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may have widely hostile opinions about many other things, but it isthis dominating belief or dream or aversion that will generally determinetheir public conduct. The idea draws them together into an inchoateand perhaps even indiscernible sub-mass. Or it may be ofsuch a character involving, let us say, an economic interest, whichwill lead them to organize. But this is not always so. They becomemany minds all thinking, wishing, moving in the same direction.They constitute a sort of social psychic stream—millions of mindsanimated by a common expectation or liking or hatred or appetite.Organized or not, they form a compact minority and, according tothe importance or intensity of the conviction, a dynamic one. Sucha minority will subordinate other beliefs and even strongly rootedmores to this motivating idea. If the idea is not brought into controversy,is not at issue, these many minds may split into numerousgroups. But if the controlling idea is invoked in a public way, theseminds move together and sweep along to become a powerful currentin the stream of life. There are many such, and they run the gamutof economic, racial, religious, cultural, and every form of socialenergy. To take an obvious example, we have the aged who, forreasons which have been accumulating over many years, have nowbecome the raw material of such a current and a very powerful one.Every politician recognizes this. All seek to run along with thatcurrent. But there are others that are not so readily identifiable andwhich only the astute politician with a nose for such forces candetect.Spengler noted this phenomenon. He called these sub-massescosmic forces and the men able to locate and use them he calledcosmic men. The term is not precise but is in accordance withSpengler's tendency to overstate or overdramatize ideas. In anotherplace he calls these minorities mass units, having all the feelings andpassions of the individual, inaccessible to reasoning, masses of menwho cohere on the basis of like purpose, like knowledge, like appetites,like hatreds. Crowds of this order of unity, he says correctly,are seized by storms of enthusiasm or, as readily, by panic.The astute politician is forever concerned in locating these currentsor forces and running with them. It is in this that he differsfrom the philosopher and the reformer and, above all, the Utopian.i$7