Introduction to the Science of Sociology Part 124

The Woman's Christian Temperance Crusade, referred to in the materials, may be regarded, if we are permitted to compare great things with small, as an ill.u.s.tration of collective behavior not unlike the crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Crusades are reformatory and religious. This was true at any rate of the early crusades, inspired by Peter the Hermit, whatever may have been the political purposes of the popes who encouraged them. It was the same motive that led the people of the Middle Ages to make pilgrimages which led them to join the crusades. At bottom it was an inner restlessness, that sought peace in great hardship and inspiring action, which moved the ma.s.ses.

Somewhat the same widespread contagious restlessness is the source of most of our revolutions. It is not, however, hardships and actual distress that inspire revolutions but hopes and dreams, dreams which find expression in those myths and "vital lies," as Vernon Lee calls them,[297] which according to Sorel are the only means of moving the ma.s.ses.

The distinction between crusades, like the Woman's Temperance Crusade, and revolutions, like the French Revolution, is that one is a radical attempt to correct a recognized evil and the other is a radical attempt to reform an existing social order.

II. MATERIALS

A. SOCIAL CONTAGION

1. An Incident in a Lancashire Cotton Mill[298]

At a cotton manufactory at Hodden Bridge, in Lancashire, a girl, on the fifteenth of February, 1787, put a mouse into the bosom of another girl, who had a great dread of mice. The girl was immediately thrown into a fit, and continued in it with the most violent convulsions for twenty-four hours. On the following day three more girls were seized in the same manner; and on the seventeenth, six more. By this time the alarm was so great that the whole work, in which 200 or 300 were employed, was totally stopped, and an idea prevailed that a particular disease had been introduced by a bag of cotton opened in the house. On Sunday, the eighteenth, Dr. St. Clare was sent for from Preston; before he arrived three more were seized, and during that night and the morning of the nineteenth, eleven more, making in all twenty-four. Of these, twenty-one were young women, two were girls of about ten years of age, and one man, who had been much fatigued with holding the girls. Three of the number lived about two miles from the place where the disorder first broke out, and three at another factory in c.l.i.theroe, about five miles distant, which last and two more were infected entirely from report, not having seen the other patients, but, like them and the rest of the country, strongly impressed with the idea of the plague being caught from the cotton. The symptoms were anxiety, strangulation, and very strong convulsions; and these were so violent as to last without any intermission from a quarter of an hour to twenty-four hours, and to require four or five persons to prevent the patients from tearing their hair and dashing their heads against the floor or walls. Dr. St. Clare had taken with him a portable electrical machine, and by electric shocks the patients were universally relieved without exception. As soon as the patients and the country were a.s.sured that the complaint was merely nervous, easily cured, and not introduced by the cotton, no fresh person was affected. To dissipate their apprehension still further, the best effects were obtained by causing them to take a cheerful gla.s.s and join in a dance. On Tuesday, the twentieth, they danced, and the next day were all at work, except two or three, who were much weakened by their fits.

2. The Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages[299]

So early as the year 1374, a.s.semblages of men and women were seen at Aix-la-Chapelle who had come out of Germany and who, united by one common delusion, exhibited to the public both in the streets and in the churches the following strange spectacle. They formed circles hand in hand and, appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the by-standers, for hours together in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. While dancing they neither saw nor heard, being insensible to external impressions through the senses, but were haunted by visions, their fancies conjuring up spirits whose names they shrieked out; and some of them afterward a.s.serted that they felt as if they had been immersed in a stream of blood, which obliged them to leap so high.

Others, during the paroxysm, saw the heavens open and the Saviour enthroned with the Virgin Mary, according as the religious notions of the age were strangely and variously reflected in their imaginations.

Where the disease was completely developed, the attack commenced with epileptic convulsions. Those affected fell to the ground senseless, panting and laboring for breath. They foamed at the mouth, and suddenly springing up began their dance amid strange contortions. Yet the malady doubtless made its appearance very variously, and was modified by temporary or local circ.u.mstances, whereof non-medical contemporaries but imperfectly noted the essential particulars, accustomed as they were to confound their observation of natural events with their notions of the world of spirits.

It was but a few months ere this demoniacal disease had spread from Aix-la-Chapelle, where it appeared in July, over the neighboring Netherlands. Wherever the dancers appeared, the people a.s.sembled in crowds to gratify their curiosity with the frightful spectacle. At length the increasing number of the affected excited no less anxiety than the attention that was paid to them. In towns and villages they took possession of the religious houses, processions were everywhere inst.i.tuted on their account, and ma.s.ses were said and hymns were sung, while the disease itself, of the demoniacal origin of which no one entertained the least doubt, excited everywhere astonishment and horror.

In Liege the priests had recourse to exorcisms and endeavored by every means in their power to allay an evil which threatened so much danger to themselves; for the possessed, a.s.sembling in mult.i.tudes, frequently poured forth imprecations against them and menaced their destruction.

A few months after this dancing malady had made its appearance at Aix-la-Chapelle, it broke out at Cologne, where the number of those possessed amounted to more than five hundred; and about the same time at Metz, the streets of which place are said to have been filled with eleven hundred dancers. Peasants left their plows, mechanics their workshops, housewives their domestic duties, to join the wild revels, and this rich commercial city became the scene of the most ruinous disorder. Secret desires were excited and but too often found opportunities for wild enjoyment; and numerous beggars, stimulated by vice and misery, availed themselves of this new complaint to gain a temporary livelihood. Girls and boys quitted their parents, and servants their masters, to amuse themselves at the dances of those possessed, and greedily imbibed the poison of mental infection. Above a hundred unmarried women were seen raving about in consecrated and unconsecrated places, and the consequences were soon perceived. Gangs of idle vagabonds, who understood how to imitate to the life the gestures and convulsions of those really affected, roved from place to place seeking maintenance and adventures, and thus, wherever they went, spreading this disgusting spasmodic disease like a plague; for in maladies of this kind the susceptible are infected as easily by the appearance as by the reality. At last it was found necessary to drive away these mischievous guests, who were equally inaccessible to the exorcisms of the priests and the remedies of the physicians. It was not, however, until after four months that the Rhenish cities were able to suppress these impostures, which had so alarmingly increased the original evil. In the meantime, when once called into existence, the plague crept on and found abundant food in the tone of thought which prevailed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and even, though in a minor degree, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth, causing a permanent disorder of the mind, and exhibiting, in those cities to whose inhabitants it was a novelty, scenes as strange as they were detestable.

B. THE CROWD

1. The "Animal" Crowd

_a. The Flock_[300]

Understand that a flock is not the same thing as a number of sheep. On the stark, wild headlands of the White Mountains, as many as thirty Bighorn are known to run in loose, fluctuating hordes; in fenced pastures, two to three hundred; close-herded on the range, two to three thousand; but however artificially augmented, the flock is always a conscious adjustment. There are always leaders, middlers, and tailers, each insisting on its own place in the order of going. Should the flock be rounded up suddenly in alarm it mills within itself until these have come to their own places.

There is much debate between herders as to the advantage of goats over sheep as leaders. In any case there are always a few goats in a flock, and most American owners prefer them; but the Frenchmen choose bell-wethers. Goats lead naturally by reason of a quicker instinct, forage more freely, and can find water on their own account. But wethers, if trained with care, learn what goats abhor, to take broken ground sedately, to walk through the water rather than set the whole flock leaping and scrambling; but never to give voice to alarm, as goats will, and call the herder.

It appears that leaders understand their office, and goats particularly exhibit a jealousy of their rights to be first over the stepping-stones or to walk the teetering log-bridges at the roaring creeks. By this facile reference of the initiative to the wisest one, the shepherd is served most. The dogs learn to which of the flock to communicate orders, at which heels a bark or a bite soonest sets the flock in motion. But the flock-mind obsesses equally the best-trained, flashes as instantly from the meanest of the flock.

By very little the herder may turn the flock-mind to his advantage, but chiefly it works against him. Suppose on the open range the impulse to forward movement overtakes them, set in motion by some eager leaders that remember enough of what lies ahead to make them oblivious to what they pa.s.s. They press ahead. The flock draws on. The momentum of travel grows. The bells clang soft and hurriedly; the sheep forget to feed; they neglect the tender pastures; they will not stay to drink. Under an unwise or indolent herder the sheep going on an unaccustomed trail will overtravel and underfeed, until in the midst of good pasture they starve upon their feet. So it is on the Long Trail you so often see the herder walking with his dogs ahead of his sheep to hold them back to feed. But if it should be new ground he must go after and press them skilfully, for the flock-mind balks chiefly at the unknown.

In sudden attacks from several quarters, or inexplicable man-thwarting of their instincts, the flock-mind teaches them to turn a solid front, revolving about in the smallest compa.s.s with the lambs in their midst, narrowing and indrawing until they perish by suffocation. So they did in the intricate defiles of Red Rock, where Carrier lost 250 in '74, and at Poison Springs, as Narcisse Duplin told me, where he had to choose between leaving them to the deadly waters, or, prevented from the spring, made witless by thirst, to mill about until they piled up and killed threescore in their midst. By no urgency of the dogs could they be moved forward or scattered until night fell with coolness and returning sanity. Nor does the imperfect gregariousness of man always save us from ill-considered rushes or strangulous in-turnings of the social ma.s.s. Notwithstanding there are those who would have us to be flock-minded.

It is doubtful if the herder is anything more to the flock than an incident of the range, except as a giver of salt, for the only cry they make to him is the salt cry. When the natural craving is at the point of urgency, they circle about his camp or his cabin, leaving off feeding for that business; and nothing else offering, they will continue this headlong circling about a bowlder or any object bulking large in their immediate neighborhood remotely resembling the appurtenances of man, as if they had learned nothing since they were free to find licks for themselves, except that salt comes by bestowal and in conjunction with the vaguely indeterminate lumps of matter that a.s.sociate with man. As if in fifty centuries of man-herding they had made but one step out of the terrible isolation of brute species, an isolation impenetrable except by fear to every other brute, but now admitting the fact without knowledge, of the G.o.d of the Salt. Accustomed to receiving this miracle on open bowlders, when the craving is strong upon them, they seek such as these to run about, vociferating, as if they said, In such a place our G.o.d has been wont to bless us, come now, let us greatly entreat Him. This one quavering bleat, unmistakable to the sheepman even at a distance, is the only new note in the sheep's vocabulary, and the only one which pa.s.ses with intention from himself to man. As for the call of distress which a leader raised by hand may make to his master, it is not new, is not common to flock usage, and is swamped utterly in the obsession of the flock-mind.

_b. The Herd_[301]

My purpose in this paper is to discuss a group of curious and useless emotional instincts of social animals, which have not yet been properly explained. Excepting two of the number, placed first and last in the list, they are not related in their origin; consequently they are here grouped together arbitrarily, only for the reason that we are very familiar with them on account of their survival in our domestic animals, and because they are, as I have said, useless; also because they resemble each other, among the pa.s.sions and actions of the lower animals, in their effect on our minds. This is in all cases unpleasant, and sometimes exceedingly painful, as when species that rank next to ourselves in their developed intelligence and organized societies, such as elephants, monkeys, dogs, and cattle, are seen under the domination of impulses, in some cases resembling insanity, and in others simulating the darkest pa.s.sions of man.

These instincts are:

(1) The excitement caused by the smell of blood, noticeable in horses and cattle among our domestic animals, and varying greatly in degree, from an emotion so slight as to be scarcely perceptible to the greatest extremes of rage or terror.

(2) The angry excitement roused in some animals when a scarlet or bright red cloth is shown to them. So well known is this apparently insane instinct in our cattle that it has given rise to a proverb and metaphor familiar in a variety of forms to everyone.

(3) The persecution of a sick or weakly animal by its companions.

(4) The sudden deadly fury that seizes on the herd or family at the sight of a companion in extreme distress. Herbivorous mammals at such times will trample and gore the distressed one to death. In the case of wolves, and other savage-tempered carnivorous species, the distressed fellow is frequently torn to pieces and devoured on the spot.

To take the first two together. When we consider that blood is red; that the smell of it is, or may be, or has been, a.s.sociated with that vivid hue in the animal's mind; that blood, seen and smelt, is, or has been, a.s.sociated with the sight of wounds and with cries of pain and rage or terror from the wounded or captive animal, there appears at first sight to be some reason for connecting these two instinctive pa.s.sions as having the same origin--namely, terror and rage caused by the sight of a member of the herd struck down and bleeding, or struggling for life in the grasp of an enemy. I do not mean to say that such an image is actually present in the animal's mind, but that the inherited or instinctive pa.s.sion is one in kind and in its working with the pa.s.sion of the animal when experience and reason were its guides.

But the more I consider the point, the more am I inclined to regard these two instincts as separate in their origin, although I retain the belief that cattle and horses and several wild animals are violently excited by the smell of blood for the reason just given--namely, their inherited memory a.s.sociates the smell of blood with the presence among them of some powerful enemy that threatens their life.

The following incident will show how violently this blood pa.s.sion sometimes affects cattle, when they are permitted to exist in a half-wild condition, as on the Pampas. I was out with my gun one day, a few miles from home, when I came across a patch on the ground where the gra.s.s was pressed or trodden down and stained with blood. I concluded that some thievish Gauchos had slaughtered a fat cow there on the previous night, and, to avoid detection, had somehow managed to carry the whole of it away on their horses. As I walked on, a herd of cattle, numbering about three hundred, appeared moving slowly on to a small stream a mile away; they were traveling in a thin, long line, and would pa.s.s the blood-stained spot at a distance of seven to eight hundred yards, but the wind from it would blow across their track. When the tainted wind struck the leaders of the herd they instantly stood still, raising their heads, then broke out into loud, excited bellowings; and finally turning, they started off at a fast trot, following up the scent in a straight line, until they arrived at the place where one of their kind had met its death. The contagion spread, and before long all the cattle were congregated on the fatal spot, and began moving round in a dense ma.s.s, bellowing continually.

It may be remarked here that the animal has a peculiar language on occasions like this; it emits a succession of short, bellowing cries, like excited exclamations, followed by a very loud cry, alternately sinking into a hoa.r.s.e murmur and rising to a kind of scream that grates harshly on the sense. Of the ordinary "cow-music" I am a great admirer, and take as much pleasure in it as in the cries and melody of birds and the sound of the wind in trees; but this performance of cattle excited by the smell of blood is most distressing to hear.

The animals that had forced their way into the center of the ma.s.s to the spot where the blood was, pawed the earth, and dug it up with their horns, and trampled each other down in their frantic excitement. It was terrible to see and hear them. The action of those on the border of the living ma.s.s, in perpetually moving round in a circle with dolorous bellowings, was like that of the women in an Indian village when a warrior dies, and all night they shriek and howl with simulated grief, going round and round the dead man's hut in an endless procession.

_c. The Pack_[302]

Wolves are the most sociable of beasts of prey. Not only do they gather in bands, but they arrange to render each other a.s.sistance, which is the most important test of sociability. The most gray wolves I ever saw in a band was five. This was in northern New Mexico in January, 1894. The most I ever heard of in a band was thirty-two that were seen in the same region. These bands are apparently formed in winter only. The packs are probably temporary a.s.sociations of personal acquaintances, for some temporary purpose, or pa.s.sing reason, such as food question or mating-instinct. As soon as this is settled, they scatter.

An instance in point was related to me by Mr. Gordon Wright of Carberry, Manitoba. During the winter of 1865 he was logging at Sturgeon Lake, Ontario. One Sunday he and some companions strolled out on the ice of the lake to look at the logs there. They heard the hunting-cry of wolves, then a deer (a female) darted from the woods to the open ice.

Her sides were heaving, her tongue out, and her legs cut by the slight crust of the snow. Evidently she was hard pressed. She was coming toward them, but one of the men gave a shout which caused her to sheer off. A minute later six timber wolves appeared galloping on her trail, heads low, tails horizontal, and howling continuously. They were uttering their hunting-cry, but as soon as they saw her they broke into a louder, different note, left the trail and made straight for her. Five of the wolves were abreast and one that seemed much darker was behind. Within half a mile they overtook her and pulled her down, all seemed to seize her at once. For a few minutes she bleated like a sheep in distress; after that the only sound was the snarling and the crunching of the wolves as they feasted. Within fifteen minutes nothing was left of the deer but hair and some of the larger bones, and the wolves fighting among themselves for even these. Then they scattered, each going a quarter of a mile or so, no two in the same direction, and those that remained in view curled up there on the open lake to sleep. This happened about ten in the morning within three hundred yards of several witnesses.

2. The Psychological Crowd[303]

In its ordinary sense the word "crowd" means a gathering of individuals of whatever nationality, profession, or s.e.x, and whatever be the chances that have brought them together. From the psychological point of view the expression "crowd" a.s.sumes quite a different signification. Under certain given circ.u.mstances, and only under those circ.u.mstances, an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics. The gathering has thus become what, in the absence of a better expression, I will call an organized crowd, or, if the term is considered preferable, a psychological crowd. It forms a single being, and is subjected to the law of the mental unity of crowds.

It is evident that it is not by the mere fact of a number of individuals finding themselves accidentally side by side that they acquire the character of an organized crowd. A thousand individuals accidentally gathered in a public place without any determined object in no way const.i.tute a crowd, from the psychological point of view. To acquire the special characteristics of such a crowd, the influence is necessary of certain predisposing causes, of which we shall have to determine the nature.

The disappearance of conscious personality and the turning of feelings and thoughts in a definite direction, which are the primary characteristics of a crowd about to become organized, do not always involve the simultaneous presence of a number of individuals on one spot. Thousands of isolated individuals may acquire at certain moments, and under the influence of certain violent emotions--such, for example, as a great national event--the characteristics of a psychological crowd.

It will be sufficient in that case that a mere chance should bring them together for their acts at once to a.s.sume the characteristics peculiar to the acts of a crowd. At certain moments half a dozen men might const.i.tute a psychological crowd, which may not happen in the case of hundreds of men gathered together by accident. On the other hand, an entire nation, though there may be no visible agglomeration, may become a crowd under the action of certain influences.

It is not easy to describe the mind of crowds with exactness, because its organization varies not only according to race and composition but also according to the nature and intensity of the exciting causes to which crowds are subjected. The same difficulty, however, presents itself in the psychological study of an individual. It is only in novels that individuals are found to traverse their whole life with an unvarying character. It is only the uniformity of the environment that creates the apparent uniformity of characters. I have shown elsewhere that all mental const.i.tutions contain possibilities of character which may be manifested in consequence of a sudden change of environment. This explains how it was that among the most savage members of the French Convention were to be found inoffensive citizens who, under ordinary circ.u.mstances, would have been peaceable notaries or virtuous magistrates. The storm past, they resumed their normal character of quiet, law-abiding citizens. Napoleon found amongst them his most docile servants.

It being impossible to study here all the successive degrees of organization of crowds, we shall concern ourselves more especially with such crowds as have attained to the phase of complete organization. In this way we shall see what crowds may become, but not what they invariably are. It is only in this advanced phase of organization that certain new and special characteristics are superposed on the unvarying and dominant character of the race; then takes place that turning, already alluded to, of all the feelings and thoughts of the collectivity in an identical direction. It is only under such circ.u.mstances, too, that what I have called above the psychological law of the mental unity of crowds comes into play.

The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act, were he in a state of isolation. There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of individuals forming a crowd. The psychological crowd is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which const.i.tute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from these possessed by each of the cells singly.