Note the fact that there is a necessary relation between the fixed ideal system of the paranoiac and his withdrawl of interest in the outside world. The system gains the function of reality for him in the same measure that, loving not the world nor the things that are in the world, he has rendered our common world unreal. His love [or empathy - DMR] thrown back upon himself [perhaps because it's been overdeveloped - DMR] causes him to create another world, a world of "pure reason," so to speak, which is more congenial to him than the world of empirical fact. In this system he takes refuge and finds peace at last. Now we see the function, at least so far as paranoia is concerned, of the ideal system. As Brill says, it is a curative process of a mind which has suffered "regression" or turning back of its interest from the affairs of ordinary men and women, to the attachments of an earlier stage in its history. To use a philosophical term, the paranoiac is the Simon-pure "solipsist." And as a priori thinking tends, as Schiller has shown, ever to solipsism, we see here the grain of truth in G. K. Chesterton's witty comparison of rationalism and lunacy.
"Regression," or withdrawl of the libido, is present to some degree I believe in all forms of the neurosis. But we are informed that a withdrawl of the libido may, and frequently does, occur also in normal people. Knowledge of the neurosis here, as elsewhere, serves to throw light on certain thought processes of people who are considered normal. Brill says that "normally we seek a substitute for the suspended attachment." New interests and new affections in time take the place of the objects from which the feelings have been torn. In analytical psychology the process by which this is achieved is called a "transference." [Note that this model implies that paranoia is the result of a very deep and prolonged depression - DMR.]
Now the crowd is in a sense a "transference phenomenon." In the temporary crowd or mob the transference is too transitory to be very evident, though even here I believe there will generally be a certain esprit de corps. In permanent crowds there is often a marked transference to the other members of the group. [And this, if true, substantiates the vague hypothesis above - DMR.] This is evident in the joy of the new convert or the newly initiated, also in terms of affection as "comrade" and "brother." I doubt, however, if this affection, so far as it is genuine among individuals of a certain crowd, is very different from the good will and affection which may spring up anywhere among individuals who are more or less closely associated, or that it ever really extends beyond the small circle of personal friends that everyone normally gains through his daily relations with others.
But to the crowd-mind this transference is supposed to extend to all the members of the group; they are comrades and brothers not because we like them and know them intimately, but because they are fellow members. In other words, this transference, in so far as it is a crowd phenomenon as such, is not to other individuals, but to the idea of the crowd itself. It is not enough for the good citizen to love his neighbors in so far as he finds them lovable; he must love his country. To the churchman the Church herself is an object of faith and adoration. One does not become a humanitarian by being a good fellow; he must love "humanity" - which is to say, the bare abstract idea of everybody. I remember once asking a missionary who was on his way into China what it was that impelled him to go so far in order to minister to suffering humanity. He answered, "It is love." I asked again, "Do you really mean to say that you care so much as that for Chinese, not one of whom you have ever seen?" He answered, "Well, I - you see, I love them through Jesus Christ." So in a sense it is with the crowd-man always; he loves through the crowd. [And, of course, that might make it easier for someone to abuse that love by pretending to believe and using those values against genuine believers. Hence the pressure to conform - DMR.]
The crowd idealized as something sacred, as end in itself, as something which it is an honor to belong to, is to some extent a disguised object of our self-love. But the idea of the crowd disguises more than self-love. Like most of the symbols through which the unconscious functions, it can serve more than one purpose at a time. The idea of the crowd also serves to disguise the parental image, and our own imaginary identification or reunion with it. The nation is to the crowd-man the "Fatherland," the "mother country," "Uncle Sam" - a figure which serves to do more than personalize for cartoonists the initial U. S. Uncle Sam is also the father-image thinly disguised. The Church is "the Mother," again the "Bride." Such religious symbols as "the Heavenly Father" and the "Holy Mother" also have the value of standing for the parent image. For a detailed discussion of these symbols, the reader is referred to Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious.
The crowd does not think in order to solve problems. To the crowd-mind, as such, there are no problems. It has closed its case beforehand. This accounts for what Le Bon termed the "credulity" of the crowd. But the crowd believes only what it wants to believe and nothing else. [Do they really need to "think for themselves"? Think of the situations in which a normal crowd develops: are those situations where this kind of independence of thought is appropriate? Remember: Martin implied that a crowd is a sort of lynch mob, and given what happened in 1919, that would have been enough to stop most people's critical faculty. It's as if someone had said that the life history of Paul Bernardo proves that upper middle class professional people should not go into business for themselves because they'll lose their humanity because of market pressures, and they'll end up spinning out of control. This might have packed a punch right after the news about Bernardo surfaced, although the Encyclopedia Gossipa basically zeroed in upon Bernardo's relationship with Karla Homolka - DMR.] Anyone who has been in the position of a public teacher knows how almost universal is the habit of thinking in the manner of the crowd and how difficult it is to get people to think for themselves. One frequently hears it said that the people do not think, that they do not want to know the truth.
It is not really because so many are ignorant, but because so few are able to resist the appeal which the peculiar logic of crowd-thinking makes to the unconscious, the cheap, the tawdry, the half-true almost exclusively gain popular acceptance. The average man is a dogmatist. [Or relies upon common sense. I suspect that the "average man" only becomes a dogmatist when their fund of common sense is either depleted or perhaps not adequate to a situation in which they see a threat so they feel that stopping and thinking isn't the wisest move - DMR.] He thinks what he thinks others think he is thinking. He is so used to propaganda that he can hardly think of any matter in other terms. It is almost impossible to keep the consideration of any subject of general interest above the dilemmas of partisan crowds. People will wherever possible change the discussion of a mooted question into an antiphonal chorus of howling mobs, each chanting its ritual as ultimate truth, and hurling its shibboleths in the faces of the others. Pursuit of truth with most people consists in repeating their creed. [Or interpreting the same slogans in different ways, depending on the situation - DMR.] Nearly every movement is immediately made into a cult. Theology supplants religion in the churches. In popular ethics a dead formalism puts an end to moral advance. Straight thinking on political subjects is subordinated to partisan ends. Catch-phrases and magical formulas become substituted for scientific information. Even the Socialists, who feel that they are the intellectual elect - and I cite them here as an example in no unfair spirit, but just because so many of them are really well-informed and "advanced" in their thinking - have been unable to save themselves from a doctrinaire economic orthodoxy of spirit which is often more dogmatic and intolerant than that of the "religious folks" to whose alleged "narrow-mindedness" every Socialist, even while repeating his daily chapter from the Marxian Koran, feels himself superior.
The crowd-mind is everywhere idealistic, and absolutist. Its truths are "given," made-in-advance. Though unconsciously its systems of logic are created to enhance the self-feeling, they appear to consciousness as highly impersonal and abstract. As in the intellectualist philosophies, forms of thought are regarded as themselves objects of thought. [With this idea, Martin seems to have struck gold. After all, philosophers have had a long if intermittent history as wise counselors - DMR.] Systems of general ideas are imposed upon the minds of men apparently from without. Universal acceptance is demanded. Thought becomes stereotyped. What ought to be is confused with what is, the ideal becomes more real than fact.
In the essays on "Pragmatism" William James showed that the rationalist system, even that of the great philosopher, is in large measure determined by the thinker's peculiar "temperament." Elsewhere he speaks of the "Sentiment of Rationality." For a discussion of the various types of philosophical rationalism, the reader is referred to the criticism by William James, F. C. S. Schiller, Dewey, and other Pragmatists. It is sufficient for our purpose to not the fact that the rationalist type of mind everywhere shows a tendency to assert the unreality of the world of everyday experience, and to seek comfort and security in the contemplation of a logically ordered system or world of "pure reason." Ideals, not concrete things, are the true realities. The world with which we are always wrestling is but a distorted manifestation, a jumbled, stereotyped copy of what James ironically referred to as "the de luxe edition which exists in the Absolute." The parable of the cave which Plato gives in the Republic represents ordinary knowledge as a delusion, [or perhaps "crowd-knowledge" - DMR] and the empirically known world as but dancing shadows on the wall of our subterranean prison.
This type of thinking, whether it be known as Idealism, Rationalism, Intellectualism, or Absolutism, finds little sympathy from those who approach the study of philosophy from the standpoint of psychology. The following passages taken from Studies in Humanism by Schiller, show that even without the technique of the analytical method, it was not hard to detect some of the motives which prompted the construction of systems of this sort. The partisanship of one of these motives is rather suggestive for our study of the mind of the crowd. Says our author:
That this is the case, Schiller evidently has little doubt. After discussing Absolutism itself as a sort of religion, and showing that its "catch-words" taken at their face value are not only emotionally barren, but also logically meaningless because " inapplicable to our actual experience," he then proceeds to an examination of the unconscious motives which determine this sort of thinking. [In otherwords, he did this in the correct order - DMR.] His description of these motives, so far as it goes, is an excellent little bit of analytical psychology. He says:
In this connection the reader will recall the passage quoted from Adler's The Neurotic Constitution, in which it was shown that the fictitious "guiding-lines" or rational systems of both the neurotic and normal are motivated by this craving for security. But it makes all the difference in the world whether the system of ideas is used, as in science and common sense, to solve real problems in an objective world, or is created to be an artificial and imaginary defense of the ego against a subjective feeling of insecurity; whether, in a word, the craving for security moves one to do something calculated to render the forces with which he must deal concretely more congenial and hospitable to his will, or make him content to withdraw and file a demur to the challenge of the environment in the form of theoretical denial of the reality of the situation. [Read the second part of the sentence again, and keep in mind what "crowd-behavior" consists of - DMR.]
There is no denying the fact that Absolute Idealism, if not taken too seriously, may have the function for some people of steadying their nerves in the battle of life. And though, as I believe, logically untenable, it not infrequently serves as a rationalization of faith-values which work out beneficially, and, quite apart from their metaphysical trappings, may be even indispensable. Yet when carried to its logical conclusions such thinking inevitably distorts the meaning of personal living, robs our world and our acts of their feeling of reality, serves as an instrument for "regression" or withdrawl of interest from the real tasks and objects of living men and women, and in fact functions for much the same purpose, if not precisely in the same way, as do the ideal systems of the psychopath. [This word isn't used accurately. It's clear that the "logical conclusion" seems to mean a fight of one sort or another. Think of what this implies - DMR]
In justice to idealism it should be added that this is by no means the only species of Rationalism which may lead to such psychic results. There are various paths by which this craving for artificial security may lead to such attempts to reduce the whole of possible experience to logical unity that the realities of time and change and of individual experience are denied. How many deterministic theories, with all their scientific jargon, are really motivated by an inability to accept a world with an element of chance in it. There is a sense in which all science by subsuming like individuals in a common class, and thus ignoring their individuality, in so far as they are alike in certain respects, gains added power over all of them. There is a sense, too, in which science, by discovering that whenever a given combination of elements occurs, a definitely foreseen result will follow, is justified in ignoring time and treating certain futures as if they were already tucked up in the sleeves of the present. It should be remembered that this sort of determinism is purely methodological, and is, like all thinking, done for a purpose - that of effecting desirable ends in a world made up of concrete solutions. [But in the social realm, to remind you, might often makes right, in the "scientific" sense too. And that really throws a spanner in the works of Pragmatism, because it's quite possible to paste someone while perfectly calm, and to cite their deference as "evidence" that you're a gooder-than-good social scientist - DMR.]
When this purpose becomes supplanted by a passion to discount all future change in general - when one imagines that he has a formula which enables him to write the equation of the curve of the universe, science has degenerated into scientificism, or head-in-the-sand philosophy. The magic formula has precisely the same psychic value as the "absolute." I know a number of economic determinists, for instance, who just cannot get out of their heads the notion that social evolution is a process absolutely underwritten, guaranteed, and predictable, without the least possible doubt. In such a philosophy of history as this the individual is of course a mere "product of his environment," and his role as a creator of value is nil. On this "materialistic" theory, the individual is as truly a mere manifestation of impersonal evolutionary forces as he is, according to orthodox Platonism, a mere manifestation of the abstract idea of his species. Notwithstanding the professed impersonalism of his view, its value for consolation in minimizing the causes of the spiritual difference in men - that is, its function for enhancing the self-feeling of some people, is obvious. That such an idea should become a crowd-idea is not to be wondered at. And this leads me to my point. It is no mere accident that the crowd takes to rationalistic philosophies like a duck to water. [And this, for me, was a real eye-opener - DMR.]
The crowd-man, however unsophisticated he might be, is a Platonist at heart. He may never have heard the word epistemology, but his theory of knowledge is essentially the same as Plato's. Religious crowds are, to one familiar with the Dialogues, astonishingly Platonic. There is the same habit of giving ontological rather than functional value to general ideas, the same other-worldliness, the same moral dilemmas, the same contempt for the material, for the human body, for selfhood; the same assertion of finality, and the conformist spirit.
Reformist crowds differ only superficially from religious crowds. Patriotic crowds make use of a different terminology, but their mental habits are the same. It has become a cult among crowds with tendencies towards social revolution to paint their faces with the colors of a borrowed nineteenth-century materialism. But all this is mere swagger and "frightfulness," an attempt to make themselves look terrible and frighten the bourgeois. I am sure that no one who has seen all this radical rigmarole, as I have had occasion to see it, can be deceived by it. These dreadful materialist doctrines of the radical crowd are wooden guns, no thicker than the soap-box. As a matter of fact, the radical crowds are extremely idealistic. With all their talk of proletarian opposition to intellectualism, Socialists never become a crowd without becoming as intellectualist as Fichte or Hegel. There is a sense in which Marx himself never succeeded in escaping Hegel's dilemmas, he only followed the fashion in those days of turning them upside down.
With radical crowds as with conservative, [note the approach Martin is taking; it really flew - DMR] there is the same substitution of a closed system of ideas for the shifting phenomena of our empirical world; the same worship of abstract forms of thought, the same uncompromising spirit and insistence upon general uniformity of opinions; the same orthodoxy. All orthodoxy is nothing other than the will of the crowd to keep itself together. With all kinds of crowds, also, there is the same diverting of attention from the personal and concrete to the impersonal and general; the same flight from reality to the transcendental for escape, for consolation, for defense, for vindication; the same fiction that existence is at bottom a sort of logical proposition, a magic formula or principle of Being to be correctly copied and learned by rote; the same attempt to create the world or find reality by thinking rather than acting.
The intellectualist bias of the average man is doubtless due in great part to the fact that theology, and therefore the religious education of the young, both Christian and Jewish, has throughout the history of these religions been saturated with Platonism. But then, the universal sway of this philosopher may be explained by the fact that there is something in his abstractionism which is congenial to the creed-making propensities of the crowd-mind. The great a priori thinkers, Plato, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Anselm, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Green, etc., have often been called solitary men [why? - DMR], but it is significant that their doctrines survive in popularized form in the creeds and shibboleths of permanent crowds of all descriptions. While humanists, nominalists, empiricists, realists, pragmatists, men like Protagoras, Epicurius, Abelard, Bacon, Locke, Hume, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, James, have always had a hard time of it. They are considered destructive, for the reason that the tendency of their teaching is to disintegrate the crowd-mind and call one back to himself. [Or to erode loyalty to a particular "crowd" or team, perhaps - DMR.] Their names are seldom mentioned in popular assemblies except to discredit them. Yet it is on the whole these latter thinkers who orient us in our real world, make us courageously face the facts with which we have to deal, stimulate our wills, force us to use our ideas for what they are - instruments for better living, - inspire us to finer and more correct valuations of things, and point out the way to freedom for those who walk it. [Sounds a lot like regular life, doesn't it? Although with the aid of such philosophers you can move farther and faster than without them - DMR.]
All this, however, is the very thing that the crowd-mind is running headlong away from. As a crowd we do not wish to think empirically. Why should we seek piecemeal goods by tedious and dangerous effort, when we only have to do a trick of attention, and behold The Good, abstract, perfect, universal, waiting just around the corner in the realm of pure reason, ready to swallow up and demolish all evil? Are we not even now in possession of Love, Justice, Beauty, and Truth by the sheer magic of thinking of them in the abstract, calling them "principles" and writing the words with the initial letters in capitals? The very mental processes by which a group of people becomes a crowd change such abstract nouns from mere class names into copies of supermundane realities.
In wholesome thinking principles are of course necessary. They are what I might call "leading ideas." Their function is to lead to more satisfactory thinking - that is, to other ideas which are desired. Or they are useful in leading us to actions the result of which are intended and wished for. [And this may be exactly what the "crowd-ideas" are for. In addition to what appears to be an overgeneralization from the lynchings, persecutions and race riots of around 1919, though, Martin seems to be hinting that the followers in such crowds are prone to be gullible and therefore are regularly swindled. This certainly flew; it's still around today, even though Prohibition and the KKK as a genuine mass movement are, thankfully, long gone. Maybe this is an overgeneralization, the result of supposedly sophisticated government officials racking up the conformity scale many notches during World War 1 in order to achieve "total victory through total conformity." Was President Wilson the sorcerer in this drama, or merely the apprentice? If the latter, then maybe there wasn't any sorcerer - DMR.] They may also be principles of valuation guiding us in the choice of ends. If there were no substantial agreement among us concerning certain principles we could not relate our conduct to one another at all; social life would be impossible. But necessary as such leading ideas are, they are means rather than ends. Circumstances may demand that we alter them or make exceptions to their application.
To the crowd-mind a principle appears as an end in itself. It must be vindicated at all costs. To offend against it in one point is to be guilty of breaking the whole law. Crowds are always uncompromising about their principles. They must apply to all alike. Crowds are no respecters of persons. [Once again, this would make intuitive sense in the aftermath of the agony of World War 1, and the demobilization thereafter; you can see the connection between the race riots and the returning black soldiers, especially if some of them are thinking, as DuBois said, that if they were good enough to fight for their country…. I'll merely note that despite the period-piece element in this, many of the attitudes in this book have proven to be remarkably durable, especially the hidden contempt for, and fear of, emotional gatherings and the empirical fact that many people like being in "crowds," and that this "gullibility" might in fact reveal their genuine preferences in that situation. After all, if I spend $200 to have my hard drive cleaned it may seem to some that I was "taken," but it later proved to have been a wise decision when I dealt with someone else. Sometimes, ya just don't know what ya don't know. Of course, I could have been wrong, in which case I would have felt like a gullible idiot, but in normal, unimportant market transactions that's the only way you can learn. You can't learn to drive a bike without scraping your knee, after all, even if such a learning process slightly increases the risk of your life being shortened. (It would be interesting to compute the odds of this.) Of course, a bike isn't the same as a car - DMR.]
As crowd-men we never appear without some set of principles or some cause over our heads. Crowds crawl under their principles like worms under stones. They cover up the wrigglings of the unconscious, and protect it from attack. Every crowd uses its principles as universal demands. In this way it gets unction upon other crowds, puts them in the wrong, makes them give assent to the crowd's real purpose by challenging them to deny the righteousness of the professed justifications of that purpose. It is said that the Sioux Indians, some years ago, used to put their women and children in front of the firing line. The braves could then crouch behind these innocent ones and shoot at white men, knowing that it would be a violation of the principles of humanity for the soldiers to shoot back and risk killing women and children. Crowds frequently make just such use of their principles. [In otherwords, "crowds" take to swindles like the proverbial duck, or so Martin implies - DMR.] About each crowd, like the circle of fire which the gods placed about the sleeping Brunhilde, there is a flaming hedge of logical abstractions, sanctions, taboos, which none but the intellectually courageous few dare cross. In this way the slumbering critical faculties of the crowd-mind are protected against the intrusion of realities from outside the cult. The intellectual curiosity of the members of the group are kept within proper bounds. Hostile persons or groups dare not resist us, for in so doing they make themselves enemies of Truth, of Morality, of Liberty, etc. Both political parties, by a common impulse, "drape themselves in the Flag." [But why doesn't it work that often? - DMR.] It is an interesting fact that the most antagonistic crowds profess much the same set of principles. The "secondary rationalization" of crowds, both Northern and Southern, at the time of the Civil War, made use of our traditional principles of American Liberty, and Christian Morality. We have seen both pacifist and militarist crowds setting forth their manifestoes in terms of New Testament teaching. Each religious sect exists only to teach "the one system of doctrine logically deduced from Scripture."
As an illustration of that sort of reasoning, I give here a few passages from a propagandist publication in which the crowd-will to dominate takes the typical American method of striving to force its cult ideas upon the community as a whole by means of restrictive legislation - in this case attempt is made to prohibit the exhibition of motion pictures on Sunday. That the demand for such legislation is for the most part a pure class-crowd phenomenon, designed to enhance the self-feeling and economic interests of the "reformers," by keeping the poor from having a good time, is I think, rather obvious. The reasoning here is interesting, as the real motive is so thinly disguised by pietistic platitudes that the two follow each other in alternate succession:
We need not be surprised to find that the closed ideational system which in the first instance is a refuge from the real, becomes in turn a device for imposing one's will upon his fellows. [Some refuge from reality - DMR.] The believer's ego is served in both instances. It is interesting to note also that this self-feeling appears in crowd-thinking as its very opposite. The greatest enemy of personality is the crowd. The crowd does not want valuable men; it wants only useful men. Everyone must justify his existence by appealing to the not-self. One may do nothing for his own sake. He may not even strive for spiritual excellence for such a reason. He must live for "principle," for "the great cause," for impersonal abstractions - which is to say, he must live for his crowd, and so make it easier for the other members to do the same for a good face.
The complex of ideas in which the crowd-mind as we have seen takes refuge, being necessarily made up of abstract generalizations, serves the crowd-will to social dominance through the very claim to universality which such ideas exert. Grant that an idea is an absolute truth, and it follows, of course, that it must be true on all occasions and for everyone. The crowd is justified, therefore, in sacrificing people to its ideal - itself. The idea is no longer an instrument of living; it is an imperative. It is not yours to use the idea; the idea is there to use you. You have ceased to be an end. Anything about you that does not partake of the reality of this idea has no right to be, any experience of yours which happens to be incommensurable with the idea loses its right to be, for experience as such has now only a "phenomenal existence." The crowd, by identifying its will to power with this idea, becomes itself absolute. Your personal self, as an end, is quite as unwelcome to the Absolute as to the crowd. There must be no private property in thought or motive. By making everybody's business my business, I have made my business everybody's business. There may be only one standard - that of our crowd, which, because of its very universal and impersonal character is really nobody's. [Then why are there crowds at all? Maybe most people want this at that time. Granted that Martin has a point that Saturday night is often regretted Sunday morning, and that occasionally a "crowd-situation" explodes into something really ugly or dangerous that can't be stopped by the law, but perhaps Harding's solution, a "return to normalcy," is a viable alternative in such situations. So are charges when heads cool; if they're not pressed, or enforced, then you might be dealing with a "tangle of pathologies" rather than "crowd-thinking" - DMR.]
The absolutism of the crowd-mind with its consequent hostility to conscious personality finds a perfect rationalization in the ethical philosophy of Kant. The absolutism of the idea of Duty is less skillfully elaborated in its popular crowd-manifestations, but in its essentials it is always present, as propaganda everywhere when carefully analyzed will show. We must not be deceived by Kant's assertion that the individual is an end. The individual is not you or I, or anyone; it is a mere logical abstraction. By declaring that everyone is equally an end, Kant ignores all personal differences, and therefore the fact of individuality as such. We are each an end in respect to those qualities only in which we are identical - namely, in that we are "rational beings." But this rational being is not a personal intelligence; it is a fiction, a bundle of mental faculties assumed a priori to exist, and then treated as if it were universally and equally applicable to all actually existing intelligences.
This loss of the conscious self in the universal, this turn away from the empirically known, this demand that an a priori principle be followed to its deadly practical conclusion regardless of the ends to which it leads, is of the utmost importance for our study. It is precisely what the paranoiac does after his own fashion. In crowd-thinking it is often made the instrument of wholesale destruction and human slaughter. The mob is ever motivated by this logic of negation, and of automatic behavior. It is thus that compulsive thinking sways vast hordes of men and women, impelling them, in the very name of truth or righteousness, to actions of the most atrocious character. It is this which robs most popular movements of their intelligent purposiveness, unleashes the fanatic and the bigot [which, Martin assumes, is lurking in the unconscious of every "crowd-man," and is almost waiting to surface - DMR], and leads me to die and to kill for a phrase. This way of thinking points straight to Salem, Massachusetts, to the torture-chamber, the pile of fagots and the mill pond at Rosmersholm.
The habit of thinking as a crowd is so widespread that it is impossible to trace the influence of its rationalistic negations in the daily mental habits of most of us. We play out our lives as if we were but acting a part which some one had assigned to us. The fact that we are ourselves realities, as inevitable as falling rain, and with the same right to be as the rocks and hills, positively startles us. We feel that we must plead extenuation, apologize for our existence, as if the end and aim of living was to serve or vindicate a Good which, being sufficient in itself and independent of us, can never be realized as actually good for anybody. [Some of us - DMR.] We behave as if we were unprofitable servants, cringing before wrathful ideas which, though our own creations, we permit to lord it over us. Our virtues we regard not as expressions of ourselves or as habitual ways of reaching desirable goods, but as if they were demanded of us unwillingly by something not self. We should remind ourselves that these big words we idolize have no eyes to see us and no hearts to care what we do, that they are but symbols of ideas which we might find very useful if we dared to become masters of them. The most common use we make of such ideas is to beat one another and ourselves into line with them, or enforce upon ourselves and others the collection of a debt which was contracted only by our unconscious desire to cheat at cards in the game of civilization.