THE WORK OF IDEAS IN HUMAN EVOLUTION. 541 

 THE WORK OF IDEAS EST HUMAN EVOLUTION. 



By GUSTAVE LE BON. 



THE study of the different civilizations that have succeeded 

 one another since the origin of the world proves that they 

 have always been guided in their development by a very small 

 number of fundamental ideas. If the history of peoples should 

 be reduced to the story of their ideas, it would not be very long. 

 We have shown in a previous essay that the evolution of a people 

 is chiefly derived from its mental constitution. We found then 

 that while the hereditary sentiments, the aggregation of which 

 constitutes character, have great fixedness, they can nevertheless 

 be transformed slowly under the influence of various factors. 

 Among the most operative of these factors are ideas. But, for 

 ideas to have influence, they must have progressively come down 

 from the mobile regions of the conscious into the stable and un- 

 conscious regions of the feelings, where our thoughts and the 

 motives of our actions are elaborated. They then form as it were 

 a part of the character and act effectively on the conduct. When 

 ideas have undergone this modification, and are fixed in the un- 

 conscious, their power over the mind is absolute. They cease 

 then to be influenced by the reason. The convert who is dom- 

 inated by a religious idea or by any belief is inaccessible to all 

 arguments, however intelligent we may suppose him to be. 



Governing ideas, formed as we have described, become estab- 

 lished and disestablished very slowly. If it were otherwise, civ- 

 ilizations would have no stability. But if ideas, once established, 

 could not be gradually transformed, and finally disappear, peo- 

 ples would achieve no progress. In consequence of the slowness 

 of our mental transformations, many human ages are required 

 for the triumph of a new idea, and several ages more for its elim- 

 ination. The most civilized peoples are those whose directing 

 ideas have been maintained at an even distance from variability 

 and fixity. History is strewn with the wrecks of those who have 

 not been able to maintain this equilibrium. 



The reader of history is struck with the paucity of the ideas 

 of peoples, the slowness with which they are modified, and the 

 power they exercise. Civilizations are the resultants of certain 

 ideas, and when these ideas are changed, the civilization is inevi- 

 tably transformed with them. The middle ages lived on two 

 fundamental ideas the religious and the feudal. From them 

 issued all the arts of the period, its literature, and its whole con- 

 ception of life. At the Renascence these ideas underwent a slight 

 modification : an ideal recovered from the ancient Greek and 

 Latin world imposed itself on Europe, and transformation of the 



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