Literally (from the etymological standpoint) this objection seems to me
unanswerable. Tarde more exactly distinguishes between crowds,
associations, and corporations.

But we retain the generic term of "crowd" because it indicates the first
stage of the social group which is the source of all the others, and
because with these successive distinctions it does not lend itself to
equivocal meaning.

In the second place, it is difficult to understand why Le Bon terms the
sect a _homogeneous_ crowd, while he classifies parliamentary assemblies
among the _heterogeneous_ crowds. The members of a sect are usually far
more different from one another in birth, education, profession, social
status, than are generally the members of a political assembly.

Turning from this criticism to note without analyzing heterogeneous
crowds, let us then proceed to determine the principal characteristics
of the three large types of homogeneous crowds, the classes, the castes,
the sects.

The heterogeneous crowd is composed of _tout le monde_, of people like
you, like me, like the first passer-by. _Chance_ unites these
individuals physically, the _occasion_ unites them psychologically; they
do not know each other, and after the moment when they find themselves
together, they may never see each other again. To use a metaphor, it is
a psychological meteor, of the most unforeseen, ephemeral, and
transitory kind.

On this accidental and fortuitous foundation are formed here and there
other crowds, always heterogeneous, but with a certain character of
stability or, at least, of periodicity. The audience at a theater, the
members of a club, of a literary or social gathering, constitute also a
crowd but a different crowd from that of the street. The members of
these groups know each other a little; they have, if not a common aim,
at least a common custom. They are nevertheless "anonymous crowds," as
Le Bon calls them, because they do not have within themselves the
nucleus of organization.

Proceeding further, we find crowds still heterogeneous, but not so
anonymous--juries, for example, and assemblies. These small crowds
experience a new sentiment, unknown to anonymous crowds, that of
responsibility which may at times give to their actions a different
orientation. Then the parliamentary crowds are to be distinguished from
the others because, as Tarde observes with his habitual penetration,
they are double crowds: they represent a majority in co