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The Psychology of Jingoism

falsehood. Further analysis of mass-psychology, disclosing the inhibition of comparison and normal reasoning processes, will explain how the most contrary suggestions of fact or feeling can be held simultaneously by the same persons, who have yielded their individual judgment to the sway of a common passion thus prompted and informed.

National hate finding sensational expression through war is the best emotional material for the operation of these forces, and the possession by the passion of Jingoism of the mass-mind of a people intellectually disposed like that of Great Britain presents a subject of incomparable interest for psychological study.

One word in conclusion of these introductory remarks. I have distinguished the spectatorial passion of Jingoism from the cruder craving for personal participation in bloodshed which seizes most savage peoples when the war-spirit is in the air. Jingoism is essentially a product of 'civilized' communities, though deriving its necessary food from the survival of savage nature: it presents therefore a number of more complex moral and intellectual problems for consideration. Its force, dependent, as we have seen, upon the submission of the individual will and judgment to collective

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