《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15节
Should it be regretted that crowds are never guided by reason? We would not venture to affirm it. Without a doubt human reason would not have availed to spur humanity along the path of civilisation with the ardour and hardihood its illusions have done. These illusions, the offspring of those unconscious forces by which we are led, were doubtless necessary. Every race carries in its mental constitution the laws of its destiny, and it is, perhaps, these laws that it obeys with a resistless impulse, even in the case of those of its impulses which apparently are the most unreasoned. It seems at times as if nations were submitted to secret forces analogous to those which compel the acorn to transform itself into an oak or a comet to follow its orbit. What little insight we can get into these forces must be sought for in the general course of the evolution of a people, and not in the isolated facts from which this evolution appears at times to proceed. Were these facts alone to be taken into consideration, history would seem to be the result of a series of improbable chances. It was improbable that a Galilean carpenter should become for two thousand years an all-powerful God in whose name the most important civilisations were founded; improbable, too, that a few bands of Arabs, emerging from their deserts, should conquer the greater part of the old Graco-Roman world, and establish an empire greater than that of Alexander; improbable, again, that in Europe, at an advanced period of its development, and when authority throughout it had been systematically hierarchised, an obscure lieutenant of artillery should have succeeded in reigning over a multitude of peoples and kings. Let us leave reason, then, to philosophers, and not insist too strongly on its intervention in the governing of men. It is not by reason, but most often in spite of it, that are created those sentiments that are the mainsprings of all civilisation--sentiments such as honour, self- sacrifice, religious faith, patriotism, and the love of glory.
注释摘要
勒庞在这一段里，事实上正在为他此前几节反复陈述的一个判断做收束和深化：群体不接受理性推理，只受形象、断言和幻觉的驱使。这句话连同随后几页的论述，构成了整节论述群最富哲学色彩、也最暴露勒庞自身世界观的一部分。 他问，是否应当为群体从不被理性引导而感到遗憾？他回答得相当明确，不会。勒庞认为，人类文明之所以能达到后来的辉煌，靠的并不是冷静的理性计算，而是错觉和幻…