458 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the silence by singing a measure or two of an air, and then stop. 

 Instantly the strain would be taken up and carried on by another 

 student working in another part of the room. The person who 

 continued the song, when questioned on the subject, did not seem 

 aware that he had followed any definite impulse. Is there not in 

 this often unconscious suggestion something that casts a light on 

 those ideas that come up, one knows not why or how, in mobs 

 that come, no one knows whence, and spread with dizzy rapidity ? 

 An audience in a theater suggests similar remarks. While it 

 is the most capricious of publics, it is also the most sheeplike, 

 and it is as hard to foresee its caprices as to reform its habits. 

 Its ways of expressing approbation or blame are usually the same 

 in the same country; then it must always be shown what it is 

 accustomed to see on the stage, no matter how artificial it may 

 be ; and it is not safe to show it what it is not accustomed to see 

 there. Still, it must be remembered that the theater audience is 

 a seated mob that is, only half a mob. The real mob that in 

 which electrification by contact reaches its highest point of ra- 

 pidity and energy is composed of people standing and, better 

 yet, in motion. Yet the most effective agents of mutual sugges- 

 tion, especially the sight, still exist among seated spectators ; and, 

 no doubt, if they did not see one another, if they were witnessing 

 the play as prisoners in cells hear mass in little grated boxes 

 whence it would be impossible to look around, each of them, in- 

 fluenced by the action of the piece and the actors, free from all 

 mixture with the action of the public, would be more fully con- 

 trolled by his own taste, and the applause or hissing would be 

 much less unanimous. It rarely happens at a theater, a banquet, 

 or any popular manifestation, that one even if he at heart dis- 

 approves the applause, the toasts, or the hurrahs dares to with- 

 hold his applause, or not to raise his glass, or to keep an obstinate 

 silence in the midst of enthusiastic cries. At Lourdes, in the pro- 

 cessional and praying throng of believers, there are skeptics who, 

 on the morrow, thinking over all they have done to-day the 

 crossing of their arms, the expressions of faith uttered by some 

 and repeated by all the others, and the prostrations will jest 

 about them. They will, nevertheless, not laugh or protest to-day, 

 but will themselves kiss the ground, or pretend to, and if they do 

 not actually hold their arms crossed, will make the gesture of it. 

 They are not afraid, for there is no force in these pious throngs : 

 but they do not wish to be scandalized. And what, at the bottom, 

 is this fear of scandal except the extraordinary importance at- 

 tributed by the most dissenting and most independent of men to 

 the collective blame of a public composed of individuals, for the 

 personal judgment of each one of whom he would not care a 

 whit ? This, however, is not always sufficient to explain the 



