Sublime

le comportement des hommes lorsqu’ils sont dans une foule diffère de manière fondamentale de leur psychologie individuelle. En un sens, la foule influence le comportement de ceux qui se trouvent dans cette situation. Ainsi, écrit-il, « la foule psychologique est un être provisoire composé d'éléments hétérogènes pour un instant soudés » qui « dote (

Crowds always, and individuals as a rule, stand in need of ready-made opinions on all subjects. The popularity of these opinions is independent of the measure of truth or error they contain, and is solely regulated by their prestige.

The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes

Donc, évanouissement de la personnalité consciente, prédominance de la personnalité inconsciente, orientation par voie de suggestion et de contagion des sentiments et des idées dans un même sens, tendance à transformer immédiatement en actes les idées suggérées, tels sont les principaux caractères de l'individu en foule. Il n'est plus lui-même, il

The conclusion to be drawn from what precedes is, that the crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual, but that, from the point of view of feelings and of the acts these feelings provoke, the crowd may, according to circumstances, he better or worse than the individual. All depends on the nature of the suggestion to which th

“In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated,” Gustave Le Bon noted in his 1895 classic on crowd psychology.