《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4节
The biological sciences have been transformed since embryology has shown the immense influence of the past on the evolution of living beings; and the historical sciences will not undergo a less change when this conception has become more widespread. As yet it is not sufficiently general, and many statesmen are still no further advanced than the theorists of the last century, who believed that a society could break off with its past and be entirely recast on lines suggested solely by the light of reason. A people is an organism created by the past, and, like every other organism, it can only be modified by slow hereditary accumulations. It is tradition that guides men, and more especially so when they are in a crowd. The changes they can effect in their traditions with any ease, merely bear, as I have often repeated, upon names and outward forms. This circumstance is not to be regretted. Neither a national genius nor civilisation would be possible without traditions. In consequence man's two great concerns since he has existed have been to create a network of traditions which he afterwards endeavours to destroy when their beneficial effects have worn themselves out. Civilisation is impossible without traditions, and progress impossible without the destruction of those traditions. The difficulty, and it is an immense difficulty, is to find a proper equilibrium between stability and variability. Should a people allow its customs to become too firmly rooted, it can no longer change, and becomes, like China, incapable of improvement. Violent revolutions are in this case of no avail; for what happens is that either the broken fragments of the chain are pieced together again and the past resumes its empire without change, or the fragments remain apart and decadence soon succeeds anarchy.
注释摘要
勒庞在这一段中，试图借用他那个年代新兴的生物学思想，来为传统的权威正名。他的论证逻辑是这样的：胚胎学已经揭示出，生物个体的发育深受其物种漫长过去的巨大影响；那么同理，历史学也应该认识到，一个民族这样的社会有机体，同样是由其过去创造的，绝无可能仅凭抽象理性的蓝图，就与过去彻底决裂、在空地上重建。他批评那些仍停留在上个世纪思维的政治家们，正是因为他们迷信理性的…