It is best understood in the light of that branch of social psychology which usually goes by the name of "mob-psychology." Perhaps mob and mobbish are rather unfortunate terms.

They are apt to make us think of the wilder explosions of collective feeling--panics, blood-mania, dancing-epidemics, and so on.

But, though a savage society is by no means a mob in the sense of a weltering mass of humanity that has for the time being lost its head, the psychological considerations applying to the latter apply also to the former, when due allowance has been made for the fact that savage society is organized on a permanent basis.

The difference between the two comes, in short, to this, that the mob as represented in the savage society is a mob consisting of many successive generations of men.

Its tradition constitutes, as it were, a prolonged and abiding impression, which its conduct thereupon expresses.
Savage thought, then, is not able, because it does not try, to break up custom into separate pieces.