The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study

by Everett Dean Martin

The crowd-mind is everywhere idealistic, and absolutist. Its truths are "given," made-in-advance. Though unconsciously its systems of logic are created to enhance the self-feeling, they appear to consciousness as highly impersonal and abstract. As in the intellectualist philosophies, forms of thought are regarded as themselves objects of thought. Systems of general ideas are imposed upon the minds of men apparently from without. Universal acceptance is demanded. Thought becomes stereotyped. What ought to be is confused with what is, the ideal becomes more real than fact.

In the essays on "Pragmatism" William James showed that the rationalist system, even that of the great philosopher, is in large measure determined by the thinkers peculiar "temperament." Elsewhere he speaks of the "Sentiment of Rationality." For a discussion of the various types of philosophical rationalism, the reader is referred to the criticisms by William James, F. C. S. Schiller, Dewey, and other Pragmatists. It is sufficient for our purpose to note the fact that the rationalist type of mind everywhere shows a tendency to assert the unreality of the world of everyday experience, and to seek comfort and security in the contemplation of a logically ordered system or world of "pure reason." Ideals, not concrete things, are the true realities. The world with which we are always wrestling is but a distorted manifestation, a jumbled, stereotyped copy of what James ironically referred to as "the de luxe edition which exists in the Absolute." The parable of the cave which Plato gives in the Republic represents ordinary knowledge as a delusion, and the empirically known world as but dancing shadows on the wall of our subterranean prison.

R. W. Livingstone, who sees in Platonism, from the very beginning, a certain world-weariness and turning away of the Greek spirit from the healthy realism which had formerly characterized it, says:

For if Greece showed men how to trust their own nature and lead a simply human life, how to look straight in the face of the world and read the beauty that met them on the surface, certain Greek writers preached a different lesson from this. In opposition to directness they taught us to look past the "unimaginary and actual" qualities of things to secondary meanings and inner symbolism. In opposition to liberty and humanism they taught us to mistrust our nature, to see in it weakness, helplessness, and incurable taint, to pass beyond humanity to communion with God, to live less for this world than for one to come.... Perhaps to some people it may seem surprising that this writer is Plato.

According to this view reality may be found only by means of "pure knowledge," and, to give a familiar quotation from the Phædo:

If we would have pure knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body; the soul in herself must behold things in themselves; and then we shall attain the wisdom which we desire and of which we say that we are lovers; not while we live, but after death; for if, while in company with the body, the soul cannot have pure knowledge, one of two things follows—either knowledge is not to be obtained at all, or if at all after death.

Intellectualism may not always be so clearly other-worldly as Plato shows himself to be in this passage. But it commonly argues that behind the visible world of "illusory sense experience" lies the true ground and cause—an unseen order in which the contradictions of experience are either unknown or harmonized, an external and unchangeable "Substance," a self-contained Absolute to which our ephemeral personalities with their imperfections and problems are unknown. A "thing in itself," or principle of Being which transcends our experience.

This type of thinking, whether it be known as Idealism, Rationalism, Intellectualism, or Absolutism, finds little sympathy from those who approach the study of philosophy from the standpoint of psychology. The following passages taken from Studies in Humanism by Schiller, show that even without the technique of the analytical method, it was not hard to detect some of the motives which prompted the construction of systems of this sort. The partisanism of one of these motives is rather suggestive for our study of the mind of the crowd. Says our author:

Logical defects rarely kill beliefs to which men, for psychological reasons, remain attached.... This may suggest to us that we may have perhaps unwittingly misunderstood Absolutism, and done it a grave injustice.... What if its real appeal was not logical but psychological?...

The history of English Absolutism distinctly bears out these anticipations. It was originally a deliberate importation from Germany, with a purpose. And this purpose was a religious one—that of counteracting the antireligious developments of Science. The indigenous philosophy, the old British empiricism, was useless for this purpose. For though a form of intellectualism, its sensationalism was in no wise hostile to Science. On the contrary, it showed every desire to ally itself with, and to promote, the great scientific movement of the nineteenth century, which penetrated into and almost overwhelmed Oxford between 1859 and 1870.

But this movement excited natural and not unwarranted alarm in that great center of theology. For Science, flushed with its hard-won liberty, ignorant of philosophy, and as yet unconscious of its proper limitations, was decidedly aggressive and overconfident. It seemed naturalistic, nay, materialistic, by the law of its being. The logic of Mill, the philosophy of Evolution, the faith in democracy, in freedom, in progress (on material lines), threatened to carry all before them.

What was to be done? Nothing directly; for on its own ground Science seemed invulnerable, and had the knack of crushing the subtlest dialectics by the knockdown force of sheer scientific fact. But might it not be possible to change the venue, to shift the battleground to a region ubi instabilis terra unda (where the land afforded no firm footing), where the frozen sea could not be navigated, where the very air was thick with mists so that phantoms might well pass for realities—the realm, in short, of metaphysics?...

So it was rarely necessary to do more than recite the august table of a priori categories in order to make the most audacious scientist feel that he had got out of his depth; while at the merest mention of the Hegelian dialectic all the "advanced thinkers" of the time would flee affrighted.

Schillers sense of humor doubtless leads him to exaggerate somewhat the deliberateness of this importation of German metaphysics. That these borrowed transcendental and dialectical systems served their purpose in the warfare of traditional theologies against Science is but half the truth. The other half is that these logical formulas provided certain intelligent believers with a defense, or safe refuge, in their own inner conflicts.