《乌合之众·第二编·群体的意见与信念·群体意见与信念的间接因素》第2节
The successive action of these two kinds of factors is to be traced in all great historical events. The French Revolution--to cite but one of the most striking of such events--had among its remote factors the writings of the philosophers, the exactions of the nobility, and the progress of scientific thought. The mind of the masses, thus prepared, was then easily roused by such immediate factors as the speeches of orators, and the resistance of the court party to insignificant reforms. Among the remote factors there are some of a general nature, which are found to underlie all the beliefs and opinions of crowds. They are race, traditions, time, institutions, and education. We now proceed to study the influence of these different factors. This factor, race, must be placed in the first rank, for in itself it far surpasses in importance all the others. We have sufficiently studied it in another work; it is therefore needless to deal with it again. We showed, in a previous volume, what an historical race is, and how, its character once formed, it possesses, as the result of the laws of heredity such power that its beliefs, institutions, and arts--in a word, all the elements of its civilisation--are merely the outward expression of its genius. We showed that the power of the race is such that no element can pass from one people to another without undergoing the most profound transformations.[7]
注释摘要
勒庞在这一节里要建立一个基本框架：历史大事件绝非凭空爆发，而是两种因素先后作用的结果。他用法国大革命作例子，把启蒙哲学家的著作、贵族的横征暴敛和科学思想的进展列为“间接因素”，认为这些因素长期铺垫了民众心理的地基；然后把演说家的煽动和宫廷对小改革的抵抗当作“直接因素”，说明地基一旦预备好，一点火星就能引爆整座火炉。紧接着，他从这种历史动力论中推导出五个具有…