their character or their intelligence the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel think and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel think and act were he in a state of isolation. There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of individuals forming a crowd. The psychological crowd is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements which for a moment are combined exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each of the cells singly.

Contrary to an opinion which one is astonished to find coming from the pen of so acute a philosopher as Herbert Spencer in the aggregate which constitutes a crowd there is in no sort a summing-up of or an average struck between its elements. What really takes place is a combination followed by the creation of new characteristics just as in

chemistry certain elements when brought into contact -- bases and acids for example -- combine to form a new body possessing properties quite different from those of the bodies that have served to form it.

It is easy to prove how much the individual forming part of a crowd differs from the isolated individual but it is less easy to discover the causes of this difference.

To obtain at any rate a glimpse of them it is necessary in the first place to call to mind the truth established by modern psychology that unconscious phenomena play an altogether preponderating part not only in organic life but also in the operations of the intelligence. The conscious life of the mind is of small importance in comparison with its unconscious life. The most subtle ***yst the most acute observer is scarcely successful in discovering more than a very small number of the unconscious motives that determine his conduct. Our conscious acts are the outcome of an unconscious substratum created in the mind in the main by hereditary influences. This substratum consists of the innumerable common characteristics handed down from generation to generation which constitute the genius of a race. Behind the avowed causes of our acts there undoubtedly lie secret causes that we do not avow but behind these secret causes there are many others more secret still which we ourselves ignore. The greater part of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives which escape our observation.

It is more especially with respect to those unconscious elements which constitute the genius of a race that all the individuals belonging to it resemble each other while it is principally in respect to the conscious elements of their character -- the fruit of education and yet more of exceptional hereditary conditions -- that they differ from each other. Men the most unlike in the matter of their intelligence possess instincts passions and feelings that are very similar. In the case of every thing that belongs to the realm of sentiment -- religion politics morality the affections and antipathies &c. -- the most eminent men seldom surpass the standard of the most ordinary individuals. From the intellectual point of view an abyss may exist between a great mathematician and his boot maker but from the point of view of character the difference is most often slight or non-existent.

It is precisely these general qualities of character governed by forces of which we are unconscious and possessed by the majority of the normal individuals of a race in much the same degree -- it is precisely these qualities I say that in crowds become common property. In the collective mind the intellectual aptitudes of the individuals and in consequence their individuality are weakened. The heterogeneous is swamped by the homogeneous and the unconscious qualities obtain the upper hand.

This very fact that crowds possess in common ordinary qualities explains why they can never accomplish acts demanding a high degree of intelligence. The decisions affecting matters of general interest come to by an assembly of men of distinction but specialists in different walks of life are not sensibly superior to the decisions that would be adopted by a gathering of imbeciles. The truth is they can only bring to bear in common on the work in hand those mediocre qualities which are the birthright of every average individual. In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated. It is not all the world as is so often repeated that has more wit than Voltaire but assuredly Voltaire that has more wit than all the world if by "all the world" crowds are to be understood.

If the individuals of a crowd confined themselves to putting in common the ordinary qualities of which each of them has his share there would merely result the striking of an average and not as we have said is actually the case the creation of new characteristics. How is it that these new characteristics are created? This is what we are now to investigate.

Different causes determine the appearance of these characteristics peculiar to crowds and not possessed by isolated individuals. The first is that the individual forming part of a crowd acquires solely from numerical considerations a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which had he been alone he would perforce have kept under restraint. He will be the less disposed to check himself from the consideration that a crowd being anonymous and in consequence irresponsible the sentiment of responsibility which always controls individuals disappears entirely.

The second cause which is contagion also intervenes to determine the manifestation in crowds of their special characteristics and at the same time the trend they are to take. Contagion is a phenomenon of which it is easy to establish the presence but that it is not easy to explain. It must be classed among those phenomena of a hypnotic order which we shall shortly study. In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest. This is an aptitude very contrary to his nature and of which a man is scarcely capable except when he makes part of a crowd.

A third cause and by far the most important determines in the individuals of a crowd special characteristics which are quite contrary at times to those presented by the isolated individual. I allude to that suggestibility of which moreover the contagion mentioned above is neither more nor less than an effect.

To understand this phenomenon it is necessary to bear in mind certain recent physiological discoveries. We know to-day that by various processes an individual may be brought into such a condition that having entirely lost his conscious personality he obeys all the suggestions of the operator who has deprived him of it and commits acts in utter contradiction with his character and habits. The most careful observations seem to prove that an individual immerged for some length of time in a crowd in action soon finds himself -- either in consequence of the magnetic influence given out by the crowd or from some other cause of which we are ignorant -- in a special state which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotised individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotiser. The activity of the brain being paralysed in the case of the hypnotised subject the latter becomes the slave of all the unconscious activities of his spinal cord which the hypnotiser directs at will. The conscious personality has entirely vanished; will and discernment are lost. All feelings and thoughts are bent in the direction determined by the hypnotiser.

Such also is approximately the state of the individual forming part of a psychological crowd. He is no longer conscious of his acts. In his case as in the case of the hypnotised subject at the same time that certain faculties are destroyed others may be brought to a high degree of exaltation. Under the influence of a suggestion he will undertake the accomplishment of certain acts with irresistible impetuosity. This impetuosity is the more irresistible in the case of crowds than in that of the hypnotised subject from the fact that the suggestion being the same for all the individuals of the crowd it gains in strength by reciprocity. The individualities in the crowd who might possess a personality sufficiently strong to resist the suggestion are too few in number to struggle against the current. At the utmost they may be able to attempt a diversion by means of different suggestions. It is in this way for instance that a happy expression an image opportunely evoked have occasionally deterred crowds from the most bloodthirsty acts.

We see then that the disappearance of the conscious personality the predominance of the unconscious personality the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these we see are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.

Moreover by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd he is a barbarian -- that is a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity the violence the ferocity and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and images -- which would be entirely without action on each of the isolated individuals composing the crowd -- and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand which the wind stirs up at will.

It is for these reasons that juries are seen to deliver verdicts of which each individual juror would disapprove that parliamentary assemblies adopt laws and measures of which each of their members would disapprove in his own person. Taken separately the men of the Convention were enlightened citizens of peaceful habits. United in a crowd they did not hesitate to give their adhesion to the most savage proposals to guillotine individuals most clearly innocent and contrary to their interests to renounce their inviolability and to decimate themselves.

It is not only by his acts that the individual in a crowd differs essentially from himself. Even before he has entirely lost his independence his ideas and feelings have undergone a transformation and the transformation is so profound as to change the miser into a spendthrift the sceptic into a believer the honest man into a criminal and the coward into a hero. The renunciation of all its privileges which the nobility voted in a moment of enthusiasm during the celebrated night of August 4 1789 would certainly never have been consented to by any of its members taken singly.

The conclusion to be drawn from what precedes is that the crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual but that from the point of view of feelings and of the acts these feelings provoke the crowd may according to circumstances he better or worse than the individual. All depends on the nature of the suggestion to which the crowd is exposed. This is the point that has been completely misunderstood by writers who have only studied crowds from the criminal point of view. Doubtless a crowd is often criminal but also it is often heroic. It is crowds rather than isolated individuals that may be induced to run the risk of death to secure the triumph of a creed or an idea that may be fired with enthusiasm for glory and honour that are led on -- almost without bread and without arms as in the age of the Crusades -- to deliver the tomb of Christ from the infidel or as in '93 to defend the fatherland. Such heroism is without doubt somewhat unconscious but it is of such heroism that history is made. Were peoples only to be credited with the great actions performed in cold blood the annals of the world would register but few of them.

CHAPTER II.

THE SENTIMENTS AND MORALITY OF CROWDS.

§ 1. Impulsiveness mobility and irritability of crowds. The crowd is at the mercy of all exterior exciting causes and reflects their incessant variations -- The impulses which the crowd obeys are so imperious as to annihilate the feeling of personal interest -- Premeditation is absent from crowds -- Racial influence. § 2. Crowds are credulous and readily influenced by suggestion. The obedience of crowds to suggestions -- The images evoked in the mind of crowds are accepted by them as realities -- Why these images are identical for all the individuals composing a crowd -- The equality of the educated and the ignorant man in a crowd -- Various examples of the illusions to which the individuals in a crowd are subject -- The impossibility of according belief to the testimony of crowds -- The unanimity of numerous witnesses is one of the worst proofs that can be invoked to establish a fact -- The slight value of works of history. § 3. The exaggeration and ingenuousness of the sentiments of crowds. Crowds do not admit doubt or uncertainty and always go to extremes -- Their sentiments always excessive. § 4. The intolerance dictatorialness and conservatism of crowds. The reasons of these sentiments -- The servility of crowds in the face of a strong authority -- The momentary revolutionary instincts of crowds do not prevent them from being extremely conservative -- Crowds instinctively hostile to changes and progress. § 5. The morality of crowds. The morality of crowds according to the suggestions under which they act may be much lower or much higher than that of the individuals composing them -- Explanation and examples -- Crowds rarely guided by those considerations of interest which are most often the exclusive motives of the isolated individual -- The moralising rôle of crowds.

HAVING indicated in a general way the principal characteristics of crowds it remains to study these characteristics in detail.

It will be remarked that among the special characteristics of crowds there are several -- such as impulsiveness irritability incapacity to reason the absence of judgment and of the critical spirit the exaggeration of the sentiments and others besides -- which are almost always observed in beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution -- in women savages and children for instance. However I merely indicate this ***ogy in passing; its demonstration is outside the scope of this work. It would moreover be useless for persons acquainted with the psychology of primitive beings and would scarcely carry conviction to those in ignorance of this matter.

I now proceed to the successive consideration of the different characteristics that may be observed in the majority of crowds.

§ 1. IMPULSIVENESS MOBILITY AND IRRITABILITY OF CROWDS.

When studying the fundamental characteristics of a crowd we stated that it is guided almost exclusively by unconscious motives. Its acts are far more under the influence of the spinal cord than of the brain. In this respect a crowd is closely akin to quite primitive beings. The acts performed may be perfect so far as their execution is concerned but as they are not directed by the brain the individual conducts himself according as the exciting causes to which he is submitted may happen to decide. A crowd is at the mercy of all external exciting causes and reflects their incessant variations. It is the slave of the impulses which it receives. The isolated individual may be submitted to the same exciting causes as the man in a crowd but as his brain shows him the inadvisability of yielding to them he refrains from yielding. This truth may be physiologically expressed by saying that the isolated individual possesses the capacity of dominating his reflex actions while a crowd is devoid of this capacity.

The varying impulses to which crowds obey may be according to their exciting causes generous or cruel heroic or cowardly but they will always be so imperious that the interest of the individual even the interest of self-preservation will not dominate them. The exciting causes that may act on crowds being so varied and crowds always obeying them crowds are in consequence extremely mobile. This explains how it is that we see them pass in a moment from the most bloodthirsty ferocity to the most extreme generosity and heroism. A crowd may easily enact the part of an executioner but not less easily that of a martyr. It is crowds that have furnished the torrents of blood requisite for the triumph of every belief. It is not necessary to go back to the heroic ages to see what crowds are capable of in this latter direction. They are never sparing of their life in an insurrection and not long since a general

Note: [2] becoming suddenly popular might easily have found a hundred thousand men ready to sacrifice their lives for his cause had he demanded it.

Any display of premeditation by crowds is in consequence out of the question. They may be animated in succession by the most contrary sentiments but they will always be under the influence of the exciting causes of the moment. They are like the leaves which a tempest whirls up and scatters in every direction and then allows to fall. When studying later on certain revolutionary crowds we shall give some examples of the variability of their sentiments.

[2]

Note:

General Boulanger. This mobility of crowds renders them very difficult to govern especially when a measure of public authority has fallen into their hands. Did not the necessities of everyday life constitute a sort of invisible regulator of existence it would scarcely be possible for democracies to last. Still though the wishes of crowds are frenzied they are not durable. Crowds are as incapable of willing as of thinking for any length of time.

A crowd is not merely impulsive and mobile. Like a savage it is not prepared to admit that anything can come between its desire and the realisation of its desire. It is the less capable of understanding such an intervention in consequence of the feeling of irresistible power given it by its numerical strength. The notion of impossibility disappears for the individual in a crowd. An isolated individual knows well enough that alone he cannot set fire to a palace or loot a shop and should he be tempted to do so he will easily resist the temptation. Making part of a crowd he is conscious of the power given him by number and it is sufficient to suggest to him ideas of murder or pillage for him to yield immediately to temptation. An unexpected obstacle will be destroyed with frenzied rage. Did the human organism allow of the perpetuity of furious passion it might be said that the normal condition of a crowd baulked in its wishes is just such a state of furious passion.

The fundamental characteristics of the race which constitute the unvarying source from which all our sentiments spring always exert an influence on the irritability of crowds their impulsiveness and their mobility as on all the popular sentiments we shall have to study. All crowds are doubtless always irritable and impulsive but with great variations of degree. For instance the difference between a Latin and an Anglo-Saxon crowd is striking. The most recent facts in French history throw a vivid light on this point. The mere publication twenty-five years ago of a telegram relating an insult supposed to have been offered an ambassador was sufficient to determine an explosion of fury whence followed immediately a terrible war. Some years later the telegraphic announcement of an insignificant reverse at Langson provoked a fresh explosion which brought about the instantaneous overthrow of the government. At the same moment a much more serious reverse undergone by the English expedition to Khartoum produced only a slight emotion in England and no ministry was overturned. Crowds are everywhere distinguished by feminine characteristics but Latin crowds are the most feminine of all. Whoever trusts in them may rapidly attain a lofty destiny but to do so is to be perpetually skirting the brink of a Tarpeian rock with the certainty of one day being precipitated from it.

§ 2. THE SUGGESTIBILITY AND CREDULITY OF CROWDS.

When defining crowds we said that one of their general characteristics was an excessive suggestibility and we have shown to what an extent suggestions are contagious in every human agglomeration; a fact which explains the rapid turning of the sentiments of a crowd in a definite direction. However indifferent it may be supposed a crowd as a rule is in a state of expectant attention which renders suggestion easy. The first suggestion formulated which arises implants itself immediately by a process of contagion in the brains of all assembled and the identical bent of the sentiments of the crowd is immediately an accomplished fact.

As is the case with all persons under the influence of suggestion the idea which has entered the brain tends to transform itself into an act. Whether the act is that of setting fire to a palace or involves self-sacrifice a crowd lends itself to it with equal facility. All will depend on the nature of the exciting cause and no longer as in the case of the isolated individual on the relations existing between the act suggested and the sum total of the reasons which may be urged against its realisation.

In consequence a crowd perpetually hovering on the borderland of unconsciousness readily yielding to all suggestions having all the violence of feeling peculiar to beings who cannot appeal to the influence of reason deprived of all critical faculty cannot be otherwise than excessively credulous. The improbable does not exist for a crowd and it is necessary to bear this circumstance well in mind to understand the facility with which are created and propagated the most improbable legends and stories.

Note: [3]

[3]

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Persons who went through the siege of Paris saw numerous examples of this credulity of crowds. A candle alight in an upper story was immediately looked upon as a signal given the besiegers although it was evident after a moment of reflection that it was utterly impossible to catch sight of the light of the candle at a distance of several miles.

The creation of the legends which so easily obtain circulation in crowds is not solely the consequence of their extreme credulity. It is also the result of the prodigious perversions that events undergo in the imagination of a throng. The simplest event that comes under the observation of a crowd is soon totally transformed. A crowd thinks in images and the image itself immediately calls up a series of other images having no logical connection with the first. We can easily conceive this state by thinking of the fantastic succession of ideas to which we are sometimes led by calling up in our minds any fact. Our reason shows us the incoherence there is in these images but a crowd is almost blind to this truth and confuses with the real event what the deforming action of its imagination has superimposed thereon. A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images evoked in its mind though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed fact.

The ways in which a crowd perverts any event of which it is a witness ought it would seem to be innumerable and unlike each other since the individuals composing the gathering are of very different temperaments. But this is not the case. As the result of contagion the perversions are of the same kind and take the same shape in the case of all the assembled individuals.

The first perversion of the truth effected by one of the individuals of the gathering is the starting-point of the contagious suggestion. Before St. George appeared on the walls of Jerusalem to all the Crusaders he was certainly perceived in the first instance by one of those present. By dint of suggestion and contagion the miracle signalised by a single person was immediately accepted by all.

Such is always the mechanism of the collective hallucinations so frequent in history -- hallucinations which seem to have all the recognised characteristics of authenticity since they are phenomena observed by thousands of persons.

To combat what precedes the mental quality of the individuals composing a crowd must not be brought into consideration. This quality is without importance. From the moment that they form part of a crowd the learned man and the ignoramus are equally incapable of observation.

This thesis may seem paradoxical. To demonstrate it beyond doubt it would be necessary to investigate a great number of historical facts and several volumes would be insufficient for the purpose.

Still as I do not wish to leave the reader under the impression of unproved assertions I shall give him some examples taken at hazard from the immense number of those that might be quoted.

The following fact is one of the most typical because chosen from among collective hallucinations of which a crowd is the victim in which are to be found individuals of every kind from the most ignorant to the most highly educated. It is related incidentally by Julian Felix a naval lieutenant in his book on "Sea Currents" and has been previously cited by the Revue Scientique.

The frigate the Belle Poule was cruising in the open sea for the purpose of finding the cruiser Le Berceau from which she had been separated by a violent storm. It was broad daylight and in full sunshine. Suddenly the watch signalled a disabled vessel; the crew looked in the direction signalled and every one officers and sailors clearly perceived a raft covered with men towed by boats which were displaying signals of distress. Yet this was nothing more than a collective hallucination. Admiral Desfosses lowered a boat to go to the rescue of the wrecked sailors. On nearing the object sighted the sailors and officers on board the boat saw "masses of men in motion stretching out their hands and heard the dull and confused noise of a great number of voices." When the object was reached those in the boat found themselves simply and solely in the presence of a few branches of trees covered with leaves that had been swept out from the neighbouring coast. Before evidence so palpable the hallucination vanished.

The mechanism of a collective hallucination of the kind we have explained is clearly seen at work in this example. On the one hand we have a crowd in a state of expectant attention on the other a suggestion made by the watch signalling a disabled vessel at sea a suggestion which by a process of contagion was accepted by all those present both officers and sailors.

It is not necessary that a crowd should be numerous for the faculty of seeing what is taking place before its eyes to be destroyed and for the real facts to be replaced by hallucinations unre lated to them. As soon as a few individuals are gathered together they constitute a crowd and though they should be distinguished men of learning they assume all the characteristics of crowds with regard to matters outside their speciality. The faculty of observation and the critical spirit possessed by each of them individually at once disappears. An ingenious psychologist Mr. Davey supplies us with a very curious example in point recently cited in the Annales des Sciences Psychiques and deserving of relation here. Mr. Davey having convoked a gathering of distinguished observers among them one of the most prominent of English scientific men Mr. Wallace executed in their presence and after having allowed them to examine the objects and to place seals where they wished all the regulation spiritualistic phenomena the materialisation of spirits writing on slates &c. Having subsequently obtained from these distinguished observers written reports admitting that the phenomena observed could only have been obtained by supernatural means he revealed to them that they were the result of very simple tricks. "The most astonishing feature of Monsieur Davey's investigation" writes the author of this account "is not the marvellousness of the tricks themselves but the extreme weakness of the reports made with respect to them by the non initiated witnesses. It is clear then" he says "that witnesses even in number may give circumstantial relations which are completely erroneous but whose result is that if their descriptions are accepted as exact the phenomena they describe are inexplicable by trickery. The methods invented by Mr. Davey were so simple that one is astonished that he should have had the boldness to employ them; but he had such a power over the mind of the crowd that he could persuade it that it saw what it did not see." Here as always we have the power of the hypnotiser over the hypnotised. Moreover when this power is seen in action on minds of a superior order and previously invited to be suspicious it is understandable how easy it is to deceive ordinary crowds.

Analogous examples are innumerable. As I write these lines the papers are full of the story of two little girls found drowned in the Seine. These children to begin with were recognised in the most unmistakable manner by half a dozen witnesses. All the affirmations were in such entire concordance that no doubt remained in the mind of the juge d'instruction. He had the certificate of death drawn up but just as the burial of the children was to have been proceeded with a mere chance brought about the discovery that the supposed victims were alive and had moreover but a remote resemblance to the drowned girls. As in several of the examples previously cited the affirmation of the first witness himself a victim of illusion had sufficed to influence the other witnesses.

In parallel cases the starting-point of the suggestion is always the illusion produced in an individual by more or less vague reminiscences contagion following as the result of the affirmation of this initial illusion. If the first observer be very impressionable it will often be sufficient that the corpse he believes he recognises should present -- apart from all real resemblance -- some peculiarity a scar or some detail of toilet which may evoke the idea of another person. The idea evoked may then become the nucleus of a sort of crystallisation which invades the understanding and paralyses all critical faculty. What the observer then sees is no longer the object itself but the image-evoked in his mind. In this way are to be explained erroneous recognitions of the dead bodies of children by their own mother as occurred in the following case already old but which has been recently recalled by the newspapers. In it are to be traced precisely the two kinds of suggestion of which I have just pointed out the mechanism.

"The child was recognised by another child who was mistaken. The series of unwarranted recognitions then began.

"An extraordinary thing occurred. The day after a schoolboy had recognised the corpse a woman exclaimed `Good Heavens it is my child!'

"She was taken up to the corpse; she examined the clothing and noted a scar on the forehead. `It is certainly' she said `my son who disappeared last July. He has been stolen from me and murdered.'

"The woman was concierge in the Rue du Four; her name was Chavandret. Her brother-in-law was summoned and when questioned he said `That is the little Filibert.' Several persons living in the street recognised the child found at La Villette as Filibert Chavandret among them being the boy's schoolmaster who based his opinion on a medal worn by the lad.

"Nevertheless the neighbours the brother-in-law the schoolmaster and the mother were mistaken. Six weeks later the identity of the child was established. The boy belonging to Bordeaux had been murdered there and brought by a carrying company to Paris."

Note: [4]

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L'Eclair April 21 1895.

It will be remarked that these recognitions are most often made by women and children -- that is to say by precisely the most impressionable persons. They show us at the same time what is the worth in law courts of such witnesses. As far as children more especially are concerned their statements ought never to be invoked. Magistrates are in the habit of repeating that children do not lie. Did they possess a psychological culture a little less rudimentary than is the case they would know that on the contrary children invariably lie; the lie is doubtless innocent but it is none the less a lie. It would be better to decide the fate of an accused person by the toss of a coin than as has been so often done by the evidence of a child.

To return to the faculty of observation possessed by crowds our conclusion is that their collective observations are as erroneous as possible and that most often they merely represent the illusion of an individual who by a process of contagion has suggestioned his fellows. Facts proving that the most utter mistrust of the evidence of crowds is advisable might be multiplied to any extent. Thousands of men were present twenty-five years ago at the celebrated cavalry charge during the battle of Sedan and yet it is impossible in the face of the most contradictory ocular testimony to decide by whom it was commanded. The English general Lord Wolseley has proved in a recent book that up to now the gravest errors of fact have been committed with regard to the most important incidents of the battle of Waterloo -- facts that hundreds of witnesses had nevertheless attested.

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Do we know in the case of one single battle exactly how it took place? I am very doubtful on the point. We know who were the conquerors and the conquered but this is probably all. What M. D'Harcourt has said with respect to the battle of Solferino which he witnessed and in which he was personally engaged may be applied to all battles -- "The generals (informed of course by the evidence of hundreds of witnesses) forward their official reports; the orderly officers modify these documents and draw up a definite narrative; the chief of the staff raises objections and reķrites the whole on a fresh basis. It is carried to the Marshal who exclaims `You are entirely in error' and he substitutes a fresh edition. Scarcely anything remains of the original report." M. D'Harcourt relates this fact as proof of the impossibility of establishing the truth in connection with the most striking the best observed events.

Such facts show us what is the value of the testimony of crowds. Treatises on logic include the unanimity of numerous witnesses in the category of the strongest proofs that can be invoked in support of the exactness of a fact. Yet what we know of the psychology of crowds shows that treatises on logic need on this point to be rewritten. The events with regard to which there exists the most doubt are certainly those which have been observed by the greatest number of persons. To say that a fact has been simultaneously verified by thousands of witnesses is to say as a rule that the real fact is very different from the accepted account of it.

It clearly results from what precedes that works of history must be considered as works of pure imagination. They are fanciful accounts of ill-observed facts accompanied by explanations the result of reflection. To write such books is the most absolute waste of time. Had not the past left us its literary artistic and monumental works we should know absolutely nothing in reality with regard to bygone times. Are we in possession of a single word of truth concerning the lives of the great men who have played preponderating parts in the history of humanity -- men such as Hercules Buddha or Mahomet? In all probability we are not. In point of fact moreover their real lives are of slight importance to us. Our interest is to know what our great men were as they are presented by popular legend. It is legendary heroes and not for a moment real heroes who have impressed the minds of crowds.

Unfortunately legends -- even although they have been definitely put on record by books -- have in themselves no stability. The imagination of the crowd continually transforms them as the result of the lapse of time and especially in consequence of racial causes. There is a great gulf fixed between the sanguinary Jehovah of the Old Testament and the God of Love of Sainte Thérèse and the Buddha worshipped in China has no traits in common with that venerated in India.

It is not even necessary that heroes should be separated from us by centuries for their legend to be transformed by the imagination of the crowd. The transformation occasionally takes place within a few years. In our own day we have seen the legend of one of the greatest heroes of history modified several times in less than fifty years. Under the Bourbons Napoleon became a sort of idyllic and liberal philanthropist a friend of the humble who according to the poets was destined to be long remembered in the cottage. Thirty years afterwards this easy-going hero had become a sanguinary despot who after having usurped power and destroyed liberty caused the slaughter of three million men solely to satisfy his ambition. At present we are witnessing a fresh transformation of the legend. When it has undergone the influence of some dozens of centuries the learned men of the future face to face with these contradictory accounts will perhaps doubt the very existence of the hero as some of them now doubt that of Buddha and will see in him nothing more than a solar myth or a development of the legend of Hercules. They will doubtless console themselves easily for this uncertainty for better initiated than we are to-day in the characteristics and psychology of crowds they will know that history is scarcely capable of preserving the memory of anything except myths.

§ 3. THE EXAGGERATION AND INGENUOUSNESS

OF THE SENTIMENTS OF CROWDS.

Whether the feelings exhibited by a crowd be good or bad they present the double character of being very simple and very exaggerated. On this point as on so many others an individual in a crowd resembles primitive beings. Inaccessible to fine distinctions he sees things as a whole and is blind to their intermediate phases. The exaggeration of the sentiments of a crowd is heightened by the fact that any feeling when once it is exhibited communicating itself very quickly by a process of suggestion and contagion the evident approbation of which it is the object considerably increases its force.

The simplicity and exaggeration of the sentiments of crowds have for result that a throng knows neither doubt nor uncertainty. Like women it goes at once to extremes. A suspicion transforms itself as soon as announced into incontrovertible evidence. A commencement of antipathy or disapprobation which in the case of an isolated individual would not gain strength becomes at once furious hatred in the case of an individual in a crowd.

The violence of the feelings of crowds is also increased especially in heterogeneous crowds by the absence of all sense of responsibility. The certainty of impunity a certainty the stronger as the crowd is more numerous and the notion of a considerable momentary force due to number make possible in the case of crowds sentiments and acts impossible for the isolated individual. In crowds the foolish ignorant and envious persons are freed from the sense of their insignificance and powerlessness and are possessed instead by the notion of brutal and temporary but immense strength.

Unfortunately this tendency of crowds towards exaggeration is often brought to bear upon bad sentiments. These sentiments are atavistic residuum of the instincts of the primitive man which the fear of punishment obliges the isolated and responsible individual to curb. Thus it is that crowds are so easily led into the worst excesses.

Still this does not mean that crowds skilfully influenced are not capable of heroism and devotion and of evincing the loftiest virtues; they are even more capable of showing these qualities than the isolated individual. We shall soon have occasion to revert to this point when we come to study the morality of crowds.

Given to exaggeration in its feelings a crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. An orator wishing to move a crowd must make an abusive use of violent affirmations. To exaggerate to affirm to resort to repetitions and never to attempt to prove anything by reasoning are methods of argument well known to speakers at public meetings.

Moreover a crowd exacts a like exaggeration in the sentiments of its heroes. Their apparent qualities and virtues must always be amplified. It has been justly remarked that on the stage a crowd demands from the hero of the piece a degree of courage morality and virtue that is never to be found in real life.

Quite rightly importance has been laid on the special standpoint from which matters are viewed in the theatre. Such a standpoint exists no doubt but its rules for the most part have nothing to do with common sense and logic. The art of appealing to crowds is no doubt of an inferior order but it demands quite special aptitudes. It is often impossible on reading plays to explain their success. Managers of theatres when accepting pieces are themselves as a rule very uncertain of their success because to judge the matter it would be necessary that they should be able to transform themselves into a crowd.

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It is understandable for this reason why it sometimes happens that pieces refused by all theatrical managers obtain a prodigious success when by a stroke of chance they are put on the stage. The recent success of Francois Coppée's play "Pour la Couronne" is well known and yet in spite of the name of its author it was refused during ten years by the managers of the principal Parisian theatres.

"Charley's Aunt" refused at every theatre and finally staged at the expense of a stockbroker has had two hundred representations in France and more than a thousand in London. Without the explanation given above of the impossibility for theatrical managers to mentally substitute themselves for a crowd such mistakes in judgment on the part of competent individuals who are most interested not to commit such grave blunders would be inexplicable. This is a subject that I cannot deal with here but it might worthily tempt the pen of a writer acquainted with theatrical matters and at the same time a subtle psychologist -- of such a writer for instance as M. Francisque Sarcey. Here once more were we able to embark on more extensive explanations we should show the preponderating influence of racial considerations. A play which provokes the enthusiasm of the crowd in one country has sometimes no success in another or has only a partial and conventional success because it does not put in operation influences capable of working on an altered public.

I need not add that the tendency to exaggeration in crowds is only present in the case of sentiments and not at all in the matter of intelligence. I have already shown that by the mere fact that an individual forms part of a crowd his intellectual standard is immediately and considerably lowered. A learned magistrate M. Tarde has also verified this fact in his researches on the crimes of crowds. It is only then with respect to sentiment that crowds can rise to a very high or on the contrary descend to a very low level.

§ 4. THE INTOLERANCE DICTATORIALNESS

AND CONSERVATISM OF CROWDS.

Crowds are only cognisant of simple and extreme sentiments; the opinions ideas and beliefs suggested to them are accepted or rejected as a whole and considered as absolute truths or as not less absolute errors. This is always the case with beliefs induced by a process of suggestion instead of engendered by reasoning. Every one is aware of the intolerance that accompanies religious beliefs and of the despotic empire they exercise on men's minds.

Being in doubt as to what constitutes truth or error and having on the other hand a clear notion of its strength a crowd is as disposed to give authoritative effect to its inspirations as it is intolerant. An individual may accept contradiction and discussion; a crowd will never do so. At public meetings the slightest contradiction on the part of an orator is immediately received with howls of fury and violent invective soon followed by blows and expulsion should the orator stick to his point. Without the restraining presence of the representatives of authority the contradictor indeed would often be done to death.

Dictatorialness and intolerance are common to all categories of crowds but they are met with in a varying degree of intensity. Here once more reappears that fundamental notion of race which dominates all the feelings and all the thoughts of men. It is more especially in Latin crowds that authoritativeness and intolerance are found developed in the highest measure. In fact their development is such in crowds of Latin origin that they have entirely destroyed that sentiment of the independence of the individual so powerful in the Anglo-Saxon. Latin crowds are only concerned with the collective independence of the sect to which they belong and the characteristic feature of their conception of independence is the need they experience of bringing those who are in disagreement with themselves into immediate and violent subjection to their beliefs. Among the Latin races the Jacobins of every epoch from those of the Inquisition downwards have never been able to attain to a different conception of liberty.

Authoritativeness and intolerance are sentiments of which crowds have a very clear notion which they easily conceive and which they entertain as readily as they put them in practice when once they are imposed upon them. Crowds exhibit a docile respect for force and are but slightly impressed by kindness which for them is scarcely other than a form of weakness. Their sympathies have never been bestowed on easy-going masters but on tyrants who vigorously oppressed them. It is to these latter that they always erect the loftiest statues.

It is true that they willingly trample on the despot whom they have stripped of his power but it is because having lost his strength he has resumed his place among the feeble who are to be despised because they are not to be feared. The type of hero dear to crowds will always have the semblance of a Caesar. His insignia attracts them his authority overawes them and his sword instils them with fear.

A crowd is always ready to revolt against a feeble and to bow down servilely before a strong authority. Should the strength of an authority be intermittent the crowd always obedient to its extreme sentiments passes alternately from anarchy to servitude and from servitude to anarchy.

However to believe in the predominance among crowds of revolutionary instincts would be to entirely misconstrue their psychology. It is merely their tendency to violence that deceives us on this point. Their rebellious and destructive outbursts are always very transitory. Crowds are too much governed by unconscious considerations and too much subject in consequence to secular hereditary influences not to be extremely conservative. Abandoned to themselves they soon weary of disorder and instinctively turn to servitude. It was the proudest and most untractable of the Jacobins who acclaimed Bonaparte with greatest energy when he suppressed all liberty and made his hand of iron severely felt.

It is difficult to understand history and popular revolutions in particular if one does not take sufficiently into account the profoundly conservative instincts of crowds. They may be desirous it is true of changing the names of their institutions and to obtain these changes they accomplish at times even violent revolutions but the essence of these institutions is too much the expression of the hereditary needs of the race for them not invariably to abide by it. Their incessant mobility only exerts its influence on quite superficial matters. In fact they possess conservative instincts as indestructible as those of all primitive beings. Their fetish like respect for all traditions is absolute; their unconscious horror of all novelty capable of changing the essential conditions of their existence is very deeply rooted. Had democracies possessed the power they wield to-day at the time of the invention of mechanical looms or of the introduction of steam-power and of railways the realisation of these inventions would have been impossible or would have been achieved at the cost of revolutions and repeated massacres. It is fortunate for the progress of civilisation that the power of crowds only began to exist when the great discoveries of science and industry had already been effected.

§ 5. THE MORALITY OF CROWDS.

Taking the word "morality" to mean constant respect for certain social conventions and the permanent repression of selfish impulses it is quite evident that crowds are too impulsive and too mobile to be moral. If however we include in the term morality the transitory display of certain qualities such as abnegation self-sacrifice disinterestedness devotion and the need of equity we may say on the contrary that crowds may exhibit at times a very lofty morality.

The few psychologists who have studied crowds have only considered them from the point of view of their criminal acts and noticing how frequent these acts are they have come to the conclusion that the moral standard of crowds is very low.

Doubtless this is often the case; but why? Simply because our savage destructive instincts are the inheritance left dormant in all of us from the primitive ages. In the life of the isolated individual it would be dangerous for him to gratify these instincts while his absorption in an irresponsible crowd in which in consequence he is assured of impunity gives him entire liberty to follow them. Being unable in the ordinary course of events to exercise these destructive instincts on our fellow-men we confine ourselves to exercising them on animals. The passion so widespread for the chase and the acts of ferocity of crowds proceed from one and the same source. A crowd which slowly slaughters a defenceless victim displays a very cowardly ferocity; but for the philosopher this ferocity is very closely related to that of the huntsmen who gather in dozens for the pleasure of taking part in the pursuit and killing of a luckless stag by their hounds.

A crowd may be guilty of murder incendiarism and every kind of crime but it is also capable of very lofty acts of devotion sacrifice and disinterestedness of acts much loftier indeed than those of which the isolated individual is capable. Appeals to sentiments of glory honour and patriotism are particularly likely to influence the individual forming part of a crowd and often to the extent of obtaining from him the sacrifice of his life. History is rich in examples ***ogous to those furnished by the Crusaders and the volunteers of 1793. Collectivities alone are capable of great disinterestedness and great devotion. How numerous are the crowds that have heroically faced death for beliefs ideas and phrases that they scarcely understood! The crowds that go on strike do so far more in obedience to an order than to obtain an increase of the slender salary with which they make shift. Personal interest is very rarely a powerful motive force with crowds while it is almost the exclusive motive of the conduct of the isolated individual. It is assuredly not self-interest that has guided crowds in so many wars incomprehensible as a rule to their intelligence -- wars in which they have allowed themselves to be massacred as easily as the larks hypnotised by the mirror of the hunter.

Even in the case of absolute scoundrels it often happens that the mere fact of their being in a crowd endows them for the moment with very strict principles of morality. Taine calls attention to the fact that the perpetrators of the September massacres deposited on the table of the committees the pocket-books and jewels they had found on their victims and with which they could easily have been able to make away. The howling swarming ragged crowd which invaded the Tuileries during the revolution of 1848 did not lay hands on any of the objects that excited its astonishment and one of which would have meant bread for many days.

This moralisation of the individual by the crowd is not certainly a constant rule but it is a rule frequently observed. It is even observed in circumstances much less grave than those I have just cited. I have remarked that in the theatre a crowd exacts from the hero of the piece exaggerated virtues and it is a commonplace observation that an assembly even though composed of inferior elements shows itself as a rule very prudish. The debauchee the souteneur the rough often break out into murmurs at a slightly risky scene or expression though they be very harmless in comparison with their customary conversation.

If then crowds often abandon themselves to low instincts they also set the example at times of acts of lofty morality. If disinterestedness resignation and absolute devotion to a real or chimerical ideal are moral virtues it may be said that crowds often possess these virtues to a degree rarely attained by the wisest philosophers. Doubtless they practice them unconsciously but that is of small import. We should not complain too much that crowds are more especially guided by unconscious considerations and are not given to reasoning. Had they in certain cases reasoned and consulted their immediate interests it is possible that no civilisation would have grown up on our planet and humanity would have had no history.

CHAPTER III.

THE IDEAS REASONING POWER AND IMAGINATION

OF CROWDS.

§ 1. The ideas of crowds. Fundamental and accessory ideas -- How contradictory ideas may exist simultaneously -- The transformation that must be undergone by lofty ideas before they are accessible to crowds -- The social influence of ideas is independent of the degree of truth they may contain. § 2. The reasoning power of crowds. Crowds are not to be influenced by reasoning -- The reasoning of crowds is always of a very inferior order -- There is only the appearance of ***ogy or succession in the ideas they associate. § 3. The imagination of crowds. Strength of the imagination of crowds -- Crowds think in images and these images succeed each other without any connecting link -- Crowds are especially impressed by the marvellous -- Legends and the marvellous are the real pillars of civilisation -- The popular imagination has always been the basis of the power of statesmen -- The manner in which facts capable of striking the imagination of crowds present themselves for observation.

§ 1. THE IDEAS OF CROWDS.

WHEN studying in a preceding work the part played by ideas in the evolution of nations we showed that every civilisation is the outcome of a small number of fundamental ideas that are very rarely renewed. We showed how these ideas are implanted in the minds of crowds with what difficulty the process is effected and the power possessed by the ideas in question when once it has been accomplished. Finally we saw that great historical perturbations are the result as a rule of changes in these fundamental ideas.

Having treated this subject at sufficient length I shall not return to it now but shall confine myself to saying a few words on the subject of such ideas as are accessible to crowds and of the forms under which they conceive them.

They may be divided into two classes. In one we shall place accidental and passing ideas created by the influences of the moment: infatuation for an individual or a doctrine for instance. In the other will be classed the fundamental ideas to which the environment the laws of heredity and public opinion give a very great stability; such ideas are the religious beliefs of the past and the social and democratic ideas of to-day.

These fundamental ideas resemble the volume of the water of a stream slowly pursuing its course; the transitory ideas are like the small waves for ever changing which agitate its surface and are more visible than the progress of the stream itself although without real importance.

At the present day the great fundamental ideas which were the mainstay of our fathers are tottering more and more. They have lost all solidity and at the same time the institutions resting upon them are severely shaken. Every day there are formed a great many of those transitory minor ideas of which I have just been speaking; but very few of them to all appearance seem endowed with vitality and destined to acquire a preponderating influence.

Whatever be the ideas suggested to crowds they can only exercise effective influence on condition that they assume a very absolute uncompromising and simple shape. They present themselves then in the guise of images and are only accessible to the masses under this form. These imagelike ideas are not connected by any logical bond of ***ogy or succession and may take each other's place like the slides of a magic-lant