The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological StudyMartin, Everett Dean
Science
The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study
Martin, Everett Dean
Crowds
Intellectualism may not always be so clearly other-worldly as Plato
shows himself to be in this passage. But it commonly argues that behind
the visible world of "illusory sense experience" lies the true ground
and cause--an unseen order in which the contradictions of experience are
either unknown or harmonized, an external and unchangeable "Substance,"
a self-contained Absolute to which our ephemeral personalities with
their imperfections and problems are unknown. A "thing in itself," or
principle of Being which transcends our experience.
This type of thinking, whether it be known as Idealism, Rationalism,
Intellectualism, or Absolutism, finds little sympathy from those who
approach the study of philosophy from the standpoint of psychology. The
following passages taken from _Studies in Humanism_ by Schiller, show
that even without the technique of the analytical method, it was not
hard to detect some of the motives which prompted the construction of
systems of this sort. The partisanism of one of these motives is rather
suggestive for our study of the mind of the crowd. Says our author:
Logical defects rarely kill beliefs to which men, for
psychological reasons, remain attached.... This may suggest to
us that we may have perhaps unwittingly misunderstood
Absolutism, and done it a grave injustice.... What if its real
appeal was not logical but psychological?...
The history of English Absolutism distinctly bears out these
anticipations. It was originally a deliberate importation from
Germany, with a purpose. And this purpose was a religious
one--that of counteracting the antireligious developments of
Science. The indigenous philosophy, the old British empiricism,
was useless for this purpose. For though a form of
intellectualism, its sensationalism was in no wise hostile to
Science. On the contrary, it showed every desire to ally itself
with, and to promote, the great scientific movement of the
nineteenth century, which penetrated into and almost overwhelmed
Oxford between 1859 and 1870.
But this movement excited natural and not unwarranted alarm in
that great center of theology. For Science, flushed with its
hard-won liberty, ignorant of philosophy, and as yet unconscious
of its proper limitations, was decidedly aggressive and
overconfident. It seemed naturalistic, nay, materialistic, by
the law of its being. The logic of Mill, the philosophy of
Evolution, the faith in democracy, in freedom, in progress (on
material lines), threatened to carry all before them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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