The psychology of the speculative mania is very simple. There is first, greed, furnishing the necessary emotional excitement; then imitation; then precipitate, unreasoning action. In the panic, the psychological sequence is the same, except that fear takes the place of greed. The stampede among animals may be taken as the type of all panics. It is a reflex phenomenon consisting merely of contagious fear and precipitate, unintelligent flight. Fear and flight constitute a most primitive form of mental action, equalled in primitive character only by that other form whose survival we have seen illustrated in wars and homicidal manias, viz., anger and combat. Although the individual has long outgrown these simple reflexes, yet in social excitement he reverts to them. The recrudescence of the first of these two forms is seen in the case of panics in theatres and burning buildings, where social fear is followed by unintelligent flight, there being a temporary paralysis of reason, prudence, the power of choosing means to ends, respect for women and consideration for the weak and feeble.
The limits of this paper permit me only to refer to other forms of the craze illustrating the same laws. In fads and fashions of all kinds, the behavior of the social personality is different only in degree from that already described in the more serious epidemics. The law of imitation is the same, but there is less excitement and emotional disturbance and consequently a lesser paralysis of the higher mental faculties and a lesser return to barbaric impulses. Whereas the others may be called forms of social paranoia, these may be called forms of social monomania. A single idea fills the public mind, and as a result this idea is unduly exalted as to its importance and worth. The higher mental powers are paralyzed only so far as that there is a perverted judgment as to the relative importance of things and consequently a more or less distorted view of the world and its values. Perhaps the simplest form of this craze is seen in the epidemic character of children’s games. At different times of the season different games completely fill the social consciousness of the child-world, so that for the moment there is no interest in any other game. New and interesting sports, such, for instance, as golf, often fill the social adult consciousness in the same way. Then there are social and literary fads, crazes in musical airs, fashions in dress, furniture, houses and carriages, without number. Crazes of all kinds have found a prolific soil in America. The American mind is highly suggestible. One fad after another rages over the country and in some cases reduces the aggregate mind to a condition of idiocy. The Dewey craze in New York City last year is an illustration of this. Nothing but a sort of hypnotic distortion of intellectual vision could cause grown men to stand in line for an hour in order that they might sit for an instant in the chair in which the hero sat during the review, or to fight for shreds of the flags and awnings that decorated the platform.
Sporadic social reform movements take the form of crazes and illustrate the same laws. One recalls the Woman’s Crusade in 1873, the result not of a rational plan but of imitation, and the Granger movement and the Farmers’ Alliance and the greenback craze and the silver craze and many others.
Since Aristotle we have been told that man is a social animal and that to study him as he really is we must not isolate him from society. The evident truth of this may lead us to forget that it is but a half truth and the uncritical acceptance of it will lead us wholly astray in our sociological study. The inference which we seem compelled to draw from studies in social psychology is that social man is, in his ethical and intellectual development, many stages behind the individual man. The progress of civilization is a slow, painful, upward climbing, in which individuals are the thinkers, the planners, the promoters and the leaders. The mind of society, on the other hand, using the phrase in the sense defined, is an imitative, unreflective, half-hypnotic, half-barbaric mind, always acting as a drag upon the upward and forward movement, and, in times of crazes, epidemics and social cataclysms, gaining temporary dominance and causing disastrous relapses to a lower plane of civilization.
SOME PHASES OF THE EARTH’S DEVELOPMENT IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT CHEMICAL RESEARCH.
By Professor EDWARD RENOUF.
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.
In the following pages an effort is made to apply some of the results of recent chemical research to the earlier history of the earth. It is hoped that the main facts brought out may be readily grasped by those who have never studied chemistry, and that each link in the chain of events will be made evident to those who have mastered the rudiments of this science.
Chemical action involves change of composition. Substances more or less complex may be broken down into simpler substances, or from several simpler substances a complex substance may be built up. From the complex ore of copper found in nature the simple element copper is obtained. From the elements sulphur and oxygen and the simple substance water the complex sulphuric acid is built up. Within the last few years the high temperature of the electric arc—the heat generated by a powerful electric current playing between two carbon poles—has been employed in bringing about chemical changes which do not occur at ordinary temperatures nor at those obtainable by burning fuel. The electric furnace is used industrially to make calcium carbide from lime and coke, carbon silicide (carborundum) from coke and sand, and the metal aluminum from its compounds.
Chemical changes at high temperatures have long been an object of research, but it was not until the introduction of the electric furnace that it was possible to command temperatures high enough to make exhaustive studies. In the last few years several chemists, especially Moissan, of Paris, and his pupils, have done systematic work with the aid of the arc furnace. The furnace used in the laboratory for high temperature work is a small and simple apparatus; Moissan’s furnace is a block of quick lime a little longer and wider than a page of this magazine and about three inches thick. A rectangular cavity is cut on the upper surface of this block. A similar block forms the cover. In opposite grooves between the top and bottom piece are placed the carbons, such as are used in ordinary arc lights. The arc plays across the cavity in such a manner that the substance to be heated is not brought into the arc itself, which is vaporized carbon, but below it. The cavity thus represents a tiny reverberatory furnace; the arc heats the roof and sides to an intense heat, which is radiated on the open dish or closed crucible or tube containing the substance heated. This is the simplest form of laboratory furnace. Various modifications are used, but in all the size is small and the arrangement simple. A powerful arc plays in the smallest possible cavity with the object of attaining the maximum of temperature, expense and duration of material being secondary considerations. Lime and magnesia are the best materials, because they are at the same time the most refractory substances available and are poor conductors of heat. A furnace top one and one half inches thick may be heated by so powerful an arc that the melted quick lime drips from the inner surface, while the outer surface is scarcely warm to the touch of the hand. Moissan has utilized in these little furnaces currents of electricity of varied strength, the lowest being that given by a four horse-power dynamo, the highest that generated by three hundred horse power. The highest temperatures obtained were about 3,500° centigrade (6,300° Fahrenheit), with the heat constantly increasing; the limit to the obtainable temperature—as far as the experimental evidence showed—was merely the lack of any known substance refractory enough to bear the heat; for at the temperature mentioned quick lime and magnesia not only melt but are changed into gases, so that the furnace was filled with the vapors of its own material.