544 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



violent revolutions sometimes both are required to free peoples 

 from the yoke of a dominant idea. 



Ideas are propagated in the minds of the multitude chiefly- 

 through affirmation, repetition, prestige, contagion, and faith. 

 Reason does not conie within the enumeration, its influence in the 

 matter being substantially null. 



Affirmation, pure and simple, without reasoning and without 

 proof, is one of the surest means of planting an idea in the popu- 

 lar mind. The more concise it is, the more free from every ap- 

 pearance of proofs and demonstration, the more authority it has. 

 The religious books and the codes of all ages have always pro- 

 ceeded by simple affirmation. Statesmen called upon to defend 

 any political cause and manufacturers advertising their goods 

 know what it is worth. Yet it has no real influence, except it is 

 constantly repeated, and, so far as possible, in the same terms. 

 Napoleon said that repetition was the only serious figure in 

 rhetoric. By repetition an affirmation is incrusted in the minds 

 of hearers till they at last accept it as a demonstrated truth. 

 What is called the current of opinion is formed, and then the 

 potent mechanism of contagion comes in. Ideas that have reached 

 a certain stage, in fact, possess a contagious power as intense as 

 that of microbes. Not fear and courage only are contagious ; ideas 

 are, too, on condition that they are repeated often enough. 



When the mechanism of contagion has begun to work, the 

 idea enters upon the phase that leads to success. Opinion, which 

 repelled it at first, ends by tolerating and then accepting it. The 

 idea henceforward gains a penetrating and subtle force which 

 sends it onward, while at the same time creating a sort of special 

 atmosphere, a general way of thinking. Like the fine road dust 

 which penetrates everywhere, the idea becomes general, and in- 

 sinuates itself into all the conceptions and all the productions of 

 an epoch. It then forms a part of that compact stock of heredi- 

 tary commonplaces, of ready-made judgments, which are regis- 

 tered in books and imposed upon us by education. The final 

 factor that gives the idea thus developed and spread its immense 

 power is that mysterious force it acquires called prestige. Every- 

 thing that rules in the world, whether of ideas or men, imposes 

 itself principally through the irresistible force expressed by this 

 word. It is a term which, while we comprehend the full meaning 

 of it, is applied in too various fashions to be easily defined. Pres- 

 tige comports with such feelings as admiration or fear, and is 

 sometimes even based upon them, but it can easily exist without 

 them. There are dead persons, and consequently beings we need 

 not fear, like Alexander, Csesar, Buddha, and Mohammed, who 

 possess the highest degree of prestige ; and there are other beings 

 or fictions which we do not admire at all like the monstrous 



