It would be superfluous to add that the powerlessness of crowds to reason aright prevents them displaying any trace of the critical spirit, prevents them, that is, from being capable of discerning truth from error, or of forming a precise judgment on any matter.Judgments accepted by crowds are merely judgments forced upon them and never judgments adopted after discussion.
In regard to this matter the individuals who do not rise above the level of a crowd are numerous.The ease with which certain opinions obtain general acceptance results more especially from the impossibility experienced by the majority of men of forming an opinion peculiar to themselves and based on reasoning of their own.
3.THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS
Just as is the case with respect to persons in whom the reasoning power is absent, the figurative imagination of crowds is very powerful, very active and very susceptible of being keenly impressed.The images evoked in their mind by a personage, an event, an accident, are almost as lifelike as the reality.
Crowds are to some extent in the position of the sleeper whose reason, suspended for the time being, allows the arousing in his mind of images of extreme intensity which would quickly be dissipated could they be submitted to the action of reflection.
Crowds, being incapable both of reflection and of reasoning, are devoid of the notion of improbability; and it is to be noted that in a general way it is the most improbable things that are the most striking.
This is why it happens that it is always the marvellous and legendary side of events that more specially strike crowds.When a civilisation is analysed it is seen that, in reality, it is the marvellous and the legendary that are its true supports.
Appearances have always played a much more important part than reality in history, where the unreal is always of greater moment than the real.
Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images.It is only images that terrify or attract them and become motives of action.
For this reason theatrical representations, in which the image is shown in its most clearly visible shape, always have an enormous influence on crowds.Bread and spectacular shows constituted for the plebeians of ancient Rome the ideal of happiness, and they asked for nothing more.Throughout the successive ages this ideal has scarcely varied.Nothing has a greater effect on the imagination of crowds of every category than theatrical representations.The entire audience experiences at the same time the same emotions, and if these emotions are not at once transformed into acts, it is because the most unconscious spectator cannot ignore that he is the victim of illusions, and that he has laughed or wept over imaginary adventures.
Sometimes, however, the sentiments suggested by the images are so strong that they tend, like habitual suggestions, to transform themselves into acts.The story has often been told of the manager of a popular theatre who, in consequence of his only playing sombre dramas, was obliged to have the actor who took the part of the traitor protected on his leaving the theatre, to defend him against the violence of the spectators, indignant at the crimes, imaginary though they were, which the traitor had committed.We have here, in my opinion, one of the most remarkable indications of the mental state of crowds, and especially of the facility with which they are suggestioned.The unreal has almost as much influence on them as the real.They have an evident tendency not to distinguish between the two.
