"Germain's theory of art converged with social psychology in his enthusiastic review of Henri Mazel's Synergie sociale of 1896. Germain found affinities in Mazel's theories of collective energies and cultural regeneration and attached his own notion of the individual's development through moral beauty to Mazel's "culture of will, of moral energy; through love". In La synergie sociale Mazel argued that Darwinian theory failed to account for "social synergy", or "social love", a collective evolutionary drive. The highest civilizations were the work not only of the elite but of the masses too; those masses must be led, however, for the crowd, a feminine and unconscious force, could not distinguish between good and evil. Socialists and anarchists who preached mediocrity led the attack on exceptional individuals—saints, heroes, or artists."
January 1, 1970