dominant that it cannot be affected
by any purely rational functional factors.

People of this type jump at decisions and reach very positive
convictions upon the most difficult matters with bewildering ease. For
them the complexities and intricacies which trouble the normal mind do
not exist. Everything is either black or white: there are no perplexing
intervening grays. Right is right and wrong is wrong; they do not
recognize that there are doubtful twilight zones. Ideas capable of the
most elaborate expansion and the most subtle intricacies of
interpretation are immaturely grasped and preached with naive assurance.
Statements alleged to be facts, no matter what their source, if they
seem to support the convictions thus emotionally derived, are received
without any examination and used as conclusive proof, notwithstanding
that a brief investigation would prove them to be worthless as evidence.

If we take the group of American intellectuals who at present are ardent
champions of bolshevism we shall find that, with exceptions so few as to
be almost negligible, they have embraced nearly every "ism" as it arose,
seeing in each one the magic solvent of humanity's ills. Those of an
older generation thus regarded bimetallism, for instance. What else
could be required to make the desert bloom like a garden and to usher in
the earthly Paradise? The younger ones, in their turn, took up
anarchist-communism, Marxian socialism, industrial unionism,
syndicalism, birth control, feminism, and many other movements and
propagandas, each of which in its turn induced ecstatic visions of a new
heaven and a new earth. The same individuals have grown lyrical in
praise of every bizarre and eccentric art fad. In the banal and
grotesque travesties of art produced by cubists, futurists, _et al._,
they saw transcendent genius. They are forever seeking new gods and
burying old ones.

It would be going too far to say that these individuals are all
hystericals in the pathological sense, but it is strictly accurate to
say that the class exhibits marked hysterical characteristics and that
it closely resembles the large class of over-emotionalized religious
enthusiasts which furnish so many true hystericals. It is probable that
accidents of environment account for the fact that their emotionalism
takes sociological rather than religious forms. If the sociological
impetus were absent, most of them would be religiously motived to a
state not less a