, one must remember, to _will_ social order and
development. In every country the machinery for determining and
expressing this will is complex. The common method in the modern
western State is through the voting of a numerous electorate, which
tends, it would seem, to become more and more the entire manhood, if
not the entire adult population of the country. It is a curious but
perhaps inevitable method. Practically thought has to percolate down
to the common man through all those strange and accidental channels,
newspapers which are advertisement sheets, books which may be
boycotted in a "Book War," pulpits pledged to doctrine and lecture
halls kept open by rich people's subscriptions; it has to reach him,
to mingle itself with generalized emotional forces in the heat of
mysteriously subsidized election campaigns, and then return as a
collective determination. For the Statesman and the Socialist there
could hardly be any study more important, one might think, than the
science of these processes and methods. Yet the world has still to
produce even the rudimentary generalizations of this needed science of
collective psychology.

Sec. 3.

Now, I ask the reader to consider very carefully how the Socialist
movement, using that expression now in its wider sense, stands to this
very vague and very real outcome of social evolution, the Collective
Mind; what it is really aspiring to do in that Collective Mind.

One has to recognize that this mind is at present a mind in a state of
confusion, full of warring suggestions and warring impulses. It is
like a very disturbed human mind, it is without a clear aim, it does
not know except in the vaguest terms what it wants to do, it has
impulses, it has fancies, it begins and forgets. In addition it is
afflicted with a division within itself that is strictly analogous to
that strange mental disorder, which is known to psychologists as
multiple personality. It has no clear conception of the whole of
itself, it goes about forgetting its proper name and address. Part of
it thinks of itself as one great being, as, let us say, Germany;
another thinks of itself as Catholicism, another as the White Race, or
Judaea. At times one might deem the whole confusion not so much a mind
as incurable dementia, a chaos of mental elements, haunted by
invincible and mutually incoherent fixed ideas. This you will remember
is the gist of that melancholy torso of irony, Flaubert's _Bouvard et
Pecuchet_.