294 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



trate the same laws. One recalls the Woman's Crusade in 1873, the 

 result not of a rational plan but of imitation, and the Granger move- 

 ment and the Farmers' Alliance and the greenback craze and the silver 

 craze and many others. 



Since Aristotle we have been told that man is a social animal and 

 that to study him as he really is we must not isolate him from society. 

 The evident truth of this may lead us to forget that it is but a half 

 truth and the uncritical acceptance of it will lead us wholly astray in our 

 sociological study. The inference which we seem compelled to draw 

 from studies in social psychology is that social man is, in his ethical 

 and intellectual development, many stages behind the individual man. 

 The progress of civilization is a slow, painful, upward climbing, in 

 which individuals are the thinkers, the planners, the promoters and the 

 leaders. The mind of society, on the other hand, using the phrase 

 in the sense defined, is an imitative, unrefleetive, half-hypnotic, half- 

 barbaric mind, always acting as a drag upon the upward and forward 

 movement, and, in times of crazes, epidemics and social cataclysms, 

 gaining temporary dominance and causing disastrous relapses to a lower 

 plane of civilization. 



