Page:The Source and Aim of Human Progress.djvu/26

22 social spirit of aggregate humanity. If there is truth in Aristotle's dictum that man is a social or rather a gregarious animal, or in that of Tarde's and others that man is an imitative animal, there is a deeper truth in the more fundamental view, which really includes all others, that man is by nature, or by his subconscious nature, a suggestible animal.

Man's subconsciousness, with its conditions and laws of normal and abnormal suggestibility, works on a large scale in the social evolution of the human race. In the course of human development and the incessant building of new social structures with their corresponding functions we find the activities of the upper, controlling, regulating, ordering, critical consciousness, rationalizing the formative activities of the subconscious with its characteristic reflex, instinctive, automatic, suggestible consciousness. The rational progress of human societies depends on the interaction and synthesis of the upper and lower consciousness. When, however, the upper, critical consciousness is kept in abeyance, or is dissociated from the lower self, society becomes subject to all forms of social diseases, mental epidemics, mob-actions, riots, horde-attacks, blind slaughters, massacres, pogroms, revolts, mass upheavals, mass movements on a great scale, such as are manifested in migrations of tribes and nations, or in local, national, and world-wars. The very weakening of the controlling social consciousness causes the social mind to become predisposed to overaction of the social subconsciousness with its abnormal suggestibility and consequent social, psychic diseases and mental epidemics of all sorts and description. For a clear understanding of Social Psychology and Social Pathology one should keep in mind the following laws formulated in my "Psychology of Suggestion":

Social subconsciousness is the vehicle of suggestibility and more specially of abnormal suggestibility. Suggestibility varies as the amount of disaggregation of social consciousness and inversely as the unification or synthesis of social consciousness. Social, impulsive, reflex action is in inverse relation to the synthesis of the upper consciousness and the reflex subconscious. While the social aggregate grows in an arithmetical progression, the emotional excitement of the aggregate grows in a geometrical progression; or the emotional energy rises as the powers of the mass, the mass varying as the logarithm of its energy. The greater the uniformity of the constituent units of social mass, the greater the mass-energy, and the more powerful are