It is easy to feel the effect of surroundings in such cases as this, because of the sharp and definite change, and because the imagination clings to one state long after the senses are subdued to the other; but it is not so with national habits and sentiments, which so completely envelop us that we are for the most part unaware of them. The more thoroughly American a man is the less he can perceive Americanism. He will embody it; all he does, says, or writes, will be full of it; but he can never truly see it, simply because he has no exterior point of view from which to look at it. If he goes to Europe he begins to get by contrast some vague notion of it, though he will never be able to see just what it is that makes futile his attempts to seem an Englishman, a German, or an Italian. Our appearance to other peoples is like one’s own voice, which one never hears quite as others hear it, and which sounds strange when it comes back from the phonograph.
The control of those larger movements of thought and sentiment that make a historical epoch is still less conscious, more inevitable. Only the imaginative student, in his best hours, can really free himself—and that only in some respects—from the limitations of his time and see things from a height. For the most part the people of other epochs seem strange, outlandish, or a little insane. We can scarcely rid ourselves of the impression that the way of life we are used to is the normal, and that other ways are eccentric. Dr. Sidis holds that the people of the Middle Ages were in a quasi-hypnotic state, and instances the crusades, dancing manias, and the like.[[7]] But the question is, would not our own time, viewed from an equal distance, appear to present the signs of abnormal suggestibility? Will not the intense preoccupation with material production, the hurry and strain of our cities, the draining of life into one channel, at the expense of breadth, richness, and beauty, appear as mad as the crusades, and perhaps of a lower type of madness? Could anything be more indicative of a slight but general insanity than the aspect of the crowd on the streets of Chicago?
An illustration of this unconsciousness of what is distinctive in our time is the fact that those who participate in momentous changes have seldom any but the vaguest notion of their significance. There is perhaps no time in the history of art that seems to us now so splendid, so dramatic, as that of the sudden rise of Gothic architecture in northern France, and the erection of the church of St. Denis at Paris was its culmination: yet Professor C. E. Norton, speaking of the Abbot Suger, who erected it, and of his memoirs, says, “Under his watchful and intelligent oversight the church became the most splendid and the most interesting building of the century; but of the features that gave it special interest, that make it one of the most important monuments of mediæval architecture, neither Suger, in his account of it, nor his biographer, nor any contemporary writer, says a single word.”[[8]] To Suger and his time the Gothic, it would seem, was simply a new and improved way of building a church, a technical matter with which he had little concern, except to see that it was duly carried out according to specifications. It was developed by draughtsmen and handicraftsmen, mostly nameless, who felt their own thrill of constructive delight as they worked, but had no thought of historical glory. It is no doubt the same in our own time, and Mr. Bryce has noted with astonishment the unconsciousness or indifference of those who founded cities in western America, to the fact that they were doing something that would be memorable and influential for ages.[[9]]
I have already said, or implied, that the activity of the will reflects the state of the social order. A constant and strenuous exercise of volition implies complexity in the surrounding life from which suggestions come, while in a simple society choice is limited in scope and life is comparatively mechanical. It is the variety of social intercourse or, what comes to the same thing, the character of social organization, that determines the field of choice; and accordingly there is a tendency for the scope of the will to increase with that widening and intensification of life that is so conspicuous a feature of recent history. This change is bound up with the extension and diffusion of communication, opening up innumerable channels by which competing suggestions may enter the mind. We are still dependent upon environment—life is always a give and take with surrounding conditions—but environment is becoming very wide, and in the case of imaginative persons may extend itself to almost any ideas that the past or present life of the race has brought into being. This brings opportunity for congenial choice and characteristic personal growth, and at the same time a good deal of distraction and strain. There is more and more need of stability, and of a vigorous rejection of excessive material, if one would escape mental exhaustion and degeneracy. Choice is like a river; it broadens as it comes down through history—though there are always banks—and the wider it becomes the more persons drown in it. Stronger and stronger swimming is required, and types of character that lack vigor and self-reliance are more and more likely to go under.
The aptitude to yield to impulse in a mechanical or reflex way is called suggestibility. As might be expected, it is subject to great variations in different persons, and in the same person under different conditions. Abnormal suggestibility has received much study, and there is a great body of valuable literature relating to it. I wish in this connection only to recall a few well-known principles which the student of normal social life needs to have in mind.
As would naturally follow from our analysis of the relation between suggestion and choice, suggestibility is simply the absence of the controlling and organizing action of the reflective will. This function not being properly performed, thought and action are disintegrated and fly off on tangents; the captain being disabled the crew breaks up into factions, and discipline goes to pieces. Accordingly, whatever weakens the reason, and thus destroys the breadth and symmetry of consciousness, produces some form of suggestibility. To be excited is to be suggestible, that is to become liable to yield impulsively to an idea in harmony with the exciting emotion. An angry man is suggestible as regards denunciation, threats, and the like, a jealous one as regards suspicions, and similarly with any passion.
The suggestibility of crowds is a peculiar form of that limitation of choice by the environment already discussed. We have here a very transient environment which owes its power over choice to the vague but potent emotion so easily generated in dense aggregates. The thick humanity is in itself exciting, and the will is further stupefied by the sense of insignificance, by the strangeness of the situation, and by the absence, as a rule, of any separate purpose to maintain an independent momentum. A man is like a ship in that he cannot guide his course unless he has way on. If he drifts he will shift about with any light air; and the man in the crowd is usually drifting, is not pursuing any settled line of action in which he is sustained by knowledge and habit. This state of mind, added to intense emotion directed by some series of special suggestions, is the source of the wild and often destructive behavior of crowds and mobs, as well as of a great deal of heroic enthusiasm. An orator, for instance, first unifying and heightening the emotional state of his audience by some humorous or pathetic incident, will be able, if tolerably skilful, to do pretty much as he pleases with them, so long as he does not go against their settled habits of thought. Anger, always a ready passion, is easily aroused, appeals to resentment being the staples of much popular oratory, and under certain conditions readily expresses itself in stoning, burning, and lynching. And so with fear: General Grant in describing the battle of Shiloh gives a picture of several thousand men on a hill-side in the rear, incapable of moving, though threatened to be shot for cowardice where they lay. Yet these very men, calmed and restored to their places, were among those who heroically fought and won the next day’s battle. They had been restored to the domination of another class of suggestions, namely those implied in military discipline.[[10]]
Suggestibility from exhaustion or strain is a rather common condition with many of us. Probably all eager brain workers find themselves now and then in a state where they are “too tired to stop.” The overwrought mind loses the healthy power of casting off its burden, and seems capable of nothing but going on and on in the same painful and futile course. One may know that he is accomplishing nothing, that work done in such a state of mind is always bad work, and that “that way madness lies,” but yet be too weak to resist, chained to the wheel of his thought so that he must wait till it runs down. And such a state, however induced, is the opportunity for all sorts of undisciplined impulses, perhaps some gross passion, like anger, dread, the need of drink, or the like.
According to Mr. Tylor,[[11]] fasting, solitude, and physical exhaustion by dancing, shouting, or flagellation are very generally employed by savage peoples to bring on abnormal states of mind of which suggestibility—the sleep of choice, and control by some idea from the subconscious life—is always a trait. The visions and ecstasies following the fastings, watchings, and flagellations of Christian devotees of an earlier time seem to belong, psychologically, in much the same category.
It is well known that suggestibility is limited by habit, or, more accurately stated, that habit is itself a perennial source of suggestions that set bounds and conditions upon the power of fresh suggestions. A total abstainer will resist the suggestion to drink, a modest person will refuse to do anything indecent, and so on. People are least liable to yield to irrational suggestions, to be stampeded with the crowd, in matters with which they are familiar, so that they have habits regarding them. The soldier, in his place in the ranks and with his captain in sight, will march forward to certain death, very likely without any acute emotion whatever, simply because he has the habits that constitute discipline; and so with firemen, policemen, sailors, brakemen, physicians, and many others who learn to deal with life and death as calmly as they read a newspaper. It is all in the day’s work.