Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/560

546 modes of feeling and thinking conducive to productions strongly affiliated with, one another. We have reason to felicitate ourselves that this is so, for it is precisely this interweaving of identical traditions, ideas, feelings, creeds, and ways of thinking that constitutes the spirit of a people. That spirit is stable in proportion as the texture is solid.

So far as we have as yet studied the imposition of the idea, we have found it existing only in the upper ranks of the nation. For it to descend to the lowest strata and be spread among them in such a way as really to influence the mob, the intervention is required of that sort of believers in it whose faith is so intense as to impel them to propagate it—apostles. Men of this kind are usually converts so fascinated by the new idea that everything else vanishes from their thoughts. They are recruited chiefly from among those nervous, excitable persons who live on the borders of madness. However absurd may be the idea they defend and the end they are pursuing, all reasoning is blunt against their conviction. Despite and persecutions do not touch them, but only excite them all the more. They sacrifice personal interest and family, and so annul the instinct of self-preservation as to seek martyrdom as their only recompense. The intensity of their zeal gives their words a great suggestive force. The multitude is always ready to listen to any strong-willed man who may impose himself upon it. Men in a throng lose all their will, and turn instinctively to one who has any. An assembly of men is capable of acting only when it has a leader at its head.

The peoples have never had any lack of such leaders; but it is not necessary that they should all be actuated by the strong convictions that make apostles. They are more frequently subtle rhetoricians seeking personal interests alone, and trying to persuade by flattering base instincts. The influence they thus exert is usually very ephemeral. The great fanatics who have raised the spirits of mobs—Peter the Hermit, Luther, and Savanarola—did not exercise their peculiar fascination till they had themselves been fascinated by some belief. They could then create in souls that formidable power called faith, a still very mysterious force of which psychology afforded no explanation till it turned its investigations upon hypnotic phenomena, studied the unconscious transformation and combination of ideas into images and sensations, the doubling of the self, the coexistence of several personalities in the same individual, dying sensations, etc. Persons possessed by their faith may be compared to hypnotic subjects. They are, as it were, absolute slaves of their dream.

Whatever may be the real nature of faith, its power can not be contested. There is profound reason for the gospel affirmation that it can move mountains. The great events of history have