At first with great courtesy—"The noble Brutus hath told you Cæsar was ambitious; if it were so it was a grievous fault ... for Brutus is an honorable man, so are they all, all honorable men." This sentence is repeated four times in the first section; Cæsar was a good faithful friend to Antony, "But ... and Brutus is an honorable man." Again Cæsar refused the crown, but "Brutus is an honorable man." Cæsar wept when the poor cried, "sure, Brutus is an honorable man, I speak not to disprove what he says" but "men have lost their reason" and "my heart is in the coffin there with Cæsar." The citizens are sorry for the weeping Antony; they listen more intently now. Again—"If I were disposed to stir your hearts and minds to mutiny and rage"—but that would be to wrong Brutus and Cassius, "Who you all know are honorable men"—this time said with more marked irony. Rather than wrong such honorable men, Antony prefers to "wrong the dead, to wrong myself—and you." That sentence sets Brutus squarely in opposition to the speaker and his audience. Cæsars will is mentioned—if only the commons knew what was in it, but Antony will not read it, "you are not wood, you are not stones, but men." The speaker now resists their demand to hear the will, he ought not have mentioned it. He fears he has, after all, wronged "the honorable men whose daggers have stabbed Cæsar." The citizens have caught the note of irony now; the honorable men are "traitors," "villains," "murderers."
From this point on the speakers task is easy; they have become a crowd. They think only of revenge, of killing everyone of the conspirators, and burning the house of Brutus. Antony has even to remind them of the existence of the will. The mischief is set afloat the moment Brutus is successfully discredited.
The development of the thought in this oration is typical. Analysis of almost any propagandist speech will reveal some, if not all, the steps by which Brutus is made an object of hatred. The crowd hates in order that it may believe in itself.
VI
THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWD-MIND
Wherever conscious thinking is determined by unconscious mechanisms, and all thinking is more or less so, it is dogmatic in character. Beliefs which serve an unconscious purpose do not require the support of evidence. They persist because they are demanded. This is a common symptom of various forms of psychoneurosis. Ideas "haunt the mind" of the patient; he cannot rid himself of them. He may know they are foolish, but he is compelled to think them. In severe cases, he may hear voices or experience other hallucinations which are symbolic of the obsessive ideas. Or his psychic life may be so absorbed by his one fixed idea that it degenerates into the ceaseless repetition of a gesture or a phrase expressive of this idea.
In paranoia the fixed ideas are organized into a system. Brill says:
I know a number of paranoiacs who went through a stormy period lasting for years, but who now live contentedly as if in another world. Such transformations of the world are common in paranoia. They do not care for anything, as nothing is real to them. They have withdrawn their sum of libido from the persons of their environment and the outer world. The end of the world is the projection of this internal catastrophe. Their subjective world came to an end since they withdrew their love from it. By a secondary rationalization, the patients then explain whatever obtrudes itself upon them as something intangible and fit it in with their own system. Thus one of my patients who considers himself a sort of Messiah denies the reality of his own parents by saying that they are only shadows made by his enemy, the devil, whom he has not yet wholly subdued. Another paranoiac in the Central Islip State Hospital, who represented himself as a second Christ, spends most of his time sewing out on cloth crude scenes containing many buildings, interspersed with pictures of the doctors. He explained all this very minutely as the new world system.... Thus the paranoiac builds up again with his delusions a new world in which he can live.... (Italics mine.)
However, a withdrawal of libido is not an exclusive occurrence in paranoia, nor is its occurrence anywhere necessarily followed by disastrous consequences. Indeed, in normal life there is a constant withdrawal of libido from persons and objects without resulting in paranoia or other neuroses. It merely causes a special psychic mood. The withdrawal of the libido as such cannot therefore be considered as pathogenic of paranoia. It requires a special character to distinguish the paranoiac withdrawal of libido from other kinds of the same process. This is readily found when we follow the further utilization of the libido thus withdrawn. Normally, we immediately seek a substitute for the suspended attachment, and until one is found the libido floats freely in the psyche and causes tensions which influence our moods. In hysteria the freed sum of libido becomes transformed into bodily innervations of fear. Clinical indications teach us that in paranoia a special use is made of the libido which is withdrawn from its object ... the freed libido in paranoia is thrown back on the ego and serves to magnify it.
Note the fact that there is a necessary relation between the fixed ideal system of the paranoiac and his withdrawal of interest in the outside world. The system gains the function of reality for him in the same measure that, loving not the world nor the things that are in the world, he has rendered our common human world unreal. His love thrown back upon himself causes him to create another world, a world of "pure reason," so to speak, which is more congenial to him than the world of empirical fact. In this system he takes refuge and finds peace at last. Now we see the function, at least so far as paranoia is concerned, of the ideal system. As Brill says, it is a curative process of a mind which has suffered "regression" or turning back of its interest from the affairs of ordinary men and women, to the attachments of an earlier stage in its history. To use a philosophical term, the paranoiac is the Simon-pure "solipsist." And as a priori thinking tends, as Schiller has shown, ever to solipsism, we see here the grain of truth in G. K. Chestertons witty comparison of rationalism and lunacy.