Now if attention can be directed to this imaginary and vague "meaning for everybody"--which is really the meaning for nobody--and so directed that the associations with the unique in personal experience are blocked, these abstractions will occupy the whole field of consciousness. The mind will yield to any connection which is made among them almost automatically. As conscious attention is cut away from the psyche as a whole, the objects upon which it is centered will appear to have a reality of their own. They become a closed system, perfectly logical it may be in itself, but with the fatal logic commonly found in paranoia--the fiction may become more real than life itself. It may be substituted, while the spell is on, for the world of actual experience. And just as the manifest content of a dream is, according to Freud, the condensed and distorted symbol of latent dream-thoughts and desires in the unconscious, so, in the case we are discussing, the unconscious invests these abstract terms with its own peculiar meanings. They gain a tremendous, though undefined, importance and an irresistible compelling power. Something like the process I have described occurs when the crowd appears. People are translated to a different world--that is, a different sense of the real. The speaker is transfigured to their vision. His words take on a mysterious importance; something tremendous, eternal, superhuman is at stake. Commonplace jokes become irresistibly amusing. Ordinary truths are wildly applauded. Dilemmas stand clear with all middle ground brushed away. No statement now needs qualification. All thought of compromise is abhorrent. Nothing now must intervene to rob these moments of their splendid intensity. As James once said of drunkenness, "Everything is just utterly utter." They who are not for us are against us. The crowd-mind consists, therefore, first of all, of a disturbance of the function of the real. _The crowd is the creature of Belief._ Every crowd has its peculiar "illusions," ideals, dreams. It maintains its existence as a crowd just so long as these crowd-ideas continue to be held by practically all the members of the group--so long, in fact, as such ideas continue to hold attention and assent to the exclusion of ideas and facts which contradict them.