In another connection I have referred to the fact that the crowd stands to the member _in loco parentis_. Here I wish to point out the fact that such a return to the parent image is commonly found in the psychoneurosis and is what is meant by "regression." I have also dwelt at some length on the fact that it is by securing a modification in the immediate social environment, ideally or actually, that the crowd permits the escape of the repressed wish. Such a modification in the social at once sets the members of the crowd off as a "peculiar people." Interest tends to withdraw from the social as a whole and center in the group who have become a crowd. The Church is "in the world but not of it." The nation is an end in itself, so is every crowd. Transference to the idea of the crowd differs then from the normal substitutes which we find for the object from which affection is withdrawn. It is itself a kind of regression. In the psychoneurosis--in paranoia most clearly--the patient's attempt to rationalize this shifting of interest gives rise to the closed systems and ideal reconstructions of the world mentioned in the passage quoted from Brill. Does the crowd's thinking commonly show a like tendency to construct an imaginary world of thought-forms and then take refuge in its ideal system? As we saw at the beginning of our discussion, it does. The focusing of general attention upon the abstract and universal is a necessary step in the development of the crowd-mind. The crowd does not think in order to solve problems. To the crowd-mind, as such, there are no problems. It has closed its case beforehand. This accounts for what Le Bon termed the "credulity" of the crowd. But the crowd believes only what it wants to believe and nothing else. Anyone who has been in the position of a public teacher knows how almost universal is the habit of thinking in the manner of the crowd and how difficult it is to get people to think for themselves. One frequently hears it said that the people do not think, that they do not want to know the truth. Ibsen makes his Doctor Stockman say: What sort of truths are they that the majority usually supports? They are truths that are of such advanced age that they are beginning to break up.... These "majority truths" are like last year's cured meat--like rancid tainted ham; and they are the origin of the moral scurvy that is rampant in our communities.... The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom among us is the compact majority, yes, the damned compact liberal majority ... the majority has might on its side unfortunately, but _right_ it has never.