Kendilik hermenötiğinin ortaya çıkışını tarihsel açıdan birbirlerini takip eden iki farklı bağlamla ortaya koymak istiyorum: (1) Roma İmparatorluğu'nun ilk döneminde, birinci ve ikinci yüzyıldaki Greko-Romen felsefesi ve (2) Roma imparatorluğu'nun son döneminde, dördüncü ve beşinci yüzyılda geliştirilmiş Hristiyan tinselliği ve manastır prensipleri. Dahası bu konuyu sadece teorik açıdan değil, geç antik dönemin pratikleri bağlamında da irdelemek istiyorum. Bu pratikler Yunanca'da epimelesthai sautou teriminde toplanıyordu, "kendine eğilme, kendinle ilgilenme, kendine bakma".
The schools teach the catechism and send the pupils to church, and government officials must produce certificates of having received communion. But a man of our circle who has finished his education and is not in the government service may even now (and formerly it was still easier for him to do so) live for ten or twenty years without once remembering that he is living among Christians and is himself reckoned a member of the orthodox Christian Church.
The judgement with which McDougall sums up the psychological behaviour of a simple 'unorganised" group is no more friendly than that of Le Bon. Such a group 'is excessively emotional, impulsive, violent, fickle, inconsistent, irresolute and extreme in action, displaying only the coarser emotions and the less refined sentiments; extremely suggestible, careless in deliberation, hasty in judgement, incapable of any but the simpler and imperfect forms of reasoning; easily swayed and led, lacking in self-consciousness, devoid of self-respect and of sense of responsibility, and apt to be carried away by the consciousness of its own force, so that it tends to produce all the manifestations we have learnt to expect of any irresponsible and absolute power.
McDougall does not dispute the thesis as to the collective inhibition of intelligence in groups. He says that the minds of lower intelligence bring down those of a higher order to their own level. The latter are obstructed in their activity, because in general an intensification of emotion creates unfavourable conditions for sound intellectual work, and further because the individuals are intimidated by the group and their mental activity is not free, and because there is a lowering in each individual of his sense of responsibility for his own performances.