Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/421

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of men, and are, therefore, altruistic in the most profound sense. This may be seen and experienced in the crowd, whose motive, accord- ing to the author, is always unselfish, however brutal and crude the means used.

The whole process of rational intelligence consists in bringing new experiences into this inner core of our natures and interpreting them from this standpoint. This is the process of perception and that of reason as well, if I understand the author. The conclusions he draws from this are, first, that the process of perception must be always and unavoidably a deformation of the object. For it is perceived only in so far as it is forced into the group of beliefs which we have inherited from the gray past. Still we are equally unable to recognize the deformation, since our process of perception is exhausted in this act. M. Le Bon fails to explain what psychologic process it is which enables him to run down this deformation of all our known world, nor why this capacity which places him, at least in this case, quite above the deform- ing phase of perception should not become the heritage of all. His second conclusion is that the conscious rational process is always egoistic over against the altruism of the unconscious impulses. The egoism seems to be involved in the attempt to make the universal impulse fit the immediate exigency of the individual. What the indi- vidual is vividly conscious of is that which he must do for his own preservation and success ; and yet he can grasp the situation only so far as he deforms it through interpretation by his altruistic impulses. If perception, then, consists in forcing all experiences upon the Pro- crustes bed of inherited impulses and beliefs, reason consists in the consciousness of the confiict between the experience in its individual demands and the altruistic impulses which still must dominate the con- duct. Now, it is just here I take it that the belief — the dogma — comes in. It is a mediation between the individualistic trend of fighting for one's own existence and advantage and the race impulses that beneath the threshold of conciousness irresistibly bear the individual upon the current in which he is but a ripple. Thus the belief in a New Jerusalem would be the compromise between the demand for satisfaction of individualistic passions and life itself, and the society and family impulse that calls for complete self-abnegation. In the New Jerusalem this dualism is to be overcome. Of course it must follow from this posi- tion that reason is always egoistic, that the conception of the new Jerusalem and kindred conceptions are always selfish. They are an attempt to put the individualistic, egoistic meaning into the altruistic