The individual isolated will be of
no meaning, the individual as a part of the herd will be
capable of transmitting the most potent impulses. Each member
of the flock tending to follow its neighbour and in turn to be
followed, each is in some sense capable of leadership; but no
lead will be followed that departs widely from normal
behaviour. A lead will be followed only from its resemblance to
the normal. If the leader go so far ahead as definitely to
cease to be in the herd, he will necessarily be ignored.

The original in conduct, that is to say, resistiveness to the
voice of the herd, will be suppressed by natural selection; the
wolf which does not follow the impulses of the herd will be
starved; the sheep which does not respond to the flock will be
eaten.

Again, not only will the individual be responsive to impulses
coming from the herd, but he will treat the herd as his normal
environment. The impulse to be in and always to remain with the
herd will have the strongest instinctive weight. Anything which
tends to separate him from his fellows, as soon as it becomes
perceptible as such, will be strongly resisted.[34]

According to sociologists of this school, public opinion, conscience,
and authority in the state rest upon the natural disposition of the
animal in the herd to conform to "the decrees of the herd."

Conscience, then, and the feelings of guilt and of duty are the
peculiar possessions of the gregarious animal. A dog and a cat
caught in the commission of an offence will both recognize that
punishment is coming; but the dog, moreover, knows that he has
done _wrong_, and he will come to be punished, unwillingly it
is true, and as if dragged along by some power outside him,
while the cat's sole impulse is to escape. The rational
recognition of the sequence of act and punishment is equally
clear to the gregarious and to the solitary animal, but it is
the former only who understands that he has committed a
_crime_, who has, in fact, the _sense of sin_.[35]

The concepts upon which this explanation of society rests is
_homogeneity_. If animals or human beings act under all circumstances in
the same way, they will act or seem to act, as if they had a common
purpose. If everybody follows the crowd, if everyone wears the same
clothes, utters the same trite rema