In panic, the dominance of the one emotion and its impulse is so complete as to allow no scope for any of the subtler modes of collective mental operation. But in other cases other conditions co-operate to determine the character of the emotional response of the crowd. Of these the most important are the awareness of the crowd as a whole in the mind of each member of it and his consciousness of his membership in the whole. When a common emotion pervades the crowd, each member becomes more or less distinctly aware of the fact; and this gives him a sense of sharing in a mighty and irresistible power which renders him reckless of consequences and encourages him to give himself up to the prevailing emotion without restraint. Thus, in the case of an audience swept by an emotion of admiration for a brilliant singer, the thunder of applause, which shows each individual that his emotion is shared by all the rest, intensifies his own emotion, not only by way of sympathetic induction, but also because it frees him from that restraint of emotion which is habitual with most of us in the presence of any critical or adversely disposed spectators, and which the mere thought of such spectators tends to maintain and strengthen. Again, the oratory of a demagogue, if addressed to a large crowd, will raise angry emotion to a pitch of intensity far higher than any it will attain if he is heard by a few persons only; and this is due not only to accentuation of the emotion by sympathetic induction, but also to the fact that, as the symptoms of the emotion begin to be manifested on all sides, each man becomes aware that it pervades the crowd, that the crowd as a whole is swayed by the same emotion and the same impulse as he himself feels, that none remains to criticise the violence of his expressions. To which it must be added that the consciousness of the harmony of one’s feelings with those of a mass of one’s fellows, and the consequent sense of freedom from all restraint, are highly pleasurable to most men; they find a pleasure in letting themselves go, in being swept away in the torrent of collective emotion. This is one of the secrets of the fascination which draws many thousands of spectators to a football match, and brings together the multitudes of base-ball ‘fans’ bubbling over with eager anticipation of an emotional orgy.
The fact that the emotions of crowds are apt to be very violent has long been recognised, and the popular mind, in seeking to account for it, has commonly postulated very special and even supernatural causes. The negro author of a most interesting book[17] has given the following description of the religious frenzy of a crowd of Christian negroes: “An air of intense excitement possessed the mass of black folk. A suppressed terror hung in the air and seemed to seize us,—a pythian madness, a demoniac possession, that lent terrible reality to song and word. The massive form of the preacher swayed and quivered as the words crowded to his lips. The people moaned and fluttered and then a gaunt brown woman suddenly leaped into the air and shrieked like a lost soul, while round about came wail and groan and outcry, a scene of human passion such as I had never even imagined.” The author goes on to say that this frenzy is attributed by the black folk to the direct influence of the Spirit of the Lord, making mad the worshippers with supernatural joy, and that this belief is one of the leading features of their religion. Similar practices, depending upon the tendency of collective emotion to rise to an extreme intensity, have been common to the peoples of many lands in all ages; and similar supernatural explanations have been commonly devised and accepted. I need only remind the reader of the Dionysiac orgies of ancient Greece.
The facts are so striking that for the popular mind they remain unaccountable, and not to be mentioned without some vague reference to magnetism, electricity, hypnotism, or some mysterious contagion; and even modern scientific writers have been led to adopt somewhat extravagant hypotheses to account for them. Thus Dr Le Bon[18] speaks of “the magnetic influence given out by the crowd” and says that, owing to this influence, “or from some other cause of which we are ignorant, an individual immerged for some length of time in a crowd in action soon finds himself in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotised individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotiser.” He goes on to say that in the hypnotised subject the conscious personality disappears and that his actions are the outcome of the unconscious activities of the spinal cord. Now, crowds undoubtedly display great suggestibility, but great suggestibility does not necessarily imply hypnosis; and there is no ground for supposing that the members of a crowd are thrown into any such condition, save possibly in very rare instances.
There are however two hypotheses, sometimes invoked for the explanation of the peculiarities of collective mental life, which demand serious consideration and which we may with advantage consider at this point.
One is the hypothesis of telepathy. A considerable amount of respectable evidence has been brought forward in recent years to prove that one mind may directly influence another by some obscure mode of action that does not involve the known organs of expression and of perception; and much of this evidence seems to show that one mind may directly induce in another a state of consciousness similar to its own. If, then, such direct interaction between two minds can take place in an easily appreciable degree in certain instances, it would seem not improbable that a similar direct interaction, producing a lesser, and therefore less easily appreciable, degree of assimilation of the states of consciousness of the minds concerned, may be constantly and normally at work. If this were the case, such telepathic interaction might well play a very important part in collective mental life, and, where a large number of persons is congregated, it might tend to produce that intensification of emotion which is so characteristic of crowds. In fact, if direct telepathic communication of emotion in however slight a degree is possible and normal, and especially if the influence is one that diminishes with distance, it may be expected to produce its most striking results among the members of a crowd; for the emotion of each member might be expected to be intensified by the telepathic influence radiating from every other member. Some slight presumption in favour of such a mode of explanation is afforded by the fact that the popular use of the word contagion in the present connexion seems to imply, however vaguely, some such direct communication of emotion. But telepathic communication has not hitherto been indisputably established; and the observations that afford so strong a presumption in its favour indicate that, if and in so far as it occurs, it does so sporadically and only between individuals specially attuned to one another or in some abnormal mental state that renders them specially sensitive to the influence[19]. And, while the acceptance of the principle of sympathetic induction of an emotion, as an instinctive perceptual response to the expressions of that emotion, renders unnecessary any further principle of explanation, the consideration of the conditions of the spread of emotion through crowds affords evidence that this mode of interaction of the individuals is all-important and that telepathic communication, if it occurs, is of secondary importance. For the spreading and the great intensification of emotion seem to depend upon its being given expressions that are perceptible by the senses. So long as its expressions are suppressed, the emotion of an assembly does not become excessive. It is only by eliciting and encouraging the expressions of emotions that the revivalist, the political orator, or the comic man on the music-hall stage, achieves his successes. That the expressions of an emotion are far more effective in this way than the emotion itself is recognised by the practice of the claqueurs. When an audience has once been induced to give expression to a common emotion, its members are, as it were, set in tune with one another; each man is aware that he is in harmony with all the rest as regards his feelings and emotions, and, even in the periods during which all expressions are suppressed by the audience, this awareness serves to sustain the mood and to prepare for fresh outbursts. The mere silence of an audience, the absence of coughs, shufflings, and uneasy movements, suffices to make each member aware that all his fellows are attentive and are responding with the appropriate emotion; but it is not until the applause, the indignation, or the laughter, breaks out in free expression that the emotion reaches its highest pitch. And a skilful orator or entertainer, recognising these facts, takes care to afford frequent opportunities for the collective displays of emotion.
We must recognise, then, that, even if telepathic communication be proved to be possible in certain cases, there is not sufficient evidence of its operation in the spread of emotion through crowds, and that the facts are sufficiently explained by another principle of general and indisputable validity, the principle of primitive sympathy.
The second hypothesis to be considered in this connexion is that of the ‘collective consciousness.’ The conception of a collective consciousness has been reached by a large number of authors along several lines of observation and reasoning and is seriously defended at the present time, more especially by several French and German writers. They maintain that, in some sense and manner, the consciousnesses of individuals are not wholly shut off from one another, but may co-operate in the genesis of, or share in the being of, a more comprehensive consciousness that exists beside and in addition to them. The conception varies according to the route by which it is reached and the use that is made of it; but in all its varieties the conception remains extremely obscure; no one has succeeded in making clear how the relation of the individual consciousness to the collective consciousness is to be conceived. In the writings of many metaphysicians, of whom Hegel is the most prominent, ‘the Absolute’ seems to imply such a collective consciousness, an all-inclusive world-consciousness of which the individual consciousness of each man is somehow but a constituent element or fragmentary manifestation. But it would be unprofitable to attempt any discussion of the conception. We are concerned only with the empirical conception of a collective consciousness based on observation and induction.
Such a conception finds its strongest support in the analogy afforded by a widely current view of the nature and conditions of the psychical individuality of men and animals; the view, namely, that the individual consciousness of any man or animal is the collective consciousness of the cells of which his body, or his nervous system, is composed. We know that the nervous system is made up of cells each of which is a vital unit, capable of living, of achieving its essential vital processes, independently of other cells; and we see free living cells that in many respects are comparable with these and to which we seem compelled, according to the principle of continuity, to attribute some germ of psychical life however rudimentary. What is known of the phylogenetic and ontogenetic development of the multicellular animal seems to justify us in regarding it as essentially an aggregate of such independent vital units, which, being formed by repeated fission from a single cell, adhere together and undergo differentiation and specialisation of functions. If then the parent cell, the germ cell, has a rudimentary psychical life, it is difficult to deny it altogether to the cells formed from it by fission; and it is argued that all these cells continue to enjoy a psychical life and that the consciousness of the individual man or animal is the collective consciousness of some or all of these cells. Now we know that the consciousness of any one of the higher animals has for its physical correlate at any moment processes going on simultaneously in many different parts and elements of the brain. It is argued, then, that we must suppose each cell of the brain to enjoy, whenever it is active, its own psychical life, and at the same time to contribute something towards the unitary ‘collective consciousness’ of the whole organism, which thus exists beside, but not independently of, these rudimentary consciousnesses of the cells. If the view be accepted, it affords a close analogy with the supposed ‘collective consciousness’ of a group of men or a society.
This conception of the collective nature of the consciousness of complex organisms finds strong support in two classes of facts. First, it finds support in the fact that, if individuals of many of the animal species of an intermediate grade of complexity, such as some of the worms and some of the radiate animals, be cut into two or more parts, each part may continue to live and may become a complete organism by reconstitution of the lost parts. Since, then, we can hardly deny some integrated psychical life to such organisms, some rudimentary consciousness, we seem compelled to believe that this consciousness may be divided into two or more consciousnesses, each of them being associated with the vital activities of one of the parts into which the organism is divided by the knife. Division of the organism into two parts is also the normal mode of reproduction in the animal world. Even the coming into existence of every human being seems to be bound up with the separation of a cell from the parent organism; and his existence as a separate psychical individual seems to result from the same process of physical division. And if one cell, when thus separated from the parent organism, can thus prove its possession of a psychical life by developing into a fully conscious organism, it is difficult to deny that all other cells have also their own psychical lives, even though they may be incapable of making it manifest to us by growing up into complex organisms when separated.
The second class of facts that seem to justify this conception of the consciousness of complex organisms are facts which have been studied and discussed widely in recent years under the head of mental dissociation or disintegration of personalities. Such disintegration seems to occur spontaneously as the essential feature of severe hysteria, and to be producible artificially and temporarily in some subjects, when they are thrown into deep hypnosis. In certain of these cases the behaviour of the human being seems to imply that it is the expression of two separate psychical individuals, formed by the splitting of the stream of consciousness and of mental activity of the individual into two streams. The two streams may be of co-ordinate complexity; but more frequently one of them seems to be a mere trickle diverted from the main stream of personal consciousness. Since it is, from the nature of the case, always impossible to obtain any direct and certain proof that any behaviour other than one’s own is the expression of conscious mental processes, it is not possible to prove that such division or disintegration of the personal consciousness actually takes place. But the facts appear to many of the psychologists who have studied them most carefully[20] to demand this interpretation; and this psychical disintegration seems to be accompanied by a functional dissociation of the nervous system into two or more systems each of which functions independently of the others,—that is to say, a division of the nervous system comparable with the division of the nervous system of the worm by the stroke of the knife which seems to split the psychical individual into two.