second or third year of the war. Freud begins his new book by analysing the works of these predecessors. He gives each one of them due credit, only laying especial stress on the descriptive qualities of Le Bon's book, which he characterizes as unparalleled in this particular. Then with his customary sharpness and concision, Dr Freud extracts the universal core from these theories and finds that, in spite of a varying terminology, it all falls under the general head of suggestion. And as to McDougall's formula for explaining that sheer snatching up and carrying away of the individual which is the chief aspect of mass movements—his "principle of the primitive sympathetic response"—even this formula cannot escape the connotation of imitation and contagion, or in other words, of suggestion. Consequently, all these interpretations of the crowd lead to the idea of suggestion as an elementary phenomenon which is incapable of further reduction and must be treated as a basic fact concerning the activities of the mind. At this point Dr Freud raises one of his favourite objections: for more than thirty years he has been averse to the use of suggestion to explain things while suggestion itself undergoes no explanation. Was the search-light which had pierced so many phenomena to find its beams too weak for the thick fog of this concept? And now, after having held off for thirty years from the puzzle of suggestion, "after so long an abstention from inquiry into the conditions under which influences can operate without an adequate logical foundation," Freud decides to employ in the interpretation of these phenomena that same idea of the libido which plays such an important part in his study of psycho-neuroses.
As Freud's work teaches us, the expression libido serves to indicate the "energy (quantitatively considered, although incommensurable) of all those impulses having to do with whatever can be included under the term love." The idea which is contained in the word love is enormously extensive, and is limited neither above nor below. It is at once the love which the Apostle speaks of in Corinthians, and the ἔρως of Plato. Everything is united here; and nothing is excluded, whether it be self-love, the love between parents and children, or friendship, or the general love of mankind, or even the devotion to concrete objects and abstract ideas. . . .
It is quite evident from the discoveries of Dr Freud and the use he makes of them, that his entire spiritual slant and that of his students is peculiarly the property of our times. Although we could
