, "so _is_
he." It is a saying, obviously, that one may easily fill with fantastic
meanings, as the prevailing gabble of the mental healers, New
Thoughters, efficiency engineers, professors of scientific salesmanship
and other such mountebanks demonstrates, but nevertheless it is one
grounded, at bottom, upon an indubitable fact. Deep down in every man
there is a body of congenital attitudes, a corpus of ineradicable
doctrines and ways of thinking, that determines his reactions to his
ideational environment as surely as his physical activity is determined
by the length of his _tibiae_ and the capacity of his lungs. These
primary attitudes, in fact, constitute the essential man. It is by
recognition of them that one arrives at an accurate understanding of his
place and function as a member of human society; it is by a shrewd
reckoning and balancing of them, one against another, that one forecasts
his probable behaviour in the face of unaccustomed stimuli.

All the arts and sciences that have to do with the management of men in
the mass are founded upon a proficient practice of that sort of
reckoning. The practical politician, as every connoisseur of ochlocracy
knows, is not a man who seeks to inoculate the innumerable caravan of
voters with new ideas; he is a man who seeks to search out and prick
into energy the basic ideas that are already in them, and to turn the
resultant effervescence of emotion to his own uses. And so with the
religious teacher, the social and economic reformer, and every other
variety of popular educator, down to and including the humblest
press-agent of a fifth assistant Secretary of State, moving-picture
actor, or Y.M.C.A. boob-squeezing committee. Such adept professors of
conviction and enthusiasm, in the true sense, never actually teach
anything new; all they do is to give new forms to beliefs already in
being, to arrange the bits of glass, onyx, horn, ivory, porphyry and
corundum in the mental kaleidoscope of the populace into novel
permutations. To change the figure, they may give the medulla oblongata,
the cerebral organ of the great masses of simple men, a powerful
diuretic or emetic, but they seldom, if ever, add anything to its
primary supply of fats, proteids and carbohydrates.

One speaks of the great masses of simple men, and it is of them, of
course, that the ensuing treatise chiefly has to say. The higher and
more delicately organized tribes and sects of men are susceptible to no
s