be admitted that these contacts become more and more perfunctory and non-personal.
Another notable feature of modern life is the vast extension of the means of communication. Men travel much more often and, as a rule, much farther than they used to. The number of people who read has also greatly increased, and they read more than they ever did before, and while the members of each class and occupation read a literature which is somewhat specialized and adapted to their tastes and needs, much of the literature that pours from the press circulates through all classes and forms a line along which ideas and emotions may be communicated across class divisions. The leading newspapers and magazines circulate over extensive areas and bring into one mental community great numbers of men widely separated in local communities. Books pour from the press in an increasing flood, and many of them are read by tens of thousands in all parts of the world and in all the strata of society. Along the innumerable telegraph and telephone wires the thoughts and emotions which engage the minds and hearts of men in one part of the world are flashed to distant peoples. It is not an exaggeration to say that the civilized world is coming to be, in some real sense of the word, one mental community. At the same time it should be borne in mind that this tends not to make all men alike in thought and feeling, but really individualizes the mental systems of men.[1]
Now what relation have these great tendencies of modern life to the phenomena of mental epidemics?
In the first place, it would be reasonable to look for the more frequent occurrence of epidemics in modern society. This may be expected to result from the vast extension of intercommunication, which brings widely separated communities into mental touch. This close inter-relation of distant sections of humanity and the wider knowledge of what is going on in the world vastly multiply the
- ↑ See Chapter III.
