A. Heterogeneous crowds 1. Anonymous (street crowds, for example) 2. Not anonymous (parliamentary assemblies, for example) B. Homogeneous crowds 1. Sects (political, religious, etc.) 2. Castes (military, sacerdotal, etc.) 3. Classes (bourgeois, working-men, etc.) This classification is open to criticism. First of all, it is inaccurate to give the name of crowd indiscriminately to every human group. Literally (from the etymological standpoint) this objection seems to me unanswerable. Tarde more exactly distinguishes between crowds, associations, and corporations. But we retain the generic term of "crowd" because it indicates the first stage of the social group which is the source of all the others, and because with these successive distinctions it does not lend itself to equivocal meaning. In the second place, it is difficult to understand why Le Bon terms the sect a _homogeneous_ crowd, while he classifies parliamentary assemblies among the _heterogeneous_ crowds. The members of a sect are usually far more different from one another in birth, education, profession, social status, than are generally the members of a political assembly. Turning from this criticism to note without analyzing heterogeneous crowds, let us then proceed to determine the principal characteristics of the three large types of homogeneous crowds, the classes, the castes, the sects. The heterogeneous crowd is composed of _tout le monde_, of people like you, like me, like the first passer-by. _Chance_ unites these individuals physically, the _occasion_ unites them psychologically; they do not know each other, and after the moment when they find themselves together, they may never see each other again. To use a metaphor, it is a psychological meteor, of the most unforeseen, ephemeral, and transitory kind. On this accidental and fortuitous foundation are formed here and there other crowds, always heterogeneous, but with a certain character of stability or, at least, of periodicity. The audience at a theater, the members of a club, of a literary or social gathering, constitute also a crowd but a different crowd from that of the street. The members of these groups know each other a little; they have, if not a common aim, at least a common custom. They are nevertheless "anonymous crowds," as Le Bon calls them, because they do not have within themselves the nucleus of organization.