A man or woman makes direct contact with society in two ways: as a member of some familial, professional or religious group, or as a member of a crowd. Groups are capable of being as moral and intelligent as the individuals who form them; a crowd is chaotic, has no purpose of its own and is capable of anything except intelligent action and realistic thinking. Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. Their suggestibility is increased to the point where they cease to have any judgement or will of their own. They e very excitable, they lose all sense of individual or collective responsibility, they are subject to sudden excesses of rage, enthusiasm and panic. In a word, a man in a crowd behaves as though he had swallowed a large dose of some powerful intoxicant. He is a victim of what I have called' herd-poisoning'. Like alcohol, herd- poison is an active, extravagant过度的,奢侈的
drug. The crowd-intoxicated individual escapes from responsibility, intelligence and morality into a kind of frantic, animal mindlessness.
一个人通过以下两种方式与社会直接接触:作为某个家庭、职业或宗教组织的成员,或者仅仅是隶属于某个群体。一个组织所表现出来的智慧和道义是与其成员的一致的,而一个群体却是无秩序的,没有特定的目的并且无法进行明智的行为和现实性的思考。在一个群体里,人们失去了用逻辑思维来推论和选择对与错的能力,取而代之的是那个群体的集体思维的选择。他们因此也变得极为亢奋,将作为个人和大众的责任全都
河海大学研究生英语课文及翻译(重点单词突出显示特殊单词有注释)Unit2IndividualsandMasses 来自淘豆网www.taodocs.com转载请标明出处.