CHAPTER V

SOCIETAL SELECTION

Social selection by the mores.--Instrumentalities of suggestion.--Symbols, pictures, etc.--Apparatus of suggestion.--Watchwords, catchwords.--"Slave," "democracy."-- Epithets.--Phrases.--Pathos.--Pathos is unfavorable to truth.--Analysis and verification as tests.--Humanity.-- Selection by distinction.--Aristocracies.--Fashion.-- Conventionalization.--Uncivilized fashions.--Ideals of beauty.--Fashion in other things than dress.--Miscellaneous fashions.--All deformations by fashion are irrational.--Satires on fashion.--Fashion in faiths and ideals.--Fashion is not trivial, not subject to argument.--Remoter effects of fashion.-- Slang and expletives.--Poses, fads, and cant.--Illustrations.-- Heroes, scapegoats, and butts.--Caricature.--Relation of fads, etc., to mores.--Ideals.--Ideals of beauty.--The man-as-he-should-be.--The standard type of man.--Who does the thinking?--The gentleman.--Standards set by taboos.--Crimes.-- Criminal law.--Mass phenomena of fear and hope.--Manias, delusions.--Monstrous mass phenomena.--Gregariousness in the Middle Ages.--The mendicant orders.--Other mendicants.-- Popular mania for poverty and beggary.--Delusions.--Manias and suggestion.--Power of the crowd over the individual.-- Discipline by pain.--The mediæval church operated societal selection.--The mediæval church.--Sacerdotal celibacy.--The masses wanted clerical celibacy.--Abelard.--The selection of sacerdotal celibacy.--How the church operated selection.--Mores and morals; social code.--Orthodoxy; treatment of dissent; selection by torture.--Execution by burning.--Burning in North American colonies.--Solidarity in penalty for fault of one.-- Torture in the ancient states.--Torture in the Roman empire.-- Jewish and Christian universality; who persecutes whom?--The ordeal.--Irrationality of torture.--Inquisitorial procedure from Roman law.--Bishops as inquisitors.--Definition of heretic.--The Albigenses.--Persecution was popular.--Theory of persecution.--Duties laid on the civil authority.--Public opinion as to the burning of heretics.--The shares of the church and the masses.--The church uses its power for selfish aggrandizement.--The inquisition took shape slowly.--Frederick II and his code.--Formative legislation.--Dungeons.--The yellow crosses.--Confiscation.--Operation of the inquisition.-- Success of the inquisition.--Torture in civil and ecclesiastical trials.--The selection accomplished.--Torture in England.--The Spanish inquisition.--The inquisition in Venice.--The use of the inquisition for political and personal purposes.--Stages of the selection by murder.

+170. Social selection by the mores.+ The most important fact about the mores is their dominion over the individual. Arising he knows not whence or how, they meet his opening mind in earliest childhood, give him his outfit of ideas, faiths, and tastes, and lead him into prescribed mental processes. They bring to him codes of action, standards, and rules of ethics. They have a model of the man-as-he-should-be to which they mold him, in spite of himself and without his knowledge. If he submits and consents, he is taken up and may attain great social success. If he resists and dissents, he is thrown out and may be trodden under foot. The mores are therefore an engine of social selection. Their coercion of the individual is the mode in which they operate the selection, and the details of the process deserve study. Some folkways exercise an unknown and unintelligent selection. Infanticide does this (Chapter VII). Slavery always exerts a very powerful selection, both physical and social (Chapter VI).

+171. Instrumentalities of suggestion.+ Suggestion is exerted in the mores by a number of instrumentalities, all of which have their origin in the mores, and may only extend to all what some have thought and felt, or may (at a later stage) be used with set intention to act suggestively in extending certain mores.

Myths, legends, fables, and mythology spread notions through a group, and from generation to generation, until the notions become components of the mores, being interwoven with the folkways. Epic poems have powerfully influenced the mores. They present types of heroic actions and character which serve as models to the young. The _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ became text-books for the instruction of Greek youth. They set notions of heroism and duty, and furnished all Greeks with a common stock of narratives, ideas, and ideals, and with sentiments which everybody knew and which could be rearoused by an allusion. Everybody was expected to produce the same reaction under the allusion. Perhaps that was a conventional assumption, and the reaction in thought and feeling may have been only conventional in many cases, but the suggestion did not fail of its effect even then. Later, when the ideals of epic heroism and of the old respect for the gods were popularly rejected and derided, this renunciation of the old stock of common ideas and faiths marked a decline in the morale of the nation. It is a very important question: What is the effect of conventional humbug in the mores of a people, which is suggested to the young as solemn and sacred, and which they have to find out and reject later in life? The _Mahabharata_, the _Kalevala_, the _Edda_, the _Nibelungen Noth_, are other examples of popular epics which had great influence on the mores for centuries. Such poems present models of action and principle, but it is inevitable that a later time will not appreciate them and will turn them to ridicule, or will make of them only poses and affectations. The former is the effect most likely to be produced on the masses, the latter on the cultured classes. In the Greco-Roman world, at the beginning of the Christian era, various philosophic sects tried to restore and renew the ideals of Greek heroism, virtue, and religious faith, so far as they seemed to have permanent ethical value. The popular mores were never touched by this effort. In fact, it is impossible for us to know whether the writings of Seneca, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Pliny represent to us the real rules of life of those men, or are only a literary pose. In the Renaissance, and since then, men educated in the classics have been influenced by them in regard to their standards of noble and praiseworthy character, and of what should be cultivated in thought and conduct. Such men have had a common stock of quotations, of accepted views in life philosophy, and of current ethical opinions. This stock, however, has been common to the members of the technical guild of the learned. It has never affected the masses. Amongst Protestants the Bible has, in the last four hundred years, furnished a common stock of history and anecdote, and has also furnished phrases and current quotations familiar to all classes. It has furnished codes and standards which none dared to disavow, and the suggestion of which has been overpowering. The effect on popular mores has been very great.

+172. Symbols, pictures.+ Before the ability to read became general art was employed in the form of symbols to carry suggestion. Symbolic acts were employed in trade and contracts, in marriage and religion. For us writing has taken the place of symbols as a means of suggestion. Symbols do not appeal to us. They are not in our habits. Illustrative pictures influence us. The introduction of them into daily newspapers is an important development of the arts of suggestion. Mediæval art in colored glass, carving, sculpture, and pictures reveals the grossness and crass simplicity of the mediæval imagination, but also its childish originality and directness. No doubt it was on account of these latter characteristics that it had such suggestive power. It was graphic. It stimulated and inflamed the kind of imagination which produced it. It found its subjects in heaven, hell, demons, torture, and the scriptural incidents which contained any horrible, fantastic, or grotesque elements. The crucifix represented a man dying in the agony of torture, and it was the chief symbol of the religion. The suggestion in all this art produced barbaric passion and sensuality. Any one who, in childhood, had in his hands one of the old Bibles illustrated by wood cuts knows what power the cuts had to determine the concept which was formed from the text, and which has persisted through life, in spite of later instruction.

+173. Apparatus of suggestion.+ In modern times the apparatus of suggestion is in language, not in pictures, carvings, morality plays, or other visible products of art. Watchwords, catchwords, phrases, and epithets are the modern instrumentalities. There are words which are used currently as if their meaning was perfectly simple, clear, and unambiguous, which are not defined at all. "Democracy," the "People," "Wall Street," "Slave," "Americanism," are examples. These words have been called "symbols." They might better be called "tokens." They are like token coins. They "pass"; that is their most noteworthy characteristic. They are familiar, unquestioned, popular, and they are always current above their value. They always reveal the invincible tendency of the masses to mythologize. They are personified and a superhuman energy is attributed to them. "Democracy" is not treated as a parallel word to aristocracy, theocracy, autocracy, etc., but as a Power from some outside origin, which brings into human affairs an inspiration and energy of its own. The "People" is not the population, but a creation of mythology, to which inherent faculties and capacities are ascribed beyond what can be verified within experience. "Wall Street" takes the place which used to be assigned to the devil. What is that "Wall Street" which is currently spoken of by editors and public men as thinking, wanting, working for, certain things? There is a collective interest which is so designated which is real, but the popular notion under "Wall Street" is unanalyzed. It is a phantasm or a myth. In all these cases there is a tyranny in the term. Who dare criticise democracy or the people? Who dare put himself on the side of Wall Street? The tyranny is greatest in regard to "American" and "Americanism." Who dare say that he is not "American"? Who dare repudiate what is declared to be "Americanism"? It follows that if anything is base and bogus it is always labeled "American." If a thing is to be recommended which cannot be justified, it is put under "Americanism." Who does not shudder at the fear of being called "unpatriotic"? and to repudiate what any one chooses to call "American" is to be unpatriotic. If there is any document of Americanism, it is the Declaration of Independence. Those who have Americanism especially in charge have repudiated the doctrine that "governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed," because it stood in the way of what they wanted to do. They denounce those who cling to the doctrine as un-American. Then we see what Americanism and patriotism are. They are the duty laid upon us all to applaud, follow, and obey whatever a ruling clique of newspapers and politicians chooses to say or wants to do. "England" has always been, amongst us, a kind of counter token, or token of things to be resisted and repudiated. The "symbols," or "tokens," always have this utility for suggestion. They carry a coercion with them and overwhelm people who are not trained to verify assertions and dissect fallacies.

+174. Watchwords, catchwords.+ A watchword sums up one policy, doctrine, view, or phase of a subject. It may be legitimate and useful, but a watchword easily changes its meaning and takes up foreign connotations or fallacious suggestions. Critical analysis is required to detect and exclude the fallacy. Catchwords are acutely adapted to stimulate desires. In the presidential campaign of 1900 we saw a catchword deliberately invented,--"the full dinner pail." Such an invention turns suggestion into an art. Socialism, as a subject of popular agitation, consists almost altogether of watchwords, catchwords, and phrases of suggestion: "the boon of nature," "the banquet of life," "the disinherited," "the submerged tenth," "the mine to the miner," "restore the land to the landless." Trades unionism consists almost entirely, on its philosophical side, of suggestive watchwords and phrases. It is said that "labor" creates all value. This is not true, but the fallacy is complete when labor is taken in the sense of "laborers," collectively and technically so called,--an abuse of language which is now current. To say that wage-earners create all value is to assert a proposition from which numerous and weighty consequences follow as to rights and interests. "The interest of one is the interest of all" is a principle which is as good for a band of robbers as for a union of any other kind. "Making work" by not producing is the greatest industrial fallacy possible.

+175. Slave, democracy.+ Since "democratic" is now a word to conjure with, we hear of democracy in industry, banking, education, science, etc., where the word is destitute of meaning or is fallacious. It is used to prejudice the discussion. Since the abolition of slavery the word "slave" has become a token. In current discussions we hear of "rent slaves," "wages slavery," "debt slavery," "marriage slavery," etc. These words bear witness to great confusion and error in the popular notions of what freedom is and can be. For negroes emancipation contained a great disillusion. They had to learn what being "free" did not mean. Debt slavery is the oldest kind of slavery except war captivity. A man in debt is not free. A man who has made a contract is not free. A man who has contracted duties and obligations as husband and father, or has been born into them as citizen, son, brother, etc., is not free. Can we imagine ourselves "free" from the conditions of human life? Does it do any good to stigmatize the case as "wages slavery," when what it means is that a man is under a necessity to earn his living? It would be a grand reform in the mores if the masses should learn to turn away in contempt from all this rhetoric.

+176. Epithets.+ Works of fiction have furnished the language with epithets for types of individuals (sec. 622). Don Quixote, Faust, Punch, Reinecke Fuchs, Br'er Rabbit, Falstaff, Bottom, and many from Dickens (Pickwick, Pecksniff, Podsnap, Turveydrop, Uriah Heep) are examples. The words are like coins. They condense ideas and produce classes. They economize language. They also produce summary criticisms and definition of types by societal selection. All the reading classes get the use of common epithets, and the usage passes to other classes in time. The coercion of an epithet of contempt or disapproval is something which it requires great moral courage to endure.

+177. Phrases.+ The educated classes are victims of the phrase. Phrases are rhetorical flourishes adapted to the pet notions of the time. They are artifices of suggestion. They are the same old tricks of the medicine man adapted to an age of literature and common schools. Instead of a rattle or a drum the operator talks about "destiny" and "duty," or molds into easy phrases the sentiments which are popular. It is only a difference of method. Solemnity, unction, and rhetorical skill are needed. Often the phrases embody only visionary generalities. "Citizenship," "publicity," "public policy," "restraint of trade," "he who holds the sea will hold the land," "trade follows the flag," "the dollar of the fathers," "the key of the Pacific," "peace with honor," are some of the recent coinages or recoinages. Phrases have great power when they are antithetical or alliterative. Some opponents of the silver proposition were quite perplexed by the saying: "The white man with the yellow metal is beaten by the yellow man with the white metal." In 1844 the alliterative watchword "Fifty-four forty or fight" nearly provoked a war. If it had been "Forty-nine thirty or fight," that would not have had nearly so great effect. The "Cape to Cairo" railroad is another case of alliteration. Humanitarianism has permeated our mores and has been a fountain of phrases. Forty years ago the phrase "enthusiasm of humanity" was invented. It inspired a school of sentimental philosophizing about social relations, which has been carried on by phrase making: "the dignity of labor," "the nobility of humanity," "a man is not a ware," "an existence worthy of humanity," "a living wage." "Humanity" in modern languages is generally used in two senses: (_a_) the human race, (_b_) the sympathetic sentiment between man and man. This ambiguity enters into all the phrases which are humanitarian.

+178. Pathos.+ Suggestion is powerfully aided by _pathos_, in the original Greek sense of the word. Pathos is the glamour of sentiment which grows up around the pet notion of an age and people, and which protects it from criticism. The Greeks, in the fourth century before Christ, cherished pathos in regard to tyrannicide. Tyrants were bosses, produced by democracy in towns, but hated by democrats. Tyrannicides were surrounded with a halo of heroism and popular admiration.[373] Something of the same sentiment was revived in the sixteenth century, when it appeared that a tyrant was any ruler whose politics one did not like. It cost several rulers their lives. Pathos was a large element in the notions of woman and knighthood (twelfth and thirteenth centuries), of the church (thirteenth century), of the Holy Sepulcher (eleventh and twelfth centuries). In the thirteenth century there was a large element of pathos in the glorification of poverty. A great deal of pathos has been expended on the history and institutions of Greece and Rome in modern times. Classical studies still depend largely on it for their prestige. There is a pathos of democracy in the United States. In all English-speaking countries marriage is an object of pathos. The pathos is cultivated by poetry and novels. Humanitarianism is nourished by pathos and it stimulates pathos. The "poor" and the "laborers" are objects of pathos, on account of which these terms, in literature, refer to a conventional and unreal concept. Consequently there is no honest discussion of any topic which concerns the poor or laborers. Some people make opposition to alcohol an object of pathos.

+179. Pathos is unfavorable to truth.+ Whenever pathos is in play the subject is privileged. It is regarded with a kind of affection, and is protected from severe examination. It is made holy or sacred. The thing is cherished with such a preëstablished preference and faith that it is thought wrong to verify it. Pathos, therefore, is unfavorable to truth. It has always been an element in religion. It is an element now in patriotism, and in regard to the history of one's own country. The coercion of pathos on the individual comes in popular disapproval of truth-telling about the matter in question. The toleration for forgery and fraud in the Christian church until modern times, which to modern people seems so shocking and inexplicable, was chiefly due to pathos about religion and the church. If a forgery would help the church or religion, any one who opposed it would seem to be an enemy of religion and the church and willing to violate the pathos which surrounded them.

+180. The value of analysis and verification as tests.+ In all the cases of the use of catchwords, watchwords, and phrases, the stereotyped forms of language seem to convey thought, especially ascertained truth, and they do it in a way to preclude verification. It is absolutely essential to correct thinking and successful discussion to reject stereotyped forms, and to insist on analysis and verification. Evidently all forms of suggestion tend to create an atmosphere of delusion. Pathos increases the atmosphere of delusion. It introduces elements which corrupt the judgment. In effect, it continues the old notion that there are edifying falsehoods and useful deceits. The masses always infuse a large emotional element into all their likes and dislikes, approval and disapproval. Hence, in time, they surround what they accept with pathos which it is hard to break through.

+181. Humanity.+ The standard of humanity or of decent behavior, especially towards the weak or those persons who may be at one's mercy, or animals, is entirely in the mores of the group and time. To the Gauchos of Uruguay "inhumanity and love of bloodshed become second nature." Their customs of treating beasts habituate them to bloodshed. "They are callous to the sight of blood and suffering and come to positively enjoy it." They have no affection for their horses and dogs. They murder for plunder.[374] It is very rarely that we meet with such a description as that of any people. Polynesians were bloodthirsty and cruel, perhaps because they had no chase of wild animals in which to expend their energies.[375] North American Indians could invent frightful tortures, but they were not bloodthirsty. They were not humane. Suffering did not revolt them. Schomburgk[376] tells a story of an Indian who became enraged at his wife because she groaned with toothache. He cut down her hammock and caused her to fall so that she suffered a dislocation of the arm. A European witness went to the chief with a report and remonstrance, but the chief was astonished that any one should take any notice of such an incident. The Assyrians cut in stone representations of flaying, impaling, etc., and of a king with his own royal hands putting out the eyes of prisoners. The Egyptians represented kings slaying men (national enemies) in masses. The Romans enjoyed bloodshed and the sight of suffering.[377] The Middle Ages reveled in cruelty to men and beasts. It is in the Middle Ages that we could find the nearest parallels to the Gauchos above. None of these people felt that repulsive revolt of the whole nature at inhumanity which characterizes modern cultivated people. The horrors have all receded out of our experience, and almost out of our knowledge. The line of familiarity is set far off. Therefore a little thing in the way of inhumanity is strange and exerts its full repulsive effect. Things happen, however, which show us that human nature is not changed, and that the brute in it may awake again at any time. It is all a question of time, custom, and occasion, and the individual is coerced to adopt the mores as to these matters which are then and there current.

+182. Selection by distinction.+ One of the leading modes by which the group exercises selection of its adopted type on the individual is by distinction. Distinction is selection. It appeals to vanity. It acts in two ways and has two opposite effects. One likes to be separated from the crowd by what is admired, and dislikes to be distinguished for what is not admired. Cases occur in which the noteworthy person is not sure whether he ought to be proud or ashamed of that for which he is distinguished. When a society gives titles, decorations, and rewards for acts, it stimulates what it rewards and causes new cases of it. The operation of selection is direct and rational. The cases in which the application of distinction is irrational show most clearly its selective effect. School-teachers are familiar with the fact that children will imitate a peculiarity of one which marks him out from all the rest, even if it is a deformity or defect. Why then wonder that barbarian mothers try to deform their babies towards an adopted type of bodily perfection which is not rationally preferable? A lady of my acquaintance showed me one of her dolls which had wire attachments on its legs in imitation of those worn by children for orthopedic effect. She explained that when she was a child, another child who had soft bones or weak ankles, and who wore irons for them, was brought into her group of playmates. They all admired and envied her, and all wished that they had weak bones so that they could wear irons. This lady made wire attachments for her doll that it might reach the highest standard.

+183. Aristocracies.+ All aristocracies are groups of those who are distinguished, at the time, for the possession of those things which are admired or approved, and which give superiority in the struggle for existence or in social power. In the higher civilization, until modern times, the possession of land was the only social power which would raise a man above sordid cares and enable him to plan his life as he chose. By talent an income could be won which would give the same advantage, but not with the same security of permanence and independence. The fields for talent were war, civil administration, and religion, the last including all mental activity. Men of talent had to win their place by craft and charlatanism (sorcery, astrology, therapeutics). Their position never was independent, except in church establishments. They had to win recognition from warriors and landowners, and they became comrades and allies of the latter. Merchants and bankers were the aristocracy at Carthage, Venice, Florence, and Genoa, and in the Hansa. Talented military men were aristocrats under Napoleon, courtiers were such under Louis XIV, and ecclesiastics at Rome. Since the fourteenth century capital has become a new and the greatest and indispensable social power. Those who, at any time, have the then most important social power in their hands are courted and flattered, envied and served, by the rest. They make an aristocracy. The aristocrats are the distinguished ones, and their existence and recognition give direction to social ambition. Of course this acts selectively to call out what is most advantageous and most valued in the society.

+184.+ There are a number of mass phenomena which are on a lower grade than the mores, lacking the elements of truth and right with respect to welfare, which illustrate still further and more obviously the coercion of all mass movements over the individual. These are fashion, poses, fads, and affectations.

+185. Fashion.+ Fashion in dress has covered both absurdities and indecencies with the ægis of custom. From the beginning of the fourteenth century laws appear against indecent dress. What nobles invented, generally in order to give especial zest to the costume of a special occasion, that burghers and later peasants imitated and made common.[378] In the fifteenth century the man's hose fitted the legs and hips tightly. The latchet was of a different color, and was decorated and stuffed as if to exaggerate still further the indecent obtrusiveness of it.[379] Schultz[380] says that the pictures which we have do not show the full indecency of the dress against which the clergy and moralists of the fifteenth century uttered denunciations, but only those forms which were considered decent, that is, those which were within the limits which custom at the time had established. At the same time women began to uncover the neck and bosom. The extent to which this may be carried is always controlled by fashion and the mores. Puritans and Quakers attempted to restrict it entirely, and to so construct the dress, by a neckerchief or attachment to the bodice, that the shape of the bust should be entirely concealed. The mores rejected this rule as excessive. In spite of all the eloquence of the moral preachers, that form of dress which shows neck and bosom has become established, only that it is specialized for full dress and covered by conventionalization.

+186. Conventionalization.+ Conventionalization also comes into play to cover the dress of the ballet or burlesque opera and the bathing dress. Conventionalization always includes strict specification and limits of time, place, and occasion, beyond which the same dress would become vicious. Amongst Moslems and Orientals this conventionalization as to dress has never been introduced. We are familiar with the fact that when a fashion has been introduced and has become common our eye is formed to it, and no one looks "right" or stylish who does not conform to it. We also know that after the fashion has changed things in the discarded fashion look dowdy and rustic. No one can resist these impressions, try as he may. This fact, in the experience of everybody, gives us an example of the power of current custom over the individual. While a fashion reigns its tendency is to greater and greater extravagance in order to produce the desired and admired effect. Then the toleration for any questionable element in the fashion is extended and the extension is unnoticed. If a woman of 1860, in the dress of her time, were to meet a woman of 1906, in the dress of her time, each would be amazed at the indecency of the dress of the other. No dress ever was more, or more justly, denounced for ugliness, inconvenience, and indecency than the crinoline, but all the women from 1855 to 1865, including some of the sweetest who ever lived, wore it. No inference whatever as to their taste or character would be justified. There never is any rational judgment in the fashion of dress. No criticism can reach it. In a few cases we know what actress or princess started a certain fashion, but in the great majority of cases we do not know whence it came or who was responsible for it. We all have to obey it. We hardly ever have any chance to answer back. Its all-sufficient sanction is that "everybody wears it," or wears it _so_. Evidently this is only a special application to dress of a general usage--conventionalization.

+187. Uncivilized fashions.+ Those "good old times" of simplicity and common sense in dress must be sought in the time anterior to waistband and apron. All the barbarians and savages were guilty of folly, frivolity, and self-deformation in the service of fashion. They found an ideal somewhere which they wanted to attain, or they wanted to be distinguished, that is, raised out of the commonplace and universal. At one stage distinction comes from being in the fashion in a high and marked degree. Also each one flees the distinction of being out of the fashion, which would not draw admiration. At another stage distinction comes from starting a new fashion. This may be done by an ornament, if it is well selected so that it will "take."[381] Beads have been a fashionable ornament from the days of savagery until to-day. An Indian woman in Florida "had six quarts (probably a peck) of the beads gathered about her neck, hanging down her back, down upon her breasts, filling the space under her chin, and covering her neck up to her ears. It was an effort for her to move her head. She, however, was only a little, if any, better off in her possessions than most of the others. Others were about equally burdened. Even girl babies are favored by their proud mammas with a varying quantity of the coveted neckwear. The cumbersome beads are said to be worn by night as well as by day."[382] "A woman sometimes hangs a weight of over five pounds around her neck, for besides the ordinary necklaces the northern women wear one or more large white, polished shells, which are brought from the western coast and which weigh from half a pound upward."[383] "Fashions change in Bechuanaland; one year the women all wear blue beads, but perhaps the next (and just when a trader has laid in a supply of blue beads) they refuse to wear any color but yellow. At the time of writing [1886] the men wore small black pot hats, but several years ago they had used huge felt hats, like that of Rip Van Winkle, and as a consequence the stores are full of those unsalable ones."[384]

+188. Fashion in ethnography.+ The Carib women in Surinam think that large calves of the leg are a beauty. Therefore they bind the leg above the ankle to make the calves larger. They begin the treatment on children.[385] Some Australian mothers press down their babies' noses. "They laugh at the sharp noses of Europeans, and call them tomahawk noses, preferring their own style."[386] The presence of two races side by side calls attention to the characteristic differences. Race vanity then produces an effort to emphasize the race characteristics. Samoan mothers want the noses and foreheads of their babies to be flat, and they squeeze them with their hands accordingly.[387] The "Papuan ideal of female beauty has a big nose, big breasts, and a dark-brown, smooth skin."[388] To-day the Papuans all smoke white clay pipes. Four weeks later no one will smoke a white pipe. All want brown ones. Still four weeks later no one wants any pipe at all. All run around with red umbrellas.[389] On the Solomon Islands sometimes they want plain pipes; then again, pipes with a ship or anchor carved on them; again, pipes with a knob. Women wear great weights of metal as rings for ornament.[390] The Galla women wear rings to the weight of four or six pounds.[391] Tylor[392] says that an African belle wears big copper rings which become hot in the sun, so that the lady has to have an attendant, whose duty it is to cool them down by wetting them. The queen of the Wavunias on the Congo wore a brass collar around her neck, which weighed from sixteen to twenty pounds. She had to lie down once in a while to rest.[393] The Herero wear iron which in the dry climate retains luster. The women wear bracelets and leglets, and iron beads from the size of a pea to that of a potato. They carry weights up to thirty-five pounds and are forced to walk with a slow, dragging step which is considered aristocratic. Iron is rare and worth more than silver.[394] Livingstone says that in Balonda poorer people imitate the step of those who carry big weights of ornament, although they are wearing but a few ounces.[395] Some women of the Dinka carry fifty pounds of iron. The rings on legs and arms clank like the fetters of slaves. The men wear massive ivory rings on the upper arm. The rich cover the whole arm. The men also wear leather bracelets and necklaces.[396] In Behar, Hindostan, the women wear brass rings on their legs. "One of these is heavy, nearly a foot broad, and serrated all around the edges. It can only be put on the legs by a blacksmith, who fits it on the legs of the women with his hammer, while they writhe upon the ground in pain." Women of the milkman caste wear bangles of bell metal, often up to the elbow. "The greater the number of bangles, the more beautiful the wearer is considered."[397] The satirist could easily show that all these details are shown now in our fashions.

+189. Ideals of beauty.+ In Melanesia a girdle ten centimeters wide is worn, drawn as tight as possible. One cut from the body of a man twenty-seven years old measured only sixty-five centimeters.[398] The women of the Barito valley wear the _sarong_ around the thighs so tight that it restricts the steps and produces a mincing gait which they think beautiful.[399] The Rukuyenn of Guiana have an ideal of female beauty which is marked by a large abdomen. They wind the abdomen with many girdles to make it appear large. "The women of the Payaguas, in Paraguay, from youth up, elongate the breasts, and they continue this after they are mothers by means of bandages."[400] The southern Arabs drop hot grease from a candle on a bride's fingers, and then plaster the fingers with henna. Then the grease is taken off, and light-colored spots (if possible, regular) are left where it was, while the rest of the skin is colored brown by the henna. They put on the bride seventeen garments, a silk one and a muslin one alternately; then a mantle over all, and a rug on the mantle, and all possible ornaments.[401] Flinders Petrie thinks that we must recognize a principle of "racial taste," "which belongs to each people as much as their language, which may be borrowed like languages from one race by another, but which survives changes and long eclipses even more than language."[402] The cases given show that ideals of beauty are somehow formed, which call for a deformation of the human body. The foreheads are flattened, the lips enlarged, the ears drawn down, the skull forced into a sugar-loaf shape, the nose flattened, etc., to try to reach a form approved by fashion. There is an ideal of beauty behind the fashion, a selected type of superiority, which must be assumed as the purpose of the fashion.

+190. Fashion in other things than dress.+ As will appear below, fashion controls many things besides dress. It governs the forms of utensils, weapons, canoes and boats, tools, etc., amongst savages. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there was a fashionable attitude or pose in standing for women, in which the abdomen was thrown forward. It is often seen in pictures and portraits.[403] It is inelegant and destitute of meaning. The Venetians were luxurious and frivolous, jealous and distrustful of women, and fond of pleasure and fashion. From the end of the sixteenth century a shopkeeper in the Merceria adopted a custom of showing the new fashions of Paris on Ascension Day by means of a life-size doll dressed in them.[404] The Venetian women of that period wore patins, shoes with blocks underneath, some of which were two feet high. The women were unable to walk without a maid on each side to support them.[405] Yriarte thinks that these patins were due to the policy of the husbands. When an ambassador, in conversation with the doge and his counselors, said that shoes would be far more convenient, a counselor replied, "Only too convenient! Only too much so!" Under the French Directory, a _demi-terme_ was the name of a framework worn by women to look as if they would soon be mothers.[406] Thirty years ago "poufs" were worn to enlarge the dress on the hips at the side. The "Grecian bend," stooping forward, was an attitude both in walking and standing. Then followed the bustle. Later, the contour was closely fitted by the dress. No one thought that the human figure would be improved if changed as the dress made it appear to be. No fashion was adopted because it would have an indecent effect. The point for our purpose is that women wore dresses of the appointed shape because everybody did so, and for no other reason, being unconscious of the effect.

Erasmus, in his colloquy on the Franciscans, makes one of the characters say: "I think that the whole matter of dress depends upon custom and the opinions which are current." He refers to some unnamed place where adulterers, after conviction, are never allowed to uncover the private parts, and says, "Custom has made it, for them, the greatest of all punishments." "The fact is that nothing is so ridiculous that usage may not make it pass."

Fashion has controlled the mode of dressing the hair and deforming the body. It has determined what animals, or what special race of an animal species, should be petted. It controls music and literature, so that a composer, poet, or novelist is the rage or is forgotten. In mediæval literature the modes of allegory were highly esteemed and very commonly used. The writers described war and battles over and over again, and paid little attention to nature. In fact, natural background, geography, and meteorology were made as conventional as stage scenery, and were treated as of no interest and little importance. Modern taste for reality and for the natural details throws this mediæval characteristic by contrast into strong relief.

+191. Miscellaneous fashions.+ Fashion rules in architecture. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, English Renaissance and Gothic were regarded as barbaric, and palladian was admired. In France the preference was for rococo and Mansard forms. At the present time the English Renaissance and Gothic are in favor again, and palladian is regarded with disfavor. Painting and sculpture undergo variations of fashion as to standards and methods. The same is true of literature. Poetry and novels follow phases of fashion. A successful novel makes imitations and sets a fashion for a time. Types of heroes and ideals of character come and go by fashion. The type of the man-as-he-should-be varies by fashion, and this type exerts a great selection in the education of the young. Educational methods run through fashions. Fads in methods of teaching arise, are advocated with great emphasis, have their run, decline, and disappear. There are fashions of standing, walking, sitting, gesture, language (slang, expletives), pronunciation, key of the voice, inflection, and sentence accent; fashions in shaking hands, dancing, eating and drinking, showing respect, visiting, foods, hours of meals, and deportment. When snuff was taken attitudes and gestures in taking it were cultivated which were thought stylish. Fashion determines what type of female beauty is at a time preferred,--plump or _svelte_, blond or brunette, large or petite, red-haired or black-haired. When was that "simple time of our fathers" when people were too sensible to care for fashions? It certainly was before the Pharaohs and perhaps before the glacial epoch. Isaiah (iii. 16) rebukes the follies of fashion. Chrysostom preached to the early church against tricks and manners of gesture and walk which had been learned in the theater. Since literature has existed moralists have satirized fashion. Galton has noticed what any one may verify,--that old portraits show "indisputable signs of one predominant type of face supplanting another." "If we may believe caricaturists, the fleshiness and obesity of many English men and women in the earlier years of this century [nineteenth] must have been prodigious."[407] Part of this phenomenon may be due to the fashion of painting. The portrait painter warps all his subjects toward the current standard of "good looks," but it is more probable that there is a true play of variation. Platycnemism and the pierced olecranon run in groups for a time. Then they run out. There are fashions in disease, as if fashion were really in nature. This goes beyond the limits of our definition, but the rise and passing away of variations in breeding plants and animals, and perhaps in men, suggests that fashion may be an analogous play of experiment, half caprice, half earnest, whose utility lies in selection. If there was no reaching out after novelty except upon rational determination, the case would be very different from what it is when variation brings spontaneous suggestions. Our present modes of dress (aside from the variations imposed by fashion) are the resultant of all the fashions of the last two thousand years.

+192. All deformations by fashion are irrational.+ There is no guarantee that fashions will serve expediency. Deformations of the skull may not be harmful; they are not useful. The block inserted in the lip interferes with eating and speaking. It alters the language. Saliva cannot be retained, and flows over it. To those who are outside the fashion it is extremely ugly and disgusting. To those inside the fashion it is a standard of beauty and a badge of dignity and tribal position. All fashions tend to extravagance because the senses become accustomed to them, and it is necessary, in order to renew the impression of distinction, to exaggerate. The extravagances of fashion run through all grades of civilization. They show that fashion, coming from the whole to the individual, adds nothing to the sense, judgment, or taste of the latter, but imposes on him a coercion to conform. He who dissents is thought rustic and boorish. He is more or less severely boycotted, which means not only that he is made to suffer, but that he loses important advantages and hurts his interests.

+193. Satires on fashion.+ Forty years ago a lady who swung her arms as she walked was considered strong-minded. A lady who was young when the present queen of England introduced the fashion of brushing up the hair and uncovering the ears says that it seemed indecent. Fashion is stronger than autocracy. Nicholas I of Russia disapproved of late hours and ordered that court balls should be commenced early that they might be finished early. He found himself almost alone until eleven o'clock, and had to give up his reform.[408] In the height of the crinoline fashion Leech published in _Punch_ a picture of two maiden ladies who "think crinoline a preposterous and extravagant invention and appear at a party in a simple and elegant attire." The shocked horror of the bystanders is perfect, but the two ladies would to-day be quite in the fashion. Du Maurier published in _Punch_ a skit in which a little girl asked her mother how Eve knew, the first time that she saw Cain as a baby, that he was not ugly. This is a very clever hit at the origin of conventions. There was when Cain was born no established convention that all babies are pretty.

+194. Fashion in faiths and ideals.+ There are also fashions in trading, banking, political devices, traveling, inn keeping, book making, shows, amusements, flowers, fancywork, carriages, gardens, and games. There seem to be fashions in logic and reasoning. Arguments which are accepted as convincing at one time have no effect at another (sec. 227, n. 4). For centuries western Europe accepted the argument for the necessity of torture in the administration of justice as convincing. At different periods the satisfaction in allegory as a valid method of interpretation has been manifested and the taste for allegory in the arts has appeared. Philosophy goes through a cycle of forms by fashion. Even mathematics and science do the same, both as to method and as to concepts. That is why "methodology" is eternal. Mediæval "realism" ruled all thought for centuries, and its dominion is yet by no means broken. It prevails in political philosophy now. Nominalism is the philosophy of modern thought. Scholasticism held all the mental outfit of the learned. Thomas Aquinas summed up all that man knows or needs to know. A modern man finds it hard to hold his own attention throughout a page of it, even for historical purposes. "Phlogiston" and "vortices" had their day and are forgotten. Eighteenth-century deism and nineteenth-century rationalism interest nobody any more. Eighteenth-century economists argued in favor of stimulating population in order to make wages low, and thereby win in international competition. They never had a compunction or a doubt about this argument. No wonder it has been asserted that all truth, except that which is mathematically demonstrable, is only a function of the age. When the earth is underpopulated and there is an economic demand for men, democracy is inevitable. That state of things cannot be permanent. Therefore democracy cannot last. It contains no absolute and "eternal" truth. While it lasts a certain set of political notions and devices are in fashion. Certain moral standards go with them. Evolution is now accepted as a final fact in regard to organic phenomena. A philosophy of nature is derived from it. Is it only a fashion,--a phase of thought? For to all but a very few such a philosophy has no guarantee except that it is current. All accept it because all accept it, and for no other reason. Narrower philosophies become the fashion in classes, coteries, and cliques. They are really affectations of something which wins prestige and comes to be a badge of culture or other superiority. A few are distinguished because they know Greek, or because they are "freethinkers," or because they are ritualists, or because they profess a certain cultus in art, or because they are disciples of Ruskin, Eastlake, Carlyle, Emerson, Browning, Tolstoi, or Nietsche, and cultivate the ideas and practices which these men have advocated as true and wise. Often such fashions of thought or art pass from a narrow coterie to a wider class, and sometimes they permeate the mores and influence an age. When men believed in witches they did so because everybody did. When the belief in witches was given up it was because a few men set the fashion, and it was no longer "enlightened" to believe in them.

+195. Fashion not trivial; not subject to argument.+ Fashion is by no means trivial. It is a form of the dominance of the group over the individual, and it is quite as often harmful as beneficial. There is no arguing with the fashion. In the case of dress we can sometimes tell what princess or actress started the fashion, and we sometimes know, in the case of ideas, who set them afloat. Generally, however, it is not known who started a fashion in dress. The authority of fashion is imperative as to everything which it touches. The sanctions are ridicule and powerlessness. The dissenter hurts himself; he never affects the fashion. No woman, whatever her age or position or her opinion about the crinoline fashion, could avoid wearing one. No effort to introduce a fashion of "rational dress" for women has ever yet succeeded. An artist, novelist, poet, or playwright of a school which is out of fashion fails and is lost. An opponent of the notions which are current can get no hearing. The fashion, therefore, operates a selection in which success and merit are often divorced from each other, but the selection is pitiless. The canons of criticism are set by fashion. It follows that there is no rational effect of fashion. There was a rule in goblinism: Say naught but good of the dead. The rule was dictated by fear that the ghost would be angry and return to avenge the dead. The rule has come down to us and is an imperative one. Eulogies on the dead are, therefore, conventional falsehoods. It is quite impossible for any one to depart from the fashion. The principle is in fashion that one should take the side of the weaker party in a contest. This principle has no rational ground at all. There is simply a slight probability that the stronger will be in the wrong. Fashion requires that we should all affect nonpartisanship in discussion, although it is absurd to do so. Of course these weighty rules on important matters go over into the mores, but they are fashions because they are arbitrary, have no rational grounds, cannot be put to any test, and have no sanction except that everybody submits to them.

+196. Remoter effects of fashion.+ The selective effect of fashion, in spite of its irrationality and independently of the goodness or badness of its effect on interests, is a reflection on the intelligence of men. It accounts for many heterogeneous phenomena in society. The fashions influence the mores. They can make a thing modest or immodest, proper or improper, and, if they last long enough, they affect the sense and the standards of modesty and propriety. Fashions of banking and trading affect standards of honesty, or definitions of cheating and gambling. Public shows, dances, punishments, and executions affect, in time, standards of decency, taste in amusement, sentiments of humanity, views as to what is interesting and attractive. Methods of argument which are fashionable may train people to flippancy, sophistry, levity of mind, and may destroy the power to think and reason correctly. Scherr[409] says that fashion served as a means to transfer to Germany the depravation of morals which had corrupted the Latin nations in the sixteenth century. Fashions now spread through all civilized nations by contact and contagion. They are spread by literature.

+197. Slang and expletives.+ Slang and expletives are fashions in language. Expletives are of all grades from simple interjections to the strongest profanity. Many expletives are ancient religious formulas of objurgation, obsecration, asseveration, anathema, etc. They express a desire to curse or bless, invite or repel. Where the original sense is lost they sink into interjections, the whole sense of which is in the accent. Their use rises and falls with fashion in nations, classes, groups, and families, and it controls the habits of individuals. Whether certain persons use a pious dialect, a learned (pedantic) dialect, a gambler's slang, a phraseology of excessive adjectives and silly expletives, or profane expressions, oaths, and phrases which abuse sacred things, depends on birth and training. In this sense each dialect is the language for each group and corresponds to the mores of the group. There may be some psychology of expletives,[410] but they seem to be accounted for, like slang, by the expediency of expression, which is the purpose of all language. There is a need for expression which will win attention and impress the memory. A strong expletive shocks an opponent, or it is an instinctive reaction on a situation which threatens the well-being of the speaker. It is a vent to emotion which gives relief from it when other relief is not possible. This last is one of the chief useful reasons for expletives. However, even then they are a vicious habit, for stronger and stronger expressions are required to win the same subjective effects. Old expressions lose force. Slang is the new coinage. The mintage is often graphic and droll; it is also often stupid and vulgar. A selection goes on. Some of it is rejected and some enters into the language. Expletives also go out of fashion. The strain for effect can be satisfied only by constantly greater and greater excess. It becomes a bad personal habit to use grotesque and extravagant expressions. Slang and expletives destroy the power of clear and cogent expression in speech or writing; and they must affect powers of thinking. Although slang is a new coinage which reinvigorates the language, the fashion of slang and expletives must be rated, like the fashion of using tobacco and alcohol, as at best a form of play, a habit and custom which springs from no need and conduces to no interest. The acts result in an idle satisfaction of the doer, and the good or ill effects all fall within his own organism. The prevalence of such fashions in a society becomes a fact of its mores, for there will be rational effects on interests. The selective effect of them is in the resistance to the fashions or subjection to them. They are only to a limited extent enforced by social sanctions. There is personal liberty in regard to them. Resistance depends on independent judgment and self-control, and produces independence and self-control; that is, it affects character. Groups are differentiated inside the society of those who resist and those who do not, and the effect on the mores (character of the group) results. The selective effects appear in the competition of life between the two groups.

+198. Poses, fads, and cant.+ When fashion seizes upon an idea or usage and elevates it to a feature of a society at a period, it is, as was said above, affected by those who cannot attain to the real type and who exaggerate its external forms. The humanism of the Renaissance produced an affectation of learning, dilettante interest in collecting manuscripts, and zeal for style which was genuine in scholars, but was an affectation of the followers. There was also an affectation of pagan philosophy and of alienation from Christianity. The euphuists in England in the sixteenth century, the _précieuses_ of Molière's time, the _illuminati_ of the eighteenth century, are instances of groups of people who took up a whim and exaggerated conduct of a certain type, practicing an affectation. There are poses which are practiced as a fashion for a time. Fads get currency. Dandyism, athleticism, pedantry of various kinds, reforms of various kinds, movements, causes, and questions are phenomena of fads around which groups cluster, formed of persons who have a common taste and sentiment. Poses go with them. Poses are also affected by those who select a type of character which is approved. The dandy has had a score of slang names within two centuries corresponding to varieties of the pose and dress which he affected. He has now given way to the athlete, who is quite a different type. The Byronic pose prevailed for a generation. Goethe's Werther inspired a pose. They would both now be ridiculed. Favorite heroes in novels have often set a pose. Carlyle inspired a literary pose ("hatred of shams," etc.). He and Ruskin set a certain cant afloat, for every fad and pose which pretends to be sober and earnest must have a cant. Zola, D'Annunzio, Wagner, Ibsen, Gorky, Tolstoi, Sudermann, are men who have operated suggestion on the public mind of our time. They get a response from a certain number who thus cluster into a self-selected union of sympathy and propagate the cult of a view of life. Gloom and savagery, passion and crime, luxury and lust, romance and adventure, adultery and divorce, self-indulgence and cynicism, the reality of foulness and decay, are so suggested as to become centers on which receptive minds will organize and congenial ones will combine in sympathy. It is the effect of a great and active literature of belles-lettres, which is practically current throughout the civilized world, to multiply these sects of sentimental philosophy, with the fads and poses which correspond, and to provide them with appropriate cant. The cant of the voluptuary, the cynical egoist, the friend of humanity, and all the rest is just as distinct as that of the religious sectarian. Each of the little groups operates its own selection, but each is small. They interfere with and neutralize each other, but a general drift may be imparted by them to the mores. Our age is optimistic by virtue of the economic opportunities, power, and prosperity which it enjoys. The writers above mentioned are all pessimistic. They do not affect the age except upon the surface, by entertaining it, but they disturb its moral philosophy, they confuse its standards and codes, and they corrupt its tastes. They set fashions in literature which the writers of the second class imitate. In general, they relax the inhibitions which have come down to us in our mores without giving by suggestion an independence of character which would replace the traditions by sound judgments. Their influence will be greater when it has been diluted so as to reach the great mass. It hardly can be worse than that of the literature which is now used by that class.

+199. Illustrations.+ In the later days of Greece the study of Homer became an affectation. Dio Chrysostom tells of a visit he made to a colony on the Borysthenes, in which nearly all could read the _Iliad_, and heard it more willingly than anything else.[411] The Athenians, especially the gilded youth, affected Spartan manners and ways. The dandies went about with uncut hair, unwashed hands, and they practiced fist-fights. They were as proud of torn ears as German students are of cuts on their faces.[412] The religious and social reforms of Augustus were a pose. They lacked sincerity and were adopted for a political purpose. Men took them up who did not conform their own conduct to them. Hence a "general social falsehood" was the result.[413] In the fourth and fifth centuries all the well-to-do classes spent their time in making imitations of the ancient literature and philosophy. They tried to imitate Seneca and Pliny, writing compositions and letters, and pursuing a mode of life which they supposed the men of the period of glory had lived.[414] The French of the fifteenth century had the greatest fear of ridicule; the Italians feared most that they might appear to be simpletons.[415] In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the "chevaliers transis" wore furs in summer and summer mantles in winter. They meant to prove that "love suffices for everything."[416] Old pictures of the sixteenth century show that it was considered modest to squint. A Spaniard thought that it showed friendship for any one to squint at him. It was also considered a sign of probity to have the lips primly closed and drawn.[417] The Italian _cicisbeo_ in the seventeenth century was a _cavalier servente_, who attended a married lady. Such men practiced extravagances and affectations, and are generally described as effeminate.[418]

+200. Heroes, scapegoats and butts, caricature.+ Fashion sets, for any group at any time, its pet likes and dislikes. The mass must have its heroes, but also its victims and scapegoats and the butts of its ridicule. Caricature is futile when it is destitute of point. The test of it lies in the popular response which shows whether it has touched the core of the thing or not. When it can do this it reveals the real truth about the thing better than a volume of argument could do it. Sometimes a popular conviction is produced by a single incident which is a very important societal fact. The voyage of the Oregon from the Pacific (1898) convinced the American people that they must cut a canal through the isthmus. Probably this conviction was a _non sequitur_, but argument cannot overcome it, and it will control action with all the financial and other consequences which must ensue. A satire, an epigram, or a caricature may suffice to produce such a conviction.

+201. Caricature.+ The mere rhetorical form may have the greatest importance. A caricature often stings national vanity. A state may be represented as afraid, as having "backed down," as having appeared ridiculous. Group vanity is often a stronger motive than personal vanity, and the desire to gratify it will prove stronger than any rational conviction.

+202. Relation of fads, etc., to mores.+ Thus the vanities, desires, prejudices, faiths, likes, and dislikes, which pervade a society, coerce dissenters and become stronger and stronger mass phenomena. They then affect interests. Then they wind strands of influence and control around individuals and demand sacrifices. In their combination they weave webs of action which constitute life and history. The selection which they exert, drawing in some and repelling others, produces results on the societal fabric of a later time. The consequences react on character, moral tone, life philosophy, ethical principles, and ruling sentiments. Thus they affect the mores, or even enter into them. The whole is handed on to the rising generation to be their outfit of knowledge, faith, and policy, and their rules of duty and well living.

+203. Ideals.+ An ideal is entirely unscientific. It is a phantasm which has little or no connection with fact. Ideals are very often formed in the effort to escape from the hard task of dealing with facts, which is the function of science and art. There is no process by which to reach an ideal. There are no tests by which to verify it. It is therefore impossible to frame a proposition about an ideal which can be proved or disproved. It follows that the use of ideals is to be strictly limited to proper cases, and that the attempt to use ideals in social discussion does not deserve serious consideration. An ideal differs from a model in that the model is deduced from reality but within the bounds of reality. It is subject to approved methods of attainment and realization. An ideal also differs from a standard, for a standard must be real.

+204. When ideals may be used.+ What are the proper cases for the use of ideals? Ideals can be useful when they are formed in the imagination of the person who is to realize them by his own exertions, for then the ideal and the programme of action are in the same consciousness, and therefore the defects of an ideal are reduced or removed. Ideals are useful (_a_) in homiletics, which are chiefly occupied with attempts at suggestion. In limited cases a preacher or teacher can suggest ideals which, if apprehended and adopted, become types toward which young persons may train themselves. Even then these cases merge in the next class. (_b_) Ideals are useful in self-education. The idea is then taken up from books or from admired persons by suggestion and imitation, or from autosuggestion, but generally from a combination of the two. An ideal from autosuggestion produces enthusiasm. The fantastic character of the ideal, if the person is young, is unimportant. His will is enlisted to work for it. He can constantly compare the ideal with his experience. The ideal is at last shorn down to reality and merges in sober plans of effort. (_c_) A far larger field for ideals is afforded by vanity. As vanity is itself a subjective affection, but one which can be awakened only in society, it uses the imagination to suppose cases, plan unlimited schemes, devise types of self-decoration and dreams of superiority, distinction, power, success, and glory. The creations are all phantasms. The ends are all ideals. These ideals may not be extravagant. Vanity generally creates them by raising to a higher pitch some treatment of the body or dress, some admired trait of character, some action which has won glory, or given pleasure and won applause. This whole field for ideals is largely influenced by suggestion from the current tastes and fashionable standards in the group, but autosuggestion is also very active in it. (_d_) Ideals also find a great field in marriage. In this case ideals of happiness have powerfully affected the institution at all its stages. Experience of marriage has been partly pleasant and partly the contrary. The experience has stimulated the reflection: How blessed it would be if only this or that unpleasant detail could be corrected! This has led to idealization or the imaginative conception of a modified institution. Our novels now sometimes aid in this idealization. Men loved their daughters with zealous and protective affection long before they loved their wives. The father's love reached out to follow his daughter into matrimony and to secure for her some stipulations which should free wedlock for her from pain or care which other wives had to endure. These stipulations were always guided by idealization. The rich and great were first able to realize the modifications. These then passed into fashion, custom, and the mores, and the institution was perfected and refined by them.

+205. Ideals of beauty.+ The educated ideals under the second and third of the above heads become mass phenomena under the influence of fashion, when they control many or all. Ideal types of beauty are adopted by a group. Uncivilized people adopt such types of bodily beauty (sec. 189). The origin of them is unknown. A Samoan mother presses her thumb on the nose of her baby to flatten it.[419] An Indian mother puts a board on the forehead of her baby to make it recede. Teeth are knocked out, or filed into prescribed shapes, or blackened. The skin is painted, cut into scars, or tattooed. Goblinism may have furnished the original motives for some deformations, but the natural physical features of the group which distinguish it from others, or the features produced by goblinistic usages, come to be the standard of beauty for the group. Those features are accentuated and exaggerated by the deformations which are practiced. The aim is at an ideal perfection of physical beauty. All fashion in dress has the same philosophy. In other cases, also, it seems that fashion is pursuing a fleeting and impossible ideal of perfect beauty, style, grace, dexterity, etc., which shall give distinction and superiority or impose subjection.

+206. The man-as-he-should-be.+ Group ideals may be types of character. In the Old Testament the ideal type is the "just man," who conformed to ritual standards at all points. A Moslem is a man who is "faithful" to Islam, which is self-surrender to the Omnipotent One.[420] The type of the perfect man-as-he-should-be in the Mahabharata is one who will give his all to a Brahmin. The god Siva, disguised as a Brahmin, came to a hero. He ordered the hero to kill his own son and serve his corpse for the Brahmin to eat. The hero obeyed at once. The Brahmin set the hero's buildings on fire, but the latter served the dish without heeding the fire. The Brahmin ordered him to eat of the dish. He prepared to obey, but was excused from this trial. He had triumphantly stood the test. There was nothing he would not do for a Brahmin.[421] The poem also contains a type of female perfection in person and character,--Savitri. [422] The Greeks had many standards of personal excellence and social worth which entered to some extent into their mores. The ideal types were noble and refined. They have affected the mores of the class educated in the "humanities" since the Renaissance. They have never been truly incorporated in the mores of any society. _Olbos_ was wealth, with grace, opulence, elegance, and generosity, and so wealth when not sordid or arrogant, the opposite of plutocratic. _Arete_ was capacity, capability, and practical efficiency,--executive ability. _Aidos_ was the opposite of "cheek." _Sophrosyne_ was continence, self-control. _Kalokagathie_ contained notions of economic, æsthetic, and moral good, fused into a single concept.[423] The _eleutheros_ was the gentleman endowed with all admirable qualities.[424] The Greeks proved that people could sink very low while talking very nobly. The ideals were in the literature, not in the mores. "Their predisposition, their will, and their fate formed a consistent whole, and their decline was a consequence of the social and political life which they lived."[425] In the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. the man-as-he-should-be was religious,--a hermit or a monk. In any case he was an ascetic. In Charlemagne's time the preferred type was changed. It became the warrior and knight, and led up to chivalry. A new poetry flourished to develop and propagate the new ideal. In mediæval society there were strongly defined ideals of the man-as-he-should-be. _Milte_ was generosity of heart and mind. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was the noble desire of the lord to share all he had with his retainers, which desire called out their devotion to him.[426] The minstrels meant by it lavishness of gifts to themselves. _Maze_ was the cardinal virtue. It meant observation of the limits in all actions and manifestations of feeling, the opposite of excess and extravagance.[427] The church taught admiration of arbitrary ideals of ecclesiastical virtues. The ideals were ascetic. They seem to have been derived from the fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, but they offer an example of borrowed and adopted ideals which were fully incorporated in the popular mores. The age accepted ascetic standards of goodness and character. The religious classes and the lay classes did not fall under the same standards of conduct and duty. It was the business of the former to live by the full standard. All classes, however, accepted the standards as valid, and the layman conformed to them at times, or as far as worldly life would permit. Elizabeth of Thuringia seems to be the ideal of the married woman, but her saintliness interfered with her other duties, and even her own time does not seem to have been sure in its judgment of her. That she was flogged is a fact which has many relations to her character and her age.[428] All admired men who practiced asceticism and self-discipline. The types of the age were knightliness and saintliness. They were both highly elaborated. The knightly type began to develop in the time of Charlemagne and ran through the crusades. It contained grotesque and absurd elements. The story of the crusades is a criticism upon it. The knight was a fantastic person, who might do isolated deeds of valor, but who could not make a plan, work persistently to a purpose, coöperate with others, or either enforce or submit to discipline. Both the knight and the saint were ideal types which exerted a controlling power of selection through centuries.

+207. The standard type of man.+ Is the ideal of the man-as-he-should-be to be found, for us, in the "common man," or in the highest product of our culture? That is a most vital question for any society. It includes the question whether the society has a discord in itself as to its own ideal of the type of men it wants to produce. In the upper strata of the masses, amongst the educated, industrious, sober-minded people of good incomes, there exists the best family life. The children live constantly with their parents, and the latter watch over the health, manners, and morals of the children unceasingly from birth to maturity. The same parents make great sacrifices for the education of their children, although the class, as a class, has means to secure what is necessary without hard sacrifice. The point is that they value education highly and get it. We also multiply educational institutions. We feel sure that all this is good work. The churches and all good literature constantly inculcate good manners and morals according to the standards in the present mores. Here is a set of objects to be prized and worked for in families, schools, self-education, literature, and art, which go to the production of a type of men as the highest product of our civilization. Then suddenly we are told that the common man is wise beyond all the philosophers. The man on the curbstone is the arbiter of our destinies, and the standard man. "Culture" is derided and sneered at. This latter view has great popularity. It brings up a serious question: whether we are spoiling our children by educating them. Are we spoiling them for political power? Are we putting them under disabilities for public influence? It is related of an English statesman, that when asked by an American mother whether she should send her son to Oxford, he replied: "Why send him to Oxford? Send him to Washington, where he will learn democracy. That is what he will need to know." Certainly it behooves us to know whether we are spoiling our sons by sending them to the universities, and whether we ought not rather to send them to Tammany Hall. Either on one side or the other there is a great mass of empty phrases and false but inflated rhetoric.

+208. Who does the thinking?+ The notion that "the group thinks" deserves to be put by the side of the great freaks of philosophy which have been put forth from age to age. Only the élite of any society, in any age, think, and the world's thinking is carried on by them by the transplanting of ideas from mind to mind, under the stress and strain of clashing argument and tugging debate. If the group thinks, then thought costs nothing, but in truth thought costs beyond everything else, for thousands search and talk while only one finds; when he finds something, a step is won and all begins over again. If this is so, it ought to be universally known and recognized. All the mores would then conform to it.

+209. The gentleman.+ In modern English-speaking society the "gentleman" is the name for the man-as-he-should-be. The type is not fixed and the definition is not established. It is a collective and social ideal. Gentlemen are a group in society who have selected a code and standard of conduct as most conducive to prosperous and pleasant social relations. Therefore manners are an essential element in the type. A gentleman is one who has been educated to conform to the type, and that he has the _cachet_ is indicated by his admission to the group. Novels develop and transmit the ideal; clubs are the tribunal of it. It is a floating notion which varies with the mores. The modern reader finds very few cases in Greek literature of what he can recognize as gentlemen. Orestes in the _Electra_ of Euripides opens the discussion of what makes the worth of a man, but after saying that it is not wealth or poverty, and not valor in war, he flinches the question and says that it is better to leave it untouched. The peasant, married to Electra, certainly acts the gentleman. He also says of Orestes and Pylades, that if they really are as noble as they seem, they will be as well satisfied with humble fare as with grand fare. A gentleman of a century ago would not be approved now. A gentleman of to-day in the society of a century ago would be thought to have rowdy manners. Artificial manners are not in the taste of our time; athletics are. The "gentleman" always tends to an arbitrary definition. It appears now that he must have some skill at sports and games. The selective force of the social type of the gentleman is obvious in our own society. The sentiment _noblesse oblige_ was once the name for the coercive force exerted on a noble by the code of his class. Now that fixed classes are gone and the gentleman is only defined by the usage and taste of an informal class, it is a term for the duties which go with social superiority of any kind, so far as those duties are prescribed and sanctioned by public opinion.

+210. Social standard set by taboos.+ It may be still more important to notice that the standard social type is defined by taboos with only social sanctions. The negative side of _noblesse oblige_ is more important than the positive. A gentleman is under more restraints than a non-gentleman. In the eighteenth century he patronized cockfights and prize fights, and he could get drunk, gamble, tell falsehoods, and deceive women without losing caste. He now finds that _noblesse oblige_ forbids all these things, and that it puts him under disabilities in politics and business.

A society exerts a positive selection on individuals by its definition of crimes and by its criminal jurisprudence. The taboos are turned into laws and are enforced by positive penalties.

+211. Crimes.+ The number and variety of crimes depends on the positive action of the state. What things are crimes in a state, therefore, indicates what the ruling authority desires to prevent. The motives have often been entirely selfish on the part of a king or a ruling caste, or they were dictated by a desire to further the vanity of such persons. By judicial precedent at Rome it was made a crime to beat a slave, or to undress near a statue of the emperor, or to carry a coin bearing his image into a latrine or a lupanar.[429] Xiphilin, in his epitome of the history of Dio Cassius, inserts a story that, in the reign of Domitian, a woman was executed for undressing near the statue of that emperor.[430] The notions in the mores of what ought to be prevented have been very variable and arbitrary. Juvenal denounces a consul who while in office drove his own chariot, although by night.[431] Seneca was shocked at the criminal luxury of putting snow in wine.[432] Pliny is equally shocked at the fashion of wearing gold rings.[433] Lecky, after citing these cases, refers to the denunciations uttered by the church fathers against women who wore false hair. Painting the face is an old fault of women, against which moral teachers of all ages have thundered. Very recently, amongst us, clergymen have denounced women for not wearing bonnets in church, because Paul said that she "dishonoreth her head, for that is even all one as if she were shaven."[434] These were not indeed cases of crimes, but of alleged vices or sins. In sumptuary laws we have cases of legislation which made fashions crimes. In the eighteenth century there was little legislation against brothels, drinking places, or gambling houses. We make it a crime to sell rum, but not to drink it. On the other hand, until recently commercial transactions and the lending of money for interest were so restricted in accordance with ethical and economic faiths that they were environed by crimes which are now obsolete. Heresy and sorcery were once very great crimes. Witchcraft and usury were abominable crimes.

+212. Criminal law.+ In the original administration of justice it appears that there was only one punishment for the violation of taboo, sin and crime being coincident: that was death. Then, in cases, banishment was substituted for death, although this was only a change in form, since a banished man could not exist alone. In either case the selection was of the simplest kind. The society extruded from itself one who violated its rules. This is the fundamental sense of all punishments, like execution, transportation, or imprisonment, which remove the culprit from the society, permanently or for a time. Other punishments contained originally a large element of vengeance, vengeance being a primary impulse of great force to satisfy those whom the crimes injured and to deter others from the same crime. The administration of justice, therefore, bore witness to the judgment of the society as to what conduct and character should be selected for preservation or caused to cease. In all modern states the power to make acts crimes has been abused, and the motive of punishment has been so lost that we wrangle as to what it is. The ruling coterie uses the power to make things crimes to serve its own interests. Protectionists make it criminal to import goods. Governments do the same to further their fiscal purposes. They also make it criminal to immigrate or emigrate, or to coin money, even of full weight and fineness, or to carry letters and parcels. In England it is made a crime to violate railroad regulations. In some cases regulations for barber shops are enforced by making violations crimes. Generally, sanitary rules are so enforced. In the latest case it has been made a crime to spit in public places. The criminal law expresses the mores of the time when they have reached very concrete and definite formulæ of prohibition. Perhaps the administration of it expresses the mores still more clearly. It is now recognized as true that frightful penalties do not exert a proportionately deterrent effect. Our mores do not permit us to inflict pain in order to compel men to confess, or to put them in solitary confinement in dark and loathsome dungeons, or to let our prisons become sinks of vice and misery or schools of crime. The selective effect of punishment is the one which we seem to aim at, although not very intelligently.

+213. Mass phenomena of fear and hope.+ Manias and delusions are mental phenomena, but they are social. They are diseases of the mind, but they are epidemic. They are contagious, not as cholera is contagious, but contact with others is essential to them. They are mass phenomena.[435] Some great hope (the good to be obtained by taking the heads of murdered men or from appeasing the gods by sacrificing one's children) or some great fear (drought, failure of food, purgatory), if common to the whole, makes them adopt any suggestion of a means to realize the hope or avert the feared calamity. Often there is no such quasi-rational reason for common action. Hysteria, especially amongst women and children, produces manias of falsehood, deceit (fasting women), trances, and witchcraft. In mediæval convents sometimes half the inmates were afflicted at the same time. Nervous depression and irritation produced physical acts of relief. One irritated another, and one surpassed another, until there was a catastrophe for the group.[436] Religious enthusiasm has produced innumerable manias and delusions. Mediæval Christianity, Mohammedanism, Persia, and modern Russia furnish cases. Martyrdom proves nothing with regard to the truth or value of a religion. All the sects have had martyrs. Martyrdom, even under torture, has been sought, under the influence of religious enthusiasm, not only by Christians[437] but by Donatists,[438] Manichæans, and other most abominated heretics. Even the Adamites produced martyrs who went joyously to death.[439] Quakers really provoked their own martyrdom in early New England.

+214. Manias, delusions.+ The phenomena of manias, popular delusions, group hallucinations, self-immolation, etc., show the possibilities of mental contagion in a group. They are responses to hope or fear which affect large numbers at the same time. They are often produced by public calamities, or other ills of life. Those who suffer feel themselves selected as victims, and they ask, Who has done this to us, and why? Often people who are not victims interpret a natural incident by egoistic reference. This is done not on account of the destruction wrought by an earthquake or a tornado, but from pure terror at what is not understood, e.g. an eclipse.[440] Pilgrimages and crusades were cases of mania and delusion. The element of delusion was in the notion of high merit which could be won in pursuing the crusades. Very often manias and delusions are pure products of fashion, as in the case of the children's crusades, when the children caught the infection of the crusades, but did not know what they were doing, or why, and rushed on their own destruction. Often manias are logical deductions from notions (especially religious notions) which have been suggested, as in the case of the flagellants. It is the ills of life which drive people to such deductions, and they bear witness to excessive nervous excitement. The mediæval dancing mania was more purely nervous. The demonism and demonology of the Middle Ages was a fertile source for such deductions, which went far to produce the witchcraft mania. The demonistic notions taught by the church furnished popular deductions, which the church took up and reduced to dogmatic form, and returned as such to the masses. Thus the notions of sorcery, heresy, and witchcraft were developed.

+215. Monstrous mass phenomena of mediæval society.+ There must have been a deep and strong anthropological reason for the development of monstrous social phenomena in mediæval society. The Latin world was disintegrated to its first elements between the sixth century and the tenth. Such a dissolution of society abolished the inherited mores with all their restraints and inhibitions, and left society to the control of fierce barbaric, that is physical, forces. At the same period the Latin world absorbed hordes of barbarians who were still on a low nomadic warrior stage of civilization, and who adopted the ruins of Roman culture without assimilating them. The Christian church contributed crass superstitions about the other world and the relations of this world to it. The product was the Merovingian and Carlovingian history. Passion, sensuality, ferocity, superstitious ignorance, and fear characterized the age. It is supposed that western Europe was overpopulated and that the crusades operated a beneficial reduction of numbers.[441] These facts may account for the gigantic mass phenomena in the early Middle Ages. Every sentiment was extravagant. Men were under some mighty gregarious instinct which drove them to act in masses, and they passed from one great passion or enthusiastic impulse to another at very short intervals. The passions of hatred and revenge were manifested, upon occasion, to the extremity of fiendishness. Nothing which the mind could conceive of seemed to be renounced as excessive (Clement V, John XXII). Gregory IX pursued the heretics and the emperor with an absorption of his whole being and a rancor which we cannot understand. Poverty was elevated into a noble virtue and a transcendent merit.[442] This was the height of ascetic absurdity, since poverty is only want, and the next step would be a cult of suicide. The mendicant orders fought each other malignantly. Every difference of opinion made a war of extermination. Civil contests were carried on with extravagant ferocity as to the means used and as to the exultation of success or the penalty of failure. What was lacking was discipline. There was no authority or doctrine which could set limits to private passion. Life was held cheap. The gallows and the pit were in use all the time. The most marked product of invention was instruments of torture. Men and women were burned to death for frivolous reasons. Punishments taught people to gloat over suffering. Torture was inflicted as idly as we take testimony. With all this went deep faith in the efficacy of ritual and great other-worldliness, that is, immediate apprehension of the other world in this one. All the mores were adjusted to these features of faith and practice. It all proceeded out of the masses of the people. The church was borne along like a chip on the tide. The church hung back from the crusades until the depth of the popular interest had been tested. Then the crusades were declared to be the "will of God." This gave their own idea back again to the masses with the approval of the societal authority. The masses insisted on having acts and apparatus provided by which to satisfy their application of dogma. The power of the keys and the treasure of salvation were provided accordingly. The souls of the people were torn by the antagonism between the wild passions of the age and the ecclesiastical restraints on conduct. They feared the wrath of God and hell to come. The ritual and sacramental system furnished a remedy. The flagellants were a phenomenon of seething, popular passion, outside of the church and unapproved by its authority. Antony of Padua ([Symbol: cross] 1231) started the movement by his sermons on repentance and the wrath of God. Processions of weeping, praying, self-scourging, and half-naked penitents appeared in the streets of all the towns of Christendom. "Nearly all enemies made friends. Usurers and robbers made haste to restore ill-gotten goods, and other vicious men confessed and renounced vanity. Prisons were opened. Prisoners were released. Exiles were allowed to return. Men and women accomplished works of pity and holiness, as if they feared the all-powerful God would consume them with fire from heaven."[443] This movement was altogether popular. It broke out again in 1349, in connection with the Black Death. Flagellation for thirty-three and a half days was held to purge from all sin. This was heresy and the flagellants were persecuted. The theory was a purely popular application by the masses of the church doctrine of penance, outside of the church system. It reappeared from time to time. The dancing mania began at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1373 and lasted for several years.[444] It was an outlet for high nervous tension under which the population was suffering on account of great calamities, social distress, and superstitious interpretations of the same. In short, the period was one of monstrous phenomena, extravagant passions, and unreasonable acts.

+216. Gregariousness of the Middle Ages.+ "To estimate fully the force of these popular ebullitions in the Middle Ages, we must bear in mind the susceptibility of the people to contagious emotions and enthusiasms of which we know little in our colder day. A trifle might start a movement which the wisest could not explain nor the most powerful restrain. It was during the preaching of this crusade [of 1208, against the Albigenses] that villages and towns in Germany were filled with women who, unable to expend their religious ardor in taking the cross, stripped themselves naked and ran silently through the roads and streets. Still more symptomatic of the diseased spirituality of the time was the crusade of the children, which desolated thousands of homes. From vast districts of territory, incited apparently by a simultaneous and spontaneous impulse, crowds of children set forth, without leaders or guides, in search of the Holy Land; and their only answer, when questioned as to their object, was that they were going to Jerusalem. Vainly did parents lock their children up; they would break loose and disappear; and the few who eventually found their way home again could give no reason for the overmastering longing which had carried them away. Nor must we lose sight of other and less creditable springs of action which brought to all crusades the vile, who came for license and spoil, and the base, who sought the immunity conferred by the quality of crusader."[445] "To comprehend fully the magnitude and influence of these movements we must bear in mind the impressionable character of the populations and their readiness to yield to contagious emotion. When we are told that the Franciscan Berthold of Ratisbon frequently preached to crowds of sixty thousand souls, we realize what power was lodged in the hands of those who could reach masses so easily swayed and so full of blind yearnings to escape from the ignoble life to which they were condemned. How the slumbering souls were awakened is shown by the successive waves of excitement which swept over one portion of Europe after another about the middle of the thirteenth century. The dumb, untutored minds began to ask whether an existence of hopeless and brutal misery was all that was to be realized from the promises of the gospel. The church had made no real effort at internal reform; it was still grasping, covetous, licentious, and a strange desire for something--they knew not exactly what--began to take possession of men's hearts and spread like an epidemic from village to village and from land to land."[446]

What we see here is the power of mere gregariousness, the impulse of acting in a crowd, without knowledge or purpose. The mere sense of being in the current movement, or "in the fashion," is a pleasure. When the movement is great in its compass and the numbers involved there is an exhilaration about being in it. If the notions by which it is enthused are great, or holy and noble, in form and pretense, even if not really so, it may become demonic, and it may accomplish incredible things. We had a grand illustration of this at the outbreak of the Civil War, in 1861, both in the North and South. Dissent on both sides was overwhelmed and all were swept away into the prevailing current.

+217. The mendicant orders.+ The mendicant orders responded to the deepest popular faiths and highest standards of the thirteenth century. Francis of Assisi ([Symbol: cross] 1226) took up the notion that it was wrong to own property, or at least meritorious to renounce it, and affirmed that Christ and his apostles repudiated all property and lived on alms. The Timotheists of the fifth century had held this notion, but were rated as heretics.[447] Poverty, for Francis, did not mean a little property, but absolute rejection of all property. This was necessarily only a pose. He had to use other men's property, the use being right. Therefore he could only renounce productive labor. The popular religious temper of the time revered simplicity, humility, self-denial, and renunciation of "the world" as especially evangelical virtues. They were thought to be summed up in poverty. That Francis was a hero of this type of religion has been universally admitted. The virtues were just the ones which the Roman court did not show. Jacques de Vitry, an enthusiastic preacher against the Albigenses, went through Italy to Palestine in 1216. He left a journal[448] in which he recorded his sadness at observing that, at the papal court, all were busy with secular affairs, kings and kingdoms, quarrels and lawsuits, so that it was almost impossible to speak about spiritual matters. He greatly admired the Franciscans, who were trying to renew primitive Christianity and save souls, thus shaming the prelates, who were "dogs who do not bark." The Count of Chiusi gave to Francis the mountain La Verna for retirement and meditation. Armed men were necessary to take possession of it against the beasts and robbers who had possession of it.[449] Carmichael believes that Francis received the stigmata, which he describes in detail. The Francis of tradition is a fabulous person, created out of the pet ideas of his time.[450] The historical person was a visionary. Dominic was a zealot. He wanted to convert all heretics by preaching or other means.

+218. Other mendicant orders.+ De Vitry found Humiliati in Lombardy, who were living by ideas like those of Francis. The Augustinian hermits were founded in 1256, the Carmelites in 1245, and the Servites, or Servants of Mary, about 1275.[451] These were all mendicants, and they bear witness to the character of the notions of the time about poverty. It was a mania, and is fully expressed in the _Romaunt de la Rose_. Perhaps Francis did not mean to "found an order." He wanted to live in a certain way with a few friends. The spontaneous and very rapid spread of his order proves that it was concordant with a great popular taste. Francis was a dreamer and enthusiast, not a politician or organizer at all. In his testament he says: "After the Lord had given me care of the brethren, no one showed me what I ought to do, but the Highest Himself revealed to me that I ought to live according to the mode of the Holy Gospel." He was not thwarted and subjugated by the curia during his life, but his ideals were not maintained by the men in the order. The man who was later pope Gregory IX aided him to organize the order and to make it practically efficient, that is, to take the enthusiasm out of it and make it practical.[452] The popes of the thirteenth century approved. There was in the principles of the order an antagonism to the church as it was, and also an antagonism to common sense. The church authorities wanted to bring the order into practical use, and suspected it of the heresies of Florus. It therefore split into "conventuals," who conformed to the methods of conventual life, and the "spirituals," who clung to the doctrines and rules of the founder. The latter became "observantines" (1368) and "recollects" (1487).[453] The two branches hated each other and fought on all occasions. In 1275 the spirituals were treated as heretics, imprisoned in chains, and forbidden the sacrament.[454] John XXII condemned their doctrine as heretical. This put the observantines in the same position as other heretical sects. They must be rebels and heretics or give up ideas which seemed to them the sum of all truth and wisdom. Generally they clung to their ideas like the heretics.[455] One of their heroes was Bernard Delicieux ([Symbol: cross] 1320), who is celebrated as the only man who ever dared to resist the Inquisition. He was tortured twice, and condemned to imprisonment in chains on bread and water. He lived only a few months under this punishment.[456] Out of admiration immense sums were given to the mendicants, and they became notorious for avarice and worldly self-seeking.[457] As early as 1257 Bonaventura, the head of the order, reproached them with these faults.[458] "Some of the venomous hatred expressed by the Italian satirists for the two great orders of St. Francis and St. Dominic may perhaps be due to an ancient grudge against them as a papal police founded in the interests of orthodoxy, but the chief point aimed at is the mixture of hypocrisy with immorality, which rendered them odious to all classes of society."[459] "In general the Franciscans seem to us far less orthodox than the Dominicans. They issued from a popular movement which was irregular, unecclesiastical, very little conformed to the ideas of the hierarchy about discipline." "The followers of St. Francis continued to contain ardent-minded men who maintained that the Franciscan reform had not produced all its due results; that that reform was superior to popes and to the dispensations issued at Rome; that the appearance of the seraphic Francis was neither more nor less than the advent of a new Christianity and a new Christ, like in all respects to the first, but superior to it by poverty. Therefore all the democratic and communistic movements of later times,--the third order of St. Francis, the Beghards, Lollards, Bisocs, Fraticelli, Spiritual Brethren, Humiliati, and Poor Men of Lyons [Waldenses], who were exterminated by the state and the prisons of the Dominicans, have their origin in the old leaven of Katharism, Joachimism, and the eternal gospel."[460]

+219. Popular mania for poverty and beggary.+ The strength of the mendicant orders was in their popularity. They reconquered for the church the respect of the masses. Then they became the inquisitors, and the abusers of power for their own interests, and fell into great disfavor. Their history shows well the course of interaction between the masses and the rulers, and the course of institutions born in popular mores but abused to serve private interests. The mendicant orders furnished the army of papal absolutism. The Roman Catholic writers say that the popes saved the world from the despotism of emperors. What is true is that the pope and the emperor contended for the mastery, and the masses gave it to the pope. What the popes did with it we know. That is history. What the emperors would have done with it is matter for conjecture. It is very probable that they would have abused the power as badly as the popes did, but conjectural history is idle.

+220. Delusions.+ Of popular delusions one of the most striking and recurrent examples is the belief that new and despised religious sects, which are forced to meet in private, practice obscene and abominable orgies. The early Christians were accused of such rites, and they charged dissenting sects with the same.[461] The Manichæans, Waldenses, Huguenots, Puritans, Luciferans, Brothers of the Free Spirit, and so on through the whole list of heretical sects, have been so charged. Lea, in his History of the Inquisition, mentions over a dozen cases of such charges, some of which were true. Nowadays the same assertions are made against freemasons by Roman Catholics.[462] Jews are believed by the peasants of eastern Europe to practice abominable rites in secret. The idea that secret sects use the blood of people not of their sect, especially of babies, in base rites is only a variant of the broad idea about secret rites. It is sometimes said that the charges were invented to make sects unpopular, but it is more probable that they arose from the secrecy of the meetings only. Christians are so charged now in China.[463] The story of the discovery of such misbehavior always contains the same explanation--a husband followed his wife to the meeting and saw the proceedings.[464]

+221. Manias need suggestion.+ Manias and delusions are like fashions and fads in that they always seem to need a suggestion from some outside source, and often it is impossible to find such a source. A strong popular belief, like the belief in Satan and demons, furnishes a ground for a general disposition to hold some other people responsible for all the ills which befall one's self. Then the disposition to act cruelly against the suspected person arises to a mental disease, and by coöperation of others under the same aberration makes a mania.[465] The explanation lies in autosuggestion or fixed ideas with the development loosely ranged under hysteria, which is the contagious form of nervous affection. The term "epidemic" can be applied only figuratively. "Mental disease occurs only on the ground of a specific constitutional and generally hereditary predisposition. It cannot therefore be spread epidemically, any more than diabetes or gout."[466] The epidemic element is due to hysterical imitation. In like manner, epidemics or manias of suicide occur by imitation, e.g. amongst the Circumcellions, a subdivision of the Donatists, in Africa, in the middle of the fourth century A.D.[467] Cognate with this was the mania for martyrdom which it required all the authority of the church to restrain.[468] Josephus[469] says of the Galileans, followers of Judas of Galilee, that they were famous for their indifference to death. Convents were often seats of frightful epidemics of hysteria. The accepted religious notions furnished a fruitful soil for it. To be possessed by devils was a distinction, and vanity was drawn into play.[470] Autosuggestion was shown by actions which were, or were supposed to be, the actions proper for "possessed" people. Ascetic practices prepared the person to fall a victim to the contagion of hysteria. The predisposition was also cultivated by the religious ecstasies, the miracle and wonder faiths, and the current superstitions. Then there was the fact which nearly any one may have experienced, that an old and familiar story becomes mixed with memory, so that he thinks that what he heard of happened to himself. Untrained people also form strong convictions from notions which have been long and firmly held without evidence, and they offer to others the firmness of their own convictions as grounds for accepting the same faith without proof. Ritual acts and ascetic observances which others can see, also conduct and zeal in prayer or singing, and the odors of incense, help this transfer of faith without or against proof. These appeals to suggestibility all come under the head of drama. Nowadays the novels with a tendency operate the same suggestion. A favorite field for it is sociological doctrine. In this field it is a favorite process to proceed by ideals, but ideals, as above shown (secs. 203, 204), are fantastic and easily degenerate into manias when they become mass phenomena. Mariolatry, the near end of the world, the coming of the Paraclete, are subjects of repeated manias, especially for minds unsettled by excessive ascetic observances. It follows from all these cases of mental aberration that the minds of the masses of a society cannot be acted on by deliberation and critical investigation, or by the weight of sound reasoning. There is a mysticism of democracy and a transcendentalism of political philosophy in the masses to-day, which can be operated on by the old methods of suggestion. The stock exchange shows the possibility of suggestion. What one ought to do is to perceive and hold fast to the truth, but also to know the delusion which the mass are about to adopt; but it is only the most exceptional men who can hold to a personal opinion against the opinion of the surrounding crowd.

+222. Power of the crowd over the individual.+ The manias and delusions therefore dominate the individual like the fashions, fads, and affectations. It is the power of the crowd over the individual which is constant. The truth and justice of the popular opinion is of very inferior importance. The manias and delusions also operate selection, but not always in the same way, or in any way which can be defined. He who resists a mania may be trodden under foot like any other heretic. There occur cases, however, in which he wins by dissent. If he can outlive the mania, he will probably gain at a later time, when its folly is proved to all.

+223. Discipline by pain.+ He who wants to make another do something, or to prevent him from doing something, may, if the former is the stronger, connect act or omission with the infliction of pain. This is only an imitation of nature, in which pain is a sanction and a deterrent. Family and school discipline have always rested on this artificial use of pain. It is, apparently, the most primary application of force or coercion. It combines directly with vengeance, which is a primary passion of human nature. Punishment is of this philosophy, for by punishment we furnish, or add, a painful consequence to acts which we desire to restrain, in the hope that the consequence will cause reflection and make the victim desist. The punishment may be imprisonment (i.e. temporary exclusion from the society), or fine, or scourging, or other painful treatment. The sense of punishment is the same whether the punishment be physical pain or other disagreeable experience. Although we have come to adopt modern ideas about the infliction of physical pain in punishment, we cannot depart far from its fundamental theory and motive. In the past, physical pain has been employed also, in lynching and in regular proceedings, to enforce conformity, and to suppress dissent from the current mores of the society. The physical proceedings are measures to produce conformity which differ from boycotting and other methods of manifesting disapproval and inflicting unpopularity in that they are positive and physical. Then the selection is positive and is pursued by external and physical sanctions.

+224. The mediæval church operated societal selection.+ It is evident that the mediæval church was a machine to exert societal selection. The great reason for its strength as such is that it never made the mores of the age; it proceeded out of them. It contributed, through a thousand previous years, phantasms about the other world and dogmas about the relation of this world to that one. These dogmas became mixed with all the experience of life in the days of civic decline and misery, and produced the mores of the tenth and eleventh centuries. All the great doctrines then took on the form of manias or delusions. In the early centuries of the Christian era "catholic" meant Christendom in its entirety, in contrast with the separate congregations, so that the concepts "all congregations" and the "universal church" are identical. However, the church over the whole world was thought to have been founded by the apostles, so that that only could be true which was found everywhere in Christendom. So "catholic" came to have a pregnant meaning, and got dogmatic and political connotations.[471] In the eleventh century all Christendom was reduced to civic fragments in which tyranny, oppression, and strife prevailed. It was not strange that "catholicity" was revived as an idea of a peace pact by means of which the church might unite Christendom into a peace group for the welfare of mankind (sec. 14). This was a grand idea. If the Christian church had devoted itself to the realization of it, by forms of constitutional liberty, the history of the world would have been different. The church, however, used "catholicity" as a name for universal submission to the bishop of Rome and for hierarchical discipline, and used all means to try to realize that conception. By the Inquisition and other apparatus it attempted to enforce conformity to this idea, and exercised a societal selection against all dissenters from it. The ecclesiastics of Cluny, in the eleventh century, gave form to this high-church doctrine, and they combined with it a rational effort to raise the clergy to honor for learning and piety, as a necessary step for the success of their church policy. The circumstances and ideas of the time gave to these efforts the form of a struggle for a monarchical constitution of the church. In the thirteenth century this monarchy came into collision with the empire as the other aspirant to the rule of Christendom. Already the papacy was losing moral hold on its subjects. The clergy were criticised for worldliness, arrogance, and tyranny, and the antagonism of the dynastic states, so far as they existed, found expression in popular literature. Walter von der Vogelweide is regarded as a forerunner of the Reformation on account of his bitter criticisms of the hierarchy.[472] It is, however, very noteworthy that, in spite of the popular language of the writers and their appeals to common experience, they did not break the people away from their ecclesiastical allegiance, and also that the church authorities paid little heed to the criticisms of these persons. The miracle and moral plays were in the taste of the age entirely. Besides being gross, they were irreligious and blasphemous. Ecclesiastics tolerated them nevertheless.[473] The authorities moved only when "the faith" was brought in question. "The faith," therefore, acquired a technical signification of great importance. It was elevated to the domain of sentiment and duty and surrounded with pathos (sec. 178), while its meaning was undefined. In time it came to mean obedience to papal authority. Thus all the circumstances and streams of faith and sentiment of the eleventh and twelfth centuries concentrated in the hands of the hierarchy the control of society, because there was no other organ to accept the deposit. The Cluny programme was a programme of reform in the church such as everybody wanted. It gathered all "the good men" in a common will and purpose. The ideals and the means were selected, and the advocates of the same became the selected classes in society. They remained such long after the movement was spent and lost, but the notion remained that every good man, or would-be good man, ought to stand with the church.

+225. The mediæval church.+ In the crusades the church went to war with Islam, another aspirant to rule mankind. It undoubtedly drilled and disciplined its own adherents by the crusades and thus confirmed its power. It is also certain that the crusades were popular and only put into effect the wish of the great body of Christians. It was the masses, therefore, who made the mediæval church. It possessed a corporate organization and hierarchy which was a body of personal interests, in which ambition, cupidity, and love of power were awakened. The church was venal, sensual, gross, and inhuman, because the mores of the age were such. How could the church be other than the age was? Where was it to find inspiration or illumination from without which should make ecclesiastics anything but men of their age? The men of that age left on record their testimony that the church was in no way better than the society.[474] From the end of the twelfth century man after man and sect after sect arose, whose inspiration was moral indignation at the vices and abuses in the church. Wycliffe denied transubstantiation on rationalistic grounds, but his work all consisted in criticism of hierarchical abuses and of the principles which made the abuses possible. The church never was on the level of the better mores of any time. Every investigation which we make leads us not to the church as the inspirer and leader, but to the dissenting apostles of righteousness, to the great fluctuations in the mores (chivalry, woman service, city growth, arts, and inventions), to the momentum of interests, to the variations in the folkways which travel (crusades and pilgrimages), commerce, industrial arts, money, credit, gunpowder, the printing press, etc., produced.

+226. Sacerdotal celibacy.+ The church rode upon the tide and tried to keep possession of the social power and use it for the interest of ecclesiastics. Asceticism was in the mores. Everybody accepted the ascetic standard of merit and holiness as correct and just, whether he lived by it or not. Sacerdotal celibacy was a case of asceticism. Every one knew that it had come about in church history and was not scriptural or primitive. It was in the notions of the age that there were stages in righteousness, and that religious persons were bound to live by higher stages than persons not technically religious. Renunciation of sex was higher righteousness than realization of sex, as is taught in the seventh chapter of First Corinthians. This notion existed amongst heathen and pagans. The priests in the Melkart temple at Gades (Cadiz) were bound to celibacy.[475]

The merit of celibacy is a very old religious idea in Hindostan. The Todas have a celibate priesthood.[476] "It is one of the inconsistencies of the Hindu religion that it enjoins the duty of marriage on all, yet honors celibacy as a condition of great sanctity, and a means of acquiring extraordinary religious merit and influence."[477] "All the ascetic sects of the Saivas are celibates."[478] Lamas at Shang (98° E. 36° N.) are allowed to marry, but not in Tibet.[479] The Christian notion of the third century was that clerics ought to come up to the higher standard. This was the purest and highest reason for celibacy. It had been a standard of perfection in the Christian church for six hundred years before Hildebrand. Whatever motives of policy or ecclesiastical ambition may have been mixed with it in the eleventh century, it had the merit of bringing doctrine and practice into accord.

+227. The masses wanted clerical celibacy.+ It is to be noticed that clerical celibacy was a demand of the masses amongst church members, and that the demand came directly out of Christian mores. In the fourth century this doctrine was derived from sacramentarianism. The notion became fixed that there was an inherent and necessary incongruity between marriage and the celebration of the sacrament of the mass. "In the course of the fourth century it was a recognized principle that clerical marriages were criminal. They were celebrated, however, habitually, and usually with the greatest openness."[480] That means that they were in antagonism with church opinion and its tendency at that time. Sacerdotalism triumphed in the fifth century. "Throughout the struggle the papacy had a most efficient ally in the people." Preachers exhorted the people to holiness, and the people required this of the clergy, and enforced it by riots and mob violence. Cases are cited which "bring before us the popular tendencies and modes of thought, and show us how powerful an instrument the passions of the people became, when skilfully aroused and directed by those in authority."[481] The fundamental notion which underlies all asceticism was here at work, viz., that virtue has stages, that a man can be more than good, or worse than bad. The council of Constantinople, in 680, made new rules against the marriage of the clergy, because the old ones were neglected and forgotten. The motive stated was the welfare of the people, who regarded such marriages as scandalous. The excess in temper and doctrine was a mark of the period. The learned would have held the doctrine as a metaphysical truth only, but the masses turned it into a practical rule. The share of the masses in the establishment of the rule is a very important fact. Lea thinks that they were manipulated by the ecclesiastics.[482] In the religious revival of the eleventh century the marriage of the clergy was "popularly regarded as a heresy and a scandal." There was no defense of it.[483] It was an undisputed fact that celibacy was not scriptural or primitive.[484] At that time "all orders, from bishops down, without shame or concealment, were publicly married and lived with their wives as laymen, leaving their children fully provided for in their wills.... This laxity prevailed throughout the whole of Latin Christendom, sacerdotal marriage being everywhere so common that it was no longer punished as unlawful and scarcely even reprehended."[485] "Not a thought of the worldly advantages consequent on the reform appears to have crossed the mind of Damiani. To him it was simply a matter of conscience that the ministers of Christ should be adorned with the austere purity through which alone lay the path to salvation. Accordingly, the arguments which he employs in his endless disputations carefully avoid the practical reasons which were the principal motive for enforcing celibacy. His main reliance was on the assumption that, as Christ was born of a virgin, so he should be served and the eucharist be handled only by virgins."[486] This took up again the fifth-century doctrine in its popular form, but it evidently led directly up to the heresy that the validity or benefit of the sacrament depended on the purity of the priest. In his zeal for celibacy Hildebrand fell into this heresy, although a man was burned for it at Cambrai in 1077.[487] Hildebrand also gave civil authorities power over ecclesiastics in order to carry out his reform.[488] In the middle of the twelfth century the "reform" was directed against the women (wives), for fear of the resistance of the men. In Rome the women were enslaved and given to the church of the Lateran. All bishops were ordered to seize the women for the benefit of their churches.[489] In 1095 the sacrament of marriage was declared by the lateran council less potent than the religious vow, although the contrary had been the church doctrine.[490] Thus what came out of the popular mores underwent the growth of formulated dogma and deduction. In the thirteenth century marriage of the clergy ceased, but concubinage continued, concubines being a legitimate but inferior order of wives, whose existence was tolerated on payment of a fee known as _cullagium_.[491] "Scarcely had the efforts of Nicholas and Gregory put an end to sacerdotal marriage at Rome when the morals of the Roman clergy became a disgrace to Christendom."[492] "Those women [clerical concubines] came to be invested with a quasi-ecclesiastical character, and to enjoy the dearly prized immunities attached to that position."[493] Gerson (1363-1429) paid admiration to virginity and celibacy, but he "saw and appreciated its practical evils, and had no scruple in recommending concubinage as a preventive, which, though scandalous in itself, might serve to prevent greater scandals." In districts it became customary to require a new parish priest to take a concubine.[494] "This was the inversion which the popular opinion had undergone in four centuries."[495] "The principles of the church led irrevocably to the conclusion, paradoxical as it may seem, that he who was guilty of immorality, knowing it to be wrong, was far less criminal than he who married, believing it to be right."[496] At Avignon, when it was the seat of the papacy, sex license and vice became proverbial. A speech of the most shameless cynicism is attributed to Cardinal Hugo, in which he described the effect, in 1251, of the residence of the papal court there for eight years. In the fourteenth century that city became the most wicked, and especially the most licentious, in Christendom.[497] The first case of the presence of women at a feast in the Vatican is said to have been at the marriage of Teodorina, daughter of Innocent VIII, in 1488. Comedies were played before the mixed company.[498]

+228. Abelard.+ A cleric who married flinched from the standard of his calling, in the view of the church. Hildebrand's decrees were like the other crowning acts of great men,--they came at the culmination of a great movement in the mores. They accorded with the will and wish of the masses. In all ages acts are due to mixed motives, but in the Middle Ages the good motives were kept for show and the bad ones controlled. Clerics did not cease to have concubines until after the Council of Trent, and the difference between law and practice (bridged over by pecuniary penalties) called for special ethics and casuistry. The case of Abelard (1079-1142) shows what tragedies were caused. He claimed to be, and to some extent he was, a champion of reason and common sense, and he was a skeptic as to the current philosophy. He was vain, weak, and ambitious. He selected the loveliest woman he knew, and won her love, which he used to persuade her to be his concubine, that she might not hinder him in his career.[499] The treatment accorded to Heloise shows that a woman could be a concubine of an ecclesiastic, but not his wife, without condemnation. That was the allowance for human despair under the ecclesiastical rules.[500] Thus the church first suggested views of life and dogmas of religion, with which the masses combined their mores and returned them to the church as a gift of societal power. The church then formulated the mores and created disciplinary systems to use the power and make it institutional and perpetual. Then the mores revolted against the authority and the religion, and the ethics which it taught. A Roman Catholic writer says that a study of the Middle Ages will produce this result: "We shall have recognized in the church the professional peacemaker between states and factions, as well as between man and man, the equitable mediator between rulers and their subjects, the consistent champion of constitutional liberty, the alleviator of the inequalities of birth, the uninterested and industrious disseminator of letters, the refiner of habits and manners, the well-meaning guardian of the national wealth, health, and intellect, and the fearless censor of public and private morality."[501] These are, indeed, the functions which the church ought to have fulfilled, and about which ecclesiastics said something from time to time. Also, the church did do something for these interests when no great interest of the church was at stake on the other side. No unbiased student of the Middle Ages has been convinced that, in truth and justice, the work of the mediæval church could be thus summed up. The one consistent effort of the church was to establish papal authority. Its greatest crime was obscurantism, which was war on knowledge and civilization. This nothing can palliate or offset.

+229. The English church and the mores.+ The church, however, from 1000 A.D. on was a machine of societal selection, and it pursued its work, suggesting and administering a work of that kind, grand results of which have come down to us in the civilization we have inherited. Our work largely consists in rational efforts to eliminate the elements which the church introduced. In some respects the history of clerical celibacy in England best illustrates the mores. In the sixteenth century the rule and usage of the church had inculcated, as a deep popular prejudice, the notion that a priest could not be married. Cranmer, in ordering a visitation, directed investigation "whether any do contemn married priests, and for that they be married will not receive the communion or other sacrament at their hands."[502] This prejudice very slowly died out, but it did die out and the popular judgment favored and required clerical marriage. In the nineteenth century popular judgment rose in condemnation of fox-hunting parsons, and also of pluralists, and it has caused reforms and the disappearance of those classes.

+230. The selection of sacerdotal celibacy.+ If it had not been for sacerdotal celibacy, there would have been ecclesiastical feudalization and the ecclesiastical benefices would have become hereditary. The children of priests inherited benefices and intermarried so long as the marriage of priests was allowed. There would have been a priestly caste.[503] The church as an institution would have been greatly modified. The consequences we cannot imagine. If Hildebrand and the other eleventh-century leaders foresaw the effect, it was statesmanship on their part to establish the celibacy of the clergy. That institution has molded the priesthood and the mores of all who have adhered to the mediæval church. The Latin people of southern Europe are now horrified at the notion of a married priest. The concubine of a priest is a wicked woman, but she is not a social abomination. All protest and resistance seems to have passed away and, since the sixteenth century, sacerdotal celibacy has been accepted as a feature of the Romish Church, which all its members are expected to accept. It is a grand triumph of social selection.

+231. How the church operated selection.+ The church was a great hierarchical organization for social power and control, which inherited part of the intense integration of the Roman empire. Fra Paolo Sarpi said of it, in the seventeenth century: "The interests of Rome demand that there shall be no change by which the power of the pontiff would be diminished, or by which the curia would lose any of the profits which it wins from the states, but the novelties by which the profits of the curia would be increased, or by which the authority of the states would be diminished and that of the curia increased, are not abhorred, but are favored. This we see every day."[504] The church decided all recognition and promotion, and disposed of all rewards of ambition. The monarchical and autocratic tendency in it was the correct process for attaining the purposes by which it was animated. Its legitimacy as an organization for realizing faiths and desires which prevailed in society is beyond question. It drew towards itself all the talent of the age except what was military. It crushed all dissenters and silenced all critics for centuries. Its enginery was all planned for selection. It disposed of the greatest prizes and the most dreadful penalties. All its methods were positive and realistic, and whatever can be accomplished by authority, tyranny, penalty, and repression it accomplished. In modern times political parties offer the nearest parallels. They are organizations for societal control, which distribute rewards and penalties and coerce dissenters. The history of the papacy in the fifteenth century reminds one of the history of Tammany Hall in the nineteenth century. The strength of Tammany is due to the fact that it fits the tastes and needs of a great modern city under democracy. When Tammany won an election it was said that the people had put the city in their hands and that they ought to profit by it. When Leo X was elected pope he said, "God has given us the papacy; now let us enjoy it."[505]

+232. Mores and morals; social code.+ For every one the mores give the notion of what ought to be. This includes the notion of what ought to be done, for all should coöperate to bring to pass, in the order of life, what ought to be. All notions of propriety, decency, chastity, politeness, order, duty, right, rights, discipline, respect, reverence, coöperation, and fellowship, especially all things in regard to which good and ill depend entirely on the point at which the line is drawn, are in the mores. The mores can make things seem right and good to one group or one age which to another seem antagonistic to every instinct of human nature. The thirteenth century bred in every heart such a sentiment in regard to heretics that inquisitors had no more misgivings in their proceedings than men would have now if they should attempt to exterminate rattlesnakes. The sixteenth century gave to all such notions about witches that witch persecutors thought they were waging war on enemies of God and man. Of course the inquisitors and witch persecutors constantly developed the notions of heretics and witches. They exaggerated the notions and then gave them back again to the mores, in their expanded form, to inflame the hearts of men with terror and hate and to become, in the next stage, so much more fantastic and ferocious motives. Such is the reaction between the mores and the acts of the living generation. The world philosophy of the age is never anything but the reflection on the mental horizon, which is formed out of the mores, of the ruling ideas which are in the mores themselves. It is from a failure to recognize the to and fro in this reaction that the current notion arises that mores are produced by doctrines. The "morals" of an age are never anything but the consonance between what is done and what the mores of the age require. The whole revolves on itself, in the relation of the specific to the general, within the horizon formed by the mores. Every attempt to win an outside standpoint from which to reduce the whole to an absolute philosophy of truth and right, based on an unalterable principle, is a delusion. New elements are brought in only by new conquests of nature through science and art. The new conquests change the conditions of life and the interests of the members of the society. Then the mores change by adaptation to new conditions and interests. The philosophy and ethics then follow to account for and justify the changes in the mores; often, also, to claim that they have caused the changes. They never do anything but draw new lines of bearing between the parts of the mores and the horizon of thought within which they are inclosed, and which is a deduction from the mores. The horizon is widened by more knowledge, but for one age it is just as much a generalization from the mores as for another. It is always unreal. It is only a product of thought. The ethical philosophers select points on this horizon from which to take their bearings, and they think that they have won some authority for their systems when they travel back again from the generalization to the specific custom out of which it was deduced. The cases of the inquisitors and witch persecutors who toiled arduously and continually for their chosen ends, for little or no reward, show us the relation between mores on the one side and philosophy, ethics, and religion on the other. (See Chapters IX, XIV, and XV.)

+233. Orthodoxy in the mores.+ +Treatment of dissent.+ +Selection by torture.+ It has been observed above (sec. 100) that the masses always enforce conformity to the mores. Primitive taboos are absolute. There is no right of private judgment. Renegades, apostates, deserters, rebels, traitors, and heretics are but varieties of dissenters who are all subject to disapproval, hatred, banishment, and death. In higher stages of civilization this popular temper becomes a societal force which combines with civil arrangements, religious observances, literature, education, and philosophy. Toleration is no sentiment of the masses for anything which they care about. What they believe they believe, and they want it accepted and respected. Illustrations are furnished by zeal for political parties and for accepted political philosophy. The first punishment for dissent less than death is extrusion from the society. Next come bodily pains and penalties, that is, torture. Torture is also applied in connection with the death penalty, or modes of death are devised which are as painful as they can be made. The motive is to deter any one from the class of acts which is especially abominated. In the cases above cited (sec. 211), under criminal law, it will be observed that death by burning was applied in the case of incest, or other very abominable crime, in the laws of Hammurabi and other ancient codes (sec. 234). Such extreme penalties are first devised to satisfy public temper. The ruler is sure of popularity if he shows rigor and ferocity. His act will be regarded as just. It is now the popular temper, when any one commits a crime which is regarded as very horrible, to think and say what frightful punishment he deserves. It is a primary outpouring of savage vengeance. When precedents have been established for frightful punishments, the rulers apply the same in cases of disobedience against themselves or their authority. Now torture and ferocious penalties have reached another stage. They were invented by the masses, or in order to appeal to the masses. They have now become the means of authority and discipline. The history of torture is a long development of knowledge of pain, and of devices to cause it. Then it becomes a means which is at the disposal of those who have the power. The Dominican Izarn, in a chant of triumph over the Albigenses, represents himself as arguing with one of them to whom he says, "Believe as we do or thou shalt be burned."[506] This is the voice of a victorious party. It is the enforcement of uniformity against dissent. Systematic and legal torture then becomes an engine of uniformity and it acts selectively as it crushes out originality and independent suggestion. It is at the disposal of any party in power. Like every other system of policy it loses its effect on the imagination by familiarity, and that effect can be regained only by intensifying it. Therefore where torture has been long applied we find that it is developed to grades of incredible horror.

+234. Execution by burning.+ In the ancient world execution by burning was applied only when some religious abomination was included in the crime, or when it seemed politically outrageous. In the laws of Hammurabi an hierodule who opened a dramshop or entered one to get a drink was to be burned.[507] One who committed incest with his mother was to meet the same punishment,[508] also one who married a mother and her daughter at the same time.[509] In Levit. xx. 14 if a man marries a mother and her daughter together, all are to be burned, and in Levit.