Appeals and threats, when once they have been made, work their way into the consciousness of the person to whom they have been addressed, by a process not unlike that by which a rumour spreads among a crowd. The appeal or the threat is whispered and passed on, but each time it is repeated the whisperer gives it his own stress. In the end one rumour may give birth to several rumours but they will all share the same kind of alarm or hope. Yet who is the crowd? Who goes on circulating and whispering the appeals and threats in the mind until the decision has been taken? The crowd is an assembly of all the other possible selves, commenting on the self in power, whom they believe to be a usurper. They were born from visions in the past; they have failed to establish their own power, but they have not been dispersed, they still inhabit the personality.