That which is meant by the cry of the Russian Revolution, "All power to the soviets," is peculiar neither to Russia nor to the working class. Such in spirit is the cry of every crowd, for every crowd is, psychologically considered, a soviet. The industrial and political danger of the soviet would amount to little or nothing, were it not for the fact that the modern world is already spiritually sovietized. The threatened soviet republic is hardly more than the practical result of a hundred years of crowd-thinking on almost every subject. Whether capitalist or proletarian, reformer or liberal, we have all along been behaving and thinking in soviet fashion. In almost every important matter in life we have ignored Emersons warning that we must rely upon ourselves, and have permitted ourselves to behave and think as crowds, fastening their labels and dogmas upon our spirits and taking their shibboleths upon our tongues, thinking more of the temporary triumph of our particular sect or party than of the effect of our behavior upon ourselves and others.
There is certainly nothing new in the discovery that our social behavior is not what it ought to be. Mediæval thinkers were as much aware of the fact as we are, but they dismissed the social problem with the simple declaration of the "sinfulness of human nature." Nineteenth-century utilitarians felt that the social problem could be solved by more enlightened and more reasonable behavior on the part of individuals. Recent social psychology—of which the writings of Prof. William McDougall are probably the best example, has abandoned the theory that social behavior is primarily governed by reason or by considerations of utility. A better explanation of social phenomena is found in instinct. It is held that the true motives of social behavior are pugnacity, the instinct of self-appreciation or self-debasement, of sex, gregariousness, and the like. Each instinct with its "affective emotion" becomes organized through various complex reactions to the social environment, into fairly well established "sentiments." These sentiments are held to be the controlling social forces. As McDougall says:
We may say then that directly or indirectly the instincts are the prime movers of all human activity; by the conative or impulsive force of some instinct (or of some habit derived from an instinct), every train of thought, however cold and passionless it may seem, is borne along toward its end, and every bodily activity is initiated and sustained. The instinctive impulses determine the ends of all activities and supply the driving-power by which all mental activities are sustained; and all the complex intellectual apparatus of the most highly developed mind is but a means toward those ends, is but the instrument by which these impulses seek their satisfactions.... These impulses are the mental forces that maintain and shape all the life of individuals and societies, and in them we are confronted with the central mystery of life and mind and will.
This is all very good so far as it goes. But I confess that I am somewhat at loss to know just what it explains so far as crowd-behavior is concerned. Do these instincts and sentiments operate the same under all social conditions? Are some of them suppressed by society and forced to seek their satisfaction in roundabout ways? If so, how? Moreover, I fail to find in present-day social psychology, any more than in the writings of Herbert Spencer, Sumner, Ward, and others, any clear distinction between the characteristic behavior of crowds and other forms of social activity. Only the school of Le Bon has shown any definite appreciation of these facts. It is to Le Bon, therefore, in spite of the many and just criticisms of his work, that we must turn for a discussion of the crowd as a problem apart from social psychology in general. Le Bon saw that the mind of the crowd demanded special psychological study, but many of the psychological principles which he used in solving the problem were inadequate to the task. Certain of his conclusions were, therefore, erroneous. Since the close of the nineteenth century, however, psychology has gained much insight into the secret springs of human activity. Possibly the most significant achievement in the history of this science is Freuds work in analytical psychology.
So much light has been thrown upon the unconscious by Freud and other analytical psychologists, that psychology in all its branches is beginning to take some of Freuds discoveries into account. Strictly speaking, psychoanalysis is a therapeutic method. It has, however, greatly enriched our knowledge of mental pathology, and thus much of its data has become indispensable to general psychology and to social psychology in particular.
In his book the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud has shown that there exist in the wish-fulfilling mechanisms of dream formation certain definite laws. These laws undoubtedly underlie and determine also many of our crowd-ideas, creeds, conventions, and social ideals. In his book, Totem and Taboo, Freud has himself led the way to the application of the analytical psychology to the customs and ideas of primitive groups. I am sure that we shall find, as we proceed, that with the analytical method we shall gain an entirely new insight into the causes and meaning of the behavior of crowds.