The indulgence in this mode of amusing contemplation is, I readily grant, in a sense anti-social, that is to say, opposed to what the laugher’s community at the moment accepts as fitting and as good. When a tranquil observer of his social world laughs at the pretences, at the futilities, or it may be at the vagaries of its high dignitaries, he may not improbably feel half-terrified at the sound of his laugh; so firmly has our early schooling set in us a tendency to regard as insolent upstarts all small things when they challenge big ones: whether a “cheeky” schoolboy standing up to his big senior, or a small country confronting a big one, or a “petty” anti-war minority facing a “practically unanimous” people. Insolence it may be, yet perhaps to the eye of reason not more contemptible than the genuine ὕβρις in which great things are wont to indulge freely as well within their right. It is indisputable, as urged above, that the verdicts of the many, when they appear to fix the permanent demands of social life, or to store away some of the precious fruit of experience slowly maturing with the ages, are entitled to respect; and a wise man will not hastily dismiss any popular opinion which promises to have persistence. On the other hand, it is no less clear that the views of minorities—whether singular or plural in number—are exposed to special risks of their own. Yet this, and more, does not affect the contention that popular opinion, just because it is {407} popular, is almost completely relieved of that necessity of finding reasons for its assertions which presses heavily upon a minority; and, what is more serious, is subject to various and potent influences which are just as likely to lead to error as to truth. An opinion which may be seen to result from a mental process palpably warped by prejudice does not grow valid merely by multiplying the number of those who adopt it; for the increase may easily be the result, either of the simultaneous working of a like prejudice, or of the contagion which propagates psychical states, as well as physical, among perfectly inert members of a crowd.