§ 4. REASON.
In enumerating the factors capable of making an impression on the
minds of crowds all mention of reason might be dispensed with, were it
not necessary to point out the negative value of its influence.
We have already shown that crowds are not to be influenced by
reasoning, and can only comprehend rough-and-ready associations of
ideas. The orators who know how to make an impression upon them always
appeal in consequence to their sentiments and never to their reason.
The laws
of logic have no action on crowds.
To bring home
conviction to crowds it is necessary first of all to thoroughly
comprehend the sentiments by which they are animated, to pretend to
share these sentiments, then to endeavour to modify them by calling up,
by means of rudimentary associations, certain eminently suggestive
notions, to be capable, if need be, of going back to the point of view
from which a start was made, and, above all, to
divine from instant
to instant the sentiments to which one's discourse is giving birth.
This necessity of ceaselessly varying one's language in accordance with
the effect produced at the moment of speaking deprives from the outset a
prepared and studied harangue of all efficaciousness. In such a speech
the orator follows his own line of thought, not that of his hearers, and
from this fact alone his influence is annihilated.
[16]
[_]
My first observations with regard to the art of impressing
crowds and touching the slight assistance to be derived in this
connection from the rules of logic date back to the seige of Paris, to
the day when I saw conducted to the Louvre, where the Government was
then sitting, Marshal V — , whom a furious crowd asserted they had
surprised in the act of taking the plans of the fortifications to sell
them to the Prussians. A member of the Government (G. P — ), a very
celebrated orator, came out to harangue the crowd, which was demanding
the immediate execution of the prisoner. I had expected that the
speaker would point out the absurdity of the accusation by remarking
that the accused Marshal was positively one of those who had constructed
the fortifications, the plan of which, moreover, was on sale at every
booksellers. To my immense stupefaction — I was very young then — the
speech was on quite different lines. "Justice shall be done," exclaimed
the orator, advancing towards the prisoner, "and pitiless justice. Let
the Government of the National Defence conclude your inquiry. In the
meantime we will keep the prisoner in custody." At once calmed by this
apparent concession, the crowd broke up, and a quarter of an hour later
the Marshal was able to return home. He would infallibly have been torn
in pieces had the speaker treated the infuriated crowd to the logical
arguments that my extreme youth induced me to consider as very
convincing.
Logical minds, accustomed to be convinced by a chain of somewhat
close reasoning, cannot avoid having recourse to this mode of persuasion
when addressing crowds, and the inability of their arguments always
surprises them. "The usual mathematical consequences based on the
syllogism — that is, on associations of identities — are imperative . . ."
writes a logician. "This imperativeness would enforce the assent even
of an inorganic mass were it capable of following associations of
identities." This is doubtless true, but a crowd is no more capable
than an inorganic mass of following such associations, nor even of
understanding them. If the attempt be made to convince by reasoning
primitive minds — savages or children, for instance — the slight value
possessed by this method of arguing will be understood.
It is not even necessary to descend so low as primitive beings to
obtain an insight into the utter powerlessness of reasoning when it has
to fight
against sentiment. Let us merely call to mind how
tenacious, for centuries long, have been religious superstitions in
contradiction with the simplest logic. For nearly two thousand years
the most luminous geniuses have bowed before their laws, and modern
times have to be reached for their veracity to be merely contested. The
Middle Ages and the Renaissance possessed many enlightened men, but not
a single man who attained by reasoning to an appreciation of the
childish side of his superstitions, or who promulgated even a slight
doubt as to the misdeeds of the devil or the necessity of burning
sorcerers.
Should it be regretted that crowds are never guided by reason? We
would not venture to affirm it. Without a doubt human reason would not
have availed to spur humanity along the path of civilisation with the
ardour and hardihood its illusions have done. These illusions, the
offspring of those unconscious forces by which we are led, were
doubtless necessary. Every race carries in its mental constitution the
laws of its destiny, and it is, perhaps, these laws that it obeys with a
resistless impulse, even in the case of those of its impulses which
apparently are the most unreasoned. It seems at times as if nations
were submitted to secret forces analogous to those which compel the
acorn to transform itself into an oak or a comet to follow its orbit.
What little insight we can get into these forces must be sought for
in the general course of the evolution of a people, and not in the
isolated facts from which this evolution appears at times to proceed.
Were these facts alone to be taken into consideration, history would
seem to be the result of a series of improbable chances. It was
improbable that a Galilean carpenter should become for two thousand
years an all-powerful God in whose name the most important civilisations
were founded; improbable, too, that a few bands of Arabs, emerging from
their deserts, should conquer the greater part of the old Graco-Roman
world, and establish an empire greater than that of Alexander;
improbable, again, that in Europe, at an advanced period of its development,
and when authority throughout it had been systematically
hierarchised, an obscure lieutenant of artillery should have succeeded
in reigning over a multitude of peoples and kings.
Let us leave reason, then, to philosophers, and not insist too
strongly on its intervention in the governing of men. It is not by
reason, but most often in spite of it, that are created those sentiments
that are the mainsprings of all civilisation — sentiments such as honour,
self-sacrifice, religious faith, patriotism, and the love of glory.
