To demonstrate it beyond doubt, it would be necessary to investigate a great number of historical facts, and several volumes would be insufficient for the purpose. From the moment that they form part of a crowd, the learned man and the ignoramus are equally incapable of observation. To combat what precedes, the mental quality of the individuals composing a crowd must not be brought into consideration. Such is always the mechanism of the collective hallucinations so frequent in history, hallucinations that seem to have all the recognized characteristics of authenticity since they are phenomena observed by thousands of people. By dint of suggestion and contagion, the miracle signalized by a single person was immediately accepted by all. Before Saint George appeared on the walls of Jerusalem to all the Crusaders, he was certainly perceived in the first instance by one of those present. The first perversion of the truth effected by one of the individuals of the gathering is the starting point of the contagious suggestion.
It accepts as real the images evoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed fact. A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. Our reason shows us the incoherence there is in these images, but a crowd is almost blind to this truth and confuses with the real event what the deforming action of its imagination has superimposed thereon. We can easily conceive this state by thinking of the fantastic succession of ideas to which we are sometimes led by calling up in our minds any fact.
#Collective hallucination series
A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself immediately calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first. The simplest event that comes under the observation of a crowd is soon totally transformed.
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