Moreover, it is hardly true that “the multitude is always in the wrong”;[74] and conclusions may be no less sound and vital for being reached under a certain exaltation of popular enthusiasm. The individual engaged in private affairs and without the thrill of the common life is not more apt to be at the height of his mental being than the man in the crowd. A mingling of these influences seems to produce the best results, and the highest rationality, while it involves much plodding thought in its preparation, is likely to come to definite consciousness and expression in moments of some excitement. As it is the common experience of artists, poets and saints that their best achievements are the outcome of long brooding culminating in a kind of ecstasy, so the clearest notes of democracy may be struck in times of exaltation like that which, in the Northern United States, followed the attack on Fort Sumter. The impulsiveness which marks popular feeling may express some brutal or trivial phase of human nature, or some profound moral intuition, the only definite test being the persistence of the sentiment which thus comes to light; and if it proves to have the lasting warrant of the general conscience it may be one of those voices of the people in which posterity will discover the voice of God. The view that the crowd is irrational and degenerate is characteristic of an intricate society where reading has largely taken the place of assembly as a stimulus to thought. In primitive times the social excitement of religious and other festivals represented the higher life; as it still does in backwoods communities, and to sluggish temperaments everywhere. Even in the towns our higher sentiments are largely formed in social meetings of one sort or another, accompanied by music, acting, dancing or speech-making, which draw one out of the more solitary currents of his thought and bring him into livelier unity with his fellows.