Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1910 edition. Excerpt: ... literature knows that the subject is touched by half the books he reads, and that the most popular are the most outspoken. Few volumes are more widely known than M. Gustave Le Bon's "Physiologie des Foules," (1895), which closes with the following paragraph: --"That which formed a people, a unity, a block, ends by becoming an agglomeration of individuals without cohesion, still held together for a time by its traditions and institutions. This is the phase when men, divided by their interests and aspirations, but no longer knowing how to govern themselves, ask to be directed in their smallest acts; and when the State exercises its absorbing influence. With the definitive loss of the old ideal, the race ends by entirely losing its soul; it becomes nothing more than a dust of isolated individuals, and returns to what it was at the start, --a crowd." Under the thinnest veil of analogy the physicist-historian, with scientific calmness, condemns our actual society as he condemns the sun; for the "crowd" which Gustave Le Bon declares to be the end of social evolution is not at all the same "crowd" that made its beginning, and is wholly incapable of doing useful work. Gustave Le Bon is himself a physicist of wide renown, but he is remarkable also as director of the "Bibliotheque de Philosophic Scientifique," the best known of all recent attempts to lighten the load of technical instruction and of scientific baggage. Among the most recent of these admirable volumes is one on "Degradation" (Paris, November, 1908), by M. Bernhard Brunhes, whose position as Director of the Observatory of the Puy de Dome guarantees his competence to narrate the story. In one or two paragraphs, with the lucidity which so often distinguishes French thought from that of...