The term "unconscious" in the psychology of the crowd does not, of course, imply that the people in the crowd are not aware of the fact that they are lynching a negro or demanding the humiliation or extermination of certain of their fellows. Everybody is perfectly aware of what is being said and done; only _the moral significance_ of the thing is changed. The deed or sentiment, instead of being disapproved, appears to be demanded, by moral principle, by the social welfare, by the glory of the state, etc. What is unconscious is the fact that the social is actually being twisted around into giving approval of the things which it normally forbids. Every crowd considers that it is vindicating some sacred principle. The more bloody and destructive the acts to which it is impelled, the more moral are its professions. Under the spell of the crowd's logic certain abstract principles lead inevitably to the characteristic forms of crowd-behavior. They seem to glorify such acts, to make heroes and martyrs of those who lead in their performance. The attention of everyone is first centered on the abstract and universal, as I have indicated. The repressed wish then unconsciously gives to the formulas which the crowd professes a meaning different from that which appears, yet unconsciously associated with it. This unconscious meaning is of course an impulse to act. But the motive professed is not the real motive. Normally our acts and ideas are corrected by our social environment. But in a crowd our test of the real fails us, because, since the attention of all near us is directed in the same way as our own, the social environment for the time fails to check us. As William James said: The sense that anything we think is unreal can only come when that thing is contradicted by some other thing of which we think. Any object which remains uncontradicted is _ipso facto_ believed and posited as "absolute reality." Our immediate social environment is all slipping along with us. It no longer contradicts the thing we want to believe, and, unconsciously, want to do. As the uncontradicted idea is, for the time, reality, so is it a motor impulse. The only normal reason why we do not act immediately upon any one of our ideas is that action is inhibited by ideas of a contradictory nature. As crowd, therefore, we find ourselves moving in a fictitious system of ideas uncritically accepted as real--not as in dreams realizing our hidden wishes, merely in imagination, but also impelled to act them out in much the way that the psychoeurotic is impelled to act out the fixed ideas which are really the symbols of his suppressed wish. In other words, _a crowd is a device for indulging ourselves in a kind of temporary insanity by all going crazy together_.