CHAPTER V

SOCIETAL SELECTION

Social selection by the mores.--Instrumentalities of

suggestion.--Symbols, pictures, etc.--Apparatus of

suggestion.--Watchwords, catchwords.--"Slave," "democracy."--

Epithets.--Phrases.--Pathos.--Pathos is unfavorable to

truth.--Analysis and verification as tests.--Humanity.--

Selection by distinction.--Aristocracies.--Fashion.--

Conventionalization.--Uncivilized fashions.--Ideals of

beauty.--Fashion in other things than dress.--Miscellaneous

fashions.--All deformations by fashion are irrational.--Satires

on fashion.--Fashion in faiths and ideals.--Fashion is not

trivial, not subject to argument.--Remoter effects of fashion.--

Slang and expletives.--Poses, fads, and cant.--Illustrations.--

Heroes, scapegoats, and butts.--Caricature.--Relation of fads,

etc., to mores.--Ideals.--Ideals of beauty.--The

man-as-he-should-be.--The standard type of man.--Who does the

thinking?--The gentleman.--Standards set by taboos.--Crimes.--

Criminal law.--Mass phenomena of fear and hope.--Manias,

delusions.--Monstrous mass phenomena.--Gregariousness in the

Middle Ages.--The mendicant orders.--Other mendicants.--

Popular mania for poverty and beggary.--Delusions.--Manias and

suggestion.--Power of the crowd over the individual.--

Discipline by pain.--The mediæval church operated societal

selection.--The mediæval church.--Sacerdotal celibacy.--The

masses wanted clerical celibacy.--Abelard.--The selection of

sacerdotal celibacy.--How the church operated selection.--Mores

and morals; social code.--Orthodoxy; treatment of dissent;

selection by torture.--Execution by burning.--Burning in North

American colonies.--Solidarity in penalty for fault of one.--

Torture in the ancient states.--Torture in the Roman empire.--

Jewish and Christian universality; who persecutes whom?--The

ordeal.--Irrationality of torture.--Inquisitorial procedure

from Roman law.--Bishops as inquisitors.--Definition of

heretic.--The Albigenses.--Persecution was popular.--Theory of

persecution.--Duties laid on the civil authority.--Public

opinion as to the burning of heretics.--The shares of the church

and the masses.--The church uses its power for selfish

aggrandizement.--The inquisition took shape slowly.--Frederick

II and his code.--Formative legislation.--Dungeons.--The

yellow crosses.--Confiscation.--Operation of the inquisition.--

Success of the inquisition.--Torture in civil and ecclesiastical

trials.--The selection accomplished.--Torture in England.--The

Spanish inquisition.--The inquisition in Venice.--The use of

the inquisition for political and personal purposes.--Stages of

the selection by murder.

+170. Social selection by the mores.+ The most important fact about the

mores is their dominion over the individual. Arising he knows not whence

or how, they meet his opening mind in earliest childhood, give him his

outfit of ideas, faiths, and tastes, and lead him into prescribed mental

processes. They bring to him codes of action, standards, and rules of

ethics. They have a model of the man-as-he-should-be to which they mold

him, in spite of himself and without his knowledge. If he submits and

consents, he is taken up and may attain great social success. If he

resists and dissents, he is thrown out and may be trodden under foot.

The mores are therefore an engine of social selection. Their coercion of

the individual is the mode in which they operate the selection, and the

details of the process deserve study. Some folkways exercise an unknown

and unintelligent selection. Infanticide does this (Chapter VII).

Slavery always exerts a very powerful selection, both physical and

social (Chapter VI).

+171. Instrumentalities of suggestion.+ Suggestion is exerted in the

mores by a number of instrumentalities, all of which have their origin

in the mores, and may only extend to all what some have thought and

felt, or may (at a later stage) be used with set intention to act

suggestively in extending certain mores.

Myths, legends, fables, and mythology spread notions through a group,

and from generation to generation, until the notions become components

of the mores, being interwoven with the folkways. Epic poems have

powerfully influenced the mores. They present types of heroic actions

and character which serve as models to the young. The _Iliad_ and

_Odyssey_ became text-books for the instruction of Greek youth. They set

notions of heroism and duty, and furnished all Greeks with a common

stock of narratives, ideas, and ideals, and with sentiments which

everybody knew and which could be rearoused by an allusion. Everybody

was expected to produce the same reaction under the allusion. Perhaps

that was a conventional assumption, and the reaction in thought and

feeling may have been only conventional in many cases, but the

suggestion did not fail of its effect even then. Later, when the ideals

of epic heroism and of the old respect for the gods were popularly

rejected and derided, this renunciation of the old stock of common ideas

and faiths marked a decline in the morale of the nation. It is a very

important question: What is the effect of conventional humbug in the

mores of a people, which is suggested to the young as solemn and sacred,

and which they have to find out and reject later in life? The

_Mahabharata_, the _Kalevala_, the _Edda_, the _Nibelungen Noth_, are

other examples of popular epics which had great influence on the mores

for centuries. Such poems present models of action and principle, but it

is inevitable that a later time will not appreciate them and will turn

them to ridicule, or will make of them only poses and affectations. The

former is the effect most likely to be produced on the masses, the

latter on the cultured classes. In the Greco-Roman world, at the

beginning of the Christian era, various philosophic sects tried to

restore and renew the ideals of Greek heroism, virtue, and religious

faith, so far as they seemed to have permanent ethical value. The

popular mores were never touched by this effort. In fact, it is

impossible for us to know whether the writings of Seneca, Plutarch,

Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Pliny represent to us the real rules of

life of those men, or are only a literary pose. In the Renaissance, and

since then, men educated in the classics have been influenced by them in

regard to their standards of noble and praiseworthy character, and of

what should be cultivated in thought and conduct. Such men have had a

common stock of quotations, of accepted views in life philosophy, and of

current ethical opinions. This stock, however, has been common to the

members of the technical guild of the learned. It has never affected the

masses. Amongst Protestants the Bible has, in the last four hundred

years, furnished a common stock of history and anecdote, and has also

furnished phrases and current quotations familiar to all classes. It has

furnished codes and standards which none dared to disavow, and the

suggestion of which has been overpowering. The effect on popular mores

has been very great.

+172. Symbols, pictures.+ Before the ability to read became general art

was employed in the form of symbols to carry suggestion. Symbolic acts

were employed in trade and contracts, in marriage and religion. For us

writing has taken the place of symbols as a means of suggestion. Symbols

do not appeal to us. They are not in our habits. Illustrative pictures

influence us. The introduction of them into daily newspapers is an

important development of the arts of suggestion. Mediæval art in colored

glass, carving, sculpture, and pictures reveals the grossness and crass

simplicity of the mediæval imagination, but also its childish

originality and directness. No doubt it was on account of these latter

characteristics that it had such suggestive power. It was graphic. It

stimulated and inflamed the kind of imagination which produced it. It

found its subjects in heaven, hell, demons, torture, and the scriptural

incidents which contained any horrible, fantastic, or grotesque

elements. The crucifix represented a man dying in the agony of torture,

and it was the chief symbol of the religion. The suggestion in all this

art produced barbaric passion and sensuality. Any one who, in childhood,

had in his hands one of the old Bibles illustrated by wood cuts knows

what power the cuts had to determine the concept which was formed from

the text, and which has persisted through life, in spite of later

instruction.

+173. Apparatus of suggestion.+ In modern times the apparatus of

suggestion is in language, not in pictures, carvings, morality plays, or

other visible products of art. Watchwords, catchwords, phrases, and

epithets are the modern instrumentalities. There are words which are

used currently as if their meaning was perfectly simple, clear, and

unambiguous, which are not defined at all. "Democracy," the "People,"

"Wall Street," "Slave," "Americanism," are examples. These words have

been called "symbols." They might better be called "tokens." They are

like token coins. They "pass"; that is their most noteworthy

characteristic. They are familiar, unquestioned, popular, and they are

always current above their value. They always reveal the invincible

tendency of the masses to mythologize. They are personified and a

superhuman energy is attributed to them. "Democracy" is not treated as a

parallel word to aristocracy, theocracy, autocracy, etc., but as a

Power from some outside origin, which brings into human affairs an

inspiration and energy of its own. The "People" is not the population,

but a creation of mythology, to which inherent faculties and capacities

are ascribed beyond what can be verified within experience. "Wall

Street" takes the place which used to be assigned to the devil. What is

that "Wall Street" which is currently spoken of by editors and public

men as thinking, wanting, working for, certain things? There is a

collective interest which is so designated which is real, but the

popular notion under "Wall Street" is unanalyzed. It is a phantasm or a

myth. In all these cases there is a tyranny in the term. Who dare

criticise democracy or the people? Who dare put himself on the side of

Wall Street? The tyranny is greatest in regard to "American" and

"Americanism." Who dare say that he is not "American"? Who dare

repudiate what is declared to be "Americanism"? It follows that if

anything is base and bogus it is always labeled "American." If a thing

is to be recommended which cannot be justified, it is put under

"Americanism." Who does not shudder at the fear of being called

"unpatriotic"? and to repudiate what any one chooses to call "American"

is to be unpatriotic. If there is any document of Americanism, it is the

Declaration of Independence. Those who have Americanism especially in

charge have repudiated the doctrine that "governments derive their just

powers from the consent of the governed," because it stood in the way of

what they wanted to do. They denounce those who cling to the doctrine as

un-American. Then we see what Americanism and patriotism are. They are

the duty laid upon us all to applaud, follow, and obey whatever a ruling

clique of newspapers and politicians chooses to say or wants to do.

"England" has always been, amongst us, a kind of counter token, or token

of things to be resisted and repudiated. The "symbols," or "tokens,"

always have this utility for suggestion. They carry a coercion with them

and overwhelm people who are not trained to verify assertions and

dissect fallacies.

+174. Watchwords, catchwords.+ A watchword sums up one policy,

doctrine, view, or phase of a subject. It may be legitimate and useful,

but a watchword easily changes its meaning and takes up foreign

connotations or fallacious suggestions. Critical analysis is required to

detect and exclude the fallacy. Catchwords are acutely adapted to

stimulate desires. In the presidential campaign of 1900 we saw a

catchword deliberately invented,--"the full dinner pail." Such an

invention turns suggestion into an art. Socialism, as a subject of

popular agitation, consists almost altogether of watchwords, catchwords,

and phrases of suggestion: "the boon of nature," "the banquet of life,"

"the disinherited," "the submerged tenth," "the mine to the miner,"

"restore the land to the landless." Trades unionism consists almost

entirely, on its philosophical side, of suggestive watchwords and

phrases. It is said that "labor" creates all value. This is not true,

but the fallacy is complete when labor is taken in the sense of

"laborers," collectively and technically so called,--an abuse of

language which is now current. To say that wage-earners create all value

is to assert a proposition from which numerous and weighty consequences

follow as to rights and interests. "The interest of one is the interest

of all" is a principle which is as good for a band of robbers as for a

union of any other kind. "Making work" by not producing is the greatest

industrial fallacy possible.

+175. Slave, democracy.+ Since "democratic" is now a word to conjure

with, we hear of democracy in industry, banking, education, science,

etc., where the word is destitute of meaning or is fallacious. It is

used to prejudice the discussion. Since the abolition of slavery the

word "slave" has become a token. In current discussions we hear of "rent

slaves," "wages slavery," "debt slavery," "marriage slavery," etc. These

words bear witness to great confusion and error in the popular notions

of what freedom is and can be. For negroes emancipation contained a

great disillusion. They had to learn what being "free" did not mean.

Debt slavery is the oldest kind of slavery except war captivity. A man

in debt is not free. A man who has made a contract is not free. A man

who has contracted duties and obligations as husband and father, or has

been born into them as citizen, son, brother, etc., is not free. Can we

imagine ourselves "free" from the conditions of human life? Does it do

any good to stigmatize the case as "wages slavery," when what it means

is that a man is under a necessity to earn his living? It would be a

grand reform in the mores if the masses should learn to turn away in

contempt from all this rhetoric.

+176. Epithets.+ Works of fiction have furnished the language with

epithets for types of individuals (sec. 622). Don Quixote, Faust, Punch,

Reinecke Fuchs, Br'er Rabbit, Falstaff, Bottom, and many from Dickens

(Pickwick, Pecksniff, Podsnap, Turveydrop, Uriah Heep) are examples. The

words are like coins. They condense ideas and produce classes. They

economize language. They also produce summary criticisms and definition

of types by societal selection. All the reading classes get the use of

common epithets, and the usage passes to other classes in time. The

coercion of an epithet of contempt or disapproval is something which it

requires great moral courage to endure.

+177. Phrases.+ The educated classes are victims of the phrase. Phrases

are rhetorical flourishes adapted to the pet notions of the time. They

are artifices of suggestion. They are the same old tricks of the

medicine man adapted to an age of literature and common schools. Instead

of a rattle or a drum the operator talks about "destiny" and "duty," or

molds into easy phrases the sentiments which are popular. It is only a

difference of method. Solemnity, unction, and rhetorical skill are

needed. Often the phrases embody only visionary generalities.

"Citizenship," "publicity," "public policy," "restraint of trade," "he

who holds the sea will hold the land," "trade follows the flag," "the

dollar of the fathers," "the key of the Pacific," "peace with honor,"

are some of the recent coinages or recoinages. Phrases have great power

when they are antithetical or alliterative. Some opponents of the silver

proposition were quite perplexed by the saying: "The white man with the

yellow metal is beaten by the yellow man with the white metal." In 1844

the alliterative watchword "Fifty-four forty or fight" nearly provoked a

war. If it had been "Forty-nine thirty or fight," that would not have

had nearly so great effect. The "Cape to Cairo" railroad is another case

of alliteration. Humanitarianism has permeated our mores and has been a

fountain of phrases. Forty years ago the phrase "enthusiasm of humanity"

was invented. It inspired a school of sentimental philosophizing about

social relations, which has been carried on by phrase making: "the

dignity of labor," "the nobility of humanity," "a man is not a ware,"

"an existence worthy of humanity," "a living wage." "Humanity" in modern

languages is generally used in two senses: (_a_) the human race, (_b_)

the sympathetic sentiment between man and man. This ambiguity enters

into all the phrases which are humanitarian.

+178. Pathos.+ Suggestion is powerfully aided by _pathos_, in the

original Greek sense of the word. Pathos is the glamour of sentiment

which grows up around the pet notion of an age and people, and which

protects it from criticism. The Greeks, in the fourth century before

Christ, cherished pathos in regard to tyrannicide. Tyrants were bosses,

produced by democracy in towns, but hated by democrats. Tyrannicides

were surrounded with a halo of heroism and popular admiration.[373]

Something of the same sentiment was revived in the sixteenth century,

when it appeared that a tyrant was any ruler whose politics one did not

like. It cost several rulers their lives. Pathos was a large element in

the notions of woman and knighthood (twelfth and thirteenth centuries),

of the church (thirteenth century), of the Holy Sepulcher (eleventh and

twelfth centuries). In the thirteenth century there was a large element

of pathos in the glorification of poverty. A great deal of pathos has

been expended on the history and institutions of Greece and Rome in

modern times. Classical studies still depend largely on it for their

prestige. There is a pathos of democracy in the United States. In all

English-speaking countries marriage is an object of pathos. The pathos

is cultivated by poetry and novels. Humanitarianism is nourished by

pathos and it stimulates pathos. The "poor" and the "laborers" are

objects of pathos, on account of which these terms, in literature, refer

to a conventional and unreal concept. Consequently there is no honest

discussion of any topic which concerns the poor or laborers. Some people

make opposition to alcohol an object of pathos.

+179. Pathos is unfavorable to truth.+ Whenever pathos is in play the

subject is privileged. It is regarded with a kind of affection, and is

protected from severe examination. It is made holy or sacred. The thing

is cherished with such a preëstablished preference and faith that it is

thought wrong to verify it. Pathos, therefore, is unfavorable to truth.

It has always been an element in religion. It is an element now in

patriotism, and in regard to the history of one's own country. The

coercion of pathos on the individual comes in popular disapproval of

truth-telling about the matter in question. The toleration for forgery

and fraud in the Christian church until modern times, which to modern

people seems so shocking and inexplicable, was chiefly due to pathos

about religion and the church. If a forgery would help the church or

religion, any one who opposed it would seem to be an enemy of religion

and the church and willing to violate the pathos which surrounded them.

+180. The value of analysis and verification as tests.+ In all the cases

of the use of catchwords, watchwords, and phrases, the stereotyped forms

of language seem to convey thought, especially ascertained truth, and

they do it in a way to preclude verification. It is absolutely essential

to correct thinking and successful discussion to reject stereotyped

forms, and to insist on analysis and verification. Evidently all forms

of suggestion tend to create an atmosphere of delusion. Pathos increases

the atmosphere of delusion. It introduces elements which corrupt the

judgment. In effect, it continues the old notion that there are edifying

falsehoods and useful deceits. The masses always infuse a large

emotional element into all their likes and dislikes, approval and

disapproval. Hence, in time, they surround what they accept with pathos

which it is hard to break through.

+181. Humanity.+ The standard of humanity or of decent behavior,

especially towards the weak or those persons who may be at one's mercy,

or animals, is entirely in the mores of the group and time. To the

Gauchos of Uruguay "inhumanity and love of bloodshed become second

nature." Their customs of treating beasts habituate them to bloodshed.

"They are callous to the sight of blood and suffering and come to

positively enjoy it." They have no affection for their horses and dogs.

They murder for plunder.[374] It is very rarely that we meet with such a

description as that of any people. Polynesians were bloodthirsty and

cruel, perhaps because they had no chase of wild animals in which to

expend their energies.[375] North American Indians could invent

frightful tortures, but they were not bloodthirsty. They were not

humane. Suffering did not revolt them. Schomburgk[376] tells a story of

an Indian who became enraged at his wife because she groaned with

toothache. He cut down her hammock and caused her to fall so that she

suffered a dislocation of the arm. A European witness went to the chief

with a report and remonstrance, but the chief was astonished that any

one should take any notice of such an incident. The Assyrians cut in

stone representations of flaying, impaling, etc., and of a king with his

own royal hands putting out the eyes of prisoners. The Egyptians

represented kings slaying men (national enemies) in masses. The Romans

enjoyed bloodshed and the sight of suffering.[377] The Middle Ages

reveled in cruelty to men and beasts. It is in the Middle Ages that we

could find the nearest parallels to the Gauchos above. None of these

people felt that repulsive revolt of the whole nature at inhumanity

which characterizes modern cultivated people. The horrors have all

receded out of our experience, and almost out of our knowledge. The line

of familiarity is set far off. Therefore a little thing in the way of

inhumanity is strange and exerts its full repulsive effect. Things

happen, however, which show us that human nature is not changed, and

that the brute in it may awake again at any time. It is all a question

of time, custom, and occasion, and the individual is coerced to adopt

the mores as to these matters which are then and there current.

+182. Selection by distinction.+ One of the leading modes by which the

group exercises selection of its adopted type on the individual is by

distinction. Distinction is selection. It appeals to vanity. It acts in

two ways and has two opposite effects. One likes to be separated from

the crowd by what is admired, and dislikes to be distinguished for what

is not admired. Cases occur in which the noteworthy person is not sure

whether he ought to be proud or ashamed of that for which he is

distinguished. When a society gives titles, decorations, and rewards for

acts, it stimulates what it rewards and causes new cases of it. The

operation of selection is direct and rational. The cases in which the

application of distinction is irrational show most clearly its selective

effect. School-teachers are familiar with the fact that children will

imitate a peculiarity of one which marks him out from all the rest, even

if it is a deformity or defect. Why then wonder that barbarian mothers

try to deform their babies towards an adopted type of bodily perfection

which is not rationally preferable? A lady of my acquaintance showed me

one of her dolls which had wire attachments on its legs in imitation of

those worn by children for orthopedic effect. She explained that when

she was a child, another child who had soft bones or weak ankles, and

who wore irons for them, was brought into her group of playmates. They

all admired and envied her, and all wished that they had weak bones so

that they could wear irons. This lady made wire attachments for her doll

that it might reach the highest standard.

+183. Aristocracies.+ All aristocracies are groups of those who are

distinguished, at the time, for the possession of those things which are

admired or approved, and which give superiority in the struggle for

existence or in social power. In the higher civilization, until modern

times, the possession of land was the only social power which would

raise a man above sordid cares and enable him to plan his life as he

chose. By talent an income could be won which would give the same

advantage, but not with the same security of permanence and

independence. The fields for talent were war, civil administration, and

religion, the last including all mental activity. Men of talent had to

win their place by craft and charlatanism (sorcery, astrology,

therapeutics). Their position never was independent, except in church

establishments. They had to win recognition from warriors and

landowners, and they became comrades and allies of the latter. Merchants

and bankers were the aristocracy at Carthage, Venice, Florence, and

Genoa, and in the Hansa. Talented military men were aristocrats under

Napoleon, courtiers were such under Louis XIV, and ecclesiastics at

Rome. Since the fourteenth century capital has become a new and the

greatest and indispensable social power. Those who, at any time, have

the then most important social power in their hands are courted and

flattered, envied and served, by the rest. They make an aristocracy. The

aristocrats are the distinguished ones, and their existence and

recognition give direction to social ambition. Of course this acts

selectively to call out what is most advantageous and most valued in the

society.

+184.+ There are a number of mass phenomena which are on a lower grade

than the mores, lacking the elements of truth and right with respect to

welfare, which illustrate still further and more obviously the coercion

of all mass movements over the individual. These are fashion, poses,

fads, and affectations.

+185. Fashion.+ Fashion in dress has covered both absurdities and

indecencies with the ægis of custom. From the beginning of the

fourteenth century laws appear against indecent dress. What nobles

invented, generally in order to give especial zest to the costume of a

special occasion, that burghers and later peasants imitated and made

common.[378] In the fifteenth century the man's hose fitted the legs and

hips tightly. The latchet was of a different color, and was decorated

and stuffed as if to exaggerate still further the indecent obtrusiveness

of it.[379] Schultz[380] says that the pictures which we have do not

show the full indecency of the dress against which the clergy and

moralists of the fifteenth century uttered denunciations, but only those

forms which were considered decent, that is, those which were within the

limits which custom at the time had established. At the same time women

began to uncover the neck and bosom. The extent to which this may be

carried is always controlled by fashion and the mores. Puritans and

Quakers attempted to restrict it entirely, and to so construct the

dress, by a neckerchief or attachment to the bodice, that the shape of

the bust should be entirely concealed. The mores rejected this rule as

excessive. In spite of all the eloquence of the moral preachers, that

form of dress which shows neck and bosom has become established, only

that it is specialized for full dress and covered by conventionalization.

+186. Conventionalization.+ Conventionalization also comes into play to

cover the dress of the ballet or burlesque opera and the bathing dress.

Conventionalization always includes strict specification and limits of

time, place, and occasion, beyond which the same dress would become

vicious. Amongst Moslems and Orientals this conventionalization as to

dress has never been introduced. We are familiar with the fact that when

a fashion has been introduced and has become common our eye is formed to

it, and no one looks "right" or stylish who does not conform to it. We

also know that after the fashion has changed things in the discarded

fashion look dowdy and rustic. No one can resist these impressions, try

as he may. This fact, in the experience of everybody, gives us an

example of the power of current custom over the individual. While a

fashion reigns its tendency is to greater and greater extravagance in

order to produce the desired and admired effect. Then the toleration for

any questionable element in the fashion is extended and the extension is

unnoticed. If a woman of 1860, in the dress of her time, were to meet a

woman of 1906, in the dress of her time, each would be amazed at the

indecency of the dress of the other. No dress ever was more, or more

justly, denounced for ugliness, inconvenience, and indecency than the

crinoline, but all the women from 1855 to 1865, including some of the

sweetest who ever lived, wore it. No inference whatever as to their

taste or character would be justified. There never is any rational

judgment in the fashion of dress. No criticism can reach it. In a few

cases we know what actress or princess started a certain fashion, but in

the great majority of cases we do not know whence it came or who was

responsible for it. We all have to obey it. We hardly ever have any

chance to answer back. Its all-sufficient sanction is that "everybody

wears it," or wears it _so_. Evidently this is only a special

application to dress of a general usage--conventionalization.

+187. Uncivilized fashions.+ Those "good old times" of simplicity and

common sense in dress must be sought in the time anterior to waistband

and apron. All the barbarians and savages were guilty of folly,

frivolity, and self-deformation in the service of fashion. They found an

ideal somewhere which they wanted to attain, or they wanted to be

distinguished, that is, raised out of the commonplace and universal. At

one stage distinction comes from being in the fashion in a high and

marked degree. Also each one flees the distinction of being out of the

fashion, which would not draw admiration. At another stage distinction

comes from starting a new fashion. This may be done by an ornament, if

it is well selected so that it will "take."[381] Beads have been a

fashionable ornament from the days of savagery until to-day. An Indian

woman in Florida "had six quarts (probably a peck) of the beads gathered

about her neck, hanging down her back, down upon her breasts, filling

the space under her chin, and covering her neck up to her ears. It was

an effort for her to move her head. She, however, was only a little, if

any, better off in her possessions than most of the others. Others were

about equally burdened. Even girl babies are favored by their proud

mammas with a varying quantity of the coveted neckwear. The cumbersome

beads are said to be worn by night as well as by day."[382] "A woman

sometimes hangs a weight of over five pounds around her neck, for

besides the ordinary necklaces the northern women wear one or more large

white, polished shells, which are brought from the western coast and

which weigh from half a pound upward."[383] "Fashions change in

Bechuanaland; one year the women all wear blue beads, but perhaps the

next (and just when a trader has laid in a supply of blue beads) they

refuse to wear any color but yellow. At the time of writing [1886] the

men wore small black pot hats, but several years ago they had used huge

felt hats, like that of Rip Van Winkle, and as a consequence the stores

are full of those unsalable ones."[384]

+188. Fashion in ethnography.+ The Carib women in Surinam think that

large calves of the leg are a beauty. Therefore they bind the leg above

the ankle to make the calves larger. They begin the treatment on

children.[385] Some Australian mothers press down their babies' noses.

"They laugh at the sharp noses of Europeans, and call them tomahawk

noses, preferring their own style."[386] The presence of two races side

by side calls attention to the characteristic differences. Race vanity

then produces an effort to emphasize the race characteristics. Samoan

mothers want the noses and foreheads of their babies to be flat, and

they squeeze them with their hands accordingly.[387] The "Papuan ideal

of female beauty has a big nose, big breasts, and a dark-brown, smooth

skin."[388] To-day the Papuans all smoke white clay pipes. Four weeks

later no one will smoke a white pipe. All want brown ones. Still four

weeks later no one wants any pipe at all. All run around with red

umbrellas.[389] On the Solomon Islands sometimes they want plain pipes;

then again, pipes with a ship or anchor carved on them; again, pipes

with a knob. Women wear great weights of metal as rings for

ornament.[390] The Galla women wear rings to the weight of four or six

pounds.[391] Tylor[392] says that an African belle wears big copper

rings which become hot in the sun, so that the lady has to have an

attendant, whose duty it is to cool them down by wetting them. The queen

of the Wavunias on the Congo wore a brass collar around her neck, which

weighed from sixteen to twenty pounds. She had to lie down once in a

while to rest.[393] The Herero wear iron which in the dry climate

retains luster. The women wear bracelets and leglets, and iron beads

from the size of a pea to that of a potato. They carry weights up to

thirty-five pounds and are forced to walk with a slow, dragging step

which is considered aristocratic. Iron is rare and worth more than

silver.[394] Livingstone says that in Balonda poorer people imitate the

step of those who carry big weights of ornament, although they are

wearing but a few ounces.[395] Some women of the Dinka carry fifty

pounds of iron. The rings on legs and arms clank like the fetters of

slaves. The men wear massive ivory rings on the upper arm. The rich

cover the whole arm. The men also wear leather bracelets and

necklaces.[396] In Behar, Hindostan, the women wear brass rings on their

legs. "One of these is heavy, nearly a foot broad, and serrated all

around the edges. It can only be put on the legs by a blacksmith, who

fits it on the legs of the women with his hammer, while they writhe upon

the ground in pain." Women of the milkman caste wear bangles of bell

metal, often up to the elbow. "The greater the number of bangles, the

more beautiful the wearer is considered."[397] The satirist could easily

show that all these details are shown now in our fashions.

+189. Ideals of beauty.+ In Melanesia a girdle ten centimeters wide is

worn, drawn as tight as possible. One cut from the body of a man

twenty-seven years old measured only sixty-five centimeters.[398] The

women of the Barito valley wear the _sarong_ around the thighs so tight

that it restricts the steps and produces a mincing gait which they think

beautiful.[399] The Rukuyenn of Guiana have an ideal of female beauty

which is marked by a large abdomen. They wind the abdomen with many

girdles to make it appear large. "The women of the Payaguas, in

Paraguay, from youth up, elongate the breasts, and they continue this

after they are mothers by means of bandages."[400] The southern Arabs

drop hot grease from a candle on a bride's fingers, and then plaster the

fingers with henna. Then the grease is taken off, and light-colored

spots (if possible, regular) are left where it was, while the rest of

the skin is colored brown by the henna. They put on the bride seventeen

garments, a silk one and a muslin one alternately; then a mantle over

all, and a rug on the mantle, and all possible ornaments.[401] Flinders

Petrie thinks that we must recognize a principle of "racial taste,"

"which belongs to each people as much as their language, which may be

borrowed like languages from one race by another, but which survives

changes and long eclipses even more than language."[402] The cases given

show that ideals of beauty are somehow formed, which call for a

deformation of the human body. The foreheads are flattened, the lips

enlarged, the ears drawn down, the skull forced into a sugar-loaf shape,

the nose flattened, etc., to try to reach a form approved by fashion.

There is an ideal of beauty behind the fashion, a selected type of

superiority, which must be assumed as the purpose of the fashion.

+190. Fashion in other things than dress.+ As will appear below, fashion

controls many things besides dress. It governs the forms of utensils,

weapons, canoes and boats, tools, etc., amongst savages. In the

fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there was a fashionable attitude or

pose in standing for women, in which the abdomen was thrown forward. It

is often seen in pictures and portraits.[403] It is inelegant and

destitute of meaning. The Venetians were luxurious and frivolous,

jealous and distrustful of women, and fond of pleasure and fashion. From

the end of the sixteenth century a shopkeeper in the Merceria adopted a

custom of showing the new fashions of Paris on Ascension Day by means of

a life-size doll dressed in them.[404] The Venetian women of that period

wore patins, shoes with blocks underneath, some of which were two feet

high. The women were unable to walk without a maid on each side to

support them.[405] Yriarte thinks that these patins were due to the

policy of the husbands. When an ambassador, in conversation with the

doge and his counselors, said that shoes would be far more convenient, a

counselor replied, "Only too convenient! Only too much so!" Under the

French Directory, a _demi-terme_ was the name of a framework worn by

women to look as if they would soon be mothers.[406] Thirty years ago

"poufs" were worn to enlarge the dress on the hips at the side. The

"Grecian bend," stooping forward, was an attitude both in walking and

standing. Then followed the bustle. Later, the contour was closely

fitted by the dress. No one thought that the human figure would be

improved if changed as the dress made it appear to be. No fashion was

adopted because it would have an indecent effect. The point for our

purpose is that women wore dresses of the appointed shape because

everybody did so, and for no other reason, being unconscious of the

effect.

Erasmus, in his colloquy on the Franciscans, makes one of the characters

say: "I think that the whole matter of dress depends upon custom and the

opinions which are current." He refers to some unnamed place where

adulterers, after conviction, are never allowed to uncover the private

parts, and says, "Custom has made it, for them, the greatest of all

punishments." "The fact is that nothing is so ridiculous that usage may

not make it pass."

Fashion has controlled the mode of dressing the hair and deforming the

body. It has determined what animals, or what special race of an animal

species, should be petted. It controls music and literature, so that a

composer, poet, or novelist is the rage or is forgotten. In mediæval

literature the modes of allegory were highly esteemed and very commonly

used. The writers described war and battles over and over again, and

paid little attention to nature. In fact, natural background, geography,

and meteorology were made as conventional as stage scenery, and were

treated as of no interest and little importance. Modern taste for

reality and for the natural details throws this mediæval characteristic

by contrast into strong relief.

+191. Miscellaneous fashions.+ Fashion rules in architecture. In the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, English Renaissance and

Gothic were regarded as barbaric, and palladian was admired. In France

the preference was for rococo and Mansard forms. At the present time the

English Renaissance and Gothic are in favor again, and palladian is

regarded with disfavor. Painting and sculpture undergo variations of

fashion as to standards and methods. The same is true of literature.

Poetry and novels follow phases of fashion. A successful novel makes

imitations and sets a fashion for a time. Types of heroes and ideals of

character come and go by fashion. The type of the man-as-he-should-be

varies by fashion, and this type exerts a great selection in the

education of the young. Educational methods run through fashions. Fads

in methods of teaching arise, are advocated with great emphasis, have

their run, decline, and disappear. There are fashions of standing,

walking, sitting, gesture, language (slang, expletives), pronunciation,

key of the voice, inflection, and sentence accent; fashions in shaking

hands, dancing, eating and drinking, showing respect, visiting, foods,

hours of meals, and deportment. When snuff was taken attitudes and

gestures in taking it were cultivated which were thought stylish.

Fashion determines what type of female beauty is at a time

preferred,--plump or _svelte_, blond or brunette, large or petite,

red-haired or black-haired. When was that "simple time of our fathers"

when people were too sensible to care for fashions? It certainly was

before the Pharaohs and perhaps before the glacial epoch. Isaiah (iii.

16) rebukes the follies of fashion. Chrysostom preached to the early

church against tricks and manners of gesture and walk which had been

learned in the theater. Since literature has existed moralists have

satirized fashion. Galton has noticed what any one may verify,--that old

portraits show "indisputable signs of one predominant type of face

supplanting another." "If we may believe caricaturists, the fleshiness

and obesity of many English men and women in the earlier years of this

century [nineteenth] must have been prodigious."[407] Part of this

phenomenon may be due to the fashion of painting. The portrait painter

warps all his subjects toward the current standard of "good looks," but

it is more probable that there is a true play of variation.

Platycnemism and the pierced olecranon run in groups for a time. Then

they run out. There are fashions in disease, as if fashion were really

in nature. This goes beyond the limits of our definition, but the rise

and passing away of variations in breeding plants and animals, and

perhaps in men, suggests that fashion may be an analogous play of

experiment, half caprice, half earnest, whose utility lies in selection.

If there was no reaching out after novelty except upon rational

determination, the case would be very different from what it is when

variation brings spontaneous suggestions. Our present modes of dress

(aside from the variations imposed by fashion) are the resultant of all

the fashions of the last two thousand years.

+192. All deformations by fashion are irrational.+ There is no guarantee

that fashions will serve expediency. Deformations of the skull may not

be harmful; they are not useful. The block inserted in the lip

interferes with eating and speaking. It alters the language. Saliva

cannot be retained, and flows over it. To those who are outside the

fashion it is extremely ugly and disgusting. To those inside the fashion

it is a standard of beauty and a badge of dignity and tribal position.

All fashions tend to extravagance because the senses become accustomed

to them, and it is necessary, in order to renew the impression of

distinction, to exaggerate. The extravagances of fashion run through all

grades of civilization. They show that fashion, coming from the whole to

the individual, adds nothing to the sense, judgment, or taste of the

latter, but imposes on him a coercion to conform. He who dissents is

thought rustic and boorish. He is more or less severely boycotted, which

means not only that he is made to suffer, but that he loses important

advantages and hurts his interests.

+193. Satires on fashion.+ Forty years ago a lady who swung her arms as

she walked was considered strong-minded. A lady who was young when the

present queen of England introduced the fashion of brushing up the hair

and uncovering the ears says that it seemed indecent. Fashion is

stronger than autocracy. Nicholas I of Russia disapproved of late hours

and ordered that court balls should be commenced early that they might

be finished early. He found himself almost alone until eleven o'clock,

and had to give up his reform.[408] In the height of the crinoline

fashion Leech published in _Punch_ a picture of two maiden ladies who

"think crinoline a preposterous and extravagant invention and appear at

a party in a simple and elegant attire." The shocked horror of the

bystanders is perfect, but the two ladies would to-day be quite in the

fashion. Du Maurier published in _Punch_ a skit in which a little girl

asked her mother how Eve knew, the first time that she saw Cain as a

baby, that he was not ugly. This is a very clever hit at the origin of

conventions. There was when Cain was born no established convention that

all babies are pretty.

+194. Fashion in faiths and ideals.+ There are also fashions in trading,

banking, political devices, traveling, inn keeping, book making, shows,

amusements, flowers, fancywork, carriages, gardens, and games. There

seem to be fashions in logic and reasoning. Arguments which are accepted

as convincing at one time have no effect at another (sec. 227, n. 4).

For centuries western Europe accepted the argument for the necessity of

torture in the administration of justice as convincing. At different

periods the satisfaction in allegory as a valid method of interpretation

has been manifested and the taste for allegory in the arts has appeared.

Philosophy goes through a cycle of forms by fashion. Even mathematics

and science do the same, both as to method and as to concepts. That is

why "methodology" is eternal. Mediæval "realism" ruled all thought for

centuries, and its dominion is yet by no means broken. It prevails in

political philosophy now. Nominalism is the philosophy of modern

thought. Scholasticism held all the mental outfit of the learned. Thomas

Aquinas summed up all that man knows or needs to know. A modern man

finds it hard to hold his own attention throughout a page of it, even

for historical purposes. "Phlogiston" and "vortices" had their day and

are forgotten. Eighteenth-century deism and nineteenth-century

rationalism interest nobody any more. Eighteenth-century economists

argued in favor of stimulating population in order to make wages low,

and thereby win in international competition. They never had a

compunction or a doubt about this argument. No wonder it has been

asserted that all truth, except that which is mathematically

demonstrable, is only a function of the age. When the earth is

underpopulated and there is an economic demand for men, democracy is

inevitable. That state of things cannot be permanent. Therefore

democracy cannot last. It contains no absolute and "eternal" truth.

While it lasts a certain set of political notions and devices are in

fashion. Certain moral standards go with them. Evolution is now accepted

as a final fact in regard to organic phenomena. A philosophy of nature

is derived from it. Is it only a fashion,--a phase of thought? For to

all but a very few such a philosophy has no guarantee except that it is

current. All accept it because all accept it, and for no other reason.

Narrower philosophies become the fashion in classes, coteries, and

cliques. They are really affectations of something which wins prestige

and comes to be a badge of culture or other superiority. A few are

distinguished because they know Greek, or because they are

"freethinkers," or because they are ritualists, or because they profess

a certain cultus in art, or because they are disciples of Ruskin,

Eastlake, Carlyle, Emerson, Browning, Tolstoi, or Nietsche, and

cultivate the ideas and practices which these men have advocated as true

and wise. Often such fashions of thought or art pass from a narrow

coterie to a wider class, and sometimes they permeate the mores and

influence an age. When men believed in witches they did so because

everybody did. When the belief in witches was given up it was because a

few men set the fashion, and it was no longer "enlightened" to believe

in them.

+195. Fashion not trivial; not subject to argument.+ Fashion is by no

means trivial. It is a form of the dominance of the group over the

individual, and it is quite as often harmful as beneficial. There is no

arguing with the fashion. In the case of dress we can sometimes tell

what princess or actress started the fashion, and we sometimes know, in

the case of ideas, who set them afloat. Generally, however, it is not

known who started a fashion in dress. The authority of fashion is

imperative as to everything which it touches. The sanctions are ridicule

and powerlessness. The dissenter hurts himself; he never affects the

fashion. No woman, whatever her age or position or her opinion about the

crinoline fashion, could avoid wearing one. No effort to introduce a

fashion of "rational dress" for women has ever yet succeeded. An artist,

novelist, poet, or playwright of a school which is out of fashion fails

and is lost. An opponent of the notions which are current can get no

hearing. The fashion, therefore, operates a selection in which success

and merit are often divorced from each other, but the selection is

pitiless. The canons of criticism are set by fashion. It follows that

there is no rational effect of fashion. There was a rule in goblinism:

Say naught but good of the dead. The rule was dictated by fear that the

ghost would be angry and return to avenge the dead. The rule has come

down to us and is an imperative one. Eulogies on the dead are,

therefore, conventional falsehoods. It is quite impossible for any one

to depart from the fashion. The principle is in fashion that one should

take the side of the weaker party in a contest. This principle has no

rational ground at all. There is simply a slight probability that the

stronger will be in the wrong. Fashion requires that we should all

affect nonpartisanship in discussion, although it is absurd to do so. Of

course these weighty rules on important matters go over into the mores,

but they are fashions because they are arbitrary, have no rational

grounds, cannot be put to any test, and have no sanction except that

everybody submits to them.

+196. Remoter effects of fashion.+ The selective effect of fashion, in

spite of its irrationality and independently of the goodness or badness

of its effect on interests, is a reflection on the intelligence of men.

It accounts for many heterogeneous phenomena in society. The fashions

influence the mores. They can make a thing modest or immodest, proper or

improper, and, if they last long enough, they affect the sense and the

standards of modesty and propriety. Fashions of banking and trading

affect standards of honesty, or definitions of cheating and gambling.

Public shows, dances, punishments, and executions affect, in time,

standards of decency, taste in amusement, sentiments of humanity, views

as to what is interesting and attractive. Methods of argument which are

fashionable may train people to flippancy, sophistry, levity of mind,

and may destroy the power to think and reason correctly. Scherr[409]

says that fashion served as a means to transfer to Germany the

depravation of morals which had corrupted the Latin nations in the

sixteenth century. Fashions now spread through all civilized nations by

contact and contagion. They are spread by literature.

+197. Slang and expletives.+ Slang and expletives are fashions in

language. Expletives are of all grades from simple interjections to the

strongest profanity. Many expletives are ancient religious formulas of

objurgation, obsecration, asseveration, anathema, etc. They express a

desire to curse or bless, invite or repel. Where the original sense is

lost they sink into interjections, the whole sense of which is in the

accent. Their use rises and falls with fashion in nations, classes,

groups, and families, and it controls the habits of individuals. Whether

certain persons use a pious dialect, a learned (pedantic) dialect, a

gambler's slang, a phraseology of excessive adjectives and silly

expletives, or profane expressions, oaths, and phrases which abuse

sacred things, depends on birth and training. In this sense each dialect

is the language for each group and corresponds to the mores of the

group. There may be some psychology of expletives,[410] but they seem to

be accounted for, like slang, by the expediency of expression, which is

the purpose of all language. There is a need for expression which will

win attention and impress the memory. A strong expletive shocks an

opponent, or it is an instinctive reaction on a situation which

threatens the well-being of the speaker. It is a vent to emotion which

gives relief from it when other relief is not possible. This last is one

of the chief useful reasons for expletives. However, even then they are

a vicious habit, for stronger and stronger expressions are required to

win the same subjective effects. Old expressions lose force. Slang is

the new coinage. The mintage is often graphic and droll; it is also

often stupid and vulgar. A selection goes on. Some of it is rejected and

some enters into the language. Expletives also go out of fashion. The

strain for effect can be satisfied only by constantly greater and

greater excess. It becomes a bad personal habit to use grotesque and

extravagant expressions. Slang and expletives destroy the power of clear

and cogent expression in speech or writing; and they must affect powers

of thinking. Although slang is a new coinage which reinvigorates the

language, the fashion of slang and expletives must be rated, like the

fashion of using tobacco and alcohol, as at best a form of play, a habit

and custom which springs from no need and conduces to no interest. The

acts result in an idle satisfaction of the doer, and the good or ill

effects all fall within his own organism. The prevalence of such

fashions in a society becomes a fact of its mores, for there will be

rational effects on interests. The selective effect of them is in the

resistance to the fashions or subjection to them. They are only to a

limited extent enforced by social sanctions. There is personal liberty

in regard to them. Resistance depends on independent judgment and

self-control, and produces independence and self-control; that is, it

affects character. Groups are differentiated inside the society of those

who resist and those who do not, and the effect on the mores (character

of the group) results. The selective effects appear in the competition

of life between the two groups.

+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.

+224. The mediæval church operated societal selection.+ It is evident

that the mediæval church was a machine to exert societal selection. The

great reason for its strength as such is that it never made the mores of

the age; it proceeded out of them. It contributed, through a thousand

previous years, phantasms about the other world and dogmas about the

relation of this world to that one. These dogmas became mixed with all

the experience of life in the days of civic decline and misery, and

produced the mores of the tenth and eleventh centuries. All the great

doctrines then took on the form of manias or delusions. In the early

centuries of the Christian era "catholic" meant Christendom in its

entirety, in contrast with the separate congregations, so that the

concepts "all congregations" and the "universal church" are identical.

However, the church over the whole world was thought to have been

founded by the apostles, so that that only could be true which was found

everywhere in Christendom. So "catholic" came to have a pregnant

meaning, and got dogmatic and political connotations.[471] In the

eleventh century all Christendom was reduced to civic fragments in which

tyranny, oppression, and strife prevailed. It was not strange that

"catholicity" was revived as an idea of a peace pact by means of which

the church might unite Christendom into a peace group for the welfare of

mankind (sec. 14). This was a grand idea. If the Christian church had

devoted itself to the realization of it, by forms of constitutional

liberty, the history of the world would have been different. The church,

however, used "catholicity" as a name for universal submission to the

bishop of Rome and for hierarchical discipline, and used all means to

try to realize that conception. By the Inquisition and other apparatus

it attempted to enforce conformity to this idea, and exercised a

societal selection against all dissenters from it. The ecclesiastics of

Cluny, in the eleventh century, gave form to this high-church doctrine,

and they combined with it a rational effort to raise the clergy to honor

for learning and piety, as a necessary step for the success of their

church policy. The circumstances and ideas of the time gave to these

efforts the form of a struggle for a monarchical constitution of the

church. In the thirteenth century this monarchy came into collision with

the empire as the other aspirant to the rule of Christendom. Already the

papacy was losing moral hold on its subjects. The clergy were criticised

for worldliness, arrogance, and tyranny, and the antagonism of the

dynastic states, so far as they existed, found expression in popular

literature. Walter von der Vogelweide is regarded as a forerunner of the

Reformation on account of his bitter criticisms of the hierarchy.[472]

It is, however, very noteworthy that, in spite of the popular language

of the writers and their appeals to common experience, they did not

break the people away from their ecclesiastical allegiance, and also

that the church authorities paid little heed to the criticisms of these

persons. The miracle and moral plays were in the taste of the age

entirely. Besides being gross, they were irreligious and blasphemous.

Ecclesiastics tolerated them nevertheless.[473] The authorities moved

only when "the faith" was brought in question. "The faith," therefore,

acquired a technical signification of great importance. It was elevated

to the domain of sentiment and duty and surrounded with pathos (sec.

178), while its meaning was undefined. In time it came to mean obedience

to papal authority. Thus all the circumstances and streams of faith and

sentiment of the eleventh and twelfth centuries concentrated in the

hands of the hierarchy the control of society, because there was no

other organ to accept the deposit. The Cluny programme was a programme

of reform in the church such as everybody wanted. It gathered all "the

good men" in a common will and purpose. The ideals and the means were

selected, and the advocates of the same became the selected classes in

society. They remained such long after the movement was spent and lost,

but the notion remained that every good man, or would-be good man, ought

to stand with the church.

+225. The mediæval church.+ In the crusades the church went to war with

Islam, another aspirant to rule mankind. It undoubtedly drilled and

disciplined its own adherents by the crusades and thus confirmed its

power. It is also certain that the crusades were popular and only put

into effect the wish of the great body of Christians. It was the masses,

therefore, who made the mediæval church. It possessed a corporate

organization and hierarchy which was a body of personal interests, in

which ambition, cupidity, and love of power were awakened. The church

was venal, sensual, gross, and inhuman, because the mores of the age

were such. How could the church be other than the age was? Where was it

to find inspiration or illumination from without which should make

ecclesiastics anything but men of their age? The men of that age left on

record their testimony that the church was in no way better than the

society.[474] From the end of the twelfth century man after man and sect

after sect arose, whose inspiration was moral indignation at the vices

and abuses in the church. Wycliffe denied transubstantiation on

rationalistic grounds, but his work all consisted in criticism of

hierarchical abuses and of the principles which made the abuses

possible. The church never was on the level of the better mores of any

time. Every investigation which we make leads us not to the church as

the inspirer and leader, but to the dissenting apostles of

righteousness, to the great fluctuations in the mores (chivalry, woman

service, city growth, arts, and inventions), to the momentum of

interests, to the variations in the folkways which travel (crusades and

pilgrimages), commerce, industrial arts, money, credit, gunpowder, the

printing press, etc., produced.

+226. Sacerdotal celibacy.+ The church rode upon the tide and tried to

keep possession of the social power and use it for the interest of

ecclesiastics. Asceticism was in the mores. Everybody accepted the

ascetic standard of merit and holiness as correct and just, whether he

lived by it or not. Sacerdotal celibacy was a case of asceticism. Every

one knew that it had come about in church history and was not scriptural

or primitive. It was in the notions of the age that there were stages in

righteousness, and that religious persons were bound to live by higher

stages than persons not technically religious. Renunciation of sex was

higher righteousness than realization of sex, as is taught in the

seventh chapter of First Corinthians. This notion existed amongst

heathen and pagans. The priests in the Melkart temple at Gades (Cadiz)

were bound to celibacy.[475]