Chapter V: Societal Selection (2)

+198. Poses, fads, and cant.+ When fashion seizes upon an idea or usage and elevates it to a feature of a society at a period, it is, as was said above, affected by those who cannot attain to the real type and who exaggerate its external forms. The humanism of the Renaissance produced an affectation of learning, dilettante interest in collecting manuscripts, and zeal for style which was genuine in scholars, but was an affectation of the followers. There was also an affectation of pagan philosophy and of alienation from Christianity. The euphuists in England in the sixteenth century, the _précieuses_ of Molière's time, the _illuminati_ of the eighteenth century, are instances of groups of people who took up a whim and exaggerated conduct of a certain type, practicing an affectation. There are poses which are practiced as a fashion for a time. Fads get currency. Dandyism, athleticism, pedantry of various kinds, reforms of various kinds, movements, causes, and questions are phenomena of fads around which groups cluster, formed of persons who have a common taste and sentiment. Poses go with them. Poses are also affected by those who select a type of character which is approved. The dandy has had a score of slang names within two centuries corresponding to varieties of the pose and dress which he affected. He has now given way to the athlete, who is quite a different type. The Byronic pose prevailed for a generation. Goethe's Werther inspired a pose. They would both now be ridiculed. Favorite heroes in novels have often set a pose. Carlyle inspired a literary pose ("hatred of shams," etc.). He and Ruskin set a certain cant afloat, for every fad and pose which pretends to be sober and earnest must have a cant. Zola, D'Annunzio, Wagner, Ibsen, Gorky, Tolstoi, Sudermann, are men who have operated suggestion on the public mind of our time. They get a response from a certain number who thus cluster into a self-selected union of sympathy and propagate the cult of a view of life. Gloom and savagery, passion and crime, luxury and lust, romance and adventure, adultery and divorce, self-indulgence and cynicism, the reality of foulness and decay, are so suggested as to become centers on which receptive minds will organize and congenial ones will combine in sympathy. It is the effect of a great and active literature of belles-lettres, which is practically current throughout the civilized world, to multiply these sects of sentimental philosophy, with the fads and poses which correspond, and to provide them with appropriate cant. The cant of the voluptuary, the cynical egoist, the friend of humanity, and all the rest is just as distinct as that of the religious sectarian. Each of the little groups operates its own selection, but each is small. They interfere with and neutralize each other, but a general drift may be imparted by them to the mores. Our age is optimistic by virtue of the economic opportunities, power, and prosperity which it enjoys. The writers above mentioned are all pessimistic. They do not affect the age except upon the surface, by entertaining it, but they disturb its moral philosophy, they confuse its standards and codes, and they corrupt its tastes. They set fashions in literature which the writers of the second class imitate. In general, they relax the inhibitions which have come down to us in our mores without giving by suggestion an independence of character which would replace the traditions by sound judgments. Their influence will be greater when it has been diluted so as to reach the great mass. It hardly can be worse than that of the literature which is now used by that class.

+199. Illustrations.+ In the later days of Greece the study of Homer became an affectation. Dio Chrysostom tells of a visit he made to a colony on the Borysthenes, in which nearly all could read the _Iliad_, and heard it more willingly than anything else.[411] The Athenians, especially the gilded youth, affected Spartan manners and ways. The dandies went about with uncut hair, unwashed hands, and they practiced fist-fights. They were as proud of torn ears as German students are of cuts on their faces.[412] The religious and social reforms of Augustus were a pose. They lacked sincerity and were adopted for a political purpose. Men took them up who did not conform their own conduct to them. Hence a "general social falsehood" was the result.[413] In the fourth and fifth centuries all the well-to-do classes spent their time in making imitations of the ancient literature and philosophy. They tried to imitate Seneca and Pliny, writing compositions and letters, and pursuing a mode of life which they supposed the men of the period of glory had lived.[414] The French of the fifteenth century had the greatest fear of ridicule; the Italians feared most that they might appear to be simpletons.[415] In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the "chevaliers transis" wore furs in summer and summer mantles in winter. They meant to prove that "love suffices for everything."[416] Old pictures of the sixteenth century show that it was considered modest to squint. A Spaniard thought that it showed friendship for any one to squint at him. It was also considered a sign of probity to have the lips primly closed and drawn.[417] The Italian _cicisbeo_ in the seventeenth century was a _cavalier servente_, who attended a married lady. Such men practiced extravagances and affectations, and are generally described as effeminate.[418]

+200. Heroes, scapegoats and butts, caricature.+ Fashion sets, for any group at any time, its pet likes and dislikes. The mass must have its heroes, but also its victims and scapegoats and the butts of its ridicule. Caricature is futile when it is destitute of point. The test of it lies in the popular response which shows whether it has touched the core of the thing or not. When it can do this it reveals the real truth about the thing better than a volume of argument could do it. Sometimes a popular conviction is produced by a single incident which is a very important societal fact. The voyage of the Oregon from the Pacific (1898) convinced the American people that they must cut a canal through the isthmus. Probably this conviction was a _non sequitur_, but argument cannot overcome it, and it will control action with all the financial and other consequences which must ensue. A satire, an epigram, or a caricature may suffice to produce such a conviction.

+201. Caricature.+ The mere rhetorical form may have the greatest importance. A caricature often stings national vanity. A state may be represented as afraid, as having "backed down," as having appeared ridiculous. Group vanity is often a stronger motive than personal vanity, and the desire to gratify it will prove stronger than any rational conviction.

+202. Relation of fads, etc., to mores.+ Thus the vanities, desires, prejudices, faiths, likes, and dislikes, which pervade a society, coerce dissenters and become stronger and stronger mass phenomena. They then affect interests. Then they wind strands of influence and control around individuals and demand sacrifices. In their combination they weave webs of action which constitute life and history. The selection which they exert, drawing in some and repelling others, produces results on the societal fabric of a later time. The consequences react on character, moral tone, life philosophy, ethical principles, and ruling sentiments. Thus they affect the mores, or even enter into them. The whole is handed on to the rising generation to be their outfit of knowledge, faith, and policy, and their rules of duty and well living.

+203. Ideals.+ An ideal is entirely unscientific. It is a phantasm which has little or no connection with fact. Ideals are very often formed in the effort to escape from the hard task of dealing with facts, which is the function of science and art. There is no process by which to reach an ideal. There are no tests by which to verify it. It is therefore impossible to frame a proposition about an ideal which can be proved or disproved. It follows that the use of ideals is to be strictly limited to proper cases, and that the attempt to use ideals in social discussion does not deserve serious consideration. An ideal differs from a model in that the model is deduced from reality but within the bounds of reality. It is subject to approved methods of attainment and realization. An ideal also differs from a standard, for a standard must be real.

+204. When ideals may be used.+ What are the proper cases for the use of ideals? Ideals can be useful when they are formed in the imagination of the person who is to realize them by his own exertions, for then the ideal and the programme of action are in the same consciousness, and therefore the defects of an ideal are reduced or removed. Ideals are useful (_a_) in homiletics, which are chiefly occupied with attempts at suggestion. In limited cases a preacher or teacher can suggest ideals which, if apprehended and adopted, become types toward which young persons may train themselves. Even then these cases merge in the next class. (_b_) Ideals are useful in self-education. The idea is then taken up from books or from admired persons by suggestion and imitation, or from autosuggestion, but generally from a combination of the two. An ideal from autosuggestion produces enthusiasm. The fantastic character of the ideal, if the person is young, is unimportant. His will is enlisted to work for it. He can constantly compare the ideal with his experience. The ideal is at last shorn down to reality and merges in sober plans of effort. (_c_) A far larger field for ideals is afforded by vanity. As vanity is itself a subjective affection, but one which can be awakened only in society, it uses the imagination to suppose cases, plan unlimited schemes, devise types of self-decoration and dreams of superiority, distinction, power, success, and glory. The creations are all phantasms. The ends are all ideals. These ideals may not be extravagant. Vanity generally creates them by raising to a higher pitch some treatment of the body or dress, some admired trait of character, some action which has won glory, or given pleasure and won applause. This whole field for ideals is largely influenced by suggestion from the current tastes and fashionable standards in the group, but autosuggestion is also very active in it. (_d_) Ideals also find a great field in marriage. In this case ideals of happiness have powerfully affected the institution at all its stages. Experience of marriage has been partly pleasant and partly the contrary. The experience has stimulated the reflection: How blessed it would be if only this or that unpleasant detail could be corrected! This has led to idealization or the imaginative conception of a modified institution. Our novels now sometimes aid in this idealization. Men loved their daughters with zealous and protective affection long before they loved their wives. The father's love reached out to follow his daughter into matrimony and to secure for her some stipulations which should free wedlock for her from pain or care which other wives had to endure. These stipulations were always guided by idealization. The rich and great were first able to realize the modifications. These then passed into fashion, custom, and the mores, and the institution was perfected and refined by them.

+205. Ideals of beauty.+ The educated ideals under the second and third of the above heads become mass phenomena under the influence of fashion, when they control many or all. Ideal types of beauty are adopted by a group. Uncivilized people adopt such types of bodily beauty (sec. 189). The origin of them is unknown. A Samoan mother presses her thumb on the nose of her baby to flatten it.[419] An Indian mother puts a board on the forehead of her baby to make it recede. Teeth are knocked out, or filed into prescribed shapes, or blackened. The skin is painted, cut into scars, or tattooed. Goblinism may have furnished the original motives for some deformations, but the natural physical features of the group which distinguish it from others, or the features produced by goblinistic usages, come to be the standard of beauty for the group. Those features are accentuated and exaggerated by the deformations which are practiced. The aim is at an ideal perfection of physical beauty. All fashion in dress has the same philosophy. In other cases, also, it seems that fashion is pursuing a fleeting and impossible ideal of perfect beauty, style, grace, dexterity, etc., which shall give distinction and superiority or impose subjection.

+206. The man-as-he-should-be.+ Group ideals may be types of character. In the Old Testament the ideal type is the "just man," who conformed to ritual standards at all points. A Moslem is a man who is "faithful" to Islam, which is self-surrender to the Omnipotent One.[420] The type of the perfect man-as-he-should-be in the Mahabharata is one who will give his all to a Brahmin. The god Siva, disguised as a Brahmin, came to a hero. He ordered the hero to kill his own son and serve his corpse for the Brahmin to eat. The hero obeyed at once. The Brahmin set the hero's buildings on fire, but the latter served the dish without heeding the fire. The Brahmin ordered him to eat of the dish. He prepared to obey, but was excused from this trial. He had triumphantly stood the test. There was nothing he would not do for a Brahmin.[421] The poem also contains a type of female perfection in person and character,--Savitri. [422] The Greeks had many standards of personal excellence and social worth which entered to some extent into their mores. The ideal types were noble and refined. They have affected the mores of the class educated in the "humanities" since the Renaissance. They have never been truly incorporated in the mores of any society. _Olbos_ was wealth, with grace, opulence, elegance, and generosity, and so wealth when not sordid or arrogant, the opposite of plutocratic. _Arete_ was capacity, capability, and practical efficiency,--executive ability. _Aidos_ was the opposite of "cheek." _Sophrosyne_ was continence, self-control. _Kalokagathie_ contained notions of economic, æsthetic, and moral good, fused into a single concept.[423] The _eleutheros_ was the gentleman endowed with all admirable qualities.[424] The Greeks proved that people could sink very low while talking very nobly. The ideals were in the literature, not in the mores. "Their predisposition, their will, and their fate formed a consistent whole, and their decline was a consequence of the social and political life which they lived."[425] In the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. the man-as-he-should-be was religious,--a hermit or a monk. In any case he was an ascetic. In Charlemagne's time the preferred type was changed. It became the warrior and knight, and led up to chivalry. A new poetry flourished to develop and propagate the new ideal. In mediæval society there were strongly defined ideals of the man-as-he-should-be. _Milte_ was generosity of heart and mind. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was the noble desire of the lord to share all he had with his retainers, which desire called out their devotion to him.[426] The minstrels meant by it lavishness of gifts to themselves. _Maze_ was the cardinal virtue. It meant observation of the limits in all actions and manifestations of feeling, the opposite of excess and extravagance.[427] The church taught admiration of arbitrary ideals of ecclesiastical virtues. The ideals were ascetic. They seem to have been derived from the fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, but they offer an example of borrowed and adopted ideals which were fully incorporated in the popular mores. The age accepted ascetic standards of goodness and character. The religious classes and the lay classes did not fall under the same standards of conduct and duty. It was the business of the former to live by the full standard. All classes, however, accepted the standards as valid, and the layman conformed to them at times, or as far as worldly life would permit. Elizabeth of Thuringia seems to be the ideal of the married woman, but her saintliness interfered with her other duties, and even her own time does not seem to have been sure in its judgment of her. That she was flogged is a fact which has many relations to her character and her age.[428] All admired men who practiced asceticism and self-discipline. The types of the age were knightliness and saintliness. They were both highly elaborated. The knightly type began to develop in the time of Charlemagne and ran through the crusades. It contained grotesque and absurd elements. The story of the crusades is a criticism upon it. The knight was a fantastic person, who might do isolated deeds of valor, but who could not make a plan, work persistently to a purpose, coöperate with others, or either enforce or submit to discipline. Both the knight and the saint were ideal types which exerted a controlling power of selection through centuries.

+207. The standard type of man.+ Is the ideal of the man-as-he-should-be to be found, for us, in the "common man," or in the highest product of our culture? That is a most vital question for any society. It includes the question whether the society has a discord in itself as to its own ideal of the type of men it wants to produce. In the upper strata of the masses, amongst the educated, industrious, sober-minded people of good incomes, there exists the best family life. The children live constantly with their parents, and the latter watch over the health, manners, and morals of the children unceasingly from birth to maturity. The same parents make great sacrifices for the education of their children, although the class, as a class, has means to secure what is necessary without hard sacrifice. The point is that they value education highly and get it. We also multiply educational institutions. We feel sure that all this is good work. The churches and all good literature constantly inculcate good manners and morals according to the standards in the present mores. Here is a set of objects to be prized and worked for in families, schools, self-education, literature, and art, which go to the production of a type of men as the highest product of our civilization. Then suddenly we are told that the common man is wise beyond all the philosophers. The man on the curbstone is the arbiter of our destinies, and the standard man. "Culture" is derided and sneered at. This latter view has great popularity. It brings up a serious question: whether we are spoiling our children by educating them. Are we spoiling them for political power? Are we putting them under disabilities for public influence? It is related of an English statesman, that when asked by an American mother whether she should send her son to Oxford, he replied: "Why send him to Oxford? Send him to Washington, where he will learn democracy. That is what he will need to know." Certainly it behooves us to know whether we are spoiling our sons by sending them to the universities, and whether we ought not rather to send them to Tammany Hall. Either on one side or the other there is a great mass of empty phrases and false but inflated rhetoric.

+208. Who does the thinking?+ The notion that "the group thinks" deserves to be put by the side of the great freaks of philosophy which have been put forth from age to age. Only the élite of any society, in any age, think, and the world's thinking is carried on by them by the transplanting of ideas from mind to mind, under the stress and strain of clashing argument and tugging debate. If the group thinks, then thought costs nothing, but in truth thought costs beyond everything else, for thousands search and talk while only one finds; when he finds something, a step is won and all begins over again. If this is so, it ought to be universally known and recognized. All the mores would then conform to it.

+209. The gentleman.+ In modern English-speaking society the "gentleman" is the name for the man-as-he-should-be. The type is not fixed and the definition is not established. It is a collective and social ideal. Gentlemen are a group in society who have selected a code and standard of conduct as most conducive to prosperous and pleasant social relations. Therefore manners are an essential element in the type. A gentleman is one who has been educated to conform to the type, and that he has the _cachet_ is indicated by his admission to the group. Novels develop and transmit the ideal; clubs are the tribunal of it. It is a floating notion which varies with the mores. The modern reader finds very few cases in Greek literature of what he can recognize as gentlemen. Orestes in the _Electra_ of Euripides opens the discussion of what makes the worth of a man, but after saying that it is not wealth or poverty, and not valor in war, he flinches the question and says that it is better to leave it untouched. The peasant, married to Electra, certainly acts the gentleman. He also says of Orestes and Pylades, that if they really are as noble as they seem, they will be as well satisfied with humble fare as with grand fare. A gentleman of a century ago would not be approved now. A gentleman of to-day in the society of a century ago would be thought to have rowdy manners. Artificial manners are not in the taste of our time; athletics are. The "gentleman" always tends to an arbitrary definition. It appears now that he must have some skill at sports and games. The selective force of the social type of the gentleman is obvious in our own society. The sentiment _noblesse oblige_ was once the name for the coercive force exerted on a noble by the code of his class. Now that fixed classes are gone and the gentleman is only defined by the usage and taste of an informal class, it is a term for the duties which go with social superiority of any kind, so far as those duties are prescribed and sanctioned by public opinion.

+210. Social standard set by taboos.+ It may be still more important to notice that the standard social type is defined by taboos with only social sanctions. The negative side of _noblesse oblige_ is more important than the positive. A gentleman is under more restraints than a non-gentleman. In the eighteenth century he patronized cockfights and prize fights, and he could get drunk, gamble, tell falsehoods, and deceive women without losing caste. He now finds that _noblesse oblige_ forbids all these things, and that it puts him under disabilities in politics and business.

A society exerts a positive selection on individuals by its definition of crimes and by its criminal jurisprudence. The taboos are turned into laws and are enforced by positive penalties.

+211. Crimes.+ The number and variety of crimes depends on the positive action of the state. What things are crimes in a state, therefore, indicates what the ruling authority desires to prevent. The motives have often been entirely selfish on the part of a king or a ruling caste, or they were dictated by a desire to further the vanity of such persons. By judicial precedent at Rome it was made a crime to beat a slave, or to undress near a statue of the emperor, or to carry a coin bearing his image into a latrine or a lupanar.[429] Xiphilin, in his epitome of the history of Dio Cassius, inserts a story that, in the reign of Domitian, a woman was executed for undressing near the statue of that emperor.[430] The notions in the mores of what ought to be prevented have been very variable and arbitrary. Juvenal denounces a consul who while in office drove his own chariot, although by night.[431] Seneca was shocked at the criminal luxury of putting snow in wine.[432] Pliny is equally shocked at the fashion of wearing gold rings.[433] Lecky, after citing these cases, refers to the denunciations uttered by the church fathers against women who wore false hair. Painting the face is an old fault of women, against which moral teachers of all ages have thundered. Very recently, amongst us, clergymen have denounced women for not wearing bonnets in church, because Paul said that she "dishonoreth her head, for that is even all one as if she were shaven."[434] These were not indeed cases of crimes, but of alleged vices or sins. In sumptuary laws we have cases of legislation which made fashions crimes. In the eighteenth century there was little legislation against brothels, drinking places, or gambling houses. We make it a crime to sell rum, but not to drink it. On the other hand, until recently commercial transactions and the lending of money for interest were so restricted in accordance with ethical and economic faiths that they were environed by crimes which are now obsolete. Heresy and sorcery were once very great crimes. Witchcraft and usury were abominable crimes.

+212. Criminal law.+ In the original administration of justice it appears that there was only one punishment for the violation of taboo, sin and crime being coincident: that was death. Then, in cases, banishment was substituted for death, although this was only a change in form, since a banished man could not exist alone. In either case the selection was of the simplest kind. The society extruded from itself one who violated its rules. This is the fundamental sense of all punishments, like execution, transportation, or imprisonment, which remove the culprit from the society, permanently or for a time. Other punishments contained originally a large element of vengeance, vengeance being a primary impulse of great force to satisfy those whom the crimes injured and to deter others from the same crime. The administration of justice, therefore, bore witness to the judgment of the society as to what conduct and character should be selected for preservation or caused to cease. In all modern states the power to make acts crimes has been abused, and the motive of punishment has been so lost that we wrangle as to what it is. The ruling coterie uses the power to make things crimes to serve its own interests. Protectionists make it criminal to import goods. Governments do the same to further their fiscal purposes. They also make it criminal to immigrate or emigrate, or to coin money, even of full weight and fineness, or to carry letters and parcels. In England it is made a crime to violate railroad regulations. In some cases regulations for barber shops are enforced by making violations crimes. Generally, sanitary rules are so enforced. In the latest case it has been made a crime to spit in public places. The criminal law expresses the mores of the time when they have reached very concrete and definite formulæ of prohibition. Perhaps the administration of it expresses the mores still more clearly. It is now recognized as true that frightful penalties do not exert a proportionately deterrent effect. Our mores do not permit us to inflict pain in order to compel men to confess, or to put them in solitary confinement in dark and loathsome dungeons, or to let our prisons become sinks of vice and misery or schools of crime. The selective effect of punishment is the one which we seem to aim at, although not very intelligently.

+213. Mass phenomena of fear and hope.+ Manias and delusions are mental phenomena, but they are social. They are diseases of the mind, but they are epidemic. They are contagious, not as cholera is contagious, but contact with others is essential to them. They are mass phenomena.[435] Some great hope (the good to be obtained by taking the heads of murdered men or from appeasing the gods by sacrificing one's children) or some great fear (drought, failure of food, purgatory), if common to the whole, makes them adopt any suggestion of a means to realize the hope or avert the feared calamity. Often there is no such quasi-rational reason for common action. Hysteria, especially amongst women and children, produces manias of falsehood, deceit (fasting women), trances, and witchcraft. In mediæval convents sometimes half the inmates were afflicted at the same time. Nervous depression and irritation produced physical acts of relief. One irritated another, and one surpassed another, until there was a catastrophe for the group.[436] Religious enthusiasm has produced innumerable manias and delusions. Mediæval Christianity, Mohammedanism, Persia, and modern Russia furnish cases. Martyrdom proves nothing with regard to the truth or value of a religion. All the sects have had martyrs. Martyrdom, even under torture, has been sought, under the influence of religious enthusiasm, not only by Christians[437] but by Donatists,[438] Manichæans, and other most abominated heretics. Even the Adamites produced martyrs who went joyously to death.[439] Quakers really provoked their own martyrdom in early New England.

+214. Manias, delusions.+ The phenomena of manias, popular delusions, group hallucinations, self-immolation, etc., show the possibilities of mental contagion in a group. They are responses to hope or fear which affect large numbers at the same time. They are often produced by public calamities, or other ills of life. Those who suffer feel themselves selected as victims, and they ask, Who has done this to us, and why? Often people who are not victims interpret a natural incident by egoistic reference. This is done not on account of the destruction wrought by an earthquake or a tornado, but from pure terror at what is not understood, e.g. an eclipse.[440] Pilgrimages and crusades were cases of mania and delusion. The element of delusion was in the notion of high merit which could be won in pursuing the crusades. Very often manias and delusions are pure products of fashion, as in the case of the children's crusades, when the children caught the infection of the crusades, but did not know what they were doing, or why, and rushed on their own destruction. Often manias are logical deductions from notions (especially religious notions) which have been suggested, as in the case of the flagellants. It is the ills of life which drive people to such deductions, and they bear witness to excessive nervous excitement. The mediæval dancing mania was more purely nervous. The demonism and demonology of the Middle Ages was a fertile source for such deductions, which went far to produce the witchcraft mania. The demonistic notions taught by the church furnished popular deductions, which the church took up and reduced to dogmatic form, and returned as such to the masses. Thus the notions of sorcery, heresy, and witchcraft were developed.

+215. Monstrous mass phenomena of mediæval society.+ There must have been a deep and strong anthropological reason for the development of monstrous social phenomena in mediæval society. The Latin world was disintegrated to its first elements between the sixth century and the tenth. Such a dissolution of society abolished the inherited mores with all their restraints and inhibitions, and left society to the control of fierce barbaric, that is physical, forces. At the same period the Latin world absorbed hordes of barbarians who were still on a low nomadic warrior stage of civilization, and who adopted the ruins of Roman culture without assimilating them. The Christian church contributed crass superstitions about the other world and the relations of this world to it. The product was the Merovingian and Carlovingian history. Passion, sensuality, ferocity, superstitious ignorance, and fear characterized the age. It is supposed that western Europe was overpopulated and that the crusades operated a beneficial reduction of numbers.[441] These facts may account for the gigantic mass phenomena in the early Middle Ages. Every sentiment was extravagant. Men were under some mighty gregarious instinct which drove them to act in masses, and they passed from one great passion or enthusiastic impulse to another at very short intervals. The passions of hatred and revenge were manifested, upon occasion, to the extremity of fiendishness. Nothing which the mind could conceive of seemed to be renounced as excessive (Clement V, John XXII). Gregory IX pursued the heretics and the emperor with an absorption of his whole being and a rancor which we cannot understand. Poverty was elevated into a noble virtue and a transcendent merit.[442] This was the height of ascetic absurdity, since poverty is only want, and the next step would be a cult of suicide. The mendicant orders fought each other malignantly. Every difference of opinion made a war of extermination. Civil contests were carried on with extravagant ferocity as to the means used and as to the exultation of success or the penalty of failure. What was lacking was discipline. There was no authority or doctrine which could set limits to private passion. Life was held cheap. The gallows and the pit were in use all the time. The most marked product of invention was instruments of torture. Men and women were burned to death for frivolous reasons. Punishments taught people to gloat over suffering. Torture was inflicted as idly as we take testimony. With all this went deep faith in the efficacy of ritual and great other-worldliness, that is, immediate apprehension of the other world in this one. All the mores were adjusted to these features of faith and practice. It all proceeded out of the masses of the people. The church was borne along like a chip on the tide. The church hung back from the crusades until the depth of the popular interest had been tested. Then the crusades were declared to be the "will of God." This gave their own idea back again to the masses with the approval of the societal authority. The masses insisted on having acts and apparatus provided by which to satisfy their application of dogma. The power of the keys and the treasure of salvation were provided accordingly. The souls of the people were torn by the antagonism between the wild passions of the age and the ecclesiastical restraints on conduct. They feared the wrath of God and hell to come. The ritual and sacramental system furnished a remedy. The flagellants were a phenomenon of seething, popular passion, outside of the church and unapproved by its authority. Antony of Padua ([Symbol: cross] 1231) started the movement by his sermons on repentance and the wrath of God. Processions of weeping, praying, self-scourging, and half-naked penitents appeared in the streets of all the towns of Christendom. "Nearly all enemies made friends. Usurers and robbers made haste to restore ill-gotten goods, and other vicious men confessed and renounced vanity. Prisons were opened. Prisoners were released. Exiles were allowed to return. Men and women accomplished works of pity and holiness, as if they feared the all-powerful God would consume them with fire from heaven."[443] This movement was altogether popular. It broke out again in 1349, in connection with the Black Death. Flagellation for thirty-three and a half days was held to purge from all sin. This was heresy and the flagellants were persecuted. The theory was a purely popular application by the masses of the church doctrine of penance, outside of the church system. It reappeared from time to time. The dancing mania began at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1373 and lasted for several years.[444] It was an outlet for high nervous tension under which the population was suffering on account of great calamities, social distress, and superstitious interpretations of the same. In short, the period was one of monstrous phenomena, extravagant passions, and unreasonable acts.

+216. Gregariousness of the Middle Ages.+ "To estimate fully the force of these popular ebullitions in the Middle Ages, we must bear in mind the susceptibility of the people to contagious emotions and enthusiasms of which we know little in our colder day. A trifle might start a movement which the wisest could not explain nor the most powerful restrain. It was during the preaching of this crusade [of 1208, against the Albigenses] that villages and towns in Germany were filled with women who, unable to expend their religious ardor in taking the cross, stripped themselves naked and ran silently through the roads and streets. Still more symptomatic of the diseased spirituality of the time was the crusade of the children, which desolated thousands of homes. From vast districts of territory, incited apparently by a simultaneous and spontaneous impulse, crowds of children set forth, without leaders or guides, in search of the Holy Land; and their only answer, when questioned as to their object, was that they were going to Jerusalem. Vainly did parents lock their children up; they would break loose and disappear; and the few who eventually found their way home again could give no reason for the overmastering longing which had carried them away. Nor must we lose sight of other and less creditable springs of action which brought to all crusades the vile, who came for license and spoil, and the base, who sought the immunity conferred by the quality of crusader."[445] "To comprehend fully the magnitude and influence of these movements we must bear in mind the impressionable character of the populations and their readiness to yield to contagious emotion. When we are told that the Franciscan Berthold of Ratisbon frequently preached to crowds of sixty thousand souls, we realize what power was lodged in the hands of those who could reach masses so easily swayed and so full of blind yearnings to escape from the ignoble life to which they were condemned. How the slumbering souls were awakened is shown by the successive waves of excitement which swept over one portion of Europe after another about the middle of the thirteenth century. The dumb, untutored minds began to ask whether an existence of hopeless and brutal misery was all that was to be realized from the promises of the gospel. The church had made no real effort at internal reform; it was still grasping, covetous, licentious, and a strange desire for something--they knew not exactly what--began to take possession of men's hearts and spread like an epidemic from village to village and from land to land."[446]

What we see here is the power of mere gregariousness, the impulse of acting in a crowd, without knowledge or purpose. The mere sense of being in the current movement, or "in the fashion," is a pleasure. When the movement is great in its compass and the numbers involved there is an exhilaration about being in it. If the notions by which it is enthused are great, or holy and noble, in form and pretense, even if not really so, it may become demonic, and it may accomplish incredible things. We had a grand illustration of this at the outbreak of the Civil War, in 1861, both in the North and South. Dissent on both sides was overwhelmed and all were swept away into the prevailing current.

+217. The mendicant orders.+ The mendicant orders responded to the deepest popular faiths and highest standards of the thirteenth century. Francis of Assisi ([Symbol: cross] 1226) took up the notion that it was wrong to own property, or at least meritorious to renounce it, and affirmed that Christ and his apostles repudiated all property and lived on alms. The Timotheists of the fifth century had held this notion, but were rated as heretics.[447] Poverty, for Francis, did not mean a little property, but absolute rejection of all property. This was necessarily only a pose. He had to use other men's property, the use being right. Therefore he could only renounce productive labor. The popular religious temper of the time revered simplicity, humility, self-denial, and renunciation of "the world" as especially evangelical virtues. They were thought to be summed up in poverty. That Francis was a hero of this type of religion has been universally admitted. The virtues were just the ones which the Roman court did not show. Jacques de Vitry, an enthusiastic preacher against the Albigenses, went through Italy to Palestine in 1216. He left a journal[448] in which he recorded his sadness at observing that, at the papal court, all were busy with secular affairs, kings and kingdoms, quarrels and lawsuits, so that it was almost impossible to speak about spiritual matters. He greatly admired the Franciscans, who were trying to renew primitive Christianity and save souls, thus shaming the prelates, who were "dogs who do not bark." The Count of Chiusi gave to Francis the mountain La Verna for retirement and meditation. Armed men were necessary to take possession of it against the beasts and robbers who had possession of it.[449] Carmichael believes that Francis received the stigmata, which he describes in detail. The Francis of tradition is a fabulous person, created out of the pet ideas of his time.[450] The historical person was a visionary. Dominic was a zealot. He wanted to convert all heretics by preaching or other means.

+218. Other mendicant orders.+ De Vitry found Humiliati in
Lombardy, who were living by ideas like those of Francis. The
Augustinian hermits were founded in 1256, the Carmelites in 1245,
and the Servites, or Servants of Mary, about 1275.[451] These
were all mendicants, and they bear witness to the character of
the notions of the time about poverty. It was a mania, and is
fully expressed in the _Romaunt de la Rose_. Perhaps Francis did
not mean to "found an order." He wanted to live in a certain way
with a few friends. The spontaneous and very rapid spread of his
order proves that it was concordant with a great popular taste.
Francis was a dreamer and enthusiast, not a politician or
organizer at all. In his testament he says: "After the Lord had
given me care of the brethren, no one showed me what I ought to
do, but the Highest Himself revealed to me that I ought to live
according to the mode of the Holy Gospel." He was not thwarted
and subjugated by the curia during his life, but his ideals were
not maintained by the men in the order. The man who was later
pope Gregory IX aided him to organize the order and to make it
practically efficient, that is, to take the enthusiasm out of it
and make it practical.[452] The popes of the thirteenth century
approved. There was in the principles of the order an antagonism
to the church as it was, and also an antagonism to common sense.
The church authorities wanted to bring the order into practical
use, and suspected it of the heresies of Florus. It therefore
split into "conventuals," who conformed to the methods of
conventual life, and the "spirituals," who clung to the doctrines
and rules of the founder. The latter became "observantines"
(1368) and "recollects" (1487).[453] The two branches hated each
other and fought on all occasions. In 1275 the spirituals were
treated as heretics, imprisoned in chains, and forbidden the
sacrament.[454] John XXII condemned their doctrine as heretical.
This put the observantines in the same position as other
heretical sects. They must be rebels and heretics or give up
ideas which seemed to them the sum of all truth and wisdom.
Generally they clung to their ideas like the heretics.[455] One
of their heroes was Bernard Delicieux ([Symbol: cross] 1320), who
is celebrated as the only man who ever dared to resist the
Inquisition. He was tortured twice, and condemned to imprisonment
in chains on bread and water. He lived only a few months under
this punishment.[456] Out of admiration immense sums were given
to the mendicants, and they became notorious for avarice and
worldly self-seeking.[457] As early as 1257 Bonaventura, the head
of the order, reproached them with these faults.[458] "Some of
the venomous hatred expressed by the Italian satirists for the
two great orders of St. Francis and St. Dominic may perhaps be
due to an ancient grudge against them as a papal police founded
in the interests of orthodoxy, but the chief point aimed at is
the mixture of hypocrisy with immorality, which rendered them
odious to all classes of society."[459] "In general the
Franciscans seem to us far less orthodox than the Dominicans.
They issued from a popular movement which was irregular,
unecclesiastical, very little conformed to the ideas of the
hierarchy about discipline." "The followers of St. Francis
continued to contain ardent-minded men who maintained that the
Franciscan reform had not produced all its due results; that that
reform was superior to popes and to the dispensations issued at
Rome; that the appearance of the seraphic Francis was neither
more nor less than the advent of a new Christianity and a new
Christ, like in all respects to the first, but superior to it by
poverty. Therefore all the democratic and communistic movements
of later times,--the third order of St. Francis, the Beghards,
Lollards, Bisocs, Fraticelli, Spiritual Brethren, Humiliati, and
Poor Men of Lyons [Waldenses], who were exterminated by the state
and the prisons of the Dominicans, have their origin in the old
leaven of Katharism, Joachimism, and the eternal gospel."[460]

+219. Popular mania for poverty and beggary.+ The strength of the mendicant orders was in their popularity. They reconquered for the church the respect of the masses. Then they became the inquisitors, and the abusers of power for their own interests, and fell into great disfavor. Their history shows well the course of interaction between the masses and the rulers, and the course of institutions born in popular mores but abused to serve private interests. The mendicant orders furnished the army of papal absolutism. The Roman Catholic writers say that the popes saved the world from the despotism of emperors. What is true is that the pope and the emperor contended for the mastery, and the masses gave it to the pope. What the popes did with it we know. That is history. What the emperors would have done with it is matter for conjecture. It is very probable that they would have abused the power as badly as the popes did, but conjectural history is idle.

+220. Delusions.+ Of popular delusions one of the most striking and recurrent examples is the belief that new and despised religious sects, which are forced to meet in private, practice obscene and abominable orgies. The early Christians were accused of such rites, and they charged dissenting sects with the same.[461] The Manichæans, Waldenses, Huguenots, Puritans, Luciferans, Brothers of the Free Spirit, and so on through the whole list of heretical sects, have been so charged. Lea, in his History of the Inquisition, mentions over a dozen cases of such charges, some of which were true. Nowadays the same assertions are made against freemasons by Roman Catholics.[462] Jews are believed by the peasants of eastern Europe to practice abominable rites in secret. The idea that secret sects use the blood of people not of their sect, especially of babies, in base rites is only a variant of the broad idea about secret rites. It is sometimes said that the charges were invented to make sects unpopular, but it is more probable that they arose from the secrecy of the meetings only. Christians are so charged now in China.[463] The story of the discovery of such misbehavior always contains the same explanation--a husband followed his wife to the meeting and saw the proceedings.[464]

+221. Manias need suggestion.+ Manias and delusions are like fashions and fads in that they always seem to need a suggestion from some outside source, and often it is impossible to find such a source. A strong popular belief, like the belief in Satan and demons, furnishes a ground for a general disposition to hold some other people responsible for all the ills which befall one's self. Then the disposition to act cruelly against the suspected person arises to a mental disease, and by coöperation of others under the same aberration makes a mania.[465] The explanation lies in autosuggestion or fixed ideas with the development loosely ranged under hysteria, which is the contagious form of nervous affection. The term "epidemic" can be applied only figuratively. "Mental disease occurs only on the ground of a specific constitutional and generally hereditary predisposition. It cannot therefore be spread epidemically, any more than diabetes or gout."[466] The epidemic element is due to hysterical imitation. In like manner, epidemics or manias of suicide occur by imitation, e.g. amongst the Circumcellions, a subdivision of the Donatists, in Africa, in the middle of the fourth century A.D.[467] Cognate with this was the mania for martyrdom which it required all the authority of the church to restrain.[468] Josephus[469] says of the Galileans, followers of Judas of Galilee, that they were famous for their indifference to death. Convents were often seats of frightful epidemics of hysteria. The accepted religious notions furnished a fruitful soil for it. To be possessed by devils was a distinction, and vanity was drawn into play.[470] Autosuggestion was shown by actions which were, or were supposed to be, the actions proper for "possessed" people. Ascetic practices prepared the person to fall a victim to the contagion of hysteria. The predisposition was also cultivated by the religious ecstasies, the miracle and wonder faiths, and the current superstitions. Then there was the fact which nearly any one may have experienced, that an old and familiar story becomes mixed with memory, so that he thinks that what he heard of happened to himself. Untrained people also form strong convictions from notions which have been long and firmly held without evidence, and they offer to others the firmness of their own convictions as grounds for accepting the same faith without proof. Ritual acts and ascetic observances which others can see, also conduct and zeal in prayer or singing, and the odors of incense, help this transfer of faith without or against proof. These appeals to suggestibility all come under the head of drama. Nowadays the novels with a tendency operate the same suggestion. A favorite field for it is sociological doctrine. In this field it is a favorite process to proceed by ideals, but ideals, as above shown (secs. 203, 204), are fantastic and easily degenerate into manias when they become mass phenomena. Mariolatry, the near end of the world, the coming of the Paraclete, are subjects of repeated manias, especially for minds unsettled by excessive ascetic observances. It follows from all these cases of mental aberration that the minds of the masses of a society cannot be acted on by deliberation and critical investigation, or by the weight of sound reasoning. There is a mysticism of democracy and a transcendentalism of political philosophy in the masses to-day, which can be operated on by the old methods of suggestion. The stock exchange shows the possibility of suggestion. What one ought to do is to perceive and hold fast to the truth, but also to know the delusion which the mass are about to adopt; but it is only the most exceptional men who can hold to a personal opinion against the opinion of the surrounding crowd.

+222. Power of the crowd over the individual.+ The manias and delusions therefore dominate the individual like the fashions, fads, and affectations. It is the power of the crowd over the individual which is constant. The truth and justice of the popular opinion is of very inferior importance. The manias and delusions also operate selection, but not always in the same way, or in any way which can be defined. He who resists a mania may be trodden under foot like any other heretic. There occur cases, however, in which he wins by dissent. If he can outlive the mania, he will probably gain at a later time, when its folly is proved to all.

+223. Discipline by pain.+ He who wants to make another do something, or to prevent him from doing something, may, if the former is the stronger, connect act or omission with the infliction of pain. This is only an imitation of nature, in which pain is a sanction and a deterrent. Family and school discipline have always rested on this artificial use of pain. It is, apparently, the most primary application of force or coercion. It combines directly with vengeance, which is a primary passion of human nature. Punishment is of this philosophy, for by punishment we furnish, or add, a painful consequence to acts which we desire to restrain, in the hope that the consequence will cause reflection and make the victim desist. The punishment may be imprisonment (i.e. temporary exclusion from the society), or fine, or scourging, or other painful treatment. The sense of punishment is the same whether the punishment be physical pain or other disagreeable experience. Although we have come to adopt modern ideas about the infliction of physical pain in punishment, we cannot depart far from its fundamental theory and motive. In the past, physical pain has been employed also, in lynching and in regular proceedings, to enforce conformity, and to suppress dissent from the current mores of the society. The physical proceedings are measures to produce conformity which differ from boycotting and other methods of manifesting disapproval and inflicting unpopularity in that they are positive and physical. Then the selection is positive and is pursued by external and physical sanctions.