TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
--Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.
--Whereas adequate characters are not available, superscript has been
rendered as a^b and a^{bc}.
DEGENERATION
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
_Uniform with this Volume._
CONVENTIONAL LIES OF
OUR CIVILIZATION.
PARADOXES.
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN.
DEGENERATION
BY
MAX NORDAU
AUTHOR OF
‘CONVENTIONAL LIES OF OUR CIVILIZATION,’ ‘PARADOXES,’ ETC.
Translated from the Second Edition
of the German Work
Popular Edition
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1898
[_All rights reserved_]
_First Edition_ _February, 1895._
_New Impressions, March 4, 1895;
March 22, 1895; April, 1895; May,
1895; June, 1895; August, 1895;
November, 1895; (Popular Edition),
September, 1898._
Dedicated
TO
CÆSAR LOMBROSO,
PROFESSOR OF PSYCHIATRY AND FORENSIC MEDICINE AT
THE ROYAL UNIVERSITY OF TURIN,
BY
THE AUTHOR.
TO
PROFESSOR CÆSAR LOMBROSO,
_TURIN_.
_DEAR AND HONOURED MASTER_ ,
_I dedicate this book to you, in open and joyful recognition of the
fact that without your labours it could never have been written._
_The notion of degeneracy, first introduced into science by Morel, and
developed with so much genius by yourself, has in your hands already
shown itself extremely fertile in the most diverse directions. On
numerous obscure points of psychiatry, criminal law, politics, and
sociology, you have poured a veritable flood of light, which those
alone have not perceived who obdurately close their eyes, or who are
too short-sighted to derive benefit from any enlightenment whatsoever._
_But there is a vast and important domain into which neither you nor
your disciples have hitherto borne the torch of your method--the domain
of art and literature._
_Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and
pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists. These,
however, manifest the same mental characteristics, and for the most
part the same somatic features, as the members of the above-mentioned
anthropological family, who satisfy their unhealthy impulses with the
knife of the assassin or the bomb of the dynamiter, instead of with pen
and pencil._
_Some among these degenerates in literature, music, and painting have
in recent years come into extraordinary prominence, and are revered by
numerous admirers as creators of a new art, and heralds of the coming
centuries._
_This phenomenon is not to be disregarded. Books and works of art
exercise a powerful suggestion on the masses. It is from these
productions that an age derives its ideals of morality and beauty. If
they are absurd and anti-social, they exert a disturbing and corrupting
influence on the views of a whole generation. Hence the latter,
especially the impressionable youth, easily excited to enthusiasm for
all that is strange and seemingly new, must be warned and enlightened
as to the real nature of the creations so blindly admired. This warning
the ordinary critic does not give. Exclusively literary and æsthetic
culture is, moreover, the worst preparation conceivable for a true
knowledge of the pathological character of the works of degenerates.
The verbose rhetorician exposes with more or less grace, or cleverness,
the subjective impressions received from the works he criticises,
but is incapable of judging if these works are the productions of
a shattered brain, and also the nature of the mental disturbance
expressing itself by them._
_Now I have undertaken the work of investigating (as much as possible
after your method), the tendencies of the fashions in art and
literature; of proving that they have their source in the degeneracy
of their authors, and that the enthusiasm of their admirers is for
manifestations of more or less pronounced moral insanity, imbecility,
and dementia._
_Thus, this book is an attempt at a really scientific criticism, which
does not base its judgment of a book upon the purely accidental,
capricious and variable emotions it awakens--emotions depending on
the temperament and mood of the individual reader--but upon the
psycho-physiological elements from which it sprang. At the same time it
ventures to fill a void still existing in your powerful system._
_I have no doubt as to the consequences to myself of my initiative.
There is at the present day no danger in attacking the Church, for
it no longer has the stake at its disposal. To write against rulers
and governments is likewise nothing venturesome, for at the worst
nothing more than imprisonment could follow, with compensating glory
of martyrdom. But grievous is the fate of him who has the audacity to
characterize æsthetic fashions as forms of mental decay. The author or
artist attacked never pardons a man for recognising in him a lunatic
or a charlatan; the subjectively garrulous critics are furious when it
is pointed out how shallow and incompetent they are, or how cowardly
in swimming with the stream; and even the public is angered when
forced to see that it has been running after fools, quack dentists,
and mountebanks, as so many prophets. Now, the graphomaniacs and their
critical bodyguard dominate nearly the entire press, and in the latter
possess an instrument of torture by which, in Indian fashion, they can
rack the troublesome spoiler of sport, to his life’s end._
_The danger, however, to which he exposes himself cannot deter a man
from doing that which he regards as his duty. When a scientific truth
has been discovered, he owes it to humanity, and has no right to
withhold it. Moreover, it is as little possible to do this as for a
woman voluntarily to prevent the birth of the mature fruit of her womb._
_Without aspiring to the most distant comparison of myself with you,
one of the loftiest mental phenomena of the century, I may yet take for
my example the smiling serenity with which you pursue your own way,
indifferent to ingratitude, insult, and misunderstanding._
_Pray remain, dear and honoured master, ever favourably disposed
towards your gratefully devoted_
_MAX NORDAU_.
CONTENTS
BOOK I.
_FIN-DE-SIÈCLE._
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
THE DUSK OF THE NATIONS 1
CHAPTER II.
THE SYMPTOMS 7
CHAPTER III.
DIAGNOSIS 15
CHAPTER IV.
ETIOLOGY 34
BOOK II.
_MYSTICISM._
CHAPTER I.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MYSTICISM 45
CHAPTER II.
THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 67
CHAPTER III.
SYMBOLISM 100
CHAPTER IV.
TOLSTOISM 144
CHAPTER V.
THE RICHARD WAGNER CULT 171
CHAPTER VI.
PARODIES OF MYSTICISM 214
BOOK III.
_EGO-MANIA._
CHAPTER I.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EGO-MANIA 241
CHAPTER II.
PARNASSIANS AND DIABOLISTS 266
CHAPTER III.
DECADENTS AND ÆSTHETES 296
CHAPTER IV.
IBSENISM 338
CHAPTER V.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 415
BOOK IV.
_REALISM._
CHAPTER I.
ZOLA AND HIS SCHOOL 473
CHAPTER II.
THE ‘YOUNG GERMAN’ PLAGIARISTS 506
BOOK V.
_THE TWENTIETH CENTURY._
CHAPTER I.
PROGNOSIS 536
CHAPTER II.
THERAPEUTICS 550
DEGENERATION
BOOK I.
_FIN-DE-SIÈCLE_.
CHAPTER I.
THE DUSK OF THE NATIONS.
FIN-DE-SIÈCLE is a name covering both what is characteristic of many
modern phenomena, and also the underlying mood which in them finds
expression. Experience has long shown that an idea usually derives
its designation from the language of the nation which first formed
it. This, indeed, is a law of constant application when historians of
manners and customs inquire into language, for the purpose of obtaining
some notion, through the origins of some verbal root, respecting the
home of the earliest inventions and the line of evolution in different
human races. _Fin-de-siècle_ is French, for it was in France that the
mental state so entitled was first consciously realized. The word has
flown from one hemisphere to the other, and found its way into all
civilized languages. A proof this that the need of it existed. The
_fin-de-siècle_ state of mind is to-day everywhere to be met with;
nevertheless, it is in many cases a mere imitation of a foreign fashion
gaining vogue, and not an organic evolution. It is in the land of its
birth that it appears in its most genuine form, and Paris is the right
place in which to observe its manifold expressions.
No proof is needed of the extreme silliness of the term. Only the
brain of a child or of a savage could form the clumsy idea that the
century is a kind of living being, born like a beast or a man, passing
through all the stages of existence, gradually ageing and declining
after blooming childhood, joyous youth, and vigorous maturity, to die
with the expiration of the hundredth year, after being afflicted in
its last decade with all the infirmities of mournful senility. Such
a childish anthropomorphism or zoomorphism never stops to consider
that the arbitrary division of time, rolling ever continuously along,
is not identical amongst all civilized beings, and that while this
nineteenth century of Christendom is held to be a creature reeling to
its death presumptively in dire exhaustion, the fourteenth century of
the Mahommedan world is tripping along in the baby-shoes of its first
decade, and the fifteenth century of the Jews strides gallantly by in
the full maturity of its fifty-second year. Every day on our globe
130,000 human beings are born, for whom the world begins with this same
day, and the young citizen of the world is neither feebler nor fresher
for leaping into life in the midst of the death-throes of 1900, nor on
the birthday of the twentieth century. But it is a habit of the human
mind to project externally its own subjective states. And it is in
accordance with this naïvely egoistic tendency that the French ascribe
their own senility to the century, and speak of _fin-de-siècle_ when
they ought correctly to say _fin-de-race_.[1]
But however silly a term _fin-de-siècle_ may be, the mental
constitution which it indicates is actually present in influential
circles. The disposition of the times is curiously confused, a compound
of feverish restlessness and blunted discouragement, of fearful presage
and hang-dog renunciation. The prevalent feeling is that of imminent
perdition and extinction. _Fin-de-siècle_ is at once a confession and
a complaint. The old Northern faith contained the fearsome doctrine
of the Dusk of the Gods. In our days there have arisen in more
highly-developed minds vague qualms of a Dusk of the Nations, in which
all suns and all stars are gradually waning, and mankind with all its
institutions and creations is perishing in the midst of a dying world.
It is not for the first time in the course of history that the horror
of world-annihilation has laid hold of men’s minds. A similar sentiment
took possession of the Christian peoples at the approach of the year
1000. But there is an essential difference between chiliastic panic
and _fin-de-siècle_ excitement. The despair at the turn of the first
millennium of Christian chronology proceeded from a feeling of fulness
of life and joy of life. Men were aware of throbbing pulses, they
were conscious of unweakened capacity for enjoyment, and found it
unmitigatedly appalling to perish together with the world, when there
were yet so many flagons to drain and so many lips to kiss, and when
they could yet rejoice so vigorously in both love and wine. Of all
this in the _fin-de-siècle_ feeling there is nothing. Neither has it
anything in common with the impressive twilight-melancholy of an aged
Faust, surveying the work of a lifetime, and who, proud of what has
been achieved, and contemplating what is begun but not completed, is
seized with vehement desire to finish his work, and, awakened from
sleep by haunting unrest, leaps up with the cry: ‘Was ich gedacht, ich
eil’ es zu vollbringen.’[2]
Quite otherwise is the _fin-de-siècle_ mood. It is the impotent despair
of a sick man, who feels himself dying by inches in the midst of an
eternally living nature blooming insolently for ever. It is the envy of
a rich, hoary voluptuary, who sees a pair of young lovers making for
a sequestered forest nook; it is the mortification of the exhausted
and impotent refugee from a Florentine plague, seeking in an enchanted
garden the experiences of a Decamerone, but striving in vain to snatch
one more pleasure of sense from the uncertain hour. The reader of
Turgenieff’s _A Nest of Nobles_ will remember the end of that beautiful
work. The hero, Lavretzky, comes as a man advanced in years to visit at
the house where, in his young days, he had lived his romance of love.
All is unchanged. The garden is fragrant with flowers. In the great
trees the happy birds are chirping; on the fresh turf the children romp
and shout. Lavretzky alone has grown old, and contemplates, in mournful
exclusion, a scene where nature holds on its joyous way, caring nought
that Lisa the beloved is vanished, and Lavretzky, a broken-down man,
weary of life. Lavretzky’s admission that, amidst all this ever-young,
ever-blooming nature, for him alone there comes no morrow; Alving’s
dying cry for ‘The sun--the sun!’ in Ibsen’s _Ghosts_--these express
rightly the _fin-de-siècle_ attitude of to-day.
This fashionable term has the necessary vagueness which fits it to
convey all the half-conscious and indistinct drift of current ideas.
Just as the words ‘freedom,’ ‘ideal,’ ‘progress’ seem to express
notions, but actually are only sounds, so in itself _fin-de-siècle_
means nothing, and receives a varying signification according to the
diverse mental horizons of those who use it.
The surest way of knowing what _fin-de-siècle_ implies, is to consider
a series of particular instances where the word has been applied. Those
which I shall adduce are drawn from French books and periodicals of the
last two years.[3]
A king abdicates, leaves his country, and takes up his residence in
Paris, having reserved certain political rights. One day he loses much
money at play, and is in a dilemma. He therefore makes an agreement
with the Government of his country, by which, on receipt of a million
francs, he renounces for ever every title, official position and
privilege remaining to him. _Fin-de-siècle_ king.
A bishop is prosecuted for insulting the minister of public worship.
The proceedings terminated, his attendant canons distribute amongst
the reporters in court a defence, copies of which he has prepared
beforehand. When condemned to pay a fine, he gets up a public
collection, which brings in tenfold the amount of the penalty. He
publishes a justificatory volume containing all the expressions of
support which have reached him. He makes a tour through the country,
exhibits himself in every cathedral to the mob curious to see the
celebrity of the hour, and takes the opportunity of sending round the
plate. _Fin-de-siècle_ bishop.
The corpse of the murderer Pranzini after execution underwent autopsy.
The head of the secret police cuts off a large piece of skin, has
it tanned, and the leather made into cigar-cases and card-cases for
himself and some of his friends. _Fin-de-siècle_ official.
An American weds his bride in a gas-factory, then gets with her into
a balloon held in readiness, and enters on a honeymoon in the clouds.
_Fin-de-siècle_ wedding.
An _attaché_ of the Chinese Embassy publishes high-class works in
French under his own name. He negotiates with banks respecting a
large loan for his Government, and draws large advances for himself
on the unfinished contract. Later it comes out that the books were
composed by his French secretary, and that he has swindled the banks.
_Fin-de-siècle_ diplomatist.
A public schoolboy walking with a chum passes the gaol where his
father, a rich banker, has repeatedly been imprisoned for fraudulent
bankruptcy, embezzlement and similar lucrative misdemeanours. Pointing
to the building, he tells his friend with a smile: ‘Look, that’s the
governor’s school.’ _Fin-de-siècle_ son.
Two young ladies of good family, and school friends, are chatting
together. One heaves a sigh. ‘What’s the matter?’ asks the other. ‘I’m
in love with Raoul, and he with me.’ ‘Oh, that’s lovely! He’s handsome,
young, elegant; and yet you’re sad?’ ‘Yes, but he has nothing, and
is nothing, and my parents want me to marry the baron, who is fat,
bald, and ugly, but has a huge lot of money.’ ‘Well, marry the baron
without any fuss, and make Raoul acquainted with him, you goose.’
_Fin-de-siècle_ girls.
Such test-cases show how the word is understood in the land of its
birth. Germans who ape Paris fashions, and apply _fin-de-siècle_
almost exclusively to mean what is indecent and improper, misuse the
word in their coarse ignorance as much as, in a previous generation,
they vulgarized the expression _demi-monde_, misunderstanding its
proper meaning, and giving it the sense of _fille de joie_, whereas
its creator Dumas intended it to denote persons whose lives contained
some dark period, for which they were excluded from the circle to which
they belong by birth, education, or profession, but who do not by their
manner betray, at least to the inexperienced, that they are no longer
acknowledged as members of their own caste.
_Prima facie_, a king who sells his sovereign rights for a big cheque
seems to have little in common with a newly-wedded pair who make their
wedding-trip in a balloon, nor is the connection at once obvious
between an episcopal Barnum and a well-brought-up young lady who
advises her friend to a wealthy marriage mitigated by a _cicisbeo_. All
these _fin-de-siècle_ cases have, nevertheless, a common feature, to
wit, a contempt for traditional views of custom and morality.
Such is the notion underlying the word _fin-de-siècle_. It means a
practical emancipation from traditional discipline, which theoretically
is still in force. To the voluptuary this means unbridled lewdness, the
unchaining of the beast in man; to the withered heart of the egoist,
disdain of all consideration for his fellow-men, the trampling under
foot of all barriers which enclose brutal greed of lucre and lust
of pleasure; to the contemner of the world it means the shameless
ascendency of base impulses and motives, which were, if not virtuously
suppressed, at least hypocritically hidden; to the believer it means
the repudiation of dogma, the negation of a supersensuous world, the
descent into flat phenomenalism; to the sensitive nature yearning for
æsthetic thrills, it means the vanishing of ideals in art, and no more
power in its accepted forms to arouse emotion. And to all, it means the
end of an established order, which for thousands of years has satisfied
logic, fettered depravity, and in every art matured something of beauty.
One epoch of history is unmistakably in its decline, and another
is announcing its approach. There is a sound of rending in every
tradition, and it is as though the morrow would not link itself with
to-day. Things as they are totter and plunge, and they are suffered to
reel and fall, because man is weary, and there is no faith that it
is worth an effort to uphold them. Views that have hitherto governed
minds are dead or driven hence like disenthroned kings, and for their
inheritance they that hold the titles and they that would usurp are
locked in struggle. Meanwhile interregnum in all its terrors prevails;
there is confusion among the powers that be; the million, robbed of its
leaders, knows not where to turn; the strong work their will; false
prophets arise, and dominion is divided amongst those whose rod is the
heavier because their time is short. Men look with longing for whatever
new things are at hand, without presage whence they will come or what
they will be. They have hope that in the chaos of thought, art may
yield revelations of the order that is to follow on this tangled web.
The poet, the musician, is to announce, or divine, or at least suggest
in what forms civilization will further be evolved. What shall be
considered good to-morrow--what shall be beautiful? What shall we know
to-morrow--what believe in? What shall inspire us? How shall we enjoy?
So rings the question from the thousand voices of the people, and where
a market-vendor sets up his booth and claims to give an answer, where
a fool or a knave suddenly begins to prophesy in verse or prose, in
sound or colour, or professes to practise his art otherwise than his
predecessors and competitors, there gathers a great concourse, crowding
around him to seek in what he has wrought, as in oracles of the Pythia,
some meaning to be divined and interpreted. And the more vague and
insignificant they are, the more they seem to convey of the future to
the poor gaping souls gasping for revelations, and the more greedily
and passionately are they expounded.
Such is the spectacle presented by the doings of men in the reddened
light of the Dusk of the Nations. Massed in the sky the clouds are
aflame in the weirdly beautiful glow which was observed for the space
of years after the eruption of Krakatoa. Over the earth the shadows
creep with deepening gloom, wrapping all objects in a mysterious
dimness, in which all certainty is destroyed and any guess seems
plausible. Forms lose their outlines, and are dissolved in floating
mist. The day is over, the night draws on. The old anxiously watch its
approach, fearing they will not live to see the end. A few amongst the
young and strong are conscious of the vigour of life in all their veins
and nerves, and rejoice in the coming sunrise. Dreams, which fill up
the hours of darkness till the breaking of the new day, bring to the
former comfortless memories, to the latter high-souled hopes. And in
the artistic products of the age we see the form in which these dreams
become sensible.
Here is the place to forestall a possible misunderstanding. The
great majority of the middle and lower classes is naturally not
_fin-de-siècle_. It is true that the spirit of the times is stirring
the nations down to their lowest depths, and awaking even in the most
inchoate and rudimentary human being a wondrous feeling of stir and
upheaval. But this more or less slight touch of moral sea-sickness
does not excite in him the cravings of travailing women, nor express
itself in new æsthetic needs. The Philistine or the Proletarian still
finds undiluted satisfaction in the old and oldest forms of art and
poetry, if he knows himself unwatched by the scornful eye of the votary
of fashion, and is free to yield to his own inclinations. He prefers
Ohnet’s novels to all the symbolists, and Mascagni’s _Cavalleria
Rusticana_ to all Wagnerians and to Wagner himself; he enjoys himself
royally over slap-dash farces and music-hall melodies, and yawns or is
angered at Ibsen; he contemplates gladly chromos of paintings depicting
Munich beer-houses and rustic taverns, and passes the open-air painters
without a glance. It is only a very small minority who honestly
find pleasure in the new tendencies, and announce them with genuine
conviction as that which alone is sound, a sure guide for the future,
a pledge of pleasure and of moral benefit. But this minority has the
gift of covering the whole visible surface of society, as a little
oil extends over a large area of the surface of the sea. It consists
chiefly of rich educated people, or of fanatics. The former give the
_ton_ to all the snobs, the fools, and the blockheads; the latter make
an impression upon the weak and dependent, and intimidate the nervous.
All snobs affect to have the same taste as the select and exclusive
minority, who pass by everything that once was considered beautiful
with an air of the greatest contempt. And thus it appears as if the
whole of civilized humanity were converted to the æsthetics of the Dusk
of the Nations.
CHAPTER II.
THE SYMPTOMS.
LET us follow in the train frequenting the palaces of European
capitals, the highways of fashionable watering-places, the receptions
of the rich, and observe the figures of which it is composed.
Amongst the women, one wears her hair combed smoothly back and down
like Rafael’s Maddalena Doni in the Pitti at Florence; another wears
it drawn up high over the temples like Julia, daughter of Titus, or
Plotina, wife of Trajan, in the busts in the Louvre; a third has
hers cut short in front on the brow and long in the nape, waved and
lightly puffed, after the fashion of the fifteenth century, as may be
seen in the pages and young knights of Gentile Bellini, Botticelli
and Mantegna. Many have their hair dyed, and in such a fashion as to
be startling in its revolt against the law of organic harmony, and
the effect of a studied discord, only to be resolved into the higher
polyphony of the toilet taken as a whole. This swarthy, dark-eyed
woman snaps her fingers at nature by framing the brown tones of her
face in copper-red or golden-yellow; yonder blue-eyed fair, with a
complexion of milk and roses, intensifies the brightness of her cheeks
by a setting of artificially blue-black tresses. Here is one who covers
her head with a huge heavy felt hat, an obvious imitation, in its
brim turned up at the back, and its trimming of large plush balls, of
the sombrero of the Spanish bull-fighters, who were displaying their
skill in Paris at the exhibition of 1889, and giving all kinds of
_motifs_ to modistes. There is another who has stuck on her hair the
emerald-green or ruby-red biretta of the mediæval travelling student.
The costume is in keeping with the bizarre coiffure. Here is a mantle
reaching to the waist, slit up on one side, draping the breast like
a _portière_, and trimmed round the hem with little silken bells, by
the incessant clicking of which a sensitive spectator would in a very
short time either be hypnotized or driven to take frantic fright.
There is a Greek peplos, of which the tailors speak as glibly as any
venerable philologist. Next to the stiff monumental trim of Catharine
de Medicis, and the high ruff of Mary, Queen of Scots, goes the flowing
white raiment of the angel of the Annunciation in Memling’s pictures,
and, by way of antithesis, that caricature of masculine array, the
fitting cloth coat, with widely opened lapels, waistcoat, stiffened
shirt-front, small stand-up collar, and necktie. The majority, anxious
to be inconspicuous in unimaginative mediocrity, seems to have for
its leading style a laboured rococo, with bewildering oblique lines,
incomprehensible swellings, puffings, expansions and contractions,
folds with irrational beginning and aimless ending, in which all the
outlines of the human figure are lost, and which cause women’s bodies
to resemble now a beast of the Apocalypse, now an armchair, now a
triptych, or some other ornament.
The children, strolling beside their mothers thus bedecked, are
embodiments of one of the most afflicting aberrations into which the
imagination of a spinster ever lapsed. They are living copies of the
pictures of Kate Greenaway, whose love of children, diverted from its
natural outlet, has sought gratification in the most affected style of
drawing, wherein the sacredness of childhood is profaned under absurd
disguises. Here is an imp dressed from head to foot in the blood-red
costume of a mediæval executioner; there a four-year-old girl wears a
cabriolet bonnet of her great-grandmother’s days and sweeps after her a
court mantle of loud-hued velvet. Another wee dot, just able to keep on
her tottering legs, has been arrayed in the long dress of a lady of the
First Empire, with puffed sleeves and short waist.
The men complete the picture. They are preserved from excessive oddity
through fear of the Philistine’s laugh, or through some remains of
sanity in taste, and, with the exception of the red dress-coat with
metal buttons, and knee-breeches with silk stockings, with which some
idiots in eye-glass and gardenia try to rival burlesque actors, present
little deviation from the ruling canon of the masculine attire of the
day. But fancy plays the more freely among their hair. One displays
the short curls and the wavy double-pointed beard of Lucius Verus,
another looks like the whiskered cat in a Japanese kakemono. His
neighbour has the _barbiche_ of Henri IV., another the fierce moustache
of a lansquenet by F. Brun, or the chin-tuft of the city-watch in
Rembrandt’s ‘Ronde de Nuit.’
The common feature in all these male specimens is that they do not
express their real idiosyncrasies, but try to present something that
they are not. They are not content to show their natural figure, nor
even to supplement it by legitimate accessories, in harmony with the
type to which they approximate, but they seek to model themselves
after some artistic pattern which has no affinity with their own
nature, or is even antithetical to it. Nor do they for the most part
limit themselves to one pattern, but copy several at once, which jar
one with another. Thus we get heads set on shoulders not belonging to
them, costumes the elements of which are as disconnected as though
they belonged to a dream, colours that seem to have been matched in
the dark. The impression is that of a masked festival, where all are
in disguises, and with heads too in character. There are several
occasions, such as the varnishing day at the Paris Champs de Mars
salon, or the opening of the Exhibition of the Royal Academy in London,
where this impression is so weirdly intensified, that one seems to be
moving amongst dummies patched together at haphazard, in a mythical
mortuary, from fragments of bodies, heads, trunks, limbs, just as they
came to hand, and which the designer, in heedless pell-mell, clothed at
random in the garments of all epochs and countries. Every single figure
strives visibly by some singularity in outline, set, cut, or colour,
to startle attention violently, and imperiously to detain it. Each
one wishes to create a strong nervous excitement, no matter whether
agreeably or disagreeably. The fixed idea is to produce an effect at
any price.
Let us follow these folk in masquerade and with heads in character to
their dwellings. Here are at once stage properties and lumber-rooms,
rag-shops and museums. The study of the master of the house is a Gothic
hall of chivalry, with cuirasses, shields and crusading banners on the
walls; or the shop of an Oriental bazaar with Kurd carpets, Bedouin
chests, Circassian narghilehs and Indian lacquered caskets. By the
mirror on the mantelpiece are fierce or funny Japanese masks. Between
the windows are staring trophies of swords, daggers, clubs and old
wheel-trigger pistols. Daylight filters in through painted glass, where
lean saints kneel in rapture. In the drawing-room the walls are either
hung with worm-eaten Gobelin tapestry, discoloured by the sun of two
centuries (or it may be by a deftly mixed chemical bath), or covered
with Morris draperies, on which strange birds flit amongst crazily
ramping branches, and blowzy flowers coquet with vain butterflies.
Amongst armchairs and padded seats, such as the cockered bodies of our
contemporaries know and expect, there are Renaissance stools, the heart
or shell-shaped bottoms of which would attract none but the toughened
hide of a rough hero of the jousting lists. Startling is the effect
of a gilt-painted couch between buhl-work cabinets and a puckered
Chinese table, next an inlaid writing-table of graceful rococo. On
all the tables and in all the cabinets is a display of antiquities or
articles of vertù, big or small, and for the most part warranted not
genuine; a figure of Tanagra near a broken jade snuff-box, a Limoges
plate beside a long-necked Persian waterpot of brass, a _bonbonnière_
between a breviary bound in carved ivory, and snuffers of chiselled
copper. Pictures stand on easels draped with velvet, the frames made
conspicuous by some oddity, such as a spider in her web, a metal bunch
of thistle-heads, and the like. In a corner a sort of temple is erected
to a squatting or a standing Buddha. The boudoir of the mistress of
the house partakes of the nature of a chapel and of a harem. The
toilet-table is designed and decorated like an altar, a _prie-Dieu_
is a pledge for the piety of the inmate, and a broad divan, with an
orgiastic _abandon_ about the cushions, gives reassurance that things
are not so bad. In the dining-room the walls are hung with the whole
stock-in-trade of a porcelain shop, costly silver is displayed in an
old farmhouse dresser, and on the table bloom aristocratic orchids, and
proud silver vessels shine between rustic stone-ware plates and ewers.
In the evening, lamps of the stature of a man illumine these rooms with
light both subdued and tinted by sprawling shades, red, yellow or green
of hue, and even covered by black lace. Hence the inmates appear,
now bathed in variegated diaphanous mist, now suffused with coloured
radiance, while the corners and backgrounds are shrouded in depths of
artfully-effected _clair-obscur_, and the furniture and bric-à-brac
are dyed in unreal chords of colour. Unreal, too, are the studied
postures, by assuming which the inmates are enabled to reproduce on
their faces the light effects of Rembrandt or Schalcken. Everything in
these houses aims at exciting the nerves and dazzling the senses. The
disconnected and antithetical effects in all arrangements, the constant
contradiction between form and purpose, the outlandishness of most
objects, is intended to be bewildering. There must be no sentiment of
repose, such as is felt at any composition, the plan of which is easily
taken in, nor of the comfort attending a prompt comprehension of all
the details of one’s environment. He who enters here must not doze, but
be thrilled. If the master of the house roams about these rooms clothed
after the example of Balzac in a white monk’s cowl, or after the model
of Richepin in the red cloak of the robber-chieftain of an operetta, he
only gives expression to the admission that in such a comedy theatre a
clown is in place. All is discrepant, indiscriminate jumble. The unity
of abiding by one definite historic style counts as old-fashioned,
provincial, Philistine, and the time has not yet produced a style
of its own. An approach is, perhaps, made to one in the furniture
of Carabin, exhibited in the salon of the Champs de Mars. But these
balusters, down which naked furies and possessed creatures are rolling
in mad riot, these bookcases, where base and pilaster consist of a pile
of guillotined heads, and even this table, representing a gigantic open
book borne by gnomes, make up a style that is feverish and infernal. If
the director-general of Dante’s ‘Inferno’ had an audience-chamber, it
might well be furnished with such as these. Carabin’s creations may be
intended to equip a house, but they are a nightmare.
We have seen how society dresses and where it dwells. We shall now
observe how it enjoys itself, and where it seeks stimulation and
distraction. In the art exhibition it crowds, with proper little cries
of admiration, round Besnard’s women, with their grass-green hair,
faces of sulphur-yellow or fiery-red, and arms spotted in violet and
pink, dressed in a shining blue cloud resembling faintly a sort of
nightdress; that is to say, it has a fondness for bold, revolutionary
debauch of colour. But not exclusively so. Next to Besnard it worships
with equal or greater rapture the works of Puvis de Chavannes, wan,
and as though blotted out with a half-transparent wash of lime; or
those of Carrière, suffused in a problematical vapour, reeking as if
with a cloud of incense; or those of Roll, shimmering in a soft and
silvery sheen. The purple of the Manet school, steeping the whole
visible creation in bluish glamour, the half-tones, or, rather,
phantom-colours of the ‘Archaists,’ that seem to have risen, faded and
nebulous, out of some primeval tomb, and all these palettes of ‘dead
leaves,’ ‘old ivory,’ evaporating yellows, smothered purple, attract on
the whole more rapturous glances than the voluptuous ‘orchestration’
of the Besnard section. The subject of the picture leaves these
select gazers apparently indifferent; it is only seamstresses and
country-folk, the grateful _clientèle_ of the chromo, who linger over
the ‘story.’ And yet these as they pass stop by preference before
Henry Martin’s ‘Every Man and his Chimæra,’ in which bloated figures,
in an atmosphere of yellow broth, are doing incomprehensible things
that need profound explanation; or before Jean Béraud’s ‘Christ and
the Adulteress,’ where, in a Parisian dining-room, in the midst of a
company in dress-coats, and before a woman in ball-dress, a Christ
robed in correct Oriental gear, and with an orthodox halo, acts a scene
out of the Gospel; or before Raffaelli’s topers and cut-throats of the
purlieus of Paris, drawn in high relief, but painted with ditch-water
and dissolved clay. Steering in the wake of ‘society’ through a
picture-gallery, one will be unalterably convinced that they turn up
their eyes and fold their hands before pictures at which the commoner
sort burst out laughing or pull the grimace of a man who believes he
is made a fool of; and that they shrug their shoulders and hasten with
scornful exchange of looks past such as the latter pause at in grateful
enjoyment.
At opera and concert the rounded forms of ancient melody are coldly
listened to. The translucent thematic treatment of classic masters,
their conscientious observance of the laws of counterpoint, are
reckoned flat and tedious. A coda graceful in cadence, serene in its
‘dying fall,’ a pedal-base with correct harmonization, provoke yawns.
Applause and wreaths are reserved for Wagner’s _Tristan and Isolde_,
and especially the mystic _Parsifal_, for the religious music in
Bruneau’s _Dream_, or the symphonies of César Franck. Music in order
to please must either counterfeit religious devotion, or agitate the
mind by its form. The musical listener is accustomed involuntarily
to develop a little in his mind every motive occurring in a piece.
The mode in which the composer carries out his _motif_ is bound,
accordingly, to differ entirely from this anticipated development.
It must not admit of being guessed. A dissonant interval must appear
where a consonant interval was expected; if the hearer is hoping that
a phrase in what is an obvious final cadence will be spun out to its
natural end, it must be sharply interrupted in the middle of a bar.
Keys and pitch must change suddenly. In the orchestra a vigorous
polyphony must summon the attention in several directions at once;
particular instruments, or groups of instruments, must address the
listener simultaneously without heeding each other, till he gets as
nervously excited as the man who vainly endeavours to understand what
is being said in the jangle of a dozen voices. The theme, even if in
the first instance it has a distinct outline, must become ever more
indefinite, ever more dissolving into a mist, in which the imagination
can see any forms it likes, as in driving clouds of night. The tide of
sound must flow on without any perceptible limit or goal, surging up
and down in endless chromatic passages of triplets. If now and then
it delude the listener, borne along by it, and straining his eyes to
see land with glimpses of a distant shore, this is soon discovered to
be a fleeting mirage. The music must continually promise, but never
perform; must seem about to tell some great secret, and grow dumb or
break away ere to throbbing hearts it tells the word they wait for. The
audience go to their concert-room in quest of Tantalus moods, and leave
it with all the nervous exhaustion of a young pair of lovers, who for
hours at the nightly tryst have sought to exchange caresses through a
closely-barred window.
The books in which the public here depicted finds its delight or
edification diffuse a curious perfume yielding distinguishable odours
of incense, eau de Lubin and refuse, one or the other preponderating
alternately. Mere sewage exhalations are played out. The filth of
Zola’s art and of his disciples in literary canal-dredging has been
got over, and nothing remains for it but to turn to submerged peoples
and social strata. The vanguard of civilization holds its nose at the
pit of undiluted naturalism, and can only be brought to bend over it
with sympathy and curiosity when, by cunning engineering, a drain from
the boudoir and the sacristy has been turned into it. Mere sensuality
passes as commonplace, and only finds admission when disguised as
something unnatural and degenerate. Books treating of the relations
between the sexes, with no matter how little reserve, seem too dully
moral. Elegant titillation only begins where normal sexual relations
leave off. Priapus has become a symbol of virtue. Vice looks to Sodom
and Lesbos, to Bluebeard’s castle and the servants’ hall of the
‘divine’ Marquis de Sade’s _Justine_, for its embodiments.
The book that would be fashionable must, above all, be obscure. The
intelligible is cheap goods for the million only. It must further
discourse in a certain pulpit tone--mildly unctuous, not too
insistent; and it must follow up risky scenes by tearful outpourings
of love for the lowly and the suffering, or glowing transports of
piety. Ghost-stories are very popular, but they must come on in
scientific disguise, as hypnotism, telepathy, somnambulism. So are
marionette-plays, in which seemingly naïve but knowing rogues make
used-up old ballad dummies babble like babies or idiots. So are
esoteric novels, in which the author hints that he could say a deal
about magic, kabbala, fakirism, astrology and other white and black
arts if he only chose. Readers intoxicate themselves in the hazy
word-sequences of symbolic poetry. Ibsen dethrones Goethe; Maeterlinck
ranks with Shakespeare; Nietzsche is pronounced by German and even
by French critics to be the leading German writer of the day; the
_Kreutzer Sonata_ is the Bible of ladies, who are amateurs in love,
but bereft of lovers; dainty gentlemen find the street ballads and
gaol-bird songs of Jules Jouy, Bruant, MacNab and Xanroff very
_distingué_ on account of ‘the warm sympathy pulsing in them,’ as the
stock phrase runs; and society persons, whose creed is limited to
baccarat and the money market, make pilgrimages to the Oberammergau
Passion-play, and wipe away a tear over Paul Verlaine’s invocations to
the Virgin.
But art exhibitions, concerts, plays and books, however extraordinary,
do not suffice for the æsthetic needs of elegant society. Novel
sensations alone can satisfy it. It demands more intense stimulus,
and hopes for it in spectacles, where different arts strive in new
combinations to affect all the senses at once. Poets and artists
strain every nerve incessantly to satisfy this craving. A painter, who
for that matter is less occupied with new impressions than with old
puffs, paints a picture indifferently well of the dying Mozart working
at his _Requiem_, and exhibits it of an evening in a darkened room,
while a dazzling ray of skilfully directed electric light falls on
the painting, and an invisible orchestra softly plays the _Requiem_.
A musician goes one step further. Developing to the utmost a Bayreuth
usage, he arranges a concert in a totally darkened hall, and thus
delights those of the audience who find opportunity, by happily
chosen juxtapositions, to augment their musical sensations by hidden
enjoyment of another sort. Haraucourt, the poet, has his paraphrase of
the Gospel, written in spirited verse, recited on the stage by Sarah
Bernhardt, while, as in the old-fashioned melodrama, soft music in
unending melody accompanies the actress. Even the nose, hitherto basely
ignored by the fine arts, attracts the pioneers, and is by them invited
to take part in æsthetic delights. A hose is set up in the theatre, by
which the spectators are sprayed with perfumes. On the stage a poem in
approximately dramatic form is recited. In every division, act, scene,
or however the thing is called, a different vowel-sound is made to
preponderate; during each the theatre is illuminated with a differently
tinted light, the orchestra discourses music in a different key, and
the jet gives out a different perfume. This idea of accompanying verses
with odours was thrown out years ago, half in jest, by Ernest Eckstein.
Paris has carried it out in sacred earnest. The new school fetch the
puppet theatre out of the nursery, and enact pieces for adults which,
with artificial simplicity, pretend to hide or reveal a profound
meaning, and with great talent and ingenuity execute a magic-lantern of
prettily drawn and painted figures moving across surprisingly luminous
backgrounds; and these living pictures make visible the process of
thought in the mind of the author who recites his accompanying poem,
while a piano endeavours to illustrate the leading emotion. And to
enjoy such exhibitions as these society crowds into a suburban circus,
the loft of a back tenement, a second-hand costumier’s shop, or a
fantastic artist’s restaurant, where the performances, in some room
consecrated to beery potations, bring together the greasy _habitué_ and
the dainty aristocratic fledgling.
CHAPTER III.
DIAGNOSIS.
THE manifestations described in the preceding chapter must be patent
enough to everyone, be he never so narrow a Philistine. The Philistine,
however, regards them as a passing fashion and nothing more; for him
the current terms, caprice, eccentricity, affectation of novelty,
imitation, instinct, afford a sufficient explanation. The purely
literary mind, whose merely æsthetic culture does not enable him to
understand the connections of things, and to seize their real meaning,
deceives himself and others as to his ignorance by means of sounding
phrases, and loftily talks of a ‘restless quest of a new ideal by the
modern spirit,’ ‘the richer vibrations of the refined nervous system
of the present day,’ ‘the unknown sensations of an elect mind.’ But
the physician, especially if he have devoted himself to the special
study of nervous and mental maladies, recognises at a glance, in the
_fin-de-siècle_ disposition, in the tendencies of contemporary art and
poetry, in the life and conduct of the men who write mystic, symbolic
and ‘decadent’ works, and the attitude taken by their admirers in the
tastes and æsthetic instincts of fashionable society, the confluence
of two well-defined conditions of disease, with which he is quite
familiar, viz. degeneration (degeneracy) and hysteria, of which the
minor stages are designated as neurasthenia. These two conditions of
the organism differ from each other, yet have many features in common,
and frequently occur together; so that it is easier to observe them in
their composite forms, than each in isolation.
The conception of degeneracy, which, at this time, obtains throughout
the science of mental disease, was first clearly grasped and formulated
by Morel. In his principal work--often quoted, but, unfortunately, not
sufficiently read[4]--the following definition of what he wishes to be
understood by ‘degeneracy’ is given by this distinguished expert in
mental pathology, who was, for a short time, famous in Germany, even
outside professional circles.[5]
‘The clearest notion we can form of degeneracy is to regard it as _a
morbid deviation from an original type_. This deviation, even if, at
the outset, it was ever so slight, contained transmissible elements of
such a nature that anyone bearing in him the germs becomes more and
more incapable of fulfilling his functions in the world; and mental
progress, already checked in his own person, finds itself menaced also
in his descendants.’
When under any kind of noxious influences an organism becomes
debilitated, its successors will not resemble the healthy, normal
type of the species, with capacities for development, but will form
a new sub-species, which, like all others, possesses the capacity of
transmitting to its offspring, in a continuously increasing degree, its
peculiarities, these being morbid deviations from the normal form--gaps
in development, malformations and infirmities. That which distinguishes
degeneracy from the formation of new species (phylogeny) is, that the
morbid variation does not continuously subsist and propagate itself,
like one that is healthy, but, fortunately, is soon rendered sterile,
and after a few generations often dies out before it reaches the lowest
grade of organic degradation.[6]
Degeneracy betrays itself among men in certain physical
characteristics, which are denominated ‘stigmata,’ or brand-marks--an
unfortunate term derived from a false idea, as if degeneracy were
necessarily the consequence of a fault, and the indication of it a
punishment. Such stigmata consist of deformities, multiple and stunted
growths in the first line of asymmetry, the unequal development of
the two halves of the face and cranium; then imperfection in the
development of the external ear, which is conspicuous for its enormous
size, or protrudes from the head, like a handle, and the lobe of which
is either lacking or adhering to the head, and the helix of which is
not involuted; further, squint-eyes, hare-lips, irregularities in the
form and position of the teeth; pointed or flat palates, webbed or
supernumerary fingers (syn-and polydactylia), etc. In the book from
which I have quoted, Morel gives a list of the anatomical phenomena of
degeneracy, which later observers have largely extended. In particular,
Lombroso[7] has conspicuously broadened our knowledge of stigmata,
but he apportions them merely to his ‘born criminals’--a limitation
which from the very scientific standpoint of Lombroso himself cannot
be justified, his ‘born criminals’ being nothing but a subdivision of
degenerates. Féré[8] expresses this very emphatically when he says,
‘Vice, crime and madness are only distinguished from each other by
social prejudices.’
There might be a sure means of proving that the application of the term
‘degenerates’ to the originators of all the _fin-de-siècle_ movements
in art and literature is not arbitrary, that it is no baseless conceit,
but a fact; and that would be a careful physical examination of the
persons concerned, and an inquiry into their pedigree. In almost all
cases, relatives would be met with who were undoubtedly degenerate, and
one or more stigmata discovered which would indisputably establish the
diagnosis of ‘Degeneration.’ Of course, from human consideration, the
result of such an inquiry could often not be made public; and he alone
would be convinced who should be able to undertake it himself.
Science, however, has found, together with these physical stigmata,
others of a mental order, which betoken degeneracy quite as clearly as
the former; and they allow of an easy demonstration from all the vital
manifestations, and, in particular, from all the works of degenerates,
so that it is not necessary to measure the cranium of an author, or to
see the lobe of a painter’s ear, in order to recognise the fact that he
belongs to the class of degenerates.
Quite a number of different designations have been found for these
persons. Maudsley and Ball call them ‘Borderland dwellers’--that is to
say, dwellers on the borderland between reason and pronounced madness.
Magnan gives to them the name of ‘higher degenerates’ (_dégénérés
supérieurs_), and Lombroso speaks of ‘mattoids’ (from _matto_, the
Italian for insane), and ‘graphomaniacs,’ under which he classifies
those semi-insane persons who feel a strong impulse to write. In spite,
however, of this variety of nomenclature, it is a question simply of
one single species of individuals, who betray their fellowship by the
similarity of their mental physiognomy.
In the mental development of degenerates, we meet with the same
irregularity that we have observed in their physical growth. The
asymmetry of face and cranium finds, as it were, its counterpart in
their mental faculties. Some of the latter are completely stunted,
others morbidly exaggerated. That which nearly all degenerates lack is
the sense of morality and of right and wrong. For them there exists no
law, no decency, no modesty. In order to satisfy any momentary impulse,
or inclination, or caprice, they commit crimes and trespasses with the
greatest calmness and self-complacency, and do not comprehend that
other persons take offence thereat. When this phenomenon is present in
a high degree, we speak of ‘moral insanity’ with Maudsley;[9] there
are, nevertheless, lower stages in which the degenerate does not,
perhaps, himself commit any act which will bring him into conflict with
the criminal code, but at least asserts the theoretical legitimacy of
crime; seeks, with philosophically sounding fustian, to prove that
‘good’ and ‘evil,’ virtue and vice, are arbitrary distinctions; goes
into raptures over evildoers and their deeds; professes to discover
beauties in the lowest and most repulsive things; and tries to awaken
interest in, and so-called ‘comprehension’ of, every bestiality.
The two psychological roots of moral insanity, in all its degrees
of development, are, firstly, unbounded egoism,[10] and, secondly,
impulsiveness[11]--_i.e._, inability to resist a sudden impulse to any
deed; and these characteristics also constitute the chief intellectual
stigmata of degenerates. In the following sections of this work, I
shall find occasion to show on what organic grounds, and in consequence
of what peculiarities of their brain and nervous system, degenerates
are necessarily egoistical and impulsive. In these introductory remarks
I would wish only to point out the stigma itself.
Another mental stigma of degenerates is their emotionalism.
Morel[12] has even wished to make this peculiarity their chief
characteristic--erroneously, it seems to me, for it is present in the
same degree among hysterics, and, indeed, is to be found in perfectly
healthy persons, who, from any transient cause, such as illness,
exhaustion, or any mental shock, have been temporarily weakened.
Nevertheless it is a phenomenon rarely absent in a degenerate. He
laughs until he sheds tears, or weeps copiously without adequate
occasion; a commonplace line of poetry or of prose sends a shudder
down his back; he falls into raptures before indifferent pictures
or statues; and music especially, even the most insipid and least
commendable, arouses in him the most vehement emotions. He is quite
proud of being so vibrant a musical instrument, and boasts that where
the Philistine remains completely cold, he feels his inner self
confounded, the depths of his being broken up, and the bliss of the
Beautiful possessing him to the tips of his fingers. His excitability
appears to him a mark of superiority; he believes himself to be
possessed by a peculiar insight lacking in other mortals, and he is
fain to despise the vulgar herd for the dulness and narrowness of their
minds. The unhappy creature does not suspect that he is conceited
about a disease and boasting of a derangement of the mind; and certain
silly critics, when, through fear of being pronounced deficient in
comprehension, they make desperate efforts to share the emotions of
a degenerate in regard to some insipid or ridiculous production, or
when they praise in exaggerated expressions the beauties which the
degenerate asserts he finds therein, are unconsciously simulating one
of the stigmata of semi-insanity.
Besides moral insanity and emotionalism, there is to be observed in
the degenerate a condition of mental weakness and despondency, which,
according to the circumstances of his life, assumes the form of
pessimism, a vague fear of all men, and of the entire phenomenon of
the universe, or self-abhorrence. ‘These patients,’ says Morel,[13]
‘feel perpetually compelled ... to commiserate themselves, to sob, to
repeat with the most desperate monotony the same questions and words.
They have delirious presentations of ruin and damnation, and all
sorts of imaginary fears.’ ‘Ennui never quits me,’ said a patient of
this kind, whose case Roubinovitch[14] describes, ‘ennui of myself.’
‘Among moral stigmata,’ says the same author,[15] ‘there are also to
be specified those undefinable apprehensions manifested by degenerates
when they see, smell, or touch any object.’ And he further[16] calls
to notice ‘their unconscious fear of everything and everyone.’ In this
picture of the sufferer from melancholia; downcast, sombre, despairing
of himself and the world, tortured by fear of the Unknown, menaced
by undefined but dreadful dangers, we recognise in every detail the
man of the Dusk of the Nations and the _fin-de-siècle_ frame of mind,
described in the first chapter.
With this characteristic dejectedness of the degenerate, there
is combined, as a rule, a disinclination to action of any kind,
attaining possibly to abhorrence of activity and powerlessness to will
(_aboulia_). Now, it is a peculiarity of the human mind, known to every
psychologist, that, inasmuch as the law of causality governs a man’s
whole thought, he imputes a rational basis to all his own decisions.
This was prettily expressed by Spinoza when he said: ‘If a stone flung
by a human hand could think, it would certainly imagine that it flew
because it wished to fly.’ Many mental conditions and operations of
which we become conscious are the result of causes which do not reach
our consciousness. In this case we fabricate causes _a posteriori_ for
them, satisfying our mental need of distinct causality, and we have
no trouble in persuading ourselves that we have now truly explained
them. The degenerate who shuns action, and is without will-power, has
no suspicion that his incapacity for action is a consequence of his
inherited deficiency of brain. He deceives himself into believing
that he despises action from free determination, and takes pleasure
in inactivity; and, in order to justify himself in his own eyes, he
constructs a philosophy of renunciation and of contempt for the world
and men, asserts that he has convinced himself of the excellence of
Quietism, calls himself with consummate self-consciousness a Buddhist,
and praises Nirvana in poetically eloquent phrases as the highest and
worthiest ideal of the human mind. The degenerate and insane are the
predestined disciples of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, and need only to
acquire a knowledge of Buddhism to become converts to it.
With the incapacity for action there is connected the predilection
for inane reverie. The degenerate is not in a condition to fix his
attention long, or indeed at all, on any subject, and is equally
incapable of correctly grasping, ordering, or elaborating into ideas
and judgments the impressions of the external world conveyed to his
distracted consciousness by his defectively operating senses. It is
easier and more convenient for him to allow his brain-centres to
produce semi-lucid, nebulously blurred ideas and inchoate embryonic
thoughts, and to surrender himself to the perpetual obfuscation of a
boundless, aimless, and shoreless stream of fugitive ideas; and he
rarely rouses himself to the painful attempt to check or counteract the
capricious, and, as a rule, purely mechanical associations of ideas
and succession of images, and bring under discipline the disorderly
tumult of his fluid presentations. On the contrary, he rejoices in
his faculty of imagination, which he contrasts with the insipidity of
the Philistine, and devotes himself with predilection to all sorts
of unlicensed pursuits permitted by the unshackled vagabondage of
his mind; while he cannot endure well-ordered civil occupations,
requiring attention and constant heed to reality. He calls this ‘having
an idealist temperament,’ ascribes to himself irresistible æsthetic
propinquities, and proudly styles himself an artist.[17]
We will briefly mention some peculiarities frequently manifested
by a degenerate. He is tormented by doubts, seeks for the basis of
all phenomena, especially those whose first causes are completely
inaccessible to us, and is unhappy when his inquiries and ruminations
lead, as is natural, to no result.[18] He is ever supplying new
recruits to the army of system-inventing metaphysicians, profound
expositors of the riddle of the universe, seekers for the philosopher’s
stone, the squaring of the circle and perpetual motion.[19] These
last three subjects have such a special attraction for him, that
the Patent Office at Washington is forced to keep on hand printed
replies to the numberless memorials in which patents are constantly
demanded for the solution of these chimerical problems. In view of
Lombroso’s researches,[20] it can scarcely be doubted that the writings
and acts of revolutionists and anarchists are also attributable to
degeneracy. The degenerate is incapable of adapting himself to existing
circumstances. This incapacity, indeed, is an indication of morbid
variation in every species, and probably a primary cause of their
sudden extinction. He therefore rebels against conditions and views of
things which he necessarily feels to be painful, chiefly because they
impose upon him the duty of self-control, of which he is incapable on
account of his organic weakness of will. Thus he becomes an improver of
the world, and devises plans for making mankind happy, which, without
exception, are conspicuous quite as much by their fervent philanthropy,
and often pathetic sincerity, as by their absurdity and monstrous
ignorance of all real relations.
Finally, a cardinal mark of degeneration which I have reserved
to the last, is mysticism. Colin says:[21] ‘Of all the delirious
manifestations peculiar to the hereditarily-afflicted, none indicates
the condition more clearly, we think, than mystical delirium, or, when
the malady has not reached this point, the being constantly occupied
with mystical and religious questions, an exaggerated piety, etc.’ I
will not here multiply evidence and quotations. In the following books,
where the art and poetry of the times are treated of, I shall find
occasion to show the reader that no difference exists between these
tendencies and the religious manias observed in nearly all degenerates
and sufferers from hereditary mental taint.
I have enumerated the most important features characterizing the
mental condition of the degenerate. The reader can now judge for
himself whether or not the diagnosis ‘degeneration’ is applicable to
the originators of the new æsthetic tendencies. It must not for that
matter be supposed that degeneration is synonymous with absence of
talent. Nearly all the inquirers who have had degenerates under their
observation expressly establish the contrary. ‘The degenerate,’ says
Legrain,[22] ‘may be a genius. A badly balanced mind is susceptible
of the highest conceptions, while, on the other hand, one meets in
the same mind with traits of meanness and pettiness all the more
striking from the fact that they co-exist with the most brilliant
qualities.’ We shall find this reservation in all authors who have
contributed to the natural history of the degenerate. ‘As regards
their intellect, they can,’ says Roubinovitch,[23] ‘attain to a high
degree of development, but from a moral point of view their existence
is completely deranged.... A degenerate will employ his brilliant
faculties quite as well in the service of some grand object as in the
satisfaction of the basest propensities.’ Lombroso[24] has cited a
large number of undoubted geniuses who were equally undoubted mattoids,
graphomaniacs, or pronounced lunatics; and the utterance of a French
savant, Guérinsen, ‘Genius is a disease of the nerves,’ has become a
‘winged word.’ This expression was imprudent, for it gave ignorant
babblers a pretext, and apparently a right, to talk of exaggeration,
and to contemn experts in nervous and mental diseases, because they
professedly saw a lunatic in everyone who ventured to be something more
than the most ordinary, characterless, average being. Science does
not assert that every genius is a lunatic; there are some geniuses of
superabundant power whose high privilege consists in the possession
of one or other extraordinarily developed faculty, without the rest
of their faculties falling short of the average standard. Just as
little, naturally, is every lunatic a genius; most of them, even if
we disregard idiots of different degrees, are much rather pitiably
stupid and incapable; but in many, nay, in abundant cases, the ‘higher
degenerate’ of Magnan, just as he occasionally exhibits gigantic bodily
stature or the disproportionate growth of particular parts, has some
mental gift exceptionally developed at the cost, it is true, of the
remaining faculties, which are wholly or partially atrophied.[25] It
is this which enables the well-informed to distinguish at the first
glance between the sane genius, and the highly, or even the most
highly, gifted degenerate. Take from the former the special capacity
through which he becomes a genius, and there still remains a capable,
often conspicuously intelligent, clever, moral, and judicious man,
who will hold his ground with propriety in our social mechanism. Let
the same be tried in the case of a degenerate, and there remains only
a criminal or madman, for whom healthy humanity can find no use. If
Goethe had never written a line of verse, he would, all the same,
have still remained a man of the world, of good principles, a fine
art connoisseur, a judicious collector, a keen observer of nature.
Let us, on the contrary, imagine a Schopenhauer who had written no
astounding books, and we should have before us only a repulsive
_lusus naturæ_, whose morals would necessarily exclude him from all
respectable society, and whose fixed idea that he was a victim of
persecution would point him out as a subject for a madhouse. The
lack of harmony, the absence of balance, the singular incapacity of
usefully applying, or deriving satisfaction from, their own special
faculty among highly-gifted degenerates, strikes every healthy censor
who does not allow himself to be prejudiced by the noisy admiration
of critics, themselves degenerates: and will always prevent his
mistaking the mattoid for the same exceptional man who opens out new
paths for humanity and leads it to higher developments. I do not
share Lombroso’s opinion[26] that highly-gifted degenerates are an
active force in the progress of mankind. They corrupt and delude;
they do, alas! frequently exercise a deep influence, but this is
always a baneful one. It may not be at once remarked, but it will
reveal itself subsequently. If cotemporaries do not recognise it, the
historian of morals will point it out _a posteriori_. They, likewise,
are leading men along the paths they themselves have found to new
goals; but these goals are abysses or waste places. They are guides
to swamps like will-o’-the-wisps, or to ruin like the ratcatcher of
Hammelin. Observers lay stress on their unnatural sterility. ‘They
are,’ says Tarabaud,[27] ‘cranks; wrong-headed, unbalanced, incapable
creatures; they belong to the class of whom it may not be said that
they have no mind, but whose mind produces nothing.’ ‘A common type,’
writes Legrain,[28] ‘unites them:--weakness of judgment and unequal
development of mental powers.... Their conceptions are never of a
high order. They are incapable of great thoughts and prolific ideas.
This fact forms a peculiar contrast to the frequently excessive
development of their powers of imagination.’ ‘If they are painters,’
we read in Lombroso,[29] ‘then their predominant attribute will be the
colour-sense; they will be decorative. If they are poets, they will be
rich in rhyme, brilliant in style, but barren of thought; sometimes
they will be “decadents.”’
Such are the qualities of the most gifted of those who are discovering
new paths, and are proclaimed by enthusiastic followers as the guides
to the promised land of the future. Among them degenerates and mattoids
predominate. The second of the above-mentioned diagnoses, on the
contrary, applies for the most part to the multitude who admire these
individuals and swear by them, who imitate the fashions they design,
and take delight in the extravagances described in the previous
chapter. In their case we have to deal chiefly with hysteria, or
neurasthenia.
For reasons which will be elucidated in the next chapter, hysteria has
hitherto been less studied in Germany than in France, where, more than
elsewhere, it has formed a subject of earnest inquiry. We owe what we
know of it almost exclusively to French investigators. The copious
treatises of Axenfeld,[30] Richer,[31] and in particular Gilles de la
Tourette,[32] adequately comprise our present knowledge of this malady;
and I shall refer to these works when I enumerate the symptoms chiefly
indicative of hysteria.
Among the hysterical--and it must not be thought that these are met
with exclusively, or even preponderantly, among females, for they are
quite as often, perhaps oftener, found among males[33]--among the
hysterical, as among the degenerate, the first thing which strikes us
is an extraordinary emotionalism. ‘The leading characteristic of the
hysterical,’ says Colin,[34] ‘is the disproportionate impressionability
of their psychic centres.... They are, above all things,
impressionable.’ From this primary peculiarity proceeds a second quite
as remarkable and important--the exceeding ease with which they can be
made to yield to suggestion.[35] The earlier observers always mentioned
the boundless mendacity of the hysterical; growing, indeed, quite
indignant at it, and making it the most prominent mark of the mental
condition of such patients. They were mistaken. The hysterical subject
does not consciously lie. He believes in the truth of his craziest
inventions. The morbid mobility of his mind, the excessive excitability
of his imagination, conveys to his consciousness all sorts of queer and
senseless ideas. He suggests to himself that these ideas are founded on
true perceptions, and believes in the truth of his foolish inventions
until a new suggestion--perhaps his own, perhaps that of another
person--has ejected the earlier one. A result of the susceptibility
of the hysterical subject to suggestion is his irresistible passion
for imitation,[36] and the eagerness with which he yields to all the
suggestions of writers and artists.[37] When he sees a picture, he
wants to become like it in attitude and dress; when he reads a book,
he adopts its views blindly. He takes as a pattern the heroes of the
novels which he has in his hand at the moment, and infuses himself into
the characters moving before him on the stage.
Added to this emotionalism and susceptibility to suggestion is a love
of self never met with in a sane person in anything like the same
degree. The hysterical person’s own ‘I’ towers up before his inner
vision, and so completely fills his mental horizon that it conceals the
whole of the remaining universe. He cannot endure that others should
ignore him. He desires to be as important to his fellow-men as he is
to himself. ‘An incessant need pursues and governs the hysterical--to
busy those about them with themselves.’[38] A means of satisfying this
need is the fabrication of stories by which they become interesting.
Hence come the adventurous occurrences which often enough occupy the
police and the reports of the daily press. In the busiest thoroughfare
the hysterical person is set upon, robbed, maltreated and wounded,
dragged to a distant place, and left to die. He picks himself up
painfully, and informs the police. He can show the wounds on his body.
He gives all the details. And there is not a single word of truth
in the whole story; it is all dreamt and imagined. He has himself
inflicted his wounds in order for a short time to become the centre
of public attention. In the lower stages of hysteria this need of
making a sensation assumes more harmless forms. It displays itself in
eccentricities of dress and behaviour. ‘Other hysterical subjects are
passionately fond of glaring colours and extravagant forms; they wish
to attract attention and make themselves talked about.’[39]
It is certainly unnecessary to draw the reader’s attention in a
special manner to the complete coincidence of this clinical picture
of hysteria with the description of the peculiarities of the
_fin-de-siècle_ public, and to the fact that in the former we meet
with all the features made familiar to us by the consideration of
contemporary phenomena; in particular with the passion for imitating
in externals--in dress, attitude, fashion of the hair and beard--the
figures in old and modern pictures, and the feverish effort, through
any sort of singularity, to make themselves talked about. The
observation of pronounced cases of degeneration and hysteria, whose
condition makes them necessary subjects for medical treatment, gives
us also the key to the comprehension of subordinate details in the
fashions of the day. The present rage for collecting, the piling up,
in dwellings, of aimless bric-à-brac, which does not become any more
useful or beautiful by being fondly called _bibelots_, appear to us in
a completely new light when we know that Magnan has established the
existence of an irresistible desire among the degenerate to accumulate
useless trifles. It is so firmly imprinted and so peculiar that Magnan
declares it to be a stigma of degeneration, and has invented for it
the name ‘oniomania,’ or ‘buying craze.’ This is not to be confounded
with the desire for buying, which possesses those who are in the first
stage of general paralysis. The purchases of these persons are due to
their delusion as to their own greatness. They lay in great supplies
because they fancy themselves millionaires. The oniomaniac, on the
contrary, neither buys enormous quantities of one and the same thing,
nor is the price a matter of indifference to him as with the paralytic.
He is simply unable to pass by any lumber without feeling an impulse to
acquire it.
The curious style of certain recent painters--‘impressionists,’
‘stipplers,’ or ‘mosaists,’ ‘papilloteurs’ or ‘quiverers,’ ‘roaring’
colourists, dyers in gray and faded tints--becomes at once intelligible
to us if we keep in view the researches of the Charcot school into the
visual derangements in degeneration and hysteria. The painters who
assure us that they are sincere, and reproduce nature as they see it,
speak the truth. The degenerate artist who suffers from _nystagmus_,
or trembling of the eyeball, will, in fact, perceive the phenomena of
nature trembling, restless, devoid of firm outline, and, if he is a
conscientious painter, will give us pictures reminding us of the mode
practised by the draughtsmen of the _Fliegende Blätter_ when they
represent a wet dog shaking himself vigorously. If his pictures fail to
produce a comic effect, it is only because the attentive beholder reads
in them the desperate effort to reproduce fully an impression incapable
of reproduction by the expedients of the painter’s art as devised by
men of normal vision.
There is hardly a hysterical subject whose retina is not partly
insensitive.[40] As a rule the insensitive parts are connected, and
include the outer half of the retina. In these cases the field of
vision is more or less contracted, and appears to him not as it does to
the normal man--as a circle--but as a picture bordered by whimsically
zigzag lines. Often, however, the insensitive parts are not connected,
but are scattered in isolated spots over the entire retina. Then the
sufferer will have all sorts of gaps in his field of vision, producing
strange effects, and if he paints what he sees, he will be inclined
to place in juxtaposition larger or smaller points or spots which
are completely or partially dissociated. The insensitiveness need
not be complete, and may exist only in the case of single colours,
or of all. If the sensitiveness is completely lost (‘achromatopsy’)
he then sees everything in a uniform gray, but perceives differences
in the degree of lustre. Hence the picture of nature presents itself
to him as a copper-plate or a pencil drawing--where the effect of
the absent colours is replaced by differences in the intensity of
light, by greater or less depth and power of the white and black
portions. Painters who are insensitive to colour will naturally have a
predilection for neutral-toned painting; and a public suffering from
the same malady will find nothing objectionable in falsely-coloured
pictures. But if, besides the whitewash of a Puvis de Chavannes,
obliterating all colours equally, fanatics are found for the screaming
yellow, blue, and red of a Besnard, this also has a cause, revealed to
us by clinical science. ‘Yellow and blue,’ Gilles de la Tourette[41]
teaches us, ‘are peripheral colours’ (_i.e._, they are seen with
the outermost parts of the retina); ‘they are, therefore, the last
to be perceived’ (if the sensitiveness for the remaining colours is
destroyed). ‘These are ... the very two colours the sensations of which
in hysterical amblyopia [dulness of vision] endure the longest. In many
cases, however, it is the red, and not the blue, which vanishes last.’
Red has also another peculiarity explanatory of the predilection
shown for it by the hysterical. The experiments of Binet[42] have
established that the impressions conveyed to the brain by the sensory
nerves exercise an important influence on the species and strength
of the excitation distributed by the brain to the motor nerves.
Many sense-impressions operate enervatingly and inhibitively on the
movements; others, on the contrary, make these more powerful, rapid and
active; they are ‘dynamogenous,’ or ‘force-producing.’ As a feeling
of pleasure is always connected with dynamogeny, or the production
of force, every living thing, therefore, instinctively seeks for
dynamogenous sense-impressions, and avoids enervating and inhibitive
ones. Now, red is especially dynamogenous. ‘When,’ says Binet,[43]
in a report of an experiment on a female hysterical subject who was
paralyzed in one half of her body, ‘we place a dynamometer in the
anæsthetically insensible right hand of Amélie Cle.... the pressure of
the hand amounts to 12 kilogrammes. If at the same time she is made to
look at a red disc, the number indicating the pressure in kilogrammes
is at once doubled.’ Hence it is intelligible that hysterical painters
revel in red, and that hysterical beholders take special pleasure in
pictures operating dynamogenously, and producing feelings of pleasure.
If red is dynamogenous, violet is conversely enervating and
inhibitive.[44] It was not by accident that violet was chosen by
many nations as the exclusive colour for mourning, and by us also
for half-mourning. The sight of this colour has a depressing effect,
and the unpleasant feeling awakened by it induces dejection in a
sorrowfully-disposed mind. This suggests that painters suffering from
hysteria and neurasthenia will be inclined to cover their pictures
uniformly with the colour most in accordance with their condition of
lassitude and exhaustion. Thus originate the violet pictures of Manet
and his school, which spring from no actually observable aspect of
nature, but from a subjective view due to the condition of the nerves.
When the entire surface of walls in salons and art exhibitions of the
day appears veiled in uniform half-mourning, this predilection for
violet is simply an expression of the nervous debility of the painter.
There is yet another phenomenon highly characteristic in some cases
of degeneracy, in others of hysteria. This is the formation of close
groups or schools uncompromisingly exclusive to outsiders, observable
to-day in literature and art. Healthy artists or authors, in possession
of minds in a condition of well-regulated equilibrium, will never think
of grouping themselves into an association, which may at pleasure be
termed a sect or band; of devising a catechism, of binding themselves
to definite æsthetic dogmas, and of entering the lists for these
with the fanatical intolerance of Spanish inquisitors. If any human
activity is individualistic, it is that of the artist. True talent
is always personal. In its creations it reproduces itself, its own
views and feelings, and not the articles of faith learnt from any
æsthetic apostle; it follows its creative impulses, not a theoretical
formula preached by the founder of a new artistic or literary church;
it constructs its work in the form organically necessary to it, not
in that proclaimed by a leader as demanded by the fashion of the day.
The mere fact that an artist or author allows himself to be sworn in
to the party cry of any ‘ism,’ that he perambulates with jubilations
behind a banner and Turkish music, is complete evidence of his lack
of individuality--that is, of talent. If the mental movements of a
period--even those which are healthy and prolific--range themselves,
as a rule, under certain main tendencies, which receive each its
distinguishing name, this is the work of historians of civilization or
literature, who subsequently survey the combined picture of an epoch,
and for their own convenience undertake divisions and classifications,
in order that they may more correctly find their way among the
multifariousness of the phenomena. These are, however, almost always
arbitrary and artificial. Independent minds (we are not here speaking
of mere imitators), united by a good critic into a group, may, it is
true, have a certain resemblance to each other, but, as a rule, this
resemblance will be the consequence, not of actual internal affinity,
but of external influences. No one is able completely to withdraw
himself from the influences of his time, and under the impression
of events which affect all contemporaries alike, as well as of the
scientific views prevailing at a given time, certain features develop
themselves in all the works of an epoch, which stamp them as of the
same date. But the same men who subsequently appear so naturally in
each other’s company, in historical works, that they seem to form a
family, went when they lived their separate ways far asunder, little
suspecting that at one time they would be united under one common
designation. Quite otherwise it is when authors or artists consciously
and intentionally meet together and found an æsthetic school, as a
joint-stock bank is founded, with a title for which, if possible, the
protection of the law is claimed, with by-laws, joint capital, etc.
This may be ordinary speculation, but as a rule it is disease. The
predilection for forming societies met with among all the degenerate
and hysterical may assume different forms. Criminals unite in bands, as
Lombroso expressly establishes.[45] Among pronounced lunatics it is the
_folie à deux_, in which a deranged person completely forces his insane
ideas on a companion; among the hysterical it assumes the form of close
friendships, causing Charcot to repeat at every opportunity: ‘Persons
of highly-strung nerves attract each other;’[46] and finally authors
found schools.
The common organic basis of these different forms of one and the same
phenomenon--of the _folie à deux_, the association of neuropaths,
the founding of æsthetic schools, the banding of criminals--is, with
the active part, viz., those who lead and inspire, the predominance
of obsessions: with the associates, the disciples, the submissive
part, weakness of will and morbid susceptibility to suggestion.[47]
The possessor of an obsession is an incomparable apostle. There is no
rational conviction arrived at by sound labour of intellect, which so
completely takes possession of the mind, subjugates so tyrannically
its entire activity, and so irresistibly impels it to words and deeds,
as delirium. Every proof of the senselessness of his ideas rebounds
from the deliriously insane or half-crazy person. No contradiction,
no ridicule, no contempt, affects him; the opinion of the majority
is to him a matter of indifference; facts which do not please him
he does not notice, or so interprets that they seem to support his
delirium; obstacles do not discourage him, because even his instinct
of self-preservation is unable to cope with the power of his delirium,
and for the same reason he is often enough ready, without further ado,
to suffer martyrdom. Weak-minded or mentally-unbalanced persons, coming
into contact with a man possessed by delirium, are at once conquered
by the strength of his diseased ideas, and are converted to them. By
separating them from the source of inspiration, it is often possible to
cure them of their transmitted delirium, but frequently their acquired
derangement outlasts this separation.
This is the natural history of the æsthetic schools. Under the
influence of an obsession, a degenerate mind promulgates some doctrine
or other--realism, pornography, mysticism, symbolism, diabolism. He
does this with vehement penetrating eloquence, with eagerness and
fiery heedlessness. Other degenerate, hysterical, neurasthenical minds
flock around him, receive from his lips the new doctrine, and live
thenceforth only to propagate it.
In this case all the participants are sincere--the founder as well as
the disciples. They act as, in consequence of the diseased constitution
of their brain and nervous system, they are compelled to act. The
picture, however, which from a clinical standpoint is perfectly
clear, gets dimmed if the apostle of a craze and his followers
succeed in attracting to themselves the attention of wider circles.
He then receives a concourse of unbelievers, who are very well able
to recognise the insanity of the new doctrine, but who nevertheless
accept it, because they hope, as associates of the new sect, to acquire
fame and money. In every civilized nation which has a developed art
and literature there are numerous intellectual eunuchs, incapable
of producing with their own powers a living mental work, but quite
able to imitate the process of production. These cripples form,
unfortunately, the majority of professional authors and artists, and
their many noxious followers often enough stifle true and original
talent. Now it is these who hasten to act as camp-followers for every
new tendency which seems to come into fashion. They are naturally the
most modern of moderns, for no precept of individuality, no artistic
knowledge, hinders them from bunglingly imitating the newest model
with all the assiduity of an artisan. Clever in discerning externals,
unscrupulous copyists and plagiarists, they crowd round every original
phenomenon, be it healthy or unhealthy, and without loss of time
set about disseminating counterfeit copies of it. To-day they are
symbolists, as yesterday they were realists or pornographists. If they
can promise themselves fame and a good sale, they write of mysteries
with the same fluency as if they were spinning romances of knights and
robbers, tales of adventure, Roman tragedies, and village stories at
a time when newspaper critics and the public seemed to demand these
things in preference to others. Now these practitioners, who, let it
be again asserted, constitute the great majority of the mental workers
of the fashionable sects in art and literature, and therefore of the
associates of these sects also, are intellectually quite sane, even
if they stand at a very low level of development, and were anyone to
examine them, he might easily doubt the accuracy of the diagnosis
‘Degeneration’ as regards the confessors of the new doctrines. Hence
some caution must be exercised in the inquiry, and the sincere
originators be always distinguished from the aping intriguers,--the
founder of the religion and his apostles from the rabble to whom the
Sermon on the Mount is of less concern than the miraculous draught of
fishes and the multiplication of loaves.
It has now been shown how schools originate. They arise from the
degeneration of their founders and of the imitators they have
convinced. That they come into fashion, and for a short time attain a
noisy success, is due to the peculiarities of the recipient public,
namely, to hysteria. We have seen that hypersusceptibility to
suggestion is the distinguishing characteristic of hysteria. The same
power of obsession with which the degenerate in mind wins imitators,
gathers round him adherents. When a hysterical person is loudly and
unceasingly assured that a work is beautiful, deep, pregnant with the
future, he believes in it. He believes in everything suggested to him
with sufficient impressiveness. When the little cow-girl, Bernadette,
saw the vision of the Holy Virgin in the grotto of Lourdes, the
women devotees and hysterical males of the surrounding country who
flocked thither did not merely believe that the hallucinant maiden
had herself seen the vision, but all of them saw the Holy Virgin
with their own eyes. M. E. de Goncourt[48] relates that in 1870,
during the Franco-Prussian War, a multitude of men, numbering tens
of thousands, in and before the Bourse in Paris, were convinced that
they had themselves seen--indeed, a part of them had read--a telegram
announcing French victories fastened to a pillar inside the Exchange,
and at which people were pointing with their finger; but as a matter
of fact it never existed. It would be possible to cite examples by
the dozen, of illusions of the senses suggested to excited crowds.
Thus the hysterical allow themselves without more ado to be convinced
of the magnificence of a work, and even find in it beauties of the
highest kind, unthought of by the authors themselves and the appointed
trumpeters of their fame. If the sect is so completely established
that, in addition to the founders, the priests of the temple, the paid
sacristans and choir-boys, it has a congregation, processions, and
far-sounding bells, it then attaches to itself other converts besides
the hysterical who have accepted the new belief by way of suggestion.
Young persons without judgment, still seeking their way, go whither
they see the multitude streaming, and unhesitatingly follow the
procession, because they believe it to be marching on the right road.
Superficial persons, fearing nothing so much as to be thought behind
the times, attach themselves to the procession, shouting ‘Hurrah!’ and
‘All hail!’ so as to convince themselves that they also are really
dancing along before the latest conqueror and newest celebrity.
Decrepit gray-beards, filled with a ridiculous dread of betraying their
real age, eagerly visit the new temple and mingle their quavering
voices in the song of the devout, because they hope to be thought young
when seen in an assembly in which young persons predominate.
Thus a regular concourse is established about a victim of degeneration.
The fashionable coxcomb, the æsthetic ‘gigerl,’[49] peeps over the
shoulder of the hysterical whose admiration has been suggested to him;
the intriguer marches at the heel of the dotard, simulating youth; and
between all these comes pushing the inquisitive young street-loafer,
who must always be in every place where ‘something is going on.’ And
this crowd, because it is driven by disease, self-interest and vanity,
makes very much more noise and bustle than a far larger number of sane
men, who, without self-seeking after-thought, take quiet enjoyment
in works of sane talent, and do not feel obliged to shout out their
appreciation in the streets, and to threaten with death harmless
passers-by who do not join in their jubilations.
CHAPTER IV.
ETIOLOGY.
WE have recognised the effect of diseases in these _fin-de-siècle_
literary and artistic tendencies and fashions, as well as in the
susceptibility of the public with regard to them, and we have succeeded
in maintaining that these diseases are degeneracy and hysteria. We have
now to inquire how these maladies of the day have originated, and why
they appear with such extraordinary frequency at the present time.
Morel,[50] the great investigator of degeneracy, traces this chiefly
to poisoning. A race which is regularly addicted, even without excess,
to narcotics and stimulants in any form (such as fermented alcoholic
drinks, tobacco, opium, hashish, arsenic), which partakes of tainted
foods (bread made with bad corn), which absorbs organic poisons (marsh
fever, syphilis, tuberculosis, goitre), begets degenerate descendants
who, if they remain exposed to the same influences, rapidly descend
to the lowest degrees of degeneracy, to idiocy, to dwarfishness, etc.
That the poisoning of civilized peoples continues and increases at a
very rapid rate is widely attested by statistics.[51] The consumption
of tobacco has risen in France from 0.8 kilogramme per head in 1841
to 1.9 kilogrammes in 1890. The corresponding figures for England
are 13 and 26 ounces;[52] for Germany, 0.8 and 1.5 kilogrammes. The
consumption of alcohol[53] during the same period has risen in
Germany (1844) from 5.45 quarts to (1867) 6.86 quarts; in England
from 2.01 litres to 2.64 litres; in France from 1.33 to 4 litres. The
increase in the consumption of opium and hashish is still greater, but
we need not concern ourselves about that, since the chief sufferers
from them are Eastern peoples, who play no part in the intellectual
development of the white races. To these noxious influences, however,
one more may be added, which Morel has not known, or has not taken into
consideration--residence in large towns. The inhabitant of a large
town, even the richest, who is surrounded by the greatest luxury, is
continually exposed to unfavourable influences which diminish his vital
powers far more than what is inevitable. He breathes an atmosphere
charged with organic detritus; he eats stale, contaminated, adulterated
food; he feels himself in a state of constant nervous excitement, and
one can compare him without exaggeration to the inhabitant of a marshy
district. The effect of a large town on the human organism offers the
closest analogy to that of the Maremma, and its population falls victim
to the same fatality of degeneracy and destruction as the victims
of malaria. The death-rate in a large town is more than a quarter
greater than the average for the entire population; it is double that
of the open country, though in reality it ought to be less, since in
a large town the most vigorous ages predominate, during which the
mortality is lower than in infancy and old age.[54] And the children
of large towns who are not carried off at an early age suffer from the
peculiar arrested development which Morel[55] has ascertained in the
population of fever districts. They develop more or less normally until
fourteen or fifteen years of age, are up to that time alert, sometimes
brilliantly endowed, and give the highest promise; then suddenly there
is a standstill, the mind loses its facility of comprehension, and the
boy who, only yesterday, was a model scholar, becomes an obtuse, clumsy
dunce, who can only be steered with the greatest difficulty through
his examinations. With these mental changes bodily modifications go
hand in hand. The growth of the long bones is extremely slow, or ceases
entirely, the legs remain short, the pelvis retains a feminine form,
certain other organs cease to develop, and the entire being presents a
strange and repulsive mixture of incompleteness and decay.[56]
Now we know how, in the last generation, the number of the inhabitants
of great towns increased[57] to an extraordinary degree. At the
present time an incomparably larger portion of the whole population is
subjected to the destructive influences of large towns than was the
case fifty years ago; hence the number of victims is proportionately
more striking, and continually becomes more remarkable. Parallel
with the growth of large towns is the increase in the number of
the degenerate of all kinds--criminals, lunatics, and the ‘higher
degenerates’ of Magnan; and it is natural that these last should play
an ever more prominent part in endeavouring to introduce an ever
greater element of insanity into art and literature.
The enormous increase of hysteria in our days is partly due to the
same causes as degeneracy, besides which there is one cause much more
general still than the growth of large towns--a cause which perhaps of
itself would not be sufficient to bring about degeneracy, but which
is unquestionably quite enough to produce hysteria and neurasthenia.
This cause is the fatigue of the present generation. That hysteria is
in reality a consequence of fatigue Féré has conclusively demonstrated
by convincing experiments. In a communication to the Biological
Society of Paris, this distinguished investigator says:[58] ‘I have
recently observed a certain number of facts which have made apparent
the analogy existing between fatigue and the chronic condition of the
hysterical. One knows that among the hysterical [involuntary!] symmetry
of movements frequently shows itself in a very characteristic manner.
I have proved that in normal subjects this same symmetry of movements
is met with under the influence of fatigue. A phenomenon which shows
itself in a very marked way in serious hysteria is that peculiar
excitability which demonstrates that the energy of the voluntary
movements, through peripheral stimulations or mental presentations,
suffers rapid and transitory modifications co-existing with parallel
modifications of sensibility, and of the functions of nutrition. This
excitability can be equally manifested during fatigue.... Fatigue
constitutes a true temporary experimental hysteria. It establishes a
transition between the states which we call normal and the various
states which we designate hysteria. One can change a normal into a
hysterical individual by tiring him.... All these causes (which produce
hysteria) can, as far as the pathogenic part they play is concerned, be
traced to one simple physiological process--to fatigue, to depression
of vitality.’
Now, to this cause--fatigue--which, according to Féré, changes healthy
men into hysterical, the whole of civilized humanity has been exposed
for half a century. All its conditions of life have, in this period
of time, experienced a revolution unexampled in the history of the
world. Humanity can point to no century in which the inventions which
penetrate so deeply, so tyrannically, into the life of every individual
are crowded so thick as in ours. The discovery of America, the
Reformation, stirred men’s minds powerfully, no doubt, and certainly
also destroyed the equilibrium of thousands of brains which lacked
staying power. But they did not change the material life of man. He
got up and laid down, ate and drank, dressed, amused himself, passed
his days and years as he had been always wont to do. In our times, on
the contrary, steam and electricity have turned the customs of life of
every member of the civilized nations upside down, even of the most
obtuse and narrow-minded citizen, who is completely inaccessible to the
impelling thoughts of the times.
In an exceptionally remarkable lecture by Professor A. W. von Hofmann,
in 1890, before the Congress of German Natural Science held in
Bremen, he gave, in concluding, a short description of the life of
an inhabitant of a town in the year 1822. He shows us a student of
science who at that date is arriving with the coach from Bremen to
Leipzig. The journey has lasted four days and four nights, and the
traveller is naturally stiff and bruised. His friends receive him,
and he wishes to refresh himself a little. But there is yet no Munich
beer in Leipzig. After a short interview with his comrades, he goes in
search of his inn. This is no easy task, for in the streets an Egyptian
darkness reigns, broken only at long distances by the smoky flame of
an oil-lamp. He at last finds his quarters, and wishes for a light. As
matches do not yet exist, he is reduced to bruising the tips of his
fingers with flint and steel, till he succeeds at last in lighting a
tallow candle. He expects a letter, but it has not come, and he cannot
now receive it till after some days, for the post only runs twice a
week between Frankfort and Leipzig.[59]
But it is unnecessary to go back to the year 1822, chosen by Professor
Hofmann. Let us stop, for purposes of comparison, at the year 1840.
This year has not been arbitrarily selected. It is about the date when
that generation was born which has witnessed the irruption of new
discoveries in every relation of life, and thus personally experienced
those transformations which are the consequences. This generation
reigns and governs to-day; it sets the tone everywhere, and its sons
and daughters are the youth of Europe and America, in whom the new
æsthetic tendencies gain their fanatical partisans. Let us now compare
how things went on in the civilized world in 1840 and a half-century
later.[60]
In 1840 there were in Europe 3,000 kilometres of railway; in 1891
there were 218,000 kilometres. The number of travellers in 1840, in
Germany, France and England, amounted to 2-1/2 millions; in 1891 it
was 614 millions. In Germany every inhabitant received, in 1840, 85
letters; in 1888, 200 letters. In 1840 the post distributed in France
94 millions of letters; in England, 277 millions; in 1881, 595 and
1,299 millions respectively. The collective postal intercourse between
all countries, without including the internal postage of each separate
country, amounted, in 1840, to 92 millions; in 1889, to 2,759 millions.
In Germany, in 1840, 305 newspapers were published; in 1891, 6,800; in
France, 776 and 5,182; in England (1846), 551 and 2,255. The German
book trade produced, in 1840, 1,100 new works; in 1891, 18,700. The
exports and imports of the world had, in 1840, a value of 28, in 1889
of 74, milliards of marks. The ships which, in 1840, entered all the
ports of Great Britain contained 9-1/2, in 1890 74-1/2, millions of
tons. The whole British merchant navy measured, in 1840, 3,200,000; in
1890, 9,688,000 tons.
Let us now consider how these formidable figures arise. The 18,000
new publications, the 6,800 newspapers in Germany, desire to be read,
although many of them desire in vain; the 2,759 millions of letters
must be written; the larger commercial transactions, the numerous
journeys, the increased marine intercourse, imply a correspondingly
greater activity in individuals. The humblest village inhabitant
has to-day a wider geographical horizon, more numerous and complex
intellectual interests, than the prime minister of a petty, or even a
second-rate state a century ago. If he do but read his paper, let it
be the most innocent provincial rag, he takes part, certainly not by
active interference and influence, but by a continuous and receptive
curiosity, in the thousand events which take place in all parts of
the globe, and he interests himself simultaneously in the issue of a
revolution in Chili, in a bush-war in East Africa, a massacre in North
China, a famine in Russia, a street-row in Spain, and an international
exhibition in North America. A cook receives and sends more letters
than a university professor did formerly, and a petty tradesman travels
more and sees more countries and people than did the reigning prince of
other times.
All these activities, however, even the simplest, involve an effort
of the nervous system and a wearing of tissue. Every line we read or
write, every human face we see, every conversation we carry on, every
scene we perceive through the window of the flying express, sets in
activity our sensory nerves and our brain centres. Even the little
shocks of railway travelling, not perceived by consciousness, the
perpetual noises, and the various sights in the streets of a large
town, our suspense pending the sequel of progressing events, the
constant expectation of the newspaper, of the postman, of visitors,
cost our brains wear and tear. In the last fifty years the population
of Europe has not doubled, whereas the sum of its labours has increased
tenfold, in part even fifty-fold. Every civilized man furnishes, at
the present time, from five to twenty-five times as much work as was
demanded of him half a century ago.
This enormous increase in organic expenditure has not, and cannot have,
a corresponding increase of supply. Europeans now eat a little more
and a little better than they did fifty years ago, but by no means in
proportion to the increase of effort which to-day is required of them.
And even if they had the choicest food in the greatest abundance, it
would do nothing towards helping them, for they would be incapable of
digesting it. Our stomachs cannot keep pace with the brain and nervous
system. The latter demand very much more than the former are able to
perform. And so there follows what always happens if great expenses
are met by small incomes; first the savings are consumed, then comes
bankruptcy.
Its own new discoveries and progress have taken civilized humanity by
surprise. It has had no time to adapt itself to its changed conditions
of life. We know that our organs acquire by exercise an ever greater
functional capacity, that they develop by their own activity, and can
respond to nearly every demand made upon them; but only under one
condition--that this occurs gradually, that time be allowed them. If
they are obliged to fulfil, without transition, a multiple of their
usual task, they soon give out entirely. No time was left to our
fathers. Between one day and the next, as it were, without preparation,
with murderous suddenness, they were obliged to change the comfortable
creeping gait of their former existence for the stormy stride of modern
life, and their heart and lungs could not bear it. The strongest could
keep up, no doubt, and even now, at the most rapid pace, no longer lose
their breath, but the less vigorous soon fell out right and left, and
fill to-day the ditches on the road of progress.
To speak without metaphor, statistics indicate in what measure the sum
of work of civilized humanity has increased during the half-century.
It had not quite grown to this increased effort. It grew fatigued and
exhausted, and this fatigue and exhaustion showed themselves in the
first generation, under the form of acquired hysteria; in the second,
as hereditary hysteria.
The new æsthetic schools and their success are a form of this general
hysteria; but they are far from being the only one. The malady of
the period shows itself in yet many other phenomena which can be
measured and counted, and thus are susceptible of being scientifically
established. And these positive and unambiguous symptoms of exhaustion
are well adapted to enlighten the ignorant, who might believe at first
sight that the specialist acts arbitrarily in tracing back fashionable
tendencies in art and literature to states of fatigue in civilized
humanity.
It has become a commonplace to speak of the constant increase of crime,
madness and suicide. In 1840, in Prussia, out of 100,000 persons of
criminally responsible age, there were 714 convictions; in 1888, 1,102
(from a letter communicated by the Prussian bureau of statistics). In
1865, in every 10,000 Europeans there were 63 suicides; in 1883, 109;
and since that time the number has increased considerably. In the last
twenty years a number of new nervous diseases have been discovered and
named.[61] Let it not be believed that they always existed, and were
merely overlooked. If they had been met with anywhere they would have
been detected, for even if the theories which prevailed in medicine at
various periods were erroneous, there have always been perspicacious
and attentive physicians who knew how to observe. If, then, the
new nervous diseases were not noticed, it is because they did not
formerly appear. And they are exclusively a consequence of the present
conditions of civilized life. Many affections of the nervous system
already bear a name which implies that they are a direct consequence of
certain influences of modern civilization. The terms ‘railway-spine’
and ‘railway-brain,’ which the English and American pathologists have
given to certain states of these organs, show that they recognise
them as due partly to the effects of railway accidents, partly to
the constant vibrations undergone in railway travelling. Again, the
great increase in the consumption of narcotics and stimulants, which
has been shown in the figures above, has its origin unquestionably
in the exhausted systems with which the age abounds. There is here a
disastrous, vicious circle of reciprocal effects. The drinker (and
apparently the smoker also) begets enfeebled children, hereditarily
fatigued or degenerated, and these drink and smoke in their turn,
because they are fatigued. These crave for a stimulus, for a
momentary, artificial invigoration, or an alleviation of their painful
excitability, and then, when they recognise that this increases, in the
long-run, their exhaustion as well as their excitability, they cannot,
through weakness of will, resist those habits.[62]
Many observers assert that the present generation ages much more
rapidly than the preceding one. Sir James Crichton-Browne points out
this effect of modern circumstances on contemporaries in his speech at
the opening of the winter term, 1891, before the medical faculty of
the Victoria University.[63] From 1859 to 1863 there died in England,
of heart-disease, 92,181 persons; from 1884 to 1888, 224,102. Nervous
complaints carried off from 1864 to 1868, 196,000 persons; from 1884
to 1888, 260,558. The difference of figures would have been still more
striking if Sir James had chosen a more remote period for comparison
with the present, for in 1865 the high pressure under which the English
worked was already nearly as great as in 1885. The dead carried off by
heart and nerve diseases are the victims of civilization. The heart
and nervous system first break down under the overstrain. Sir James
in his speech says further on: ‘Men and women grow old before their
time. Old age encroaches upon the period of vigorous manhood.... Deaths
due exclusively to old age are found reported now between the ages of
forty-five and fifty-five....’ Mr. Critchett (an eminent oculist) says:
‘My own experience, which extends now over a quarter of a century,
leads me to believe that men and women, in the present day, seek
the aid of spectacles at a less advanced period of life than their
ancestors.... Previously men had recourse to spectacles at the age of
fifty. The average age is now forty-five years.’ Dentists assert that
teeth decay and fall out at an earlier age than formerly. Dr. Lieving
attests the same respecting the hair, and assures us that precocious
baldness is to be specially observed ‘among persons of nervous
temperaments and active mind, but of weak general health.’ Everyone who
looks round the circle of his friends and acquaintances will remark
that the hair begins to turn gray much sooner than in former days. Most
men and women show their first white hairs at the beginning of the
thirties, many of them at a very much younger age. Formerly white hair
was the accompaniment of the fiftieth year.
All the symptoms enumerated are the consequences of states of fatigue
and exhaustion, and these, again, are the effect of contemporary
civilization, of the vertigo and whirl of our frenzied life, the
vastly increased number of sense impressions and organic reactions,
and therefore of perceptions, judgments, and motor impulses, which at
present are forced into a given unity of time. To this general cause
of contemporary pathological phenomena, one may be added special to
France. By the frightful loss of blood which the body of the French
people suffered during the twenty years of the Napoleonic wars, by
the violent moral upheavals to which they were subjected in the
great Revolution and during the imperial epic, they found themselves
exceedingly ill-prepared for the impact of the great discoveries of the
century, and sustained by these a more violent shock than other nations
more robust and more capable of resistance. Upon this nation, nervously
strained and predestined to morbid derangement, there broke the awful
catastrophe of 1870. It had, with a self-satisfaction which almost
attained to megalomania, believed itself the first nation in the world;
it now saw itself suddenly humiliated and crushed. All its convictions
abruptly crumbled to pieces. Every single Frenchman suffered reverses
of fortune, lost some members of his family, and felt himself
personally robbed of his dearest conceptions, nay, even of his honour.
The whole people fell into the condition of a man suddenly visited by a
crushing blow of destiny, in his fortune, his position, his family, his
reputation, even in his self-respect. Thousands lost their reason. In
Paris a veritable epidemic of mental diseases was observed, for which
a special name was found--_la folie obsidionale_, ‘siege-madness.’ And
even those who did not at once succumb to mental derangement, suffered
lasting injury to their nervous system. This explains why hysteria and
neurasthenia are much more frequent in France, and appear under such a
greater variety of forms, and why they can be studied far more closely
in this country than anywhere else. But it explains, too, that it is
precisely in France that the craziest fashions in art and literature
would necessarily arise, and that it is precisely there that the
morbid exhaustion of which we have spoken became for the first time
sufficiently distinct to consciousness to allow a special name to be
coined for it, namely, the designation of _fin-de-siècle_.
The proposition which I set myself to prove may now be taken as
demonstrated. In the civilized world there obviously prevails a
twilight mood which finds expression, amongst other ways, in all
sorts of odd æsthetic fashions. All these new tendencies, realism or
naturalism, ‘decadentism,’ neo-mysticism, and their sub-varieties,
are manifestations of degeneration and hysteria, and identical
with the mental stigmata which the observations of clinicists have
unquestionably established as belonging to these. But both degeneration
and hysteria are the consequences of the excessive organic wear and
tear suffered by the nations through the immense demands on their
activity, and through the rank growth of large towns.
Led by this firmly linked chain of causes and effects, everyone capable
of logical thought will recognise that he commits a serious error if,
in the æsthetic schools which have sprung up in the last few years, he
sees the heralds of a new era. They do not direct us to the future,
but point backwards to times past. Their word is no ecstatic prophecy,
but the senseless stammering and babbling of deranged minds, and what
the ignorant hold to be the outbursts of gushing, youthful vigour and
turbulent constructive impulses are really nothing but the convulsions
and spasms of exhaustion.
We should not allow ourselves to be deceived by certain catch-words,
frequently uttered in the works of these professed innovators. They
talk of socialism, of emancipation of the mind, etc., and thereby
create the outward show of being deeply imbued with the thoughts and
struggles of the times. But this is empty sham. The catch-words in
vogue are scattered through the works without internal sequence, and
the struggles of the times are merely painted on the outside. It is
a phenomenon observed in every kind of mania, that it receives its
special colouring from the degree of culture of the invalid, and from
the views prevailing at the times in which he lived. The Catholic who
is a prey to megalomania fancies he is the Pope; the Jew, that he is
the Messiah; the German, that he is the Emperor or a field-marshal;
the Frenchman, that he is the President of the Republic. In the
persecution-mania, the invalid of former days complained of the
wickedness and knavery of magicians and witches; to-day he grumbles
because his imaginary enemies send electric streams through his nerves,
and torment him with magnetism. The degenerates of to-day chatter of
Socialism and Darwinism, because these words, and, in the best case,
the ideas connected with these, are in current use. These so-called
socialist and free-thinking works of the degenerate as little advance
the development of society towards more equitable economic forms, and
more rational views of the relations among phenomena, as the complaints
and descriptions of an individual suffering from persecution-mania,
and who holds electricity responsible for his disagreeable sensations,
advance the knowledge of this force of nature. Those obscure or
superficially verbose works which pretend to offer solutions for
the serious questions of our times, or, at least, to prepare the
way thereto, are even impediments and causes of delay, because they
bewilder weak or unschooled brains, suggest to them erroneous views,
and make them either more inaccessible to rational information or
altogether closed to it.
The reader is now placed at those points of view whence he can see the
new æsthetic tendencies in their true light and their real shape. It
will be the task of the following books to demonstrate the pathological
character of each one of these tendencies, and to inquire what
particular species of degenerate delirium or hysterical psychological
process they are related to or identical with.
BOOK II.
_MYSTICISM._
CHAPTER I.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MYSTICISM.
WE have already learnt to see in mysticism a principal characteristic
of degeneration. It follows so generally in the train of the latter,
that there is scarcely a case of degeneration in which it does not
appear. To cite authorities for this is about as unnecessary as to
adduce proof for the fact that in typhus a rise in the temperature
of the body is invariably observed. I will therefore only repeat one
remark of Legrain’s:[64] ‘Mystical thoughts are to be laid to the
account of the insanity of the degenerate. There are two states in
which they are observed--in epilepsy and in hysterical delirium.’ When
Federoff,[65] who makes mention of religious delirium and ecstasy as
among the accompanying features of an attack of hysteria, puts them
down as a peculiarity of women, he commits an error, since they are at
least as common in male hysterical and degenerate subjects as in female.
What is really to be understood by this somewhat vague term
‘mysticism’? The word describes a state of mind in which the subject
imagines that he perceives or divines unknown and inexplicable
relations amongst phenomena, discerns in things hints at mysteries, and
regards them as symbols, by which a dark power seeks to unveil or, at
least, to indicate all sorts of marvels which he endeavours to guess,
though generally in vain. This condition of mind is always connected
with strong emotional excitement, which consciousness conceives to be
the result of its presentiments, although it is this excitement, on the
contrary, which is pre-existent, while the presentiments are caused by
it and receive from it their peculiar direction and colour.
All phenomena in the world and in life present themselves in a
different light to the mystic from what they do to the sane man. The
simplest word uttered before the former appears to him an allusion
to something mysteriously occult; in the most commonplace and
natural movements he sees hidden signs. All things have for him deep
backgrounds; far-reaching shadows are thrown by them over adjacent
tracts; they send out wide-spreading roots into remote substrata. Every
image that rises up in his mind points with mysterious silence, though
with significant look and finger, to other images distinct or shadowy,
and induces him to set up relations between ideas, where other people
recognise no connection. In consequence of this peculiarity of his
mind, the mystic lives as if surrounded by sinister forms, from behind
whose masks enigmatic eyes look forth, and whom he contemplates with
constant terror, since he is never sure of recognising any shapes among
the disguises which press upon him. ‘Things are not what they seem’
is the characteristic expression frequently heard from the mystic.
In the history of a ‘degenerate’ in the clinics of Magnan[66] it is
written: ‘A child asks drink of him at a public fountain. He finds this
unnatural. The child follows him. This fills him with astonishment.
Another time he sees a woman sitting on a curb-stone. He asks himself
what that could possibly mean.’ In extreme cases this morbid attitude
amounts to hallucinations, which, as a rule, affect the hearing; but
it can also influence sight and the other senses. When this is so, the
mystic does not confine himself to conjectures and guesses at mysteries
in and behind phenomena, but hears and sees as real, things which for
the sane man are non-existent.
Pathological observation of the insane is content to describe this
mental condition, and to determine its occurrence in the hysterical and
degenerate. That, however, is not the end of the matter. We also want
to know in what manner the degenerate or exhausted brain falls into
mysticism. In order to understand the subject, we must refer to some
simple facts in the growth of the mind.[67]
Conscious intellection is activity of the gray surface of the brain, a
tissue consisting of countless nerve-cells united by nerve-fibres. In
this tissue the nerves, both of the external bodily surface and of the
internal organs, terminate. When one of these nerves is excited (the
nerve of vision by a ray of light, a nerve in the skin by contact, an
organic nerve by internal chemical action, etc.), it at once conveys
the excitement to the nerve-cell in the cerebral cortex in which it
debouches. This cell undergoes in consequence chemical changes, which,
in a healthy condition of the organism, are in direct relation to the
strength of the stimulus. The nerve-cell, which is immediately affected
by the stimulus conveyed to it by the conducting nerve, propagates in
its turn the stimulus received to all the neighbouring cells with which
it is connected by fibrous processes. The disturbance spreads itself on
all sides, like a wave-circle that is caused by any object thrown into
water, and subsides gradually exactly as does the wave--more quickly
or more slowly, with greater or less diffusion, as the stimulus that
caused it has been stronger or weaker.
Every stimulus which reaches a place on the cerebral cortex results
in a rush of blood to that spot,[68] by means of which nutriment
is conveyed to it. The brain-cells decompose these substances, and
transmute the stored-up energy in them into other forms of energy,
namely, into ideas and motor impulses.[69] How an idea is formed out of
the decomposition of tissues, how a chemical process is metamorphosed
into consciousness, nobody knows; but the fact that conscious ideas
are connected with the process of decomposition of tissues in the
stimulated brain-cells is not a matter of doubt.[70]
In addition to the fundamental property in the nerve-cells of
responding to a stimulus produced by chemical action, they have also
the capacity of preserving an image of the strength and character of
this stimulus. To put it popularly, the cell is able to remember its
impressions. If now a new, although it may be a weaker, disturbance
reach this cell, it rouses in it an image of similar stimuli which
had previously reached it, and this memory-image strengthens the
new stimulus, making it more distinct and more intelligible to
consciousness. If the cell could not remember, consciousness would
be ever incapable of interpreting its impressions, and could never
succeed in attaining to a presentation of the outer world. Particular
direct stimuli would certainly be perceived, but they would remain
without connection or import, since they are by themselves, and without
the assistance of earlier impressions, inadequate to lead to knowledge.
Memory is therefore the first condition of normal brain activity.
The stimulus which reaches a brain-cell gives rise, as we have
seen, to an expansion of this stimulus to the neighbouring cells,
to a wave of stimulus proceeding in all directions. And since every
stimulus is connected with the rise of conscious presentations, it
proves that every stimulus calls a large number of presentations into
consciousness, and not only such presentations as are related to the
immediate external cause of the stimulation perceived, but also such
as are only aroused by the cells that elaborate them happening to lie
in the vicinity of that cell, or group of cells, which the external
stimulus has immediately reached. The wave of stimulus, like every
other wave-motion, is strongest at its inception; it subsides in
direct ratio to the widening of its circle, till at last it vanishes
into the imperceptible. Corresponding to this, the presentations,
having their seat in cells which are in the immediate neighbourhood of
those first reached by the stimulus, are the most lively, while those
arising from the more distant cells are somewhat less distinct, and
this distinctness continues to decrease until consciousness can no
longer perceive them--until they, as science expresses it, sink beneath
the threshold of consciousness. Each particular stimulus arouses,
therefore, not only in the cell to which it was directly led, but also
in countless other contiguous and connected cells, the activity which
is bound up with presentation. Thus arise simultaneously, or, more
accurately, following each other in an immeasurably short interval of
time, thousands of impressions of regularly decreasing distinctness;
and since unnumbered thousands of external and internal organic stimuli
are carried to the brain, so continually thousands of stimulus-waves
are coursing through it, crossing and intersecting each other with the
greatest diversity, and in their course arousing millions of emerging,
waning, and vanishing impressions. It is this that Goethe means when he
depicts in such splendid language how
‘...ein Tritt tausend Fäden regt,
Die Schifflein herüber, hinüber schiessen,
Die Fäden ungesehen fliessen,
Ein Schlag tausend Verbindungen schlägt.’[71]
Now, memory is a property not only of the nerve-cell, but also of the
nerve-fibre, which is only a modification of the cell. The fibre has
a recollection of the stimulus which it conveyed, in the same way as
the cell has of that which it has transformed into presentation and
motion. A stimulus will be more easily conducted by a fibre which has
already conveyed it, than by one which propagates it for the first time
from one cell to another. Every stimulus which reaches a cell will take
the line of least resistance, and this will be set out for it along
those nerve-tracks which it has already traversed. Thus a definite
path is formed for the course of a stimulus-wave, a customary line
of march; it is always the same nerve-cells which exchange mutually
their stimulus-waves. Presentation always awakens the same resulting
presentations, and always appears in consciousness accompanied by them.
This procedure is called the association of ideas.
It is neither volition nor accident that determines to which other
cells a disturbed cell habitually communicates its stimulus, which
accompanying impressions an aroused presentation draws with it into
consciousness. On the contrary, the linking of presentations is
dependent upon laws which Wundt especially has well formulated.
Those who have not been born blind and deaf (like the unfortunate
Laura Bridgman, cited by all psychologists) will never be influenced
by one external stimulus only, but invariably by many stimuli at once.
Every single phenomenon of the outer world has, as a rule, not only
one quality, but many; and since that which we call a quality is the
assumed cause of a definite sensation, it results that phenomena appeal
at once to several senses, are simultaneously seen, heard, felt, and
moreover are seen in different degrees of light and colour, heard in
various nuances of timbre, etc. The few phenomena which possess only
one quality and arouse therefore only one sense, _e.g._, thunder, which
is only heard, although with varying intensity, occur nevertheless in
conjunction with other phenomena, such as, to keep to thunder, with a
clouded sky, lightning and rain. Our brains are therefore accustomed to
receive at once from every phenomenon several stimuli, which proceed
partly from the many qualities of the phenomenon itself, and partly
from the phenomena usually accompanying it. Now, it is sufficient that
only one of these stimuli should reach the brain, in order to call
into life, in virtue of the habitual association of the memory-images,
the remaining stimuli of the same group as well. Simultaneity of
impressions is therefore a cause of the association of ideas.
One and the same quality belongs to many phenomena. There is a whole
series of things which are blue, round, and smooth. The possession
of a common quality is a condition of similarity, which is greater in
proportion to the number of common qualities. Every single quality,
however, belongs to a habitually associated group of qualities, and can
by the mechanism of simultaneity arouse the memory-image of this group.
In consequence of their similarity, therefore, the memory-images can be
aroused of all those groups, which resemble each other in some quality.
The colour blue is a quality which belongs equally to the cheerful sky,
the cornflower, the sea, certain eyes, and many military uniforms. The
perception of blue will awaken the memory of some or many blue things
which are only related through their common colour. Similarity is
therefore another cause of the association of ideas.
It is a distinctive characteristic of the brain-cell to elaborate at
the same time both a presentation and its opposite. It is probable that
what we perceive as its opposite is generally, in its original and
simplest form, only the consciousness of the cessation of a certain
presentation. As the fatigue of the optic nerve by a colour arouses
the sensation of the complimentary colour, so, on the exhaustion
of a brain-cell through the elaboration of a presentation, the
contrary presentation appears in consciousness. Now, whether this
interpretation be right or not, the fact itself is established through
the ‘contradictory double meaning of primitive roots,’ discovered by K.
Abel.[72] Contrast is the third cause of the association of ideas.
Many phenomena present themselves in the same place close to, or after,
one another; and we associate there, presentation of the particular
place with those objects, to which it is used to serve as a frame.
Simultaneity, similarity, contrast, and occurrence in the same place
(contiguity), are thus, according to Wundt, the four conditions under
which phenomena will be connected in our consciousness through the
association of ideas. To these James Sully[73] believes yet a fifth
should be added: presentations which are rooted in the same emotion.
Nevertheless all the examples cited by the distinguished English
psychologist demonstrate without effort the action of one or more of
Wundt’s laws.
In order that an organism should maintain itself, it must be in a
position to make use of natural resources, and protect itself from
adverse conditions of every sort. It can accomplish this only if
it possesses a knowledge of these adverse conditions, and of such
natural resources as it can use; and it can do this better and more
surely the more complete this knowledge is. In the more highly
differentiated organism it devolves upon the brain and nervous system
to acquire knowledge of the outer world, and to turn that knowledge
to the advantage of the organism. Memory makes it possible for the
brain to perform its task, and the mechanism by which memory is
made to serve the purport of knowledge is the association of ideas.
For it is clear that a brain, in which a single perception awakens
through the operation of the association of ideas a whole train of
connected representations, will recognise, conceive and judge far more
rapidly than one in which no association of ideas obtains, and which
therefore would form only such concepts as had for their content direct
sense-perceptions and such representations as originated in those cells
which, by the accident of their contiguity, happened to lie in the
circuit of a stimulus-wave. For the brain which works with association
of ideas, the perception of a ray of light, of a tone, is sufficient,
in order instantly to produce the presentation of the object from
which the sensation proceeds, as well as of its relations in time
and space, to group these presentations as concepts, and from these
concepts to arrive at a judgment. To the brain without association of
ideas that perception would only convey the presentation of having
something bright or sonant in front of it. In addition, presentations
would be aroused which had nothing in common with this bright or sonant
something; it could form no image of the exciter of the sense, but it
would first have to receive a train of further impressions from several
or all of the senses, in order to learn to recognise the various
properties of the object, of which at first only a tone or a colour
was perceived, and to unite them in a single presentation. Even then
the brain would only know in what the object consisted, _i.e._, what
it had in front of it, but not how the object stood in relation to
other things, where and when it had already been perceived, and by what
phenomena it was accompanied, etc. Knowledge of objects thus acquired
would be wholly unadapted to the formation of a right judgment. It
can now be seen what a great advantage was given to the organism in
the struggle for existence by the association of ideas, and what
immense progress in the development of the brain and its activity the
acquirement of it signified.
But this is only true with a limitation. The association of ideas as
such does not do more to lighten the task of the brain in apprehending
and in judging than does the uprising throng of memory-images in the
neighbourhood of the excited centre. The presentations, which the
association of ideas calls into consciousness, stand, it is true,
in somewhat closer connection with the phenomenon which has sent a
stimulus to the brain, and by the latter has been perceived, than do
those occurring in the geometrical circuit of the stimulus-wave;
but even this connection is so slight, that it offers no efficient
help in the interpretation of the phenomenon. We must not forget that
properly all our perceptions, ideas, and conceptions are connected more
or less closely through the association of ideas. As in the example
cited above the sensation of blue arouses the ideas of the sky, the
sea, a blue eye, a uniform, etc., so will each of these ideas arouse
in its turn, according to Wundt’s law, ideas associated with them.
The sky will arouse the idea of stars, clouds and rain; the sea, that
of ships, voyages, foreign lands, fishes, pearls, etc.; blue eyes,
that of a girl’s face, of love and all its emotions; in short, this
one sensation, through the mechanism of the association of ideas, can
arouse pretty well almost all the conceptions which we have ever at any
time formed, and the blue object which we have in fact before our eyes
and perceive, will, through this crowd of ideas which are not directly
related to it, be neither interpreted nor explained.
In order, however, that the association of ideas may fulfil its
functions in the operations of the brain, and prove itself a
useful acquisition to the organism, one thing more must be added,
namely, attention. This it is which brings order into the chaos of
representations awakened by the association of ideas, and makes them
subserve the purposes of cognition and judgment.
What is attention? Th. Ribot[74] defines this attribute as ‘a
spontaneous or an artificial adaptation of the individual to a
predominating thought’. (I translate this definition freely because
too long an explanation would be necessary to make the uninitiated
comprehend the expressions made use of by Ribot.) In other words,
attention is the faculty of the brain to suppress one part of the
memory-images which, at each excitation of a cell or group of cells,
have arisen in consciousness, by way either of association or of
stimulus-wave; and to maintain another part, namely, only those
memory-images which relate to the exciting cause, _i.e._, to the object
just perceived.
Who makes this selection among the memory-images? The stimulus itself,
which rouses the brain-cells into activity. Naturally those cells
would be the most strongly excited which are directly connected with
the afferent nerves. Somewhat weaker is the excitement of the cells to
which the cell first excited sends its impulse by way of the customary
nerve channels; still weaker the excitement of those cells which,
by the same mechanism, receive their stimulus from the secondarily
excited cell. That idea will be the most powerful, therefore, which
is awakened directly by the perception itself; somewhat weaker that
which is aroused by the first impression through association of ideas;
weaker still that which the association in its turn involves. We
know further that a phenomenon never produces a single stimulus, but
several at once. If, for example, we see a man before us, we do not
merely perceive a single point in him, but a larger or smaller portion
of his exterior, _i.e._, a large number of differently coloured and
differently illuminated points; perhaps we hear him as well, possibly
touch him, and, at all events, perceive besides him somewhat of his
environment, of his spacial relations. Thus, there arise in our brain
quite a number of centres of stimulation, operating simultaneously in
the manner described above. There awakes in consciousness a series
of primary presentations, which are stronger, _i.e._, clearer, than
the associated or consequent representations, namely, just those
presentations which the man standing before us has himself aroused.
They are like the brightest light-spots in the midst of others less
brilliant. These brightest light-spots necessarily predominate in
consciousness over the lesser ones. They fill the consciousness,
which combines them in a judgment. For what we call a judgment is,
in the last resort, nothing else than a simultaneous lighting up of
a number of presentations in consciousness, which we in truth only
bring into relation with each other because we ourselves became
conscious of them at one and the same moment. The ascendency which
the clearer presentations acquire over the more obscure, the primary
presentations over derived representations, in consciousness, enables
them, with the help of the will, to influence for a time the whole
brain-activity to their own advantage, viz., to suppress the weaker,
_i.e._, the derived, representations; to combat those which cannot be
made to agree with them; to reinforce, to draw into their circuit of
stimulation, or simply to arouse, others, through which they themselves
are reinforced and secure some duration in the midst of the constant
emergence and disappearance of representations in their pursuit of each
other. I myself conceive the interference of the will in this struggle
for life amongst representations as giving motor impulses (even if
unconsciously) to the muscles of the cerebral arteries. By this means
the bloodvessels are dilated or contracted as required,[75] and the
consequent supply of blood becomes more or less copious.[76] The cells
which receive no blood must suspend their action; those which receive a
larger supply can, on the contrary, operate more powerfully. The will
which regulates the distribution of blood, when incited by a group of
presentations temporarily predominating, thus resembles a servant who
is constantly occupied in a room in carrying out the behests of his
master: to light the gas in one place, in another to turn it up higher,
in another to turn it off partly or wholly, so that at one moment this,
and at another that, corner of the room becomes bright, dim, or dark.
The preponderance of a group of presentations allows them during their
period of power to bring into their service, not only the brain-cells,
but the whole organism besides; and not only to fortify themselves
through the representations which they arouse by way of association,
but also to seek certain new sense-impressions, and repress others, in
order, on the one hand, to obtain new excitations favourable to their
persistence--new original perceptions--and on the other hand, through
the exclusion of the rest, to ward off such excitations as are adverse
to their persistence.
For instance, I see in the street a passer-by who for some reason
arouses my attention. The attention immediately suppresses all other
presentations which, an instant before, were in my consciousness, and
permits those only to remain which refer to the passer-by. In order to
intensify these presentations I look after him, _i.e._, the ciliary and
ocular muscles, then the muscles of the neck, perhaps also the muscles
of the body and of the legs, receive motor impulses, which serve the
purpose only of keeping up continually new sense-impressions of the
object of my attention, by means of which the presentations of him are
continuously strengthened and multiplied. I do not notice other persons
who for the time come into my field of vision, I disregard the sounds
which meet my ears, if my attention is strong enough I do not perhaps
even hear them; but I should at once hear them if they proceeded from
the particular passer-by, or if they had any reference to him.
This is the ‘adaptation of the whole organism to a predominant idea’
of which Ribot speaks. This it is which gives us exact knowledge of
the external world. Without it that knowledge would be much more
difficult of attainment, and would remain much more incomplete. This
adaptation will continue until the cells, which are the bearers of
the predominating presentations, become fatigued. They will then be
compelled to surrender their supremacy to other groups of cells,
whereupon the latter will obtain the power to adapt the organism to
their purposes.
Thus we see it is only through attention that the faculty of
association becomes a property advantageous to the organism, and
attention is nothing but the faculty of the will to determine
the emergence, degree of clearness, duration and extinction of
presentations in consciousness. The stronger the will, so much the more
completely can we adapt the whole organism to a given presentation, so
much the more can we obtain sense impressions which serve to enhance
this presentation, so much the more can we by association induce
memory-images, which complete and rectify the presentation, so much the
more definitely can we suppress the presentations which disturb it or
are foreign to it; in a word, so much the more exhaustive and correct
will our knowledge be of phenomena and their true connection.
Culture and command over the powers of nature are solely the result of
attention; all errors, all superstition, the consequence of defective
attention. False ideas of the connection between phenomena arise
through defective observation of them, and will be rectified by a more
exact observation. Now, to observe means nothing else than to convey
deliberately determined sense-impressions to the brain, and thereby
raise a group of presentations to such clearness and intensity that it
can acquire preponderance in consciousness, arouse through association
its allied memory-images, and suppress such as are incompatible with
itself. Observation, which lies at the root of all progress, is thus
the adaptation through attention of the sense-organs and their centres
of perception to a presentation or group of presentations predominating
in consciousness.
A state of attention allows no obscurity to persist in consciousness.
For either the will strengthens every rising presentation to full
clearness and distinctness, or, if it cannot do this, it extinguishes
the idea completely. The consciousness of a healthy, strong-minded, and
consequently attentive man, resembles a room in the full light of day,
in which the eye sees all objects distinctly, in which all outlines are
sharp, and wherein no indefinite shadows are floating.
Attention, therefore, presupposes strength of will, and this, again,
is the property only of a normally constituted and unexhausted brain.
In the degenerate, whose brain and nervous system are characterized
by hereditary malformations or irregularities; in the hysterical,
whom we have learnt to regard as victims of exhaustion, the will is
entirely lacking, is possessed only in a small degree. The consequence
of weakness or want of will is incapacity of attention. Alexander
Starr[77] published twenty-three cases of lesions, or diseases of
the convolutions of the brain, in which ‘it was impossible for the
patients to fix their attention’; and Ribot[78] remarks: ‘A man who
is tired after a long walk, a convalescent who has undergone a severe
illness--in a word, all weakened persons are incapable of attention....
Inability to be attentive accompanies all forms of exhaustion.’
Untended and unrestrained by attention, the brain activity of the
degenerate and hysterical is capricious, and without aim or purpose.
Through the unrestricted play of association representations are called
into consciousness, and are free to run riot there. They are aroused
and extinguished automatically; and the will does not interfere to
strengthen or to suppress them. Representations mutually alien or
mutually exclusive appear continuously. The fact that they are retained
in consciousness simultaneously, and at about the same intensity,
combines them (in conformity with the laws of conscious activity) into
a thought which is necessarily absurd, and cannot express the true
relations of phenomena.
Weakness or want of attention, produces, then, in the first place,
false judgments respecting the objective universe, respecting the
qualities of things and their relations to each other. Consciousness
acquires a distorted and blurred view of the external world. And there
follows a further consequence. The chaotic course of stimuli along
the channels of association and of the adjacent structures arouses
the activity both of contiguous, of further, and of furthest removed
groups of cells, which, left to themselves, act only so long and with
such varying intensity as is proportionate to the intensity of the
stimulus which has reached them. Clear, obscure, and yet obscurer
representations rise in consciousness, which, after a time, disappear
again, without having attained to greater distinctness than they had
when first appearing. The clear representations produce a thought, but
such a one as cannot for a moment become firmer or clearer, because
the definite representations of which it is composed are mingled
with others which consciousness perceives indistinctly, or scarcely
perceives at all. Such obscure ideas cross the threshold of even a
healthy person’s consciousness; but in that case attention intervenes
at once, to bring them fully to the light, or entirely to suppress
them. These synchronous overtones of every thought cannot, therefore,
blur the tonic note. The emergent thought-phantoms can acquire no
influence over the thought-procedure because attention either lightens
up their faces, or banishes them back to their under-world of the
Unconscious. It is otherwise with the degenerate and debilitated,
who suffer from weakness of will and defective attention. The faint,
scarcely recognisable, liminal presentations are perceived at the same
time as those that are well lit and centrally focussed. The judgment
grows drifting and nebulous like floating fog in the morning wind.
Consciousness, aware of the spectrally transparent shapes, seeks in
vain to grasp them, and interprets them without confidence, as when
one fancies in a cloud resemblances to creatures or things. Whoever
has sought on a dark night to discern phenomena on a distant horizon
can form an idea of the picture which the world of thought presents to
the mind of an asthenic. Lo there! a dark mass! What is it? A tree?
A hayrick? A robber? A beast of prey? Ought one to fly? Ought one
to attack it? The incapacity to recognise the object, more guessed
at than perceived, fills him with uneasiness and anxiety. This is
just the condition of the mind of an asthenic in the presence of his
liminal presentations. He believes he sees in them a hundred things
at once, and he brings all the forms that he seems to discern into
connection with the principal presentation which has aroused them. He
has, however, a strong feeling that this connection is incomprehensible
and inexplicable. He combines presentations into a thought which
is in contradiction to all experience, but which he must look upon
as equal in validity to all his remaining thoughts and opinions,
because it originated in the same way. And even if he wishes to make
clear to himself what is really the content of his judgment, and of
what particular presentations it is composed, he observes that these
presentations are, as a matter of fact, nothing but unrecognisable
adumbrations of presentations, to which he vainly seeks to give a
name. Now, this state of mind, in which a man is straining to see,
thinks he sees, but does not see--in which a man is forced to construct
thoughts out of presentations which befool and mock consciousness
like will-o’-the-wisps or marsh vapours--in which a man fancies that
he perceives inexplicable relations between distinct phenomena and
ambiguous formless shadows--this is the condition of mind that is
called Mysticism.
From the shadowy thinking of the mystic, springs his washed-out style
of expression. Every word, even the most abstract, connotes a concrete
presentation or a concept, which, inasmuch as it is formed out of the
common attributes of different concrete presentations, betrays its
concrete origin. Language has no word for that which one believes he
sees as through a mist, without recognisable form. The mystic, however,
is conscious of ghostly presentations of this sort without shape or
other qualities, and in order to express them he must either use
recognised words, to which he gives a meaning wholly different from
that which is generally current, or else, feeling the inadequacy of the
fund of language created by those of sound mind, he forges for himself
special words which, to a stranger, are generally incomprehensible,
and the cloudy, chaotic sense of which is intelligible only to
himself; or, finally, he embodies the several meanings which he gives
to his shapeless representations in as many words, and then succeeds
in achieving those bewildering juxtapositions of what is mutually
exclusive, those expressions which can in no way be rationally made
to harmonize, but which are so typical of the mystic. He speaks, as
did the German mystics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
of the ‘cold fire’ of hell, and of the ‘dark light’ of Satan; or,
he says, like the degenerate in the twenty-eighth pathological case
of Legrain,[79] ‘that God appeared to him in the form of luminous
shadows;’ or he remarks, as did another of Legrain’s patients:[80] ‘You
have given me an immutable evening’ (_soirée immutable_).[81]
The healthy reader or listener who has confidence in his own judgment,
and tests with lucidity and self-dependence, naturally discerns at
once that these mystical expressions are senseless, and do but reflect
the mystic’s confused manner of thinking. The majority of mankind,
however, have neither self-confidence nor the faculty of judging,
and cannot throw off the natural inclination to connect some meaning
with every word. And since the words of the mystic have no definite
meaning in themselves, or in their juxtaposition, a certain meaning
is arbitrarily imputed to them, is mysteriously conjured into them.
The effect of the mystical method of expression on people who allow
themselves to be bewildered is for this reason a very strong one. It
gives them food for thought, as they call it; that is to say, it allows
them to give way to all kinds of dream-fancies, which is very much
easier, and therefore more agreeable, than the toil of reflecting on
firmly outlined presentations and thoughts admitting of no evasions
and extravagances.[82] It transports their minds to the same condition
of mental activity determined by unbridled association of ideas that
is peculiar to the mystic; it awakens in them also his ambiguous,
unutterable presentations, and makes them divine the strangest and
most impossible relations of things to each other. All the weak-headed
appear therefore ‘deep’ to the mystic, and this designation has, from
the constant use made of it by them, become almost an insult. Only
very strong minds are really deep, such as can keep the processes of
thought under the discipline of an extraordinarily powerful attention.
Such minds are in a position to exploit the association of ideas in the
best possible way, to impart the greatest sharpness and clearness to
all representations which through them are called into consciousness;
to suppress them firmly and rapidly if they are not compatible with
the rest; to procure new sense-impressions, if these are necessary in
order to make the presentations and judgments predominant at the time
in their minds still more vivid and distinct; they gain in this way an
incomparably clear picture of the world, and discover true relations
among phenomena which, to a weaker attention, must always remain
hidden. This true depth of strong select minds is wholly luminous. It
scares shadows out of hidden corners, and fills abysses with radiant
light. The mystic’s pseudo-depth, on the contrary, is all obscurity.
It causes things to appear deep by the same means as darkness, viz.,
by reason of its rendering their outlines imperceptible. The mystic
obliterates the firm outlines of phenomena; he spreads a veil over
them, and conceals them in blue vapour. He troubles what is clear, and
makes the transparent opaque, as does the cuttle-fish the waters of the
ocean. He, therefore, who sees the world through the eyes of a mystic,
gazes into a black heaving mass, in which he can always find what he
desires, although, and just because, he actually perceives nothing at
all. To the weak-headed everything which is clearly, firmly defined,
and which, therefore, has strictly but one meaning, is flat. To them
everything is profound which has no meaning, and which, therefore,
allows them to apply what meaning they please. To them mathematical
analysis is flat; theology and metaphysics, deep. The study of Roman
law is flat; the dream-book and the prophecies of Nostradamus are deep.
The forms assumed by pouring molten lead on New Year’s Eve are the true
symbols of their depth.
The content of mystic thought is determined by the individual character
and level of culture possessed by each degenerate and hysteric. For
we should never forget that the morbidly-affected or exhausted brain
is only the soil which receives the seed sown by nurture, education,
impressions and experience of life, etc. The seed-grains do not
originate in the soil; they only receive in and through it their
special irregularities of development, their deformities, and crazy
offshoots. The naturalist who loses the faculty of attention becomes
the so-called ‘Natural Philosopher,’ or the discoverer of a fourth
dimension in space, like the unfortunate Zöllner. A rough, ignorant
person from the low ranks of the people falls into the wildest
superstition. The mystic, nurtured in religion and nourished with
dogma, refers his shadowy impressions to his beliefs, and interprets
them as revelations of the nature of the Trinity, or of the condition
of existence before birth or after death. The technologist who has
fallen into mysticism worries over impossible inventions, believes
himself to be on the track of the solution of the problem of a
_perpetuum mobile_, devises communication between earth and stars,
shafts to the glowing core of the earth, and what not. The astronomer
becomes an astrologist, the chemist an alchemist and a seeker after the
philosopher’s stone; the mathematician labours to square the circle, or
to invent a system in which the notion of progress is expressed by a
process of integration, the war of 1870 by an equation, and so on.
As was set forth above, the cerebral cortex receives its stimuli,
not only from the external nerves, but also from the interior of the
organism, from the nerves of separate organs, and the nerve-centres of
the spinal cord and the sympathetic system. Every excitement in these
centres affects the brain-cells, and arouses in them more or less
distinct presentations, which are necessarily related to the activity
of the centres from which the stimulus proceeds. A few examples will
make this clear, even to the uninitiated. If the organism feels the
need of nourishment, and we are hungry, we shall not only be generally
conscious of an indeterminate desire for food, but there will also
arise in our minds definite representations of dishes, of served
repasts, and of all the accessories of eating. If we, from some cause,
maybe an affection of the heart or lungs, cannot breathe freely, we
have not only a hunger for air, but also accompanying ideas of an
uneasy nature, presentiments of unknown dangers, melancholy memories,
etc., _i.e._, representations of circumstances which tend to deprive
us of breath or affect us oppressively. During sleep also organic
stimuli exert this influence on the cerebral cortex, and to them we owe
the so-called somatic dreams (_Leibesträume_), _i.e._, dream-images
about the functioning of any organs which happen not to be in a normal
condition.
Now, it is known that certain organic nerve-centres, the sexual
centres, namely, in the spinal cord and the medulla oblongata, are
frequently malformed, or morbidly irritated among the degenerate.
The stimuli proceeding from them therefore awaken, in the brain of
patients of this sort, presentations which are more or less remotely
connected with the sexual activity. In the consciousness, therefore,
of such a subject there always exist, among the other presentations
which are aroused by the varying stimuli of the external world,
presentations of a sexual character, erotic thoughts being associated
with every impression of beings and things. In this way he attains to
a state of mind in which he divines mysterious relations among all
possible objective phenomena, _e.g._, a railway-train, the title of his
newspaper, a piano on the one hand, and woman on the other; and feels
emotions of an erotic nature at sights, words, odours, which would
produce no such impression on the mind of a sound person, emotions
which he refers to unknown qualities in those sights, words, etc. Hence
it comes that in most cases mysticism distinctly takes on a decidedly
erotic colouring, and the mystic, if he interprets his inchoate liminal
presentations, always tends to ascribe to them an erotic import. The
mixture of super-sensuousness and sensuality, of religious and amorous
rapture, which characterizes mystic thought, has been noticed even by
those observers who do not understand in what way it is brought about.
The mysticism which I have hitherto investigated is the incapacity,
due to weakness of will, either innate or acquired, to guide the work
of the association of ideas by attention, to draw shadowy liminal
representations into the bright focal circle of consciousness, and to
suppress presentations which are incompatible with those attended to.
There exists, however, another form of mysticism, the cause of which
is not defective attention, but an anomaly in the sensitivity of the
brain and nervous system. In the healthy organism the afferent nerves
convey impressions of the external world in their full freshness to the
brain, and the stimulation of the brain-cell is in direct ratio to the
intensity of the stimulus conducted to it. Not so is the deportment of
a degenerate or exhausted organism. Here the brain may have forfeited
its normal irritability; it is blunted, and is only feebly excited
by stimuli conveyed to it. Such a brain, as a rule, never succeeds
in elaborating sharply-defined impressions. Its thoughts are always
shadowy and confounded. There is, however, no occasion for me to depict
in detail the characteristics of its mental procedure, for in the
higher species of the degenerate a blunted brain is hardly ever met
with, and plays no part in art or literature. To the possessor of a
sluggishly-reacting brain it hardly ever occurs to compose or paint.
He is of account only as forming the creative mystic’s partial and
grateful public. Inadequate excitability may moreover be a property
of the sensory nerves. This irregularity leads to anomalies in mental
life, with which I shall deal exhaustively in the next book. Finally,
instead of slow reaction there may exist excessive excitability, and
this may be peculiar to the whole nervous system and brain, or only to
a portion of the latter. A generally excessive excitability produces
those morbidly-sensitive natures in whom the most insignificant
phenomena create the most astonishing perceptions; who hear the
‘sobbing of the evening glow,’ shudder at the contact of a flower;
distinguish thrilling prophecies and fearful threatenings in the
sighing of the wind, etc.[83] Excessive irritability of particular
groups of cells of the cerebral cortex gives rise to other phenomena.
In the affected part of the brain, stimulated either externally or
by adjacent stimuli, in other words, by sense impressions or by
association, the disturbance does not in this case proceed in a natural
ratio to the strength of the exciting cause, but is stronger and more
lasting than is warranted by the stimulus. The aroused group of cells
returns to a state of rest either with difficulty or not at all. It
attracts large quantities of nutriment for purposes of absorption,
withdrawing them from the other parts of the brain. It works like a
machine which an unskilful hand has set in motion but cannot stop.
If the normal action of the brain-cells may be compared to quiet
combustion, the action of a morbidly-irritable group of cells may be
said to resemble an explosion, and one, too, which is both violent and
persistent. With the stimulus there flames forth in consciousness a
presentation, or train of presentations, conceptions and reasonings,
which suffuse the mind as with the glare of a conflagration, outshining
all other ideas.
The degree of exclusiveness and insistence in the predominance of any
presentation is in proportion to the degree of morbid irritability in
the particular tract of brain by which it is elaborated. Where the
degree is not excessive there arise obsessions which the consciousness
recognises as morbid. They do not preclude the coexistence of healthy
functioning of the brain, and consciousness acquires the habit of
treating these co-existent obsessions as foreign to itself, and of
banishing them from its presentations and judgments. In aggravated
cases these obsessions grow into fixed ideas. The immoderately
excitable portions of the brain work out their ideas with such
liveliness that consciousness is filled with them, and can no longer
distinguish them from such as are the result of sense-impressions, the
nature and strength of which they accurately reflect. Then we reach
the stage of hallucinations and delirium. Finally, in the last stage,
comes ecstasy, which Ribot calls ‘the acute form of the effort after
unity of consciousness.’ In ecstasy the excited part of the brain
works with such violence that it suppresses the functioning of all
the rest of the brain. The ecstatic subject is completely insensible
to external stimuli. There is no perception, no representation, no
grouping of presentations into concepts, and of concepts into judgments
and reasoning. A single presentation, or group of presentations, fills
up consciousness. These presentations are of extreme distinctness and
clearness. Consciousness is, as it were, flooded with the blinding
light of mid-day. There therefore takes place exactly the reverse
of what has been noticed in the case of the ordinary mystic. The
ecstatic state is associated with extremely intense emotions, in
which the highest bliss is mixed with pain. These emotions accompany
every strong and excessive functioning of the nerve-cells, every
extraordinary and violent decomposition of nerve-nutriment. The
feeling of voluptuousness is an example of the phenomena accompanying
extraordinary decompositions in a nerve-cell. In healthy persons the
sexual nerve-centres are the only ones which, conformably with their
functions, are so differentiated and so adapted that they exercise no
uniform or lasting activity, but, for by far the greatest part of the
time, are perfectly tranquil, storing up large quantities of nutriment
in order, during very short periods, to decompose this suddenly and,
as it were, explosively. Every nerve-centre which operates in this
way would procure us voluptuous emotion; but precisely among healthy
persons there are, except the sexual nerve-centres, none which are
compelled to act in this manner, in order to serve the purpose of the
organism. Among the degenerate, on the contrary, particular morbidly
excited brain-centres operate in this way, and the emotions of delight
which accompany their explosive activity are more powerful than sexual
feelings, in proportion as the brain-centres are more sensitive than
the subordinate and more sluggish spinal centres. One may completely
believe the assurances of great ecstatics, such as a St. Theresa,
a Mohammed, an Ignatius Loyola, that the bliss accompanying their
ecstatic visions is unlike anything earthly, and almost more than a
mortal can bear. This latter statement proves that they were conscious
of the sharp pain which accompanies nerve-action in overexcited
brain-cells, and which, on careful analysis, may be distinguished in
every very strong feeling of pleasure. The circumstance that the only
normal organic sensation known to us which resembles that of ecstasy
is the sexual feeling, explains the fact that ecstatics connect their
ecstatic presentations by way of association with the idea of love,
and describe the ecstasy itself as a kind of supernatural act of
love, as a union of an ineffably high and pure sort with God or the
Blessed Virgin. This drawing near to God and the saints is the natural
result of a religious training, which begets the habit of looking
on everything inexplicable as supernatural, and of bringing it into
connection with the doctrines of faith.
We have now seen that mysticism depends upon the incapacity to control
the association of ideas by the attention, and that this incapacity
results from weakness of will; while ecstasy is a consequence of
the morbid irritability of special brain-centres. The incapacity
of being attentive occasions, however, besides mysticism, other
eccentricities of the intellect, which may here be briefly mentioned.
In extreme stages of degeneration, _e.g._, in idiocy, attention is
utterly wanting. No stimulus is able to arouse it, nor is there any
external means of making an impression on the brain of the idiot, and
awakening his consciousness to definite presentations. In less complete
degeneration, _i.e._, in cases of mental debility, attention may
exist, but it is extremely weak and fleeting. Imbeciles (weak minds)
present, in graduated intensity, the phenomenon of fugitive thought
(_Gedankenflucht_), _i.e._, the incapacity to retain, or to unite in a
concept or judgment, the representations automatically and reciprocally
called into consciousness in conformity with the laws of association,
and also that of reverie, which is another form of fugitive thought,
but which differs from it in that the particular representations of
which it is composed are feebly elaborated, and are therefore shadowy
and undefined, sometimes so much so that an imbecile, who in the
midst of his reveries is asked of what he is thinking, is not able
to state exactly what happens to be present in his consciousness.
All observers maintain that the ‘higher degenerate’ is frequently
‘original, brilliant, witty,’ and that whereas he is incapable of
activity which demands attention and self-control, he has strong
artistic inclinations. All these peculiarities are to be explained by
the uncontrolled working of association.
The reader should recall the procedure of that brain which is incapable
of attention. A perception arouses a representation which summons
into consciousness a thousand other associated representations. The
healthy mind suppresses the representations which are contradictory
to, or not rationally connected with, the first perception. This the
weak-minded cannot do. The mere similarity of sound determines the
current of his thought. He hears a word, and feels compelled to repeat
it, once or oftener, sometimes to the extent of ‘Echolalia’; or it
calls into his consciousness other words similar to it in sound, but
not connected with it in meaning,[84] whereupon he thinks and talks in
a series of completely disconnected rhymes; or else the words have,
besides their similarity of sound, a very remote and weak connection
of meaning; this gives rise to punning. Ignorant persons are inclined
to call the rhyming and punning of imbeciles witty, not bearing in
mind that this way of combining ideas according to the sound of the
words frustrates the purposes of the intellect by obscuring the
apprehension of the real connections of phenomena. No witticism has
ever made easier the discovery of any truth. And whoever has tried to
hold a serious conversation with a quibbling person of weak mind will
have recognised the impossibility of keeping him in check, of getting
from him a logical conclusion, or of making him comprehend a fact or
a causal connection. When presentations are connected, not merely
according to auditory impressions of simple similarity of sound, but
also according to the other laws of association, those juxtapositions
of words are effected which the ignorant designate as ‘original modes
of expression,’ and which confer upon their originator the reputation
of a ‘brilliant’ conversationalist or author. Sollier[85] cites
some characteristic examples of the ‘original’ modes of expression
of imbeciles. One said to his comrade, ‘You look like a piece of
barley-sugar put out to nurse.’ Another expresses the thought that
his friend made him laugh so much he could not restrain his saliva,
by saying, ‘Tu me fais baver des ronds de chapeaux.’ The junction
of words which by their sense have little or no relation to each
other is, as a rule, an evidence of imbecility, although it often
enough is sensational and mirth-provoking. The cleverness which in
Paris is called _blague_, or _boulevard-esprit_, the psychologist
discerns as imbecility. That this condition goes hand-in-hand with
artistic tendencies is easy to understand. All callings which require
knowledge of fact, and adaptation to it, presuppose attention. This
capacity is wanting in imbeciles; hence they are not fitted for
serious professions. Certain artistic occupations, especially those
of a subordinate kind, are, on the contrary, quite compatible with
uncontrolled association of ideas, reverie, or fugitive thought,
because they exact only a very limited adaptation to fact, and
therefore have great attractions for persons of weak intellect.
Between the process of thought and movement there exists an
exact parallelism explicable by the fact that the elaboration of
presentations is nothing else than a modification of the elaboration
of the motor impulses. The phenomena of movement make the mechanism
of thought more easily apprehensible to the lay mind. The automatic
association of muscular contractions corresponds to the association of
ideas, their co-ordination to attention. As with defective attention
there ensues no intelligent thought, so with faulty co-ordination there
can be no appropriate movement. Palsy is equivalent to idiocy, St.
Vitus’s dance to obsessions and fixed ideas. The attempts at witticisms
of the weak-minded are like beating the air with a sword; the notions
and judgments of sound brains are like the careful thrust and parry of
skilful fencing. Mysticism finds its reflected image in the aimless
and powerless, often hardly discernible, movements of senile and
paralytic trembling; and ecstasy is, for a brain-centre, the same state
as a prolonged and violent tonic contraction for a muscle or group of
muscles.