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SOCIOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS OF THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HERD INSTINCT

hospitals. Or, if his difficulty is the ethical one, he will come to see how right the herd view really is; that it is a very narrow mind which cannot see the intrinsic excellence of suffering; that the sheep and cattle we breed for eating, the calf we bleed to death that its meat may be white, the one baby out of four we kill in the first year of life, that cancer, consumption, and insanity and the growing river of blood which bathes the feet of advancing mankind, all have their part in the Increasing Purpose which is leading the race ever upwards and onwards to a Divine consummation of joy. Thus the conflict ceases, and the man is content to watch the blood and the Purpose go on increasing together and to put on flesh unperplexed by the shallow and querulous scruples of his youth.

Of these three solutions that of scepticism is unquestionably the least common, though the impression that this is not the case is created by the frequency of apparent scepticism, which, in fact, merely masks the continuation of conflict in the deeper strata of the mind. A man the subject of such submerged conflict, though he may appear

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