Prof. Le Bon, in his work "The Crowd," says of the "collective mind" of men: "The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly marked characteristics. The gathering has become what, in the absence of a better expression, I will call an organized crowd, or, if the term be considered preferable, a psychological crowd. _It forms a single being_, and is subjected to the law of the mental unity of crowds.... The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupation, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of _a sort of collective mind_, which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think and act, were he in a state of isolation. There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being, or do not transform themselves into acts, except in the case of the individuals forming a crowd.... In the collective mind the intellectual aptitudes of the individuals, and in consequence their individuality, is weakened.... The most careful observations seem to prove that an individual immerged for some length of time in a crowd in action soon finds itself in a special state, which most resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself.... The conscious personality has entirely vanished, will and discernment are lost. All feelings and thoughts are bent in the direction determined by the hypnotizer.... An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will."