Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/559

Rh divinities of the subterranean temples of India—which appear to us invested with it.

Prestige is a kind of domination exercised over our minds which paralyzes all our critical faculties and fills our hearts with astonishment and respect. The feeling provoked by it is, like all our feelings, inexplicable, but it is probably of similar order to the fascination experienced by a magnetized subject. It is the strongest moving spring of all domination. The gods, kings, and women would never have reigned without it. Many factors enter into its genesis, of which one of the most important is always success. Every man who succeeds, every idea which prevails, cease by that fact to be disputed; and when success ceases, prestige vanishes with it. The hero applauded by the multitude in the evening is spat upon in the morning if his fortune has failed him; and the reaction is quicker in proportion as the prestige has been more brilliant. Prestige likewise tends to disappear under the light of discussion. One must hold the multitude at a distance to keep their respect.

The details of the psychology of prestige may be studied by setting them at the end of a series that descends from the founders of religions and empires to the particular person who is trying to astonish his neighbors with a new coat or a decoration. Between the extreme terms of such a series we should place all the forms of prestige in the various elements of a civilization in the sciences, arts, literature, etc.—when we shall see that it constitutes the fundamental element of persuasion. Whether consciously or not, the being, the idea, or the thing possessing prestige is imitated at once, and imposes on a whole generation certain ways of thinking and of expressing thought. The four fifths of modern painters who reproduce the faded colors and stiff attitudes of the primitive school hardly suspect that they are imitators. They believe they are sincere; yet if an eminent master had not revived this form of art, they would still have seen in it only the childish side. Those who, at the instance of another illustrious master, flood their canvases with violet shades, do not see any more violet in Nature than was seen fifty years ago, but they have been infected with the personal and special impression of a painter who, in spite of this eccentricity, was able to gain great prestige. Similar examples might be found in all the elements of civilization.

Thus, through repetition, contagion, and prestige, men of each age come to possess a fund of ideas of an average sort which render them like one another, and to such a point that when centuries have accumulated over them, we recognize, by their artistic, scientific, philosophical, and literary productions, the age in which they lived. It is true that we can not say that they absolutely copied one another, but that they had in common