Masses

“ The masses were millions, yet how weak! To awaken them from their stupor, to make them conscious of their power—that is the great need! Soon, I told myself, I should be able to reach them throughout America. ”

“ Must not the mass, in its conscience, be like the individuals of which it is composed? Shall the mass, in relation with other masses, do what individuals in relation with each other may not do? As in the physical creation, so in the moral, there is but one rule for the individual and the mass. ”

“ The masses, in the sense of the common people, the great body of the people, exclusive of the wealthy or privileged, has so entered into popular speech that the expression is now beyond criticism, although exception has been taken to it, on the ground that the subject of the mass should be specifically named. ”

“ Masses! the calamity is the masses. I do not wish any mass at all, but honest men only, lovely, sweet, accomplished women only, and no shovel-handed, narrow-brained, gin-drinking million stockingers or lazzaroni at all. ”

“ Indeed, when we consider any of the masses before us, as deriving all its apparent magnitude from a number of separate bodies, of which it is composed,—any one of which, individually, would be too minute to be distinguishable by us,—it is scarcely possible not to think of the similarity which it presents to the multitudes of human beings that are as it were, massed together in the great nations of the earth ”

“ Do we wish to obtain an accurate view of the motives which move masses to action? would we investigate man, not as an individual, but according to those common qualities of the human mind by which we may classify his species and genera, and by which only we must consider him if we would rightly estimate the effects of circumstances upon masses? ”

“ It is only when we come to consider the problem of governing great masses that the serious elements of the question present themselves, and must be determined before a satisfactory answer can be given. The tendency of modern civilization is toward the concentration of population in dense masses. ”

“ Fallacies about the masses and classes. It is a fallacy to infer that the masses have some occult wisdom or inspiration by virtue of which they select what is wise, right, and good from what the classes offer. There is, also, no device by which it is possible to obtain from the masses, in advance or on demand, a judgment on any proposed changes or innovations. The masses are not an oracle. If any answers can be obtained on the problems of life, such answers will come rather from the classes. The two sections of society are such that they may coöperate with advantage to the good of all. ”

“ Why is it that those who do no work are always called "upper classes," and those who do much work are called "the masses," unless it is so? Being so, let us agree to import "the masses" as rapidly as we can. ”

“ I am sticking as closely to my subject as I can; for my subject is precisely this, that it is the masses, the majority—this infernal compact majority—that poisons the sources of our moral life and infects the ground we stand on. ”

“ But the masses—they are only to be regarded as one of three things: either as copies of great personalities, bad copies, clumsily produced in a poor material, or as foils to the great, or finally as their tools. Otherwise they are matter for statisticians to deal with, who find so-called historical laws in the instincts of the masses—aping, laziness, hunger and sexual impulse. What has set the mass in motion for any length of time is then called great. ”

“ Classes versus Masses may be characterized as the main cleavage of organic societies. That is why the whole history of humanity which, until our present times presents the evolution of societies, associations, and generally of social aggregates, based on structural organic lines, is full of conflicts of classes and masses. History is full of struggles of the powers of the conscious classes with the subconscious forces of the masses. ”

“ This is the reason why there are so many, and that they have come to be what we see.
But perhaps all this is a new and unheard-of doctrine, especially in the eyes of those that fear to lose their livelihood, if these masses were abolished. I must therefore reserve what I have to say on this subject until men have arrived at a truer understanding of the mass, its nature and use. The mass has, alas! for so many years been turned into means of gaining a livelihood, that I should advise a man to become a shepherd, a labourer, rather than a priest or monk, unless he knows what the mass is. ”

“ Correlated with the sudden development of mechanical forces that first began to be socially perceptible in the middle eighteenth century, has been the appearance of great masses of population, having quite novel functions and relations in the social body, and together with this appearance such a suppression, curtailment, and modification of the older classes, as to point to an entire disintegration of that system. ”

“ Leave therefore the masses to themselves; although I would ask the wiseacres who illumine the world in the present day, to explain how the masses can do anything without the help of the individuals that compose them. ”

“ That is, the sum of the products of the volumes of the masses by their pressures, diminished by the sum of the products of the areas of the surfaces of discontinuity by their tensions, must be a maximum. ”

“ Whether the French masses have risen out of it, remains to be seen. The English masses, thanks to Almighty God, have risen out of it; and by the very same factor by which the middle-age masses rose—by Religion. ”

“ But the elements are not separated each into its own region of the universe, because the revolution unites their minute particles, compressing and forcing them together into the centre, at the same time as it separates the larger masses. ”

“ Hence it is equally the case that movements which are carried on by great masses, and are left to themselves, move on consistently to their extreme, and on the other hand a once attained equilibrium of conditions is not easily abandoned, so far as the change depends on the mass. ”

“ We obtain our knowledge of forces by having some theory about masses, and our knowledge of masses by having some theory about forces. Our theories about masses enable us in certain circumstances to assign the numerical ratios of the masses of the bodies involved ”

“ Whilst population exists in detached and independent masses, incapable of transfusion amongst each other, their dormant affinities are never called into action, (p. 207) and the most precious qualities of each are never imparted to the other. ”

“ In asking you, therefore, to look for a little at what statistics tell us of the progress of the great masses of the nation, I feel that I am selecting a subject which is connected with the special history of the society. That it happens for the moment to be attracting a considerable amount of popular attention in connection with sensational politics and sociology, with agitations for land nationalization and collectivism among pretended representatives of the working-classes, is an additional reason for our not neglecting this question ”

“ But mingled masses are justly denominated by the greater quantity, and when the precious particles are not worth extraction, a faction and a pig must be melted down together to the forms and offices that chance allots them. ”

“ To study the laws of history we must completely change the subject of our observation, must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, and study the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses are moved. ”

“ This will explain the word “again” in this place—not meaning that John would do this personally, but that this would be in fact the result of the restoration of the Bible to the church. ¶ Before many peoples. This word denotes people considered as masses, or as grouped together in masses, without reference to the manner in which it is done. It is used when we look on a mass of men, without taking into account the question whether they are of the same nation, or language, or rank. See Notes on ch. ”

“ I am drifting again — with the bright warm sun ahead and masses of vegetation around — and in the heat everything is so still, so calm — and I am drifting languidly — in the warm heart of the river! I dare not make a splash with my hands or feet — for fear of breaking the marvellous stillness, stillness that makes you feel sure it is an illusion! ”

“ Whenever the world has required it, this perennial flood of spirituality has overflowed and deluged the world. Gifts of political knowledge can be made with the blast of trumpets and the march of cohorts. Gifts of secular knowledge and social knowledge can be made with fire and sword. But spiritual knowledge can only be given in silence like the dew that falls unseen and unheard, yet bringing into bloom masses of roses. This has been the gift of India to the world again and again. ”

“ And the great mass of the Middle part of our community, the part which comes between those who labour with their hands, on the one side, and people of fortune on the other, is brought up at establishments of this kind, although there is a certain portion broken off at the top which is educated at better. But the great mass are both badly taught, and are also brought up on a lower plane than is right, brought up ignobly. And this deteriorates their standard of life, their civilization. ”

“ See now, not the mass of the people, for we all know that it is a proverb and a bitter jest to speak of the “down-trodden million.” We know that, down to our own time, a principle never had so fair a chance to pervade the mass of the people, but that we must solicit its illustration from select examples. ”

“ Hence arises the diversification of that mass which we call the people, within each nature or state, and even the relatively greater or less development which this mass can attain to or really possess in each country. ”

“ And yet this world, so attractive in its multiplicity of details, is almost a chaos at the first sight; a confused and inextricable mass, so large, so high, so deep as to defy human effort to compass or master it. ”

“ Force, says Marx, is the midwife of progress; force, a vast and burning upheaval from below, a strained and spasmodic pressure from the molten womb of the earth, bowed the mountain out of its deep resting place, tilted away the early sea, arched its summit high over the surrounding lowlands. ”

“ The mass is, doubtless, neither pure nor irreproachable; but still, if you want to characterise it by the idea which prevails in the immense majority, you will find it occupied in founding by toil, economy, and the most respectable means, the immense work which constitutes the strength of this country, the participation of all classes in property. ”

“ Now-a-days we seek to know more of the domestic habits and conditions of the mass of the population, and the degree and kind of intellectual and moral culture which obtained amongst a people at any given period of their history. ”

“ The mass of the population is under the sway of a natural vis inertiæ, but this inertia must not be confused with unculture and roughness, for it is a natural and healthy shrinking from logical thought, a natural tendency to shun the hustle of modern progress. ”

“ But without soaring to the stars, the moment that this theory of progression, which seems so natural to us amid an advancing civilization, looks around the world, it comes against an enormous fact—the fixed, petrified civilizations. ”

“ And while you are looking, the opaque mass begins to stir, and by-and-by slowly to turn upon its axis like a forming planet,—life beginning in the microcosm, as in the great worlds of the firmament, with the revolution that turns the surface in ceaseless round to the source of life and light. ”

“ And, of these multitudinous results of man's inventive and constructive faculty, the great mass will be the products of the past century's experience and progress, of which hardly the germs existed when we set up in politics for ourselves. ”

“ There are wanting therefore in the mass, as the ruled subject, the resources, adaptabilities, the accommodations, the developments of power which the whole individual possesses through the unity and presence of his total psychical energy. ”

“ That they gradually increase in mass; that they become little by little more complex; that at the same time their parts grow more mutually dependent; and that they continue to live and grow as wholes, while successive generations of their units appear and disappear; are broad peculiarities which bodies politic display, in common with all living bodies ”

“ Do you consider, from your minute observation of our social system, that the form of our elliptical government is gradually undergoing a change, and that a revolutionary parabolic tendency is observable in the action of individual particles? ”

“ The pressure of the mass will yet be felt, but in spite of its persistence there are abundant signs that [25] the individual is asserting himself more and more, and even the undeniable acceptance of collectivist ideas in many quarters helps to prove it. ”