Page:The Modern Review (July-December 1925).pdf/756

728 hance the greatness of both. If I adore the Poet as he knows I do in spite of difference between us, I am not likely to disparage the greatness of the man who made the great reform movement of Bengal possible and of which the Poet is one of the finest of fruits,—Young India, Nov. 5, 1925.

' Hold Upon the People.” We print below some extracts from M. Gustave Le Bon’s standard work, "The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind," to facilitate the formation of correct comparative estimates of the value of the “hold upon the people” of different historical characters.

cultural work in India. At such a time it may not be futile to bring to mindf what Prof. Frederick Soddy, F. R. S., wrote in Nature for February 26, 1920. Said lie :— “The proposals to centralise under the control of a few official departmental heads the body of actual scientific investigators in India, thus creating a few highly paid administrative posts for senior men and effectually killing all initiative, enthusiasm, and liberty of action on the part of those actually carrying on the investigations, is perfectly in accord ■with what has happened in this country since, in an evil day, the Government assumed the control of scientific and industrial research. It is a proposal that appeals, naturally, to the official without knowledge of the way in which scientific discover­ ies originate, and anxious to secure a body of cheap and docile labour, even though it be mediocre in calibre, and to those few wTho hope to secure for themselves these senior lucrative administrative posts. To genuine investigators such posts, how­ ever highly paid, would be unattractive, and under such a system there seems every inducement for men of originality and scientific ability to give the service a wide berth.”

“Ideas being only accessible to crowds after having assumed a very simple shape must often undergo the most thoroughgoing transformation to become popular. It is especially when we are dealing with somewhat lofty philosophic or scienti­ fic ideas that we see how far-reaching are the modifications they require in order to lower them to the level of the intelligence of crowds. These modifications are dependent on the nature of the crowds, or of the race to which the crowds belong. But their tendency is always belittling and in the Professor Formichi at Santiuiketan direction of simplification-•• However great or true an idea may have been to begin with, it is deprived Professor Formichi of the University of of almost all that which conslituted its elevation Rome, of w'hom a short appreciation and greatness by the mere fact that it has come within the intellectual range of crowds and exerts an influence upon them.”—Pp. 70—71. “Even when an idea has undergone the trans­ formations which render it accessible to crowds, it only exerts influence when by various processes, which we shall examine elsewhere, it has entered the domain of the unconscious, when indeed it has become a sentiment, for which much time is required.”—P. 71. “A long time is necessary for ideas to establish themselves in the minds of crowds-- For this reason crowds, as far as ideas are concerned, are always several generations behind learned men and philosophers.” Pp. 72-73. “The ease with which certain opinions obtain general acceptance results most especially from the impossibility experienced by the majority of men of forming an opinion peculiar to themselves and based on reasoning of their own.” P. 75. “At everv period there exists a small number of individualities which react upon the remainder and are imitated by the unconscious mass. It is needful, however, that those individualities should not be in too pronounced disagreement with received ideas. Were they so, to imitate them would be too difficult and their influence would be nil. For this very reason, men who are too superior to their epoch are generally without influence upon it.” Pp. 144-5,

Organisation of Scientific Work. The appointment of a “farmer” Viceroy to succeed Lord Reading gives rise to the fear that he would import docile agricultural “experts” from England to “organise” agri-

Signor Mussolini in his Orders, Religious and Royal.