Introduction to the Science of Sociology

by Robert Ezra Park; E. W. Burgess

Proceeding further, we find crowds still heterogeneous, but not so anonymous—juries, for example, and assemblies. These small crowds experience a new sentiment, unknown to anonymous crowds, that of responsibility which may at times give to their actions a different orientation. Then the parliamentary crowds are to be distinguished from the others because, as Tarde observes with his habitual penetration, they are double crowds: they represent a majority in conflict with one or more minorities, which safeguards them in most cases from unanimity, the most menacing danger which faces crowds.

We come now to homogeneous crowds, of which the first type is the sect. Here are found again individuals differing in birth, in education, in profession, in social status, but united and, indeed, voluntarily cemented by an extremely strong bond, a common faith and ideal. Faith, religious, scientific, or political, rapidly creates a communion of sentiments capable of giving to those who possess it a high degree of homogeneity and power. History records the deeds of the barbarians under the influence of Christianity, and the Arabs transformed into a sect by Mahomet. Because of their sectarian organization, a prediction may be made of what the future holds in store for the socialists.

The sect is a crowd, picked out and permanent; the crowd is a transitory sect which has not chosen its members. The sect is a chronic kind of crowd; the crowd is an acute kind of sect. The crowd is composed of a multitude of grains of sand without cohesion; the sect is a block of marble which resists every effort. When a sentiment or an idea, having in itself a reason for existence, slips into the crowd, its members soon crystallize and form a sect. The sect is then the first crystallization of every doctrine. From the confused and amorphous state in which it manifests itself to the crowd, every idea is predestined to define itself in the more specific form of the sect, to become later a party, a school, or a church—scientific, political, or religious.

Any faith, whether it be Islamism, Buddhism, Christianity, patriotism, socialism, anarchy, cannot but pass through this sectarian phase. It is the first step, the point where the human group in leaving the twilight zone of the anonymous and mobile crowd raises itself to a definition and to an integration which then may lead up to the highest and most perfect human group, the nation.

If the sect is composed of individuals united by a common idea and aim, in spite of diversity of birth, education, and social status, the caste unites, on the contrary, those who could have—and who have sometimes—diverse ideas and aspirations, but who are brought together through identity of profession. The sect corresponds to the community of faith, the caste to the community of professional ideas. The sect is a spontaneous association; the caste is, in many ways, a forced association. After having chosen a profession—let it be priest, soldier, magistrate—a man belongs necessarily to a caste. A person, on the contrary, does not necessarily belong to a sect. And when one belongs to a caste—be he the most independent man in the world—he is more or less under the influence of that which is called esprit de corps.

The caste represents the highest degree of organization to which the homogeneous crowd is susceptible. It is composed of individuals who by their tastes, their education, birth, and social status, resemble each other in the fundamental types of conduct and mores. There are even certain castes, the military and sacerdotal, for example, in which the members at last so resemble one another in appearance and bearing that no disguise can conceal the nature of their profession.

The caste offers to its members ideas already molded, rules of conduct already approved; it relieves them, in short, of the fatigue of thinking with their own brains. When the caste to which an individual belongs is known, all that is necessary is to press a button of his mental mechanism to release a series of opinions and of phrases already made which are identical in every individual of the same caste.

This harmonious collectivity, powerful and eminently conservative, is the most salient analogy which the nations of the Occident present to that of India. In India the caste is determined by birth, and it is distinguished by a characteristic trait: the persons of one caste can live with, eat with, and marry only individuals of the same caste.

In Europe it is not only birth, but circumstances and education which determine the entrance of an individual into a caste; to marry, to frequent, to invite to the same table only people of the same caste, exists practically in Europe as in India. In Europe the above-mentioned prescriptions are founded on convention, but they are none the less observed. We all live in a confined circle, where we find our friends, our guests, our sons- and daughters-in-law.

Misalliances are assuredly possible in Europe; they are impossible in India. But if there religion prohibits them, with us public opinion and convention render them very rare. And at bottom the analogy is complete.