attention and assent to the exclusion of ideas and facts which contradict them.

I am aware of the fact that we could easily be led aside at this point into endless metaphysical problems. It is not our purpose to enter upon a discussion of the question, what is the real world? The problem of the real is by no means so simple as it appears "to common sense." Common sense has, however, in practical affairs, its own criteria, and beyond these it is not necessary for us now to stray. The "illusions" of the crowd are almost never illusions in the psychological sense. They are not false perceptions of the objects of sense. They are rather akin to the delusions and fixed ideas commonly found in paranoia. The man in the street does not ordinarily require the technique either of metaphysics or of psychiatry in order to characterize certain individuals as "crazy." The "crazy" man is simply unadjustable in his speech and conduct. His ideas may be real to him, just as the color-blind mans sensations of color may be as real as those of normal people, but they wont work, and that is sufficient.

It is not so easy to apply this criterion of the real to our crowd-ideas. Social realities are not so well ordered as the behavior of the forces of nature. Things moral, religious, and political are constantly in the making. The creative role which we all play here is greater than elsewhere in our making of reality. When most of our neighbors are motivated by certain ideas, those ideas become part of the social environment to which we must adjust ourselves. In this sense they are "real," however "crazy." Every struggle-group and faction in society is constantly striving to establish its ideas as controlling forces in the social reality. The conflicts among ideals are therefore in a sense conflicts within the real. Ideas and beliefs which seek their verification in the character of the results to which they lead, may point to very great changes in experience, and so long as the believer takes into account the various elements with which he has to deal, he has not lost his hold upon reality. But when ones beliefs or principles become ends in themselves, when by themselves they seem to constitute an order of being which is more interesting than fact, when the believer saves his faith only by denying or ignoring the things which contradict him, when he strives not to verify his ideas but to "vindicate" them, the ideas so held are pathological. The obsessions of the paranoiac are of this sort. We shall see later that these ideas have a meaning, though the conscious attention of the patient is systematically diverted from that meaning. Crowd-ideas are similar. The reason why their pathology is not more evident is the fact that they are simultaneously entertained by so great a number of people.

There are many ideas in which our faith is sustained chiefly by the knowledge that everyone about us also believes them. Belief on such ground has commonly been said to be due to imitation or suggestion. These do play a large part in determining all our thinking, but I can see no reason why they should be more operative in causing the crowd-mind than in other social situations. In fact, the distinctive phenomena which I have called crowd-ideas clearly show that other causes are at work.

Among civilized people, social relationships make severe demands upon the individual. Primitive impulses, unchecked eroticism, tendencies to perversions, and antisocial demands of the ego which are in us all, are constantly inhibited, resisted, controlled and diverted to socially acceptable ends. The savage in us is "repressed," his demands are so habitually denied that we learn to keep him down, for the most part, without conscious effort. We simply cease to pay attention to his gnawing desires. We become decently respectable members of society largely at the expense of our aboriginal nature. But the primitive in us does not really die. It asserts itself harmlessly in dreams. Psychoanalysis has revealed the fact that every dream is the realization of some desire, usually hidden from our conscious thought by our habitual repression. For this reason the dream work consists of symbols. The great achievement of Freud is the technique which enables the analyst to interpret this symbolism so that his own unconscious thought and desire are made known to the subject. The dream is harmless and is normally utilized by the unconscious ego because during sleep we cannot move. If one actually did the things he dreamed, a thing which happens in various somnambulisms, the dream would become anything but harmless. Every psychosis is really a dramatized dream of this sort.

Now as it is the social which demands the repression of our primitive impulses, it is to be expected that the unconscious would on certain occasions make use of this same social in order to realize its primitive desires. There are certain mental abnormalities, such as dementia præcox, in which the individual behaves in a wholly antisocial manner, simply withdrawing into himself. In the crowd the primitive ego achieves its wish by actually gaining the assent and support of a section of society. The immediate social environment is all pulled in the same direction as the unconscious desire. A similar unconscious impulse motivates each member of the crowd. It is as if all at once an unspoken agreement were entered into whereby each member might let himself go, on condition that he approved the same thing in all the rest. Of course such a thing cannot happen consciously. Our normal social consciousness would cause us each to resist, let us say, an exhibition of cruelty—in our neighbors, and also in ourselves. The impulse must therefore be disguised.

The term "unconscious" in the psychology of the crowd does not, of course, imply that the people in the crowd are not aware of the fact that they are lynching a negro or demanding the humiliation or extermination of certain of their fellows. Everybody is perfectly aware of what is being said and done; only the moral significance of the thing is changed. The deed or sentiment, instead of being disapproved, appears to be demanded, by moral principle, by the social welfare, by the glory of the state, etc. What is unconscious is the fact that the social is actually being twisted around into giving approval of the things which it normally forbids. Every crowd considers that it is vindicating some sacred principle. The more bloody and destructive the acts to which it is impelled, the more moral are its professions. Under the spell of the crowds logic certain abstract principles lead inevitably to the characteristic forms of crowd-behavior. They seem to glorify such acts, to make heroes and martyrs of those who lead in their performance.

The attention of everyone is first centered on the abstract and universal, as I have indicated. The repressed wish then unconsciously gives to the formulas which the crowd professes a meaning different from that which appears, yet unconsciously associated with it. This unconscious meaning is of course an impulse to act. But the motive professed is not the real motive.

Normally our acts and ideas are corrected by our social environment. But in a crowd our test of the real fails us, because, since the attention of all near us is directed in the same way as our own, the social environment for the time fails to check us. As William James said:

The sense that anything we think is unreal can only come when that thing is contradicted by some other thing of which we think. Any object which remains uncontradicted is ipso facto believed and posited as "absolute reality."

Our immediate social environment is all