Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/558

544 violent revolutions—sometimes both—are required to free peoples from the yoke of a dominant idea.

Ideas are propagated in the minds of the multitude chiefly through affirmation, repetition, prestige, contagion, and faith. Reason does not conie within the enumeration, its influence in the matter being substantially null.

Affirmation, pure and simple, without reasoning and without proof, is one of the surest means of planting an idea in the popular mind. The more concise it is, the more free from every appearance of proofs and demonstration, the more authority it has. The religious books and the codes of all ages have always proceeded by simple affirmation. Statesmen called upon to defend any political cause and manufacturers advertising their goods know what it is worth. Yet it has no real influence, except it is constantly repeated, and, so far as possible, in the same terms. Napoleon said that repetition was the only serious figure in rhetoric. By repetition an affirmation is incrusted in the minds of hearers till they at last accept it as a demonstrated truth. What is called the current of opinion is formed, and then the potent mechanism of contagion comes in. Ideas that have reached a certain stage, in fact, possess a contagious power as intense as that of microbes. Not fear and courage only are contagious; ideas are, too, on condition that they are repeated often enough.

When the mechanism of contagion has begun to work, the idea enters upon the phase that leads to success. Opinion, which repelled it at first, ends by tolerating and then accepting it. The idea henceforward gains a penetrating and subtle force which sends it onward, while at the same time creating a sort of special atmosphere, a general way of thinking. Like the fine road dust which penetrates everywhere, the idea becomes general, and insinuates itself into all the conceptions and all the productions of an epoch. It then forms a part of that compact stock of hereditary commonplaces, of ready-made judgments, which are registered in books and imposed upon us by education. The final factor that gives the idea thus developed and spread its immense power is that mysterious force it acquires called prestige. Everything that rules in the world, whether of ideas or men, imposes itself principally through the irresistible force expressed by this word. It is a term which, while we comprehend the full meaning of it, is applied in too various fashions to be easily defined. Prestige comports with such feelings as admiration or fear, and is sometimes even based upon them, but it can easily exist without them. There are dead persons, and consequently beings we need not fear, like Alexander, Cæsar, Buddha, and Mohammed, who possess the highest degree of prestige; and there are other beings or fictions which we do not admire at all—like the monstrous