Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/403

Rh the criminal mood that chiefly marks off the human crowd from the animal crowd.

More than any other animal, man is restrained by a morality founded not on impulse but on discipline. Animal morality is mainly the prompting of fellow-feeling. But by the long pressure of an artificial environment man is brought to submit himself to the constant sway of a moral code often quite alien to his impulses. Remove the fear of consequences by the anonymity of the crowd, take away the sense of personal responsibility by the participation of numbers, and people will step by step descend into depths of evil-doing and violence that measure how far their prevailing inclinations lie below the moral standard which social pressure has forced upon them. Animals, because they have been less moralized than men by education, rarely show any such collective demoralization.

A one-mindedness, therefore, the result not of reasoning or discussion or coming together of the like-minded, but of imitation, is the mark of the true mob. We think of the mob as excited simply because it is under stress of excitement that men become highly imitative. Fickleness and instability characterize it simply because mood changes promptly with every change in the nature of the suggestion. It is irrational because dominated not by the remembered teachings of experience but by the fleeting impressions of the moment. It is cowardly because its members, actuated not by stern purpose or set resolve but by mere suggestion, scatter in craven flight the moment the charm is broken. It is transitory because the orgy of excitement leads to fatigue and lessened power of response to stimuli from without. In a few hours the hyperæsthesia wears away, physical wants and sensations turn the attention inward, the psychic bond is broken, and the crowd disperses and goes home. A mob, then, defined for purposes of social psychology, is a crowd of people showing a unanimity due to mental contagion. Other traits of the mob of which much is made such—as ferocity, shamelessness, criminality, courage, intolerance, etc.—need not flow from suggestion at all. More often, as I have pointed out, they are the effect of the sense of numbers.

Analyzing the mob as thus defined, we find at the base of it that mental quality termed suggestibility which comes to light in gregarious animals, children, certain lunatics, hysterical patients, and hypnotized subjects. It dominates childhood, but fades as character sets and the will hardens. In adult life it is so over-borne by habit and reason as to be dominant only under abnormal conditions such as disease, fascination, or excitement.

Why, now, should this quality be heightened when one is in the midst of a crowd?