244 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING
And whether its acts are despicable, horrible or noble de pends upon the character of the emotion which at any time may be in the ascendant; and as the emotions are exceed ingly unstable and variable, the mob s performances may quickly shift from one extreme of the moral scale to the other; yet, strictly speaking, a mob is not an ethical entity and its acts are non-ethical.
The passing of an assembly into the second and third stages of unity may be accurately described as a process of inhibiting the intellectual or rational control of conduct, which is accomplished by collective suggestion in a state of high emotion. But the rational control itself is essentially of an inhibitive character. . The normal personality con sists, first, of a substratum of inherited nerve co-ordinations, reflexive and instinctive ; and, second, of a system of habits and ideas which are the deposit of personal experience, plus a certain inscrutable and indefinable power of choice which develops along with the organization of the mind. Now, the impulses of the instinctive nature are more or less con trolled by the mental organization which is the result of individual experience; and this control is exercised mainly, if not exclusively, by the arrest of many of the conflicting impulses which originate in the numerous contacts with our environment or in our organic sensations. By the stopping of some impulses the right of way is given to others, which thus pass on into realization as our volitions. In a fused mass of men the collective suggestion simply suspends these individual inhibitive functions ; and in so far as they are suspended, the reflexes and instincts are left exposed to be played upon by the external influences of the crowd or mob.
Now, these reflexes and instincts constitute our racial in heritance; they are the parts of our nature in which, not withstanding individual peculiarities, we are most nearly identical with our fellow men. They are a common patrimony. It is in the mental systems built up in personal experience that we are most widely differentiated, and it is
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