546 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



modes of feeling and thinking conducive to productions strongly- 

 affiliated with, one another. We have reason to felicitate our- 

 selves that this is so, for it is precisely this interweaving of iden- 

 tical traditions, ideas, feelings, creeds, and ways of thinkiDg that 

 constitutes the spirit of a people. That spirit is stable in propor- 

 tion as the texture is solid. 



So far as we have as yet studied the imposition of the idea, we 

 have found it existing only in the upper ranks of the nation. For 

 it to descend to the lowest strata and be spread among them in 

 such a way as really to influence the mob, the intervention is re- 

 quired of that sort of believers in it whose faith is so intense as to 

 impel them to propagate it apostles. Men of this kind are usu- 

 ally converts so fascinated by the new idea that everything else 

 vanishes from their thoughts. They are recruited chiefly from 

 among those nervous, excitable persons who live on the borders 

 of madness. However absurd may be the idea they defend and 

 the end they are pursuing, all reasoning is blunt against their 

 conviction. Despite and persecutions do not touch them, but only 

 excite them all the more. They sacrifice personal interest and 

 family, and so annul the instinct of self-preservation as to seek 

 martyrdom as their only recompense. The intensity of their zeal 

 gives their words a great suggestive force. The multitude is 

 always ready to listen to any strong-willed man who may impose 

 himself upon it. Men in a throng lose all their will, and turn in- 

 stinctively to one who has any. An assembly of men is capable 

 of acting only when it has a leader at its head. 



The peoples have never had any lack of such leaders ; but it is 

 not necessary that they should all be actuated by the strong con- 

 victions that make apostles. They are more frequently subtle 

 rhetoricians seeking personal interests alone, and trying to per- 

 suade by flattering base instincts. The influence they thus exert 

 is usually very ephemeral. The great fanatics who have raised 

 the spirits of mobs Peter the Hermit, Luther, and Savanarola 

 did not exercise their peculiar fascination till they had them- 

 selves been fascinated by some belief. They could then create in 

 souls that formidable power called faith, a still very mysterious 

 force of which psychology afforded no explanation till it turned 

 its investigations upon hypnotic phenomena, studied the uncon- 

 scious transformation and combination of ideas into images and 

 sensations, the doubling of the self, the coexistence of several per- 

 sonalities in the same individual, dying sensations, etc. Persons 

 possessed by their faith may be compared to hypnotic subjects. 

 They are, as it were, absolute slaves of their dream. 



Whatever may be the real nature of faith, its power can not 

 be contested. There is profound reason for the gospel affirmation 

 that it can move mountains. The great events of history have 



