A Mystery of Crowds 207 



the direction of least resistance. You have only 

 to watch any crowded street for half an hour to 

 be convinced of this. But the law is not easily 

 found or formulated: there are puzzles in the 

 phenomenon. 



If you study the crowd-movement closely, you 

 will perceive that those encounters in which one 

 person yields to make way for the other are 

 much less common than those in which both 

 parties give way. But a little reflection will con- 

 vince you that, even in cases of mutual yielding, 

 one person must of necessity yield sooner than 

 the other, though the difference in time of 

 the impulse-manifestation should be as it often 

 is altogether inappreciable. For the sum of 

 character, physical and psychical, cannot be pre- 

 cisely the same in two human beings. No two 

 persons can have exactly equal faculties of per- 

 ception and will, nor exactly similar qualities of 

 that experience which expresses itself in mental 

 and physical activities. And therefore in every 

 case of apparent mutual yielding, the yielding 

 must really be successive, not simultaneous. 

 Now although what we might here call the 

 " personal equation " proves that in every case of 



