NOTES AND ABSTRA CTS 4 1 3
in a like degree of agitation. The almost instant consensus of feeling or opinion works for ill if it issues in immediate action. Wholesome deliberateness disappears with the vanishing of slowness in focusing and ascertaining the common will due to improved facilities of communication.
lob mind working in vast bodies of dispersed individuals gives us the craze or fad. This may be defined as that irrational unanimity of interest, feeling, opinion, or deed in a body of communicating individuals which results from suggestion or imita- tion."
Vogue can often be explained in terms of novelty, fascination, and mob mind. Even the new which can make its way by sheer merit does not escape becoming a fad. Persistence in consciousness is the test of reality. Mere novelty must ever yield to a fresh sensation, while the genuine improvement, on the other hand, meets a real need and therefore la
The fad does not spread in a medium specially prepared for it by excitement. Ii owes half its power over minds to the prestige that in this age attaches to the new. "The great mass of men have always had their lives ruled by usage and tradition." Today people ape the many instead of their forefathers. " Except where rural con- servatism holds sway, mob mind in the milder forms of fad and craze begins to agi- tate the great deeps of society."
Half-education has supplied many with ideas without having developed the abil- ity to choose among them. Power to discriminate between ideas in respect to their value lags behind their power to receive them, and so a half-education leaves the individual with nothing to do but follow the drift. " Formerly people rejected the new in favor of wont and tradition ; now they tend to 'go in ' for everything, and atone for their former suspiciousness by a touching credulity. The world is abuzz with half-baked ecstatic people who eagerly champion a do/en different reforms in
spelling, dress .... each of which is to bring in the millenium all at once
Had these ripples a real ground swell beneath them the world might soon be made over. But, alas ! they are only ripples."
- ' The remedy for mob mind, whether presented in the liquefaction of our city
folk under modern conditions of mental intimacy, or in the mad rush of the public for the novelty of the hour, is not in replanting the hedgerows of custom. \Ve muM ^-. forward, keeping in mind, however, that the chief present need is not to discredit the past but to discredit the ma. The spell of ancestors is broken; let us next break the spell of numbers. Without lessening obedience to the decision of majorities, let us cultivate a habit of doubt and review. In a good democracy blind imitation can never take the place of individual effort to weigh and judge. The frantic desire of frightened deer or buffalo to press to the very center of the throng does not befit civ- ilized man. The huddling instinct has no place in strong character. Democracy's ideal is a society of men with neither the "back "-look on the past nor yet the "out"- look on their fellows, but with the "in "-look upon reason and conscience. We must hold always to a sage Emersonian individualism, that, without consecrating an ethics of selfishness, a religion of di^nit. or a policy of anarchism, shall brace men to stand t the rush of the mass." EDWARD A. Ross, Appletons Popular Science Monthly, Julv 1897.
Natural Selection, Social Selection, and Heredity. "Natural selectim. is the outcome of certain physical f mm-nt : the complex of forces, such as
soil, climate, food, and competitors; (2) heredity: the tendency of offspring to follow the type of the part-lit ; I \) variation: the trn.lcmv in .livelier from that type; (4) overpopulation: the t. multiply offspring beyond the food supph
t life: the effort to exclude others 01 me thns; (<>) consciousness of
kiti'l : the tendency t> spare and cooperate \\ith offspring and otheis i like t\j>e; (7) survival of the fittest : the vutntx of i 1 icdity,
variation, numbers. ;u ml. '
The above physical facts underlie human SOCK If -consciousness enters
with novel results. Self'- <-ss is the jnoduct <-| evolution biological, as
seen in the prolonged plastic and unfolding state of the brain, and sociological, as is
