Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/124

110 an individual that they do not know personally, perhaps have never seen, who certainly will never reciprocate their sentiments, and when they let this affection surpass that which they feel for their own families or even for their own selves.

It is certainly one of the most deeply rooted characteristics of man's nature to prostrate himself in the dust before any one whom the multitude has acknowledged and set up as pre-eminent. I say: whom the multitude has set up as pre-eminent, not: who is by nature pre-eminent. Man as an animal, was born to live in herds, and has all the instincts of a gregarious animal. The principal one of these instincts is the habit of subordination to a leader. But he only is leader who is accepted and endured as such by the entire herd. Only a small group of enlightened minds are able to judge a personality by its inherent qualities; the majority of mankind judges it by the effects of those qualities on others. A cultivated intellect examines and tests the individual, uninfluenced by his relations with other men; the man of the masses asks only for the position and situation accorded him by the world, and experiences an irresistible compulsion to accept as his own the views of the majority. This explains why every famous man, even if he is only well-known, or sometimes merely notorious, meets with an attention and devotion which are refused to the man of real worth who, indifferent to the world and its popularity, has lived in contemplative solitude. It is not necessary to be a king, to be surrounded by a court. Notoriety alone is sufficient. Actors, conjurors and circus clowns have their courtiers. There are people who force their way to notorious criminals and boast of their intercourse with them. Acts of self-abasement are being daily performed before Victor Hugo, which surpass any