《乌合之众·第一编·群体的心理·群体的观念、推理与想象力》第12节
Whatever strikes the imagination of crowds presents itself under the shape of a startling and very clear image, freed from all accessory explanation, or merely having as accompaniment a few marvellous or mysterious facts: examples in point are a great victory, a great miracle, a great crime, or a great hope. Things must be laid before the crowd as a whole, and their genesis must never be indicated. A hundred petty crimes or petty accidents will not strike the imagination of crowds in the least, whereas a single great crime or a single great accident will profoundly impress them, even though the results be infinitely less disastrous than those of the hundred small accidents put together. The epidemic of influenza, which caused the death but a few years ago of five thousand persons in Paris alone, made very little impression on the popular imagination. The reason was that this veritable hecatomb was not embodied in any visible image, but was only learnt from statistical information furnished weekly. An accident which should have caused the death of only five hundred instead of five thousand persons, but on the same day and in public, as the outcome of an accident appealing strongly to the eye, by the fall, for instance, of the Eiffel Tower, would have produced, on the contrary, an immense impression on the imagination of the crowd. The probable loss of a transatlantic steamer that was supposed, in the absence of news, to have gone down in mid-ocean profoundly impressed the imagination of the crowd for a whole week. Yet official statistics show that 850 sailing vessels and 203 steamers were lost in the year 1894 alone. The crowd, however, was never for a moment concerned by these successive losses, much more important though they were as far as regards the destruction of life and property, than the loss of the Atlantic liner in question could possibly have been.
注释摘要
勒庞在这一段中着力证明的是，群体的想象力并非由事实本身的分量来决定，而是由事实能否被压缩成一幅轰动性的、清晰而完整的画面来决定。他所说的“惊人的、非常清晰的形象”，必须是摆脱了一切附加解释、斩断来龙去脉的孤立意象，至多只允许少量神奇或神秘的陪衬。他举出的例子是“一场伟大的胜利、一个伟大的奇迹、一桩骇人的罪行或一个巨大的希望”。这里的逻辑很明确：群体不关心事…