nflict with one
or more minorities, which safeguards them in most cases from unanimity,
the most menacing danger which faces crowds.

We come now to homogeneous crowds, of which the first type is the sect.
Here are found again individuals differing in birth, in education, in
profession, in social status, but united and, indeed, voluntarily
cemented by an extremely strong bond, a common faith and ideal. Faith,
religious, scientific, or political, rapidly creates a communion of
sentiments capable of giving to those who possess it a high degree of
homogeneity and power. History records the deeds of the barbarians under
the influence of Christianity, and the Arabs transformed into a sect by
Mahomet. Because of their sectarian organization, a prediction may be
made of what the future holds in store for the socialists.

The sect is a crowd, picked out and permanent; the crowd is a transitory
sect which has not chosen its members. The sect is a chronic kind of
crowd; the crowd is an acute kind of sect. The crowd is composed of a
multitude of grains of sand without cohesion; the sect is a block of
marble which resists every effort. When a sentiment or an idea, having
in itself a reason for existence, slips into the crowd, its members soon
crystallize and form a sect. The sect is then the first crystallization
of every doctrine. From the confused and amorphous state in which it
manifests itself to the crowd, every idea is predestined to define
itself in the more specific form of the sect, to become later a party, a
school, or a church--scientific, political, or religious.

Any faith, whether it be Islamism, Buddhism, Christianity, patriotism,
socialism, anarchy, cannot but pass through this sectarian phase. It is
the first step, the point where the human group in leaving the twilight
zone of the anonymous and mobile crowd raises itself to a definition and
to an integration which then may lead up to the highest and most
perfect human group, the nation.

If the sect is composed of individuals united by a common idea and aim,
in spite of diversity of birth, education, and social status, the caste
unites, on the contrary, those who could have--and who have
sometimes--diverse ideas and aspirations, but who are brought together
through identity of profession. The sect corresponds to the community of
faith, the caste to the community of professional ideas. The sect is a
_spontaneous_ association; the caste is, in many ways, a _force