ould do or consent to, if they were taken separately. The
crowd has no greater guarantee of wisdom and virtue than an individual
would have. In fact, the participants in a crowd almost always throw
away all the powers of wise judgment which have been acquired by
education, and submit to the control of enthusiasm, passion, animal
impulse, or brute appetite. A crowd always has a common stock of
elementary faiths, prejudices, loves and hates, and pet notions. The
common stock is acted on by the same stimuli, in all the persons, at the
same time. The response, as an aggregate, is a great storm of feeling,
and a great impulse to the will. Hence the great influence of omens and
of all popular superstitions on a crowd. Omens are a case of "egoistic
reference."[34] An army desists from a battle on account of an eclipse.
A man starting out on the food quest returns home because a lizard
crosses his path. In each case an incident in nature is interpreted as a
warning or direction to the army or the man. Thus momentous results for
men and nations may be produced without cause. The power of watchwords
consists in the cluster of suggestions which has become fastened upon
them. In the Middle Ages the word "heretic" won a frightful suggestion
of base wickedness. In the seventeenth century the same suggestions were
connected with the words "witch" and "traitor." "Nature" acquired great
suggestion of purity and correctness in the eighteenth century, which it
has not yet lost. "Progress" now bears amongst us a very undue weight of
suggestion. Suggestibility is the quality of liability to suggestive
influence.[35] "Suggestibility is the natural faculty of the brain to
admit any ideas whatsoever, without motive, to assimilate them, and
eventually to transform them rapidly into movements, sensations, and
inhibitions."[36] It differs greatly in degree, and is present in
different grades in different crowds. Crowds of different nationalities
would differ both in degree of suggestibility and in the kinds of
suggestive stimuli to which they would respond. Imitation is due to
suggestibility. Even suicide is rendered epidemic by suggestion and
imitation.[37] In a crisis, like a shipwreck, when no one knows what to
do, one, by acting, may lead them all through imitative suggestibility.
People who are very suggestible can be led into states of mind which
preclude criticism or reflection. Any one who acquires skill in the
primary processes of associat