Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/365

Rh population, therefore, everything of a collective nature will be, not simply mediocre, but positively crude, because only in the simplest mental life is it possible to find a plane that can include everybody.

From their study of crowds Sighele, Tarde, and Le Bon conclude that, contrary to Mr. Spencer's hypothesis, the group-unit does not accurately reflect the characteristics of its members. The whole is not the algebraic sum of its parts. It is not a resultant of its units, obeying the law of the parallelogram of forces, but is a chemical combination possessing properties different from those of its elements. For this reason crowds are more alike than are their members. A mob of philosophers and a mob of hoodlums will think and behave in about the same way. The reason is that in the crowd men lose their acquired individualities and revert to their instincts. Renouncing their higher selves built up by reflection and education, they meet on that substratum of unconscious life which is common to all of them. Tarde points out that the character of a homogeneous crowd is that of its members, only intensified, but a heterogeneous crowd gives us, not a product, but a combination, of individual qualities. He also insists—and this is the key to the mystery—that there are various modes of synthesis, and that with the same membership these may yield very different results.

It is the writer's intention to pass now in review the chief types of association, to show to what extent and why the properties of the resulting group-units cannot be explained on Mr. Spencer's principle, and to formulate such additional principles as shall be necessary to express the true relation between the totality and its component individuals.

The current account of what takes place in the crowd is exceedingly defective, and the thing is in need of a fresh analysis. The discovery that people are suggestible, and that they are more than ordinarily suggestible when assembled, does not of itself explain the behavior of crowds nor refute Mr. Spencer's principle of average. It leaves us where we were. It is true that the more plastic the minds of men, the more