The reflections of a lonely man

Contents

Page

I. Preliminary Musings ..... 3

II. The Vantage Ground of Loneliness 18

II The Vantage Ground Of Loneliness

THERE is another and a greater gain in loneliness, reflects the Lonely Man. It is the gain that comes from thinking one's own thoughts and knowing that they are one's own and not the mere participation of an automatic mind in the unreasoned thinking of a mob. How many thoughts are uttered that are not the mere reverberations of the general voice ? The thought-wave of the crowd strikes on the puny little brain of one man in the crowd, and he crys out, " Aye, aye ! 't is so ! " and thinks the thought his own. He passes on the thought with neither i8 more nor less of content in it than it had before, and thus the ever-widening circle of this mental agitation extends till it embraces the entire crowd and blends it into one unreasoning whole. The individual minds are blotted out. They flow together like the drops that go to form the ocean, and have no longer power to do the bidding of their wills, but yield to every undulation of the undifferentiated whole.

Unlike a wave of water, sound, or light, which loses amplitude with every increase of the distance from its starting point, the thought-wave in a crowd gathers in volume with its progress, and each reflection of the mental undulation seems to strengthen it. A whisper sets a mob in motion ; the whispering quickly grows to murmuring ; the murmuring grows to yells ; and when the yells come back to him who uttered the first whisper, he yells himself, not knowing that he has but hypnotized the mob, and that his own reflected hypnotism has hypnotized himself. 19

There is something of the mob in every assemblage : it has not many minds, but one — if we may call that mind whose thinking is as reasonless and reflex as the vagaries of a dream.

What is the nature of a dream ?

If the sleeper's head is high, he thinks he is being hanged ; if it is low, he is falling down a well. The heavy food he ate last night makes an impression on the endings of his pneumogastric nerve, which carries this impression to the medulla oblongata^ — the little piece of marrow that is the seat of all the vital centres of vegetative life. From here the spreading fibres of the crura cerebri conduct the food's impression to those gray cells in the brain where simple consciousness resides. It goes no higher. The citadel of Reason, wherein the godlike mistress of all sane thinking sits, has closed its doors and drawn the bridges from across the moat. The veiled enchantress. Reason, is asleep; and while she sleeps, the disconnected and ungoverned points of consciousness within the brain, being roused to action by the food's impression, respond by being conscious in the only way for which their structure fits them.

Their different structures fit them to be conscious in different ways. One group of cells can see, but cannot hear nor smell nor feel ; and if the impulse started by a sound or smell or touch can reach this group, the consciousness of sight — not touch nor smell nor sound — is the result. One group can hear, but cannot see nor feel ; another feels, and others taste or smell.

If the slumber is not deep, these different groups may be united into a larger group, in which a little thinking, like the thinking of a printing-press, is done. It simply utters to itself the thing to which the structure of its type compels it to give utterance. The movements of a jumping-jack could not be more automatic. Its structure makes it only fit to kick or turn a somersault, and when its string is pulled, no matter how, the jumping-jack responds in the only way in which it can respond — it kicks or turns a somersault. Thus physical disturbances give rise to grotesque fancies, which the dreaming mind believes and the dreamer sometimes acts upon.

If the sleeping goddess, Reason, were awake, she would at once perceive the groundlessness of all these various perceptions and conclusions. She would at once distinguish that of which she simply recollects or recombines a past impression from that by which she is surrounded. Her sovereign sway would relegate these flimsy fragments of the shadow world back to their proper sphere. She alone would be the guide of choice and action : her regal voice would fix the limits and conditions of belief. No conscious nor half-conscious act would be permitted whose motive did not first appeal to her and get her sanction. No credence would be given to groundless fancies that have no passport to the sacred chamber of belief, and the agitation of a group of partlydisconnected brain cells would not be counted such a passport.

But now, while Reason sleeps, the most absurd and idiotic fancies are believed. Both judgment and volition have become the sport and plaything of every chance impression : an elephant has feathers ; a crocodile has wings ; a man falls in a pit that is ten feet deep, and never strikes the bottom. He dreams he slays his dearest child, and dreams that he does right j or he is dead and knows he is, and still attends to his affairs on earth. Or, if the field of action is invaded, the dreamer leaves his bed and does things that he neither would nor could do if awake : he climbs down fire escapes or lightning rods, and thinks he is dancing on a level floor.

Such is the nature of a dream. Such is

the nature of all thought and action when

Reason does not sit upon her throne and

wield her royal sceptre, and seldom does she sit secure upon her throne in the environment of a crowd. The presence of the crowd distracts and interrupts the inner currents of the soul by which Queen Reason holds communication with the lower mind. The currents seem to leave their protoplasmic wires within the brain, and, through the medium of sympathy, to leap through space to other brains when other brains come near.

The all-pervading medium of the mental universe is sympathy ; and as the undulations of material ether transmit such forms of energy as heat and light and magnetism to every particle and planet in the world of space, so sympathy transmits these subtler forces of the soul from one soul to another, with an increase of intensity as their proximity increases. So fear or anger, courage, merriment, or hope, will leap through sympathy across an intervening space and cause a like emotion in another mind.

If this drawing off of currents makes a break in the connection between the higher 24 and the lower elements of mind, Queen Reason sleeps again, for she cannot keep awake without the stimulus of action ; and, without the personality which Reason gives, the mental forces, melting into those of all the other minds about them, may be moulded by suggestion as a potter moulds a mass of clay. He of the crowd asks not, " What does Reason say ? " but, " What says the crowd ? "

There may be strong men in the crowd who are not of it. There may be others not so strong, who, while they feel the substance of their minds and wills dissolving in the mental tides that ebb and flow about them, still do a little thinking for themselves. The rest have undergone complete solution in the waters of those tides, and have no more volition of their own than a patent music-box that plays whatever piece one puts between its rollers. They undulate to every wind of doctrine that blows upon them and move in 25 dull obedience before the one that blows upon them hardest. What they believe is what the crowd believes; what they approve is what the crowd approves. And if to-morrow the general conscience and belief shall change, theirs will change with them, and not because a ground for change is found, but for the sole reason that one drop of water in the ocean can hold no more nor less of salt than its next neighbors.

The crowd they follow may be either great or small ; its sway may reach back into the remotest past, or be a thing of yesterday ; it may be like a little lake whose slender streams keep it but faintly in communication with the sea, or like a mighty ocean, embodying in its substance the most of all the liquid minds that are or have been or shall be.

In any case such persons' minds are liquid, and their bodies do the bidding of their formless minds. They ever bend their suppliant knees before their shrine of fashion, be it the 26 fashion of apparel or that of belief. They wear the clothes she dictates, without regard to comfort, beauty, health, or common sense. They blindly follow where she leads in politics and religion. They wear the face of Europe out in waging vain crusades against the Turks, and blot the history of the world by burning heretics and witches.

They learn at school that three times one are three, and straightway go to church and learn that three times one are one. They are as confident that they are right in one place as in the other. In neither case do they believe because they hear the voice of Reason telling them that that which they believe is true. In their minds Reason sleeps ; her sacred voice is dumb ; and what is left of mental life in them is no more worthy to be called a mind than is the mechanism of a phonograph, which speaks back anything that one speaks into it, provided it is spoken loud enough.

If they are scientific, their science will most certainly conform to the formulae prescribed by that particular scientific crowd to which they happen to belong. If some rash member of the crowd brings forward some new truth which contradicts some old accepted theory, they ridicule his reasoning and treat him with contempt and scorn, — unless he is a leader of the crowd whom it is the fashion to believe. In that case, the very walls are damaged by their tumultuous applause. They wear out their eyes and microscopes in hunting further proof of what the great man says ; and, no matter what they find, not until the current of belief within their crowd begins to ebb will the firmness of their own conviction weaken.

In the field of politics their side is always wholly right, and the other wholly wrong, whether the issue be a tariff, stamp act, prohibition, or a war with Spain. No matter how their leaders blunder, or the country 28 flourishes or suffers, no matter how their promises are kept or broken, their side is always right and the other side is wrong.

If some great or small upheaval in the swamp of politics should make them occupy the ground their foes have lately held, and send the other party to the ooze and slime which they themselves have just forsaken, the doctrines which they fought before they now defend, and they execrate their own abandoned policies. For this change of heart their ever-ready tongues will find pretexts, and their heads will think them reasons. That the cause of their conversion is the presence in this new part of the swamp of their own particular crowd or dominating leader, they never once suspect. They may deny that they have undergone a change, so easily do they assume new forms. The shimmering surface of their minds will now reflect as true an image of the cat-tails waving over them as were the images of those dragon-flies that were embodied in their old belief. 29

The literature they read must bear the impress of that literary fashion which has dominion in their crowd. The books and magazines they read are praised and gloated over, not because their contents merit it, but because the author's or the publisher's name upon the title-page is a literary fetich in their crowd and has the magic power of making wheat and chafF of equal worth. They blindly think their favorite authors cannot make mistakes with reference to either literary art or facts, — oblivious of the axiom that no living man is perfect, and that nothing ever was or can be proved by being printed in a book.

What fallacy that ever yet has been conceived within the human mind and come to term has not been born on paper ? If being printed could make an assertion true, I would print the consummation of my dearest hopes and thus transmute the shadowy material of hope into the solid substance of reality. I would write the opposite of many 30 things which now are true, and make them untrue; for the slavish ink would shape itself into a falsehood with no more trouble than it takes to tell the truth.

A truth must find its proof in reason or experience and not in ink, which can do nothing but present it to these tests. If these tests prove it true, it is true ; if they do not, there is not ink enough in all the sea of books which groaning printingpresses vomit forth to prove one word of any truth.

The slaves who follow crowds mistake the medium of truth for truth itself. To them the printed statement of a fact is the fact, especially if they find it in some book which has the approbation of their crowd. Then, not only do they pin their faith and fix the seal of their approval to the book, but their interpretation of its contents is the one that has the sanction of the crowd. If in some lofty moral lesson wrought into the texture of a fable the crowd sees nothing but a 31 literal narrative of facts, they will see nothing in the story but authentic history, and the winds of prejudice which they let loose lash up the watery substance of their minds into furious waves whose thunders drown the voice of him who sees the truth. If, on the other hand, a love-song seething with the passions of hot-blooded youth is held to be a prophecy, they see in each particular sentence a prophetic meaning which the author never put there, and they completely miss the beauty of the song. If in the crude attempts of primitive, half-savage man to find an explanation of the universe, the crowd finds reason to believe that Nature's laws are temporal and mutable, they blindly do the same and strive to close not only their own eyes, but those of all mankind. Thus, they miss the lesson which the ancient writers teach, that man's solution of Nature's boundless mystery must be gradual, and that every honest effort in this line contains some grains of truth which may give it lasting fame. 32

If their crowd is one that makes a specialty of scoffing at the writings which some other crowd holds dear, they will sneer and scoff because their crowd does, and not because they ever had opinions of their own. An applauded shaft of sarcasm which they hear their leaders utter has the force of an obsession in their minds, — not because the situation warrants it (and sometimes it does), but because they know it takes the fancy of their crowd.

The book that lives because its gleaming rays of truth send swift conviction into minds that have not yet dissolved within the crowd (and, when Reason momentarily awakes, into those minds that have), lives by the same concurrence of opinion that gives unworthy fame to books that have but hypnotized the crowd. Who knows, then, whether any book that rides high on the wave of popularity is held aloft by virtue of its own eternal worth or by the force of fashion ? One may decide by reading it whether it deserves the place it has ; but, even though the book 3 33

REFLECTIONS OF A LONELY Mx\N

be worthy of its fame, can one know that it is this that keeps its name and its author's name alive ? How long must fame outlive its dead possessor to prove that it depends upon a true perception of the dead man's work ?

Those who compose the automatic and composite crowd-mind are as completely under the dominion of suggestion in their acts and feelings as they are in their beliefs. Their aims in life and their methods of achieving them are the aims and methods of the crowd. In the shaping of these ends and means Reason has no voice. If their crowd bows at the shrine of Mammon, so do they ; if it worships Mars, they bend the knee to him ; and they know as little why they worship one god as the other.

Thrift that impels men to provide for future needs is reasonable, and the just protection of one's honor, liberty, or life may necessitate recourse to arms ; but it is not 34 thrift that gives to gold its devilish charm, nor justice that makes war the hellish game it is. It is the inertia of a somnambulistic crowd.

Swayed by the suggestion that the mere possession of unnecessary wealth confers more honor than any virtue could confer, the dancing puppets of the crowd scramble after money which they do not need and never can need, — often at the cost of all their honor, all their virtues, all their finer feelings, and all their decent human traits, — just to get the plaudits and the envy of other dancing puppets like themselves.

When the dreamer wakes, he cannot tell why he left his bed and found the most unspeakably intense delight in heaping up a pile of trash. Nor do the dreaming puppets of the crowd know that the keen delight they find in amassing needless wealth is not based on reason, but springs from the tyranny of a fierce suggestion dominating a somnambulistic crowd.

The joy they find in needless wealth would quickly vanish if their crowd should disintegrate and its individual members so awake. What pleasure would their vast possessions give them if they should be banished from their crowd, and their liquid minds should melt in the waters of some other crowd in which no drop of mental liquid but their own would find pleasure in unnecessary wealth ?

But now, while the teeming millions of their fellow drops find their most ecstatic joy in the ownership of wealth, so do they. Though their fellows have no gold and curse the man who has, yet they feel the deadly charm of its baleful glitter, and — although they do not know it — what they feel is instantly imparted to the waters of the crowd about them, and helps to swell the heaving billows of its greed. One liquid mind thus acts and reacts on the liquid minds about it in awakening and maintaining greed for gold, as it does in transmitting and reflecting waves of murderous fury in a mob.

It cannot be denied that it requires ability to create a princely fortune, and there is some reason in the admiration of ability of any kind ; but it does not follow that it is as reasonable to admire that which ability achieves. It requires some skill and courage to cut a good man's throat ; and a successful counterfeiter can lay claim to some ability. But the crowd that follows Mammon pays homage not so much to skill and courage as to gold. If a man has that in plenty, no one cares in Mammon's crowd how much or little sense he has.

Really great men in that crowd are seldom great enough to feel that there is no special honor in a rich man's smile. Men of smaller calibre, who still have sense, count it gain to violate what sense they have to get the rich man's notice. The rest are so completely hypnotized by wealth that they see no other good or great thing in this world or any future world. Even though they hate the owner, they betray by their very hatred how they 37 envy him and would like to own his wealth. If they can, they imitate him, and if they can't, they often try to do so. If he has some crazy fad, they endeavor to affect it also. If he is illiterate, they do not care for learning. If he is immoral, their own morals may be lax. Doing what he does, they feel in some small measure the honor and the greatness which they think belong to wealth. They read in glaring headlines all the petty details of the rich man's daily life, and thus furnish all the reason editors have for printing such unprofitable trash. They join the rich man's club, and they attend the church of which he is a member. They build their houses on the rich man's street and as near his house as they can.

Rich men are not all fools, nor are all poor men slaves to Mammon ; but those who are, and whose prayers to Mammon have not yet been answered, would give ten years of life to have any fool who is rich thrust his feet beneath their tables and eat their food.

Their doors will quickly swing upon their hinges to the magic touch of gold, and no questions will be asked as to how the gold was won. Their daughters' hearts, though cold as marble to the pleading voice of love, will melt like snow in summer in a crucible of gold.

Thus, however much they hate the man, by every word and action they glorify his wealth. By their envy and their fawning and their aping of rich men, and their base idolatry of wealth, the puppets of the crowd who have no wealth exhibit as complete a subjugation to automatic greed as that which dominates the greediest millionaire. Their fluid minds impart emotions as readily as they absorb them, and thus intensify the force of that false suggestion which gives to needless wealth the only charm it has. So the insane greed for gold dissolves and grows within the general crowd, while the gold itself collects within the coffers of a few.

If the crowd is one of fighters, those who compose it are dominated by the love of war. They see no glory and no honor save that achieved in battle, and they see this just because it is suggested to them. Nature may have given them human hearts, but the plaudits of their crowd will make them glad to welter in a human shambles. Their greatest heroes are the men whose hands have shed the greatest quantity of human blood. Their interests are the interests of war. The cause for which they fight may be either just or unjust, but the delight they find in slaughter is not the pleasure that arises from satisfying justice; it rests upon the lust for carnage awakened by some breath of hell blowing on an automatic crowd.

The walking dreamer cannot tell, when he awakes, why it gave him pleasure when asleep to cut his brother's throat ; nor does the war crowd know that the hideous joy it finds in wholesale murder is the suggested pleasure of a crowd that has been hypno- 40 tized. Poor human nature, however bad it is, would never do the ghastly things that have been done on myriad battlefields, if their doing were dependent on the approval of Reason.

But there is no other form of hypnotism that sweeps so surely and so swiftly through the most enormous crowds as that which is induced by the bugle blast of war. There is no other crowd that is so completely automatic as the crowd whose serried ranks comprise the means and food of war. The commands of officers are unconsciously obeyed. The men and the very horses of the crowd are mere levers and escapements, wheels and springs of some machine. In the tumult of the fight, the movements of the vast machine may seem less regular and uniform, but they are no less automatic than the movements of a marching army. And, as some monster engine whose wheels have left the tracks will plunge in mindless madness to its own complete destruction, crushing into 41 flying splinters every obstacle in its way, so when some accident of war starts a panic in the war machine, there is no means of staying it till its fury has been spent.

Hope and fear and hate and thirst for human blood are as dependent on suggestion in this huge machine as are the movements of a marching or a fighting army or the pandemonium of a disorderly retreat.

But the actual war machine is not the whole war crowd, and all the fluid minds within the crowd are dominated by the same suggestion that controls the soldier in the field. Ranting politicians who start the first war cry, demagogues whose duties to their families keep them at their own firesides, silly girls whose heads are turned by the splendor of their lovers' uniforms, kings and princes whose dominions are not wide enough, and all the hosts of others who see glory in the murder of a fellow-man for murder's sake, are members of the dreaming crowd, whose fluid minds have melted in its waves. 42

They get their feelings from the fluid minds about them and impart their dreaming frenzy to their neighbors. Thus the whole crowd is a huge automaton, with no will or reason of its own.

In their amusements, the followers of crowds get their inspiration not from Reason, but from the crowd. If the latter finds its chief delight in straddling a two-wheeled machine, and riding like the wind to no place, for no reason, — so do they. The usefulness of the machine and the pleasure which its reasonable use affords are not the reasons for their riding it. They do it — though they do not know it — because it is the fashion of the crowd. Their minds, at this particular point, have melted in the waters of the crowd, which diffuse some specially soluble ingredients with greater swiftness than some others. The frenzy quickly spreads, like an epidemic of la grippe^ till the very roads and sidewalks are ob- 43 structed with flying wheels. Little boys and girls, young men and women, aged men with flying beards and spindling shanks, ponderous dames with quivering outlines, blushing spinsters and other females grown too bold to blush, — crouch like monkeys in the saddle, while their reeking bodies pump and pedal, jolt and jostle, over stony roads to proclaim their own subjection to the craze.

If the crowd is one that travels, your crowd-man travels with the best of them, not for the benefit that sane minds get from travel, but because of his subjection to the fashion of the crowd. He strokes his pointed beard in Paris and ogles shop-girls in Berlin, and swells with silly pride to think how like he is to the travelled members of his crowd whose ape and mirror he aspires to be. He travels endless weary miles in wretched railroad coaches to see some landscape that may not equal those he never saw at home. He grows eloquent over any pond in Europe, as 44 if there were no lakes at home. He lets a red-nosed guide fill his memory with fables about any crumbling pile of stones and mortar that some other fool has paid to see. He does it all because it is the fashion of his crowd, and does not stop to notice that he has been hypnotized. If Reason were awake, he certainly would not do all the things he does, or, at least, would do them differently.

If his crowd is superstitious, so is he. He will lie awake at night and tremble while he listens for the footsteps of a ghost that some other members of his crowd have heard. If he hears them, or thinks he does (which is the same), he will pay a priest to exorcise the house. He will let the broken fragments of a mirror outweigh the reassuring voice of science, and make up his mind to die; sometimes he will succeed, for a false conviction may be as depressing to the vital forces as a fear which Reason warrants.

If some crazy agitation is going forward in the neighborhood, and some new prophet or Messiah is being proclaimed, the crowd-man is the one who is most apt to go to scofF and then remain to pray. His fluid mind is so devoid of personaHty that it instantly assumes the form and nature of the minds within the crowd it happens to be in at a particular time.

Thus do all weak minds — and in a less degree all stronger ones — reveal their solubility in all the oceans, lakes, and pools in which the minds of men collect.

To think one's own thoughts and to know they are one's own, and not the thoughts which melted minds absorb in mobs ; to feel the sane emotions of the human heart, and know they are the feelings normal to one's self; to let Reason guide one's thoughts and feelings and desires, as far as Reason can guide human minds — these are the gains of loneliness. Strong minds within the crowd 46 may do all this, but such strong minds will not be of the crowd, and will be as lonely as the mind of him whose sole companion is his pipe.