The biological sciences have been transformed since embryology has shown the immense influence of the past on the evolution of living beings; and the historical sciences will not undergo a less change when this conception has become more widespread.As yet it is not sufficiently general, and many statesmen are still no further advanced than the theorists of the last century, who believed that a society could break off with its past and be entirely recast on lines suggested solely by the light of reason.
A people is an organism created by the past, and, like every other organism, it can only be modified by slow hereditary accumulations.
It is tradition that guides men, and more especially so when they are in a crowd.The changes they can effect in their traditions with any ease, merely bear, as I have often repeated, upon names and outward forms.
This circumstance is not to be regretted.Neither a national genius nor civilisation would be possible without traditions.In consequence man's two great concerns since he has existed have been to create a network of traditions which he afterwards endeavours to destroy when their beneficial effects have worn themselves out.Civilisation is impossible without traditions, and progress impossible without the destruction of those traditions.The difficulty, and it is an immense difficulty, is to find a proper equilibrium between stability and variability.
Should a people allow its customs to become too firmly rooted, it can no longer change, and becomes, like China, incapable of improvement.Violent revolutions are in this case of no avail;for what happens is that either the broken fragments of the chain are pieced together again and the past resumes its empire without change, or the fragments remain apart and decadence soon succeeds anarchy.
The ideal for a people is in consequence to preserve the institutions of the past, merely changing them insensibly and little by little.This ideal is difficult to realise.The Romans in ancient and the English in modern times are almost alone in having realised it.
It is precisely crowds that cling the most tenaciously to traditional ideas and oppose their being changed with the most obstinacy.This is notably the case with the category of crowds constituting castes.I have already insisted upon the conservative spirit of crowds, and shown that the most violent rebellions merely end in a changing of words and terms.At the end of the last century, in the presence of destroyed churches, of priests expelled the country or guillotined, it might have been thought that the old religious ideas had lost all their strength, and yet a few years had barely lapsed before the abolished system of public worship had to be re-established in deference to universal demands.[8]
[8] The report of the ex-Conventionist, Fourcroy, quoted by Taine, is very clear on this point.
"What is everywhere seen with respect to the keeping of Sunday and attendance at the churches proves that the majority of Frenchmen desire to return to their old usages and that it is no longer opportune to resist this natural tendency....The great majority of men stand in need of religion, public worship, and priests.IT IS AN ERROR OF SOME MODERN PHILOSOPHERS, BYWHICH I MYSELF HAVE BEEN LED AWAY, to believe in the possibility of instruction being so general as to destroy religious prejudices, which for a great number of unfortunate persons are a source of consolation....The mass of the people, then, must be allowed its priests, its altars, and its public worship."Blotted out for a moment, the old traditions had resumed their sway.
No example could better display the power of tradition on the mind of crowds.The most redoubtable idols do not dwell in temples, nor the most despotic tyrants in palaces; both the one and the other can be broken in an instant.But the invisible masters that reign in our innermost selves are safe from every effort at revolt, and only yield to the slow wearing away of centuries.
3.TIME
In social as in biological problems time is one of the most energetic factors.It is the sole real creator and the sole great destroyer.It is time that has made mountains with grains of sand and raised the obscure cell of geological eras to human dignity.The action of centuries is sufficient to transform any given phenomenon.It has been justly observed that an ant with enough time at its disposal could level Mount Blanc.A being possessed of the magical force of varying time at his will would have the power attributed by believers to God.
In this place, however, we have only to concern ourselves with the influence of time on the genesis of the opinions of crowds.
Its action from this point of view is still immense.Dependent upon it are the great forces such as race, which cannot form themselves without it.It causes the birth, the growth, and the death of all beliefs.It is by the aid of time that they acquire their strength and also by its aid that they lose it.
It is time in particular that prepares the opinions and beliefs of crowds, or at least the soil on which they will germinate.
This is why certain ideas are realisable at one epoch and not at another.It is time that accumulates that immense detritus of beliefs and thoughts on which the ideas of a given period spring up.They do not grow at hazard and by chance; the roots of each of them strike down into a long past.When they blossom it is time that has prepared their blooming; and to arrive at a notion of their genesis it is always back in the past that it is necessary to search.They are the daughters of the past and the mothers of the future, but throughout the slaves of time.
