《乌合之众·第二编·群体的意见与信念·群体意见的直接因素》第6节
Numerous are the words whose meaning has thus profoundly changed from age to age--words which we can only arrive at understanding in the sense in which they were formerly understood after a long effort. It has been said with truth that much study is necessary merely to arrive at conceiving what was signified to our great grandfathers by such words as the "king" and the "royal family." What, then, is likely to be the case with terms still more complex? Words, then, have only mobile and transitory significations which change from age to age and people to people; and when we desire to exert an influence by their means on the crowd what it is requisite to know is the meaning given them by the crowd at a given moment, and not the meaning which they formerly had or may yet have for individuals of a different mental constitution. Thus, when crowds have come, as the result of political upheavals or changes of belief, to acquire a profound antipathy for the images evoked by certain words, the first duty of the true statesman is to change the words without, of course, laying hands on the things themselves, the latter being too intimately bound up with the inherited constitution to be transformed. The judicious Tocqueville long ago made the remark that the work of the consulate and the empire consisted more particularly in the clothing with new words of the greater part of the institutions of the past--that is to say, in replacing words evoking disagreeable images in the imagination of the crowd by other words of which the novelty prevented such evocations. The "taille" or tallage has become the land tax; the "gabelle," the tax on salt; the "aids," the indirect contributions and the consolidated duties; the tax on trade companies and guilds, the license, &c.
注释摘要
在这一段里，勒庞要证明的核心主张是：词语的意义并不固定，它们在历史长河中不停地流动和转化，而左右群体心智的，恰恰是词语在某一具体时刻所唤起的形象和情感，而不是它们在字典里的原义。他举了若干法国历史上的例子，比如“国王”“王室”这样的词，对几代人之前的先辈而言，其所承载的敬畏感、宗教神圣性以及封建纽带的意义，已经完全不同于十九世纪末普通市民的理解。由此他推论…