We knew already and Dr. Gustave Le Bon had demonstrated to us in a curious way that the soul of a crowd does not resemble the soul of any of its component members. According to the leaders and the circumstances that control it, the collective soul is sometimes loftier, juster, more generous and most often more impulsive, more credulous, more cruel, more barbarous and blind. But a crowd has only a provisional, momentary soul, which does not survive the short-lived and nearly always violent event that calls it into being; and its contingent and transitory psychology is hardly able to tell us how the profound, lasting and, so to speak, immortal soul of a nation takes shape. 3 It is quite natural that a nation should not know itself at all and that its acts should plunge it into a state of bewilderment from which it does not recover until history has explained them to a greater or lesser degree. None of the men who make up a nation knows himself; still less does any of them know his fellows. Not one of us really knows who or what he is; not one of us can say what he will do in unexpected circumstances which are a trifle more serious than those which form the customary tissue of life. We spend our existence in questioning and exploring ourselves; our acts are as much a revelation to ourselves as to others; and, the nearer we draw to our end, the farther stretches the vista of that which still remains for us to discover. We own but the smallest part of ourselves; the rest, which is almost the whole, does not belong to us at all, but merges in the past and the future and in other mysteries more unknown than the future or the past.