[Decoration]
WHO has not at some time leaned over the parapet of a bridge to watch
the wrinklings and dimplings of the current below,--to wonder at the
trembling permanency of surface-shapes that never change, though the
substance of them is never for two successive moments the same? The
mystery of the spectacle fascinates; and it is worth thinking about.
Symbols of the riddle of our own being are those shuddering forms. In
ourselves likewise the substance perpetually changes with the flow of
the Infinite Stream; but the shapes, though ever agitated by various
inter-opposing forces, remain throughout the years.
And who has not been fascinated also by the sight of the human stream
that pours and pulses through the streets of some great metropolis?
This, too, has its currents and counter-currents and eddyings,--all
strengthening or weakening according to the tide-rise or tide-ebb of the
city's sea of toil. But the attraction of the greater spectacle for us
is not really the mystery of motion: it is rather the mystery of man. As
outside observers we are interested chiefly by the passing forms and
faces,--by their intimations of personality, their suggestions of
sympathy or repulsion. We soon cease to think about the general flow.
For the atoms of the human current are visible to our gaze: we see them
walk, and deem their movements sufficiently explained by our own
experience of walking. And, nevertheless, the motions of the visible
individual are more mysterious than those of the always invisible
molecule of water.--I am not forgetting the truth that all forms of
motion are ultimately incomprehensible: I am referring only to the fact
that our common relative knowledge of motions, which are supposed to
depend upon will, is even less than our possible relative knowledge of
the behavior of the atoms of a water-current.
* * * * *
Every one who has lived in a great city is aware of certain laws of
movement which regulate the flow of population through the more crowded
thoroughfares. (We need not for present purposes concern ourselves about
the complex middle-currents of the living river, with their thunder of
hoofs and wheels: I shall speak of the side-currents only.) On either
footpath the crowd naturally divides itself into an upward and a
downward stream. All persons going in one direction take the right-hand
side; all going in the other direction take the left-hand side. By
moving with either one of these two streams you can proceed even
quickly; but you cannot walk against it: only a drunken or insane person
is likely to attempt such a thing. Between the two currents there is
going on, by reason of the pressure, a continual self-displacement of
individuals to left and right, alternately,--such a yielding and
swerving as might be represented, in a drawing of the double-current, by
zigzag medial lines ascending and descending. This constant yielding
alone makes progress possible: without it the contrary streams would
quickly bring each other to a standstill by lateral pressure. But it is
especially where two crowd-streams intersect each other, as at
street-angles, that this systematic self-displacement is worthy of
study. Everybody observes the phenomenon; but few persons think about
it. Whoever really thinks about it will discover that there is a mystery
in it,--a mystery which no individual experience can fully explain.
* * * * *
In any thronged street of a great metropolis thousands of people are
constantly turning aside to left or right in order to pass each other.
Whenever two persons walking in contrary directions come face to face in
such a press, one of three things is likely to happen:--Either there is
a mutual yielding,--or one makes room for the other,--or else both, in
their endeavor to be accommodating, step at once in the same direction,
and as quickly repeat the blunder by trying to correct it, and so keep
dancing to and fro in each other's way,--until the first to perceive the
absurdity of the situation stands still, or until the more irritable
actually pushes his _vis-a-vis_ to one side. But these blunders are
relatively infrequent: all necessary yielding, as a rule, is done
quickly and correctly.
Of course there must be some general law regulating all this
self-displacement,--some law in accord with the universal law of motion
in the direction of least resistance. You have only to watch any
crowded street for half an hour to be convinced of this. But the law is
not easily found or formulated: there are puzzles in the phenomenon.
* * * * *
If you study the crowd-movement closely, you will perceive that those
encounters in which one person yields to make way for the other are much
less common than those in which both parties give way. But a little
reflection will convince you that, even in cases of mutual yielding, one
person must of necessity yield sooner than the other,--though the
difference in time of the impulse-manifestation should be--as it often
is--altogether inappreciable. For the sum of character, physical and
psychical, cannot be precisely the same in two human beings. No two
persons can have exactly equal faculties of perception and will, nor
exactly similar qualities of that experience which expresses itself in
mental and physical activities. And therefore in every case of apparent
mutual yielding, the yielding must really be successive, not
simultaneous. Now although what we might here call the "personal
equation" proves that in every case of mutual yielding one individual
necessarily yields sooner than the other, it does not at all explain the
mystery of the individual impulse in cases where the yielding is not
mutual;--it does not explain why you feel at one time that you are about
to make your _vis-a-vis_ give place, and feel at another time that you
must yourself give place. What originates the feeling?
A friend once attempted to answer this question by the ingenious theory
of a sort of eye-duel between every two persons coming face to face in a
street-throng; but I feel sure that his theory could account for the
psychological facts in scarcely half-a-dozen of a thousand such
encounters. The greater number of people hurrying by each other in a
dense press rarely observe faces: only the disinterested idler has time
for that. Hundreds actually pass along the street with their eyes fixed
upon the pavement. Certainly it is not the man in a hurry who can guide
himself by ocular snap-shot views of physiognomy;--he is usually
absorbed in his own thoughts.... I have studied my own case repeatedly.
While in a crowd I seldom look at faces; but without any conscious
observation I am always able to tell when I should give way, or when my
_vis-a-vis_ is going to save me that trouble. My knowledge is certainly
intuitive--a mere knowledge of feeling; and I know not with what to
compare it except that blind faculty by which, in absolute darkness, one
becomes aware of the proximity of bulky objects without touching them.
And my intuition is almost infallible. If I hesitate to obey it, a
collision is the invariable consequence.
Furthermore, I find that whenever automatic, or at least semi-conscious,
action is replaced by reasoned action--in plainer words, whenever I
begin to think about my movements--I always blunder. It is only while I
am thinking of other matters,--only while I am acting almost
automatically,--that I can thread a dense crowd with ease. Indeed, my
personal experience has convinced me that what pilots one quickly and
safely through a thick press is not conscious observation at all, but
unreasoning, intuitive perception. Now intuitive action of any kind
represents inherited knowledge, the experience of past lives,--in this
case the experience of past lives incalculable.
Utterly incalculable.... Why do I think so? Well, simply because this
faculty of intuitive self-direction in a crowd is shared by man with
very inferior forms of animal being,--evolutional proof that it must be
a faculty immensely older than man. Does not a herd of cattle, a herd of
deer, a flock of sheep, offer us the same phenomenon of mutual yielding?
Or a flock of birds--gregarious birds especially: crows, sparrows, wild
pigeons? Or a shoal of fish? Even among insects--bees, ants,
termites--we can study the same law of intuitive self-displacement. The
yielding, in all these cases, must still represent an inherited
experience unimaginably old. Could we endeavor to retrace the whole
course of such inheritance, the attempt would probably lead us back, not
only to the very beginnings of sentient life upon this planet, but
further,--back into the history of non-sentient substance,--back even to
the primal evolution of those mysterious tendencies which are stored up
in the atoms of elements. Such atoms we know of only as points of
multiple resistance,--incomprehensible knittings of incomprehensible
forces. Even the tendencies of atoms doubtless represent accumulations
of inheritance----but here thought checks with a shock at the eternal
barrier of the Infinite Riddle.