unions, fraternal orders, brotherhoods, churches, political parties. They live the part by maintaining a sort of a group loyalty, and by loyalty is meant devotion to the same beliefs to the same aims, to the same idelas. There is thus a process of imitation within each group. But in a community, city, state or nation, these groups make up still bigger groups in which 1 takes place inter-group competition and imitation.

Gabriel Tarde in one of his works develops the thesis that the history of a race is a series of discoveries, inventions and imitations, but mostly imitations. An example, says he,

2

Bryce,

has a tendency to spread in geometrical progression. speaking of the political nature of man, has in mind the same human tendency when he says that "men follow in the path which they see others treading; they hasten to adopt the view that

seems likely to prevail".

3

Obviously enough, this tendency to imitate others is manifest only after the inertia of conservatism has been overcome. To direct this imitative tendency is the task of leadership and to overcome the inertia of conservatism, its hardest battle. Both Le Bon and Trotter have interesting Machiavellian discussions on the art of leadership. Both agree that the fundamental prerequisite for a leader is identification

with the crowd; the establishment on his part of a crowd-interest 4 and crowd-loyalty. Carried to its logical conclusion, this

1. The reconciliation and consolidation of individual and group opinions is discussed in Chapter IV.

2. His Social Laws.

3. James Bryce. The American Commonwelath, p. 274.

4. See Le Bon. The Crowd and Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War.

theory does not approve the favorite tactics of reformers of attacking without mercy the prevailing systems of traditions and beliefs in order to replace them with others more adequate and Such an attack would be disloyalty to the crowd

more useful.

on the part of the leader.

Should leaders then, resort to logic? Do individuals

use their capacity for reasoning to arrive at and believe in certain conclusions? If so, Dewey's theory that as between the impulses and the environment, "intelligence" makes up for the "frailty" of the former, can stand. Otherwise it will have to be admitted, as he himself virtually admits, that the environment, because organized in ignorance of the potentiality for progressive betterment of the plastic instincts, actually render stillborn the individual's biological bequest.

Indeed, authorities are unanimous in the assertion that human judgments and opinions are seldom the result of deliberate reasoning, much less of deliberate ascertainment of the truth of the facts involved. The immensity, prematureness and allinclusiveness of individual opinions convince Trotter that reason, surely, does not play a significant part in their formation. He says:

1

If we examine the mental furniture of the
average man we shall find it made up of a
vast number of judgments of a very precise
kind upon subjects of very great variety
complexity and difficulty.

1. W. Trotter. Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, p.36.

The bulk of such opinions must necessarily
be without rational basis, since many of them
are concerned with problems admitted by the
expert to be still unsolved.... The rational method
adequately used would have told him that on the
great majority of these questions there could be
for him but one attitude that of suspended
judgment.

That individual judgments and opinions are, as a rule, passively acquired and accepted, President Butler is also

convinced:

1

When we endeavor to direct public opinion or to
study its genesis, we are surprised and astonished
to find how small a share the ordinary individual
has in making up his own mind; and while claim-
ing independence, how largely he is dependent
on forces and influences with which the student
of psychology and history is very familiar.
This is due in the first place, to the very
small part which genuine thinking plays in the
life of any of us .... We grow Republicans or
Democrats, Presbyterians or Episcopalians; we
do not reason ourselves as a rule into the
one form of belief or the other, be it poli-
tical or religious .... We believe first and de-
fend our beliefs afterwards.

In Bernays we have another authority on the proposition we have been trying to maintain - that normally, man is a permeable being, capable of selective absorption, indeed, but seldom exercising this faculty, his tendency being to be intuitive rather than rational. He says:

2

The mental equipment of the average individual
consists of a mass of judgments on most of the
subjects which touch his daily physical or mental
life. These judgments are the tools of his
daily being and yet they are his judgments, not

1. N. M. Butler. True and False Democracy, p.36.
2. Edward L. Bernays. Crystalizing Public Opinion, p.62.