the spiritual profile, and does no more, at the most, than set off that profile with greater clarity. Twenty years ago Dr Freud was the same kind of interesting and inconspicuous private citizen as Rudolf Kassner or Karl Eugen Neumann—and all three men, by the way, are of similar age. He was essentially the same then as now; there was living in him an intuition which gave him the key to a great maze of the most secret and silenced processes operating not only in the individual but in the community as well. No one had ever before held this key in his hand with such awareness—with the exception of the poets. But the poets—who have held this key firmly and at all times—were prevented from using it except as something priestly, veiled, and esoteric. As to Dr Freud, with the boldness and the fanatical zeal of an inventor and a discoverer he has made a far-reaching exoteric use of the key in his hands. Twenty years ago a friend of his, Dr Brewer, a practising physician of Vienna, made an acute and penetrating observation to him. Dr Freud supplemented it with astounding and highly consequential propositions of his own. And this marked the first decisive step in the formulation of that viewpoint which he has since fixed in such an acutely chosen terminology, as though it were made into a high-power search-light with its strong lenses turned upon one field of existence after another. Among other things, this procedure has produced those remarkable books on the meaning of dreams, the psychological phenomena of daily life, and his widely known and stimulating theory of sex; nor must we overlook certain other works in which this same search-light is trained upon the phenomena of prehistoric times, upon tales and myths, or other forms of the primitive community as in his treatment of the concepts totem and taboo.
His new book, which lies before me, has as its subject crowd-psychology. The book The Crowd, which was written by Le Bon, has been famous for a number of years. Recently a group of English savants has been occupied with the same theme, and it is evident that this activity comes as a result of the war. For in war the idea of the organized mass so obviously triumphs over the idea of the individual which we had been accustomed since the Renaissance to hold as the fulcrum of European thought, or to take silently for granted. It is quite natural that, as a reflex to the new poignancy which these problems have acquired, there should arise such inquiries as McDougall's The Group Mind, or Trotter's Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War which made its appearance in London during the
