You will find one day everyone enterprising, enthusiastic, vigorous, eager to buy, and eager to order: in a week or so you will find almost the whole society depressed, anxious, and wanting to sell.
Walter Bagehot
The Public Record
Walter Bagehot was an English journalist, businessman, and essayist, who wrote extensively about government, economics, literature and race. He is known for co-founding the National Review in 1855, and for his works The English Constitution and Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873).
gutenberg.org
In fact, these opinions were not formed by reason, but by mimicry.
Something happened that looked a little good, on which eager sanguine men talked loudly, and common people caught their tone.
In this way the infection of imitation catches men in their most inward and intellectual part--their creed.
But it also invades men--by the most bodily part of the mind--so to speak--the link between soul and body--the manner.
No one needs to have this explained; we all know how a kind of subtle influence makes us imitate or try to imitate the manner of those around us.
To conform to the fashion of Rome--whatever the fashion may be, and whatever Rome we may for the time be at--is among the most obvious needs of human nature.
The eager passion of the meaning beats upon the mild drapery of the words.
So you could not express the plain thoughts of an Englishman in the grand manner of a Spaniard.
Insensibly, and as by a sort of magic, the kind of manner which a man catches eats into him, and makes him in the end what at first he only seems.
This is the principal mode in which the greatest minds of an age produce their effect.
They set the tone which others take, and the fashion which others use.
There is an odd idea that those who take what is called a 'scientific view' of history need rate lightly the influence of individual character.
It would be as reasonable to say that those who take a scientific view of nature need think little of the influence of the sun.
On the scientific view a great man is a great new cause (compounded or not out of other causes, for I do not here, or elsewhere in these papers, raise the question of free-will), but, anyhow, new in all its effects, and all its results.
Great models for good and evil sometimes appear among men, who follow them either to improvement or degradation.
Society is not then formed upon a 'voluntary system' but upon an involuntary.
A man in early ages is born to a certain obedience, and cannot extricate himself from an inherited government.
Society then is made up, not of individuals, but of families; creeds then descend by inheritance in those families.
The philosophers, of course, said that a man's fathers' believing anything was no reason for his believing it unless it was true.
We are dealing with people capable of history when we speak of great ideas, not with prehistoric flint-men or the present savages.
But though under very different forms, the same essential causes--the imitation of preferred characters and the elimination of detested characters--were at work in the oldest times, and are at work among rude men now.
Strong as the propensity to imitation is among civilised men, we must conceive it as an impulse of which their minds have been partially denuded.
This extreme propensity to imitation is one great reason of the amazing sameness which every observer notices in savage nations.
When you have seen one Euegian, you have seen all Fuegians--one Tasmanian, all Tasmanians.
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