THE PSYCHICAL CORRELATION OF RELIGIOUS EMOTION AND SEXUAL DESIRE.
That there exists a relationship between the cultivated ethical emotion,
religious feeling, and the essentially natural physio-psychical
function, sexual desire or _libido_, is a fact noticed and commented on
by many thinkers and writers. The literature of the subject is, however,
exceedingly fragmentary and disconnected, no author (as far as I have
been able to determine) having devoted as much as one thousand words to
the consideration of this very interesting psychical phenomenon. Hence,
my data have been gathered from many sources, which are as diversified
as they are numerous.
Beyond a question of doubt, man becomes religiously enthused most
frequently either early in life, when pubescence is, or is about to be,
established, or late in life, when sexual desire has become either
entirely extinct or very much abated. Young boys and girls are
exceedingly impressionable at, or just before, puberty, and are apt to
embrace religion with the utmost enthusiasm. A distinguished evangelist
declares that "men and women seldom or never enter into the kingdom of
God after they have arrived at maturity. Out of a thousand converts,
seven hundred are converted before they are twenty years old."[92]
[92] B. Fay Mills, _Sermon to Young Men and Young Women_, at
Owensboro, Ky., May 20, 1894.
The Roman Catholic church is keenly alive to these facts, therefore
requires the rite of confirmation to be administered, if possible, to
its would-be communicants at, or before, the age of puberty.[AE]
[AE] This knowledge is not confined to the Catholic church alone;
in all denominations the pubescent human being is considered most
susceptible to religious influences. The cause or _raison d 'etre_
of this susceptibility is, by no means, generally recognized.
Of all the insanities of the pubescent state, erotomania and religious
mania are the most frequent and the most pronounced. Sometimes they go
hand in hand, the most inordinate sensuality being coupled with abnormal
religious zeal. A young woman of my acquaintance, whose conduct has
given rise to much scandal, is, at times, a reincarnate Messalina, while
at other times she is the very embodiment of ethical and religious
purity. Another young girl, in whom _vita sexualis_ was about to be
established, became religiously insane and had delusions in which she
declared that she was in heaven and sitting at the right hand of God.
She declared this over and over again, while shamelessly committing
manustrupation! Krafft-Ebing calls attention to this relation between
religious and sexual feeling in psycho-pathological states. "It
suffices," says he, "to recall how intense sensuality makes itself
manifest in the clinical history of many religious maniacs; the motley
mixture of religious and sexual delusions that is so frequently observed
in psychoses (_e. g._, in maniacal women who think they are or will be
the mother of God), but particularly in masturbatic insanity; and
finally, the sexual, cruel self-punishment, injuries, self-castrations,
and even self-crucifixions, resulting from abnormal religio-sexual
feeling."[93]
[93] Krafft-Ebing, _Psychopathia Sexualis_, p. 8.
An example of the last mentioned self-immolation (self-crucifixion) is
given by Berghierri, and is a remarkable instance of the
interchangeableness of religious emotion and sexual desire in
psychopathic individuals. The man in question, who had been intensely
sensual, manufactured a cross, nailed himself to it, and ingeniously
managed to suspend himself and cross from the window of his sleeping
apartment.
"All through the history of insanity the student has occasion to observe
this close alliance of sexual and religious ideas; an alliance which may
be partly accounted for because of the prominence which sexual themes
have in most creeds, as illustrated in ancient times by the phallus
worship of the Egyptians, the ceremonies of the Friga cultus of the
Saxons, the frequent and detailed reference to sexual topics in the
Koran and several other books of the kind, and which is further
illustrated in the performances which, to come down to a modern period,
characterize the religious revival and camp-meeting as they tinctured
their medieval model, the Muenster Anabaptist movement."[94]
[94] Spitzka: _Insanity_, p. 39.
Men, owing to their greater freedom, soon learn the difference of the
sexes and the delights of sexual congress; women, hedged in by
conventionalities and deterred by their innate passivity, remain, for
the most part, in ignorance of sexual knowledge until their marriage.
For this reason it happens that very many more women than men experience
religious emotion. _Young married men and women, who are in perfect
sexual health, and who have not experienced religion before marriage,
seldom give this emotion a single thought until late in life, when both
libido and vita sexualis are on the wane or are extinct._ Voltaire
cynically, though truthfully, observes that when woman is no longer
pleasing to man she then turns to God. A woman who has been disappointed
in love almost invariably seeks consolation in religion. The virtuous
unmarried woman, who has been unsuccessful in the pursuit of a husband,
invariably turns to God and religion with impassioned zeal and energy.
Ungratified, or, rather, _unsatisfied_, sensuality very frequently gives
rise to great religio-sexual enthusiasm. The circumcised foreskin of
Christ, where it was and what had become of it, was a source of
continual worriment to the nun Blanbekin; in an ecstacy of ungratified
_libido_, St. Catherine of Genoa would frequently cast herself on the
hard floor of her cell, crying: "Love! love! I can endure it no longer;"
St. Armelle and St. Elizabeth were troubled with _libido_ for the child
Jesus;[95] an old prayer is quite significant: "Oh, that I had found
thee, Holy Emanuel; _Oh, that I had thee in my bed to bring delight to
body and soul!_ Come and be mine, and my heart shall be thy
resting-place."[96] Francis Parkman calls attention to the fact that the
nuns sent over to America in colonization days were frequently seized
with religio-sexual frenzy. "She heard," writes he of Marie de
l'Incarnation, "in a trance, a miraculous voice. It was that of Christ,
promising to become her spouse. Months and years passed, full of
troubled hopes and fears, when again the voice sounded in her ear, with
assurance that the promise was fulfilled, and that she was, indeed, his
bride. Now ensued phenomena which are not infrequent among Roman
Catholic female devotees, when unmarried, or married unhappily, and
_which have their source in the necessities of a woman's nature_." (The
italics are my own.) "To her excited thought, her divine spouse became a
living presence; and her language to him, as recorded by herself, is of
intense passion. She went to prayer, agitated and tremulous, as if to a
meeting with an earthly lover: 'Oh, my Love,' she exclaimed, 'when shall
I embrace you? Have you no pity on the torments that I suffer? Alas!
alas! my Love, my Beauty, my Life! Instead of healing my pain, you take
pleasure in it. Come, let me embrace you, and die in your sacred
arms!'"[97] The historian remarks that the "holy widow," as her
biographers call her, is an example, and a lamentable one, of the
tendency of the erotic principle to ally itself with high religious
excitement and enthusiasm. Further along he says that "some of the
pupils of Marie de l'Incarnation, also, had mystical marriages with
Christ; and the impassioned rhapsodies of one of them being overheard,
she nearly lost her character, as it was thought that she was
apostrophizing an earthly lover."[98]
[95] Krafft-Ebing: _op. cit. ante._, p. 8, footnote.
[96] _Ibid._
[97] Francis Parkman: _The Jesuits in North America_, p. 175. "_O
amour, quand vous embrasserai-je? N'avez vous point pitie de moi
dans le tourment que je souffre? Helas! mon amour, ma beaute, ma
vie! au lieu de me guerir, vous vous plaisez a mes maux. Venez donc
que je vous embrasse et je meure entre vos bras sacres._" Journal
de Marie de l'Incarnation.
[98] Francis Parkman: _The Jesuits in North America_, p. 176.
The instances of religio-sexual outbursts in nuns and Roman Catholic
female devotees who lead celibate lives are very numerous; I will,
however, call attention to but one other: St. Veronica was so much in
love with the divine lion that she took a young lion to bed with her,
fondled and kissed it, and allowed it to suck her breasts.[99]
Throughout sacred literature, beginning with the Bible itself,
religio-sexual feeling is very much _en evidence_. Hosea married a
prostitute because--so he declared--God commanded him so to do. If
Solomon's beautiful song is typical of the Church and the Christ (as
some theologians teach), then it is an unmistakable instance of
religio-sexual feeling; religious emotion and sexual desire walk hand in
hand through the measures of this impassioned verse. Circumcision, now
eminently a religious ceremony, was, unquestionably, a sexual fetich and
a phallic rite, which has been handed down from antiquity, when all the
world were phallic worshipers! The very pillars set up by the patriarchs
in commemoration of certain events were but rude images of the phallus,
while not a few of the mysteries of the Holy of Holies itself were but
vestiges of Chaldean and Egyptian genital worship![AF]
[99] Friedreich: _Psychologie_, p. 389.
[AF] A recent writer, Dr. Lydston, expresses surprise that the
brothel should occupy such a prominent place in the ancient
chronicles. When the universality and high honor of phallic worship
is taken into consideration, the entertainment of the "Captain of
the Host" in a brothel ceases to be a matter or cause for surprise;
the prominence given such entertainment by the ancient historians
is perfectly natural and to be expected. _Compare_ Lydston: _The
Diseases of Society_, p. 305.
That a relationship between, and an interchangeableness of, these two
widely dissimilar psychical operations, _i.e._, religious emotion and
sexual desire, does exist, there can be no doubt.[AG] Now, what is the
cause of, the reason for, this relationship? Mantegazza, Maudsley,
Schleiermacher, Krafft-Ebing, and many others have endeavored,
incidentally, to assign reasons for this relationship, but have, in my
opinion, signally failed. Spitzka has tentatively, and without
elaborating his idea in the least, suggested a theory which, I believe,
solves the problem in every essential point. Says he in "Insanity,"
page 39: This "alliance" (between religious emotion and _libido_) "may
be partly accounted for because of the prominence which sexual themes
have in most creeds, as illustrated in ancient times by the phallus
worship of the Egyptians, the ceremonies of the Friga cultus of the
Saxons, the frequent and detailed reference to sexual topics in the
Koran and several other books of the kind, etc." Dr. Spitzka does not
enter into any discussion of the matter; he simply asserts his belief in
the cause of the relationship, and then dismisses the subject without
further comment.
[AG] The author believes that upon the correlation of religious
emotion and sexual desire depends, in a great measure, the
stability of sexual morality. Were it not for this correlation,
sexual promiscuity would be the rule throughout the world.
Now, permit me, as briefly as possible, to designate the cause of the
relationship between, and the interchangeableness of, religious feeling
and sexual desire, which, as I believe, is to be found in the once
widespread existence of phallic worship.
Some ten or twelve years ago, in an article on Suicide, which was
published in the _American Practitioner and News_, I suggested (as a
possible explanation for certain psychical phenomena) the existence in
man of two consciousnesses, an active, vigilant consciousness and a
pseudo-dormant consciousness. Again, in the _American Naturalist_, in an
essay entitled "The Psychology of Hypnotism,"[100] I reasserted this
theory and, to a certain extent, elaborated it. I placed man's active
consciousness in the cortical portion of the brain, and his
pseudo-dormant, _unconscious_ consciousness (arbitrarily, be it
confessed) in the basilar ganglia, and called this latter consciousness,
"ganglionic consciousness."
[100] _Loc. cit._, November, 1894.
Recently, much has been written on the doctrine of duplex personality,
notably by Mr. F. W. H. Myers, in a series of papers read before the
Society of Psychical Research. Professor Newbold has also written very
entertainingly and instructively on this subject. While not fully
accepting the theory of "duplex personality," _i. e._, active
consciousness and _subliminal consciousness_ (Myers' name for the
pseudo-dormant consciousness), as having been proven, Newbold says: "Of
all the theories developed from the point of independence, Mr. Myers' is
the most comprehensive in its scope, is kept in most constant touch with
what the author regards as facts, and displays the greatest philosophic
insight."[101] According to the theory of duplex personality, many
instincts, desires, and emotions have been crowded out of the active
consciousness and have been relegated to the pseudo-dormant
consciousness. This has been brought about by a "process of selection
out of an infinity of possible elements solely on the grounds of
utility." Thus the _cause_ for our horror of incest is hidden away in
our subliminal consciousness; yet we cannot but think, with
Westermarck, that this instinct is but the result of natural
selection,[102] the utility of the factor or factors occasioning it
being no longer in evidence or required. Again, at certain seasons, man
is seized with _waldliebe_ (forest-love) and longs to flee from the
haunts of men, and, with gun and rod, to revert, as far as possible, to
the state of his savage ancestors. The desire is safely hidden away in
his subliminal consciousness until favoring circumstances tempt it
forth. It is not alone in "sleep, dreams, hypnosis, trance, and ecstacy
that we see a temporary subsidence of the upper consciousness and the
upheaval of a subliminal stratum"; there are many other states and many
other causes for this strange psychical phenomenon.
[101] Newbold: _Appleton's Popular Science Monthly_, February,
1897, p. 516.
[102] Westermarck: _History of Human Marriage_, p. 352.
I have demonstrated in the preceding pages that the worship of the
generative principle was almost, if not wholly, universal; I have also
shown that the beliefs, rites, and ceremonies of this cult made a
lasting impression upon the minds of every people among whom it gained a
foothold. Take the case of the ancient Hebrews. Notwithstanding the fact
that they were tried in the furnace of Javeh's awful wrath time and
again; notwithstanding the fact that famine, pestilence, war, and
imprisonment destroyed them by thousands; and, notwithstanding the fact
that they were threatened with utter and absolute annihilation--all on
account of this cult--they would not wholly abandon it. The words of the
prophets become almost pathetic as we read, over and over again, that,
although the kings did that which was pleasing in the sight of the Lord,
"the high places and the groves were not destroyed." Take the case of
the Aztecs. Crushed beneath the iron heels of Spain's hardy buccaneers,
an utterly broken and conquered race, Cortez turned them over to the
ministering care of his zealous priests. The prison, agonizing torture,
and the awful stake succeeded, at last, in Christianizing them; they
became children of Holy Mother Church! And yet, hundreds of years after
this "glorious victory of the cross," Biart finds the humble offerings
of their descendants at the feet of Mictlanteuctli! The modern Christian
Indian, in the deep shadows of the night, steals forth to offer up in
secrecy a prayer at the feet of one of the phallic trinity! What matters
it to the modern Aztec that his petition is offered to the ruler of
Mictlan, the hell of his forefathers, instead of to the mighty
Ipalnemoani, the Life-Giver?[103] In his opinion, Mictlanteuctli
represents the entire Aztec theogony, for has not his white priest kept
the name of _this_ god green in his memory? All the other gods have been
forgotten; their personalities have been absorbed into that of the god
of hell, for he has had advertisers in the shape of Catholic priests
ever since the fall of the Aztec Empire! Take the case of the Peruvians.
Although the Place of Gold and the beautiful Virgins of the Sun are not
even memories to the descendants of the Incas, the religion which gave
rise to them is not wholly forgotten; "phallic rites and ceremonies are
to be observed interwoven with their Christian ritual and belief!" Take
the case of the Roman Catholic devotees of Isernia, of Varailles, of
Lyons, of hundreds of other places during the latter half of the
eighteenth century. Priapus died when the first Christian emperor took
his seat on the throne of Imperial Rome, and yet, hundreds and hundreds
of years thereafter, we behold some of the mysteries of Eleusis almost
within the shadow of St. Peter's!
[103] Biart: _The Aztecs_, p. 110.
Now, why is this? There can be but one answer, and that is that these
people simply inherited a portion of the _psychos_ of their
forefathers, which made the tenets of this religion natural and easy of
belief. I have demonstrated, I believe, that religious feeling was not a
psychical trait in the beginning; like a number of other mental
attributes, it was the result of evolution.[104] Mental abstraction,
especially as associated with religious feeling, was the result of
psychical growth, of psychically inherited experiences.[AH] As _psychos_
grew beneath the fostering influence of ages of experience, the mind
became able to formulate abstract thought. In the beginning, the process
of ratiocination was, necessarily, very simple; but, simple as it was,
it was able to recognize the source of life--first, in the sun, then, in
the second place, in man himself; and, finally and _abstractly_, in a
source outside of, but connected with, man. This abstract source, which
sprung from sexuality, _ab initio_, they deified and worshiped. Thus we
see that, in the very beginning, the worship of the generative principle
sprung from, and was a part of, man himself. Throughout thousands and
thousands of years, religious feeling and sexual desire, the component
parts of phallic adoration, were intimately associated; finally,
religio-sexuality became an instinct, just as a belief in the existence
of a double or soul became an instinct.
[104] Huxley: _Essays_; Haeckel: _The History of Creation_;
Haeckel: _The Evolution of Man_; Peschel: _The Races of Man_; De
Quatrefages: _The Human Species_; Draper: _The Conflict Between
Religion and Science_; White: _History of the Warfare of Science
with Theology_; Romanes: _Mental Evolution in Man_; Wallace: _The
Malay Archipelago_ (_The Races of Man in the Malay Archipelago_, c.
xl); Darwin's _Works_; Maudsley: _The Physiology of Mind_; Tylor:
_Anthropology_; Spencer: _Synthetic Philosophy_--_Prin. Psych.,
Prin. Sociol._
[AH] The sense of familiarity implies previous perception now
dissociated, but subconsciously present and struggling up toward
the surface of the upper consciousness to gain recognition. Boris
Sidis: _Multiple Personality_, p. 51.
Belief in the existence of a soul has never been repressed; its utility
is still recognized; hence, it is present in our active consciousness.
The accumulated experiences of civilization have, however, declared the
inutility of phallic worship, hence, it has been crowded out of our
active consciousness by a process of selection and has been relegated to
the innermost recesses of our subliminal consciousness, where also dwell
many other formerly active instincts of our savage ancestors. When
circumstances favoring their appearances occur, these pseudo-dormant
instincts always become evident; it is due to this fact that the
correlation of religious emotion and sexual desire exists.
VIRAGINITY AND EFFEMINATION.
In following up the chain of evolution in animal life from its inception
in primordial protoplasm to its end, as we now find it, we discover that
the interlinking organisms are, in the beginning, either asexual or
hermaphroditic. The moneron, the lowest form of animal life, simply
multiplies by division. The different elements through which propagation
and generation are carried on, are undoubtedly present even in the
moneron, but are not differentiated. The moneron is an organless,
structureless organism, consequently asexual. The cell, on the contrary,
is hermaphroditic, for it contains within itself the necessary elements
for reproducing itself. The am[oe]ba is the connecting link which
connects all terrene life with primitive bathybian protoplasm, and is,
strictly speaking, a true hermaphrodite. Ascending at once to the sixth
stage in the ancestry of man, we come to the _acoelomi_, or worms
without body cavity. These worms are phylogenetic, consequently
hermaphroditic. I do not mean to say that these worms have the organs of
each sex equally developed; therefore, in the use of the word
hermaphrodite, I use it in its broadest sense. I simply mean that they
are autogenetic. In the _rhabdocoela_ the sexual organs appear in their
simplest forms--a testis anterior to a single or double ovary. Other
gliding worms have a more complex arrangement of the sexual organs, but
most of them are true hermaphrodites. Next in the chain of evolutionary
development, and one step nearer man, we find the soft worms
(_scolecidae_); from a branch of this family the parent group of
vertebrates was developed. The immediate ancestor of the vertebrates was
either the amphioxus (lancelet) or some other notochordate animal, whose
type is now extinct. Thus we have traced hermaphroditism from the
am[oe]ba to the amphioxus, from the ancestor of the parent cell to the
ancestor of the vertebrates. We could carry it further, but it is
unnecessary. Effemination and viraginity, are due directly to the
influence of that strange law laid down by Darwin--the law of reversion
to ancestral types. It is an effort of nature to return man to the old
hermaphroditic form from which he was evolved. It is an effort on the
part of nature to incorporate the individualities of the male and
female, both physical and psychical, in one body. The phenomenon of
atavism is more apt to occur in feeble types than in strong, healthy and
well-developed types. Microcephalism, occurring, as it most frequently
does, among ignorant, ill-nourished, and unhealthy people, is an
example. Dolichocephalism and a flattening of the cranial arch, with
corresponding loss of capacity in the skull--types that we see
everywhere among the depraved and vicious--are other examples of this
tendency of atavism to seize on weakened and unhealthy subjects.
Effemination finds more victims among the wealthy and the educated than
among the poor and uneducated. This phenomenon is a psychic rather than
a physical hermaphroditism, and is directly traceable to the enervation
produced by the habits of the wealthy and unemployed. Wealth begets
luxury, luxury begets debauchery and consequent enervation. Periods of
moral decadence in the life of a nation are always coincident with
periods of luxury and great wealth, with consequent enervation and
effemination; examples of this may be found in the histories of Rome,
Greece, and France. During the reign of Louis XV., examples of
effemination crowded into the court and vied with the royal fop in the
splendor of their raiment and effeminacy of their bearing. Psychic
hermaphroditism does not occur _naturally_ in uncivilized or
half-civilized races. The reason for this is patent. Atavism finds
among them no weakened and enervated subjects on whom to perpetrate this
strange travesty on nature.
Large cities are the hotbeds and breeding-places of the various
neuroses. There general paresis treads closely upon the heels of sexual
neurasthenia, while the victims of hysteria and kindred ills are almost
countless in their number. What wonder, then, that the offspring of such
parents should be weak and neurasthenic, and fall easy victims to the
thousand and one erotic fancies which beset them! What wonder that here
atavism finds its richest field, and plays its strangest and most
fearful pranks, sending men into the world with the tastes, desires, and
habits of women, and women with all the mental hibitudes of men! Juvenal
wrote in scathing, searing sarcasm of the degeneracy of the Roman youth;
effemination was very prevalent, and this bitter satirist wrote burning
words against their degrading and bestial practices. It seems to me
that we are beginning to need a Juvenal for this day and generation!
People divide themselves into classes, and these classes are generally
exceedingly clannish. It is not considered "good form" to marry out of
the class to which an individual may belong, consequently, no new types
of individuals are added. Luxury and debauchery enervate the classes
which indulge in them. The people of these classes intermarry among
themselves, no new blood is added, hence, in a very few generations,
degeneration sets in.
Effemination and viraginity are common types of degeneration which
always follow in the wake of luxury and debauchery. Effemination makes
its appearance early in life. The young boy likes the society of girls;
he plays with dolls, and, if permitted, will don female attire and dress
his hair like a girl. He learns to sew, to knit, to embroider, to do
"tatting." He becomes a connoisseur in female dress, and likes to
discuss matters pertaining to the toilet of females. He does not care
for boyish sports, and when he grows older, takes no pleasure in the
amusements and pursuits of his masculine acquaintances. He prefers to
spend his time with women and to engage in their employments and
amusements. As the change in his psychic being becomes more pronounced
and more overpowering, he will endeavor to approach the female in gait,
attitude, and style of dress.
I have seen mothers guilty of incalculable harm by fostering such
inclinations in their sons. They think (the thought is a natural one)
that such perversions of taste indicate gentleness and kindliness, and
induce their sons to continue in the practice of them, thus assisting
atavism in its baneful work.
Effemination is a disease which, taken at its inception, can generally
be eradicated and cured. As soon as it is discovered, the boy's
surroundings should be changed; his mind should be directed into new
channels, and his dormant boy's nature aroused. Outdoor exercise and a
free intercourse with companions of his own sex should be made important
factors in the treatment of an incipient effeminant. He should be
carefully watched until _vita sexualis_ has been established; he should
then be taught the dangers of youthful follies and indiscretions.
A dandified man is always ridiculous, but when he adds to his foppery,
effemination, he then becomes contemptible.
Several years ago I had the opportunity of studying a pronounced
effeminant. He is one of the best known young men of a Southern city,
and is a leader in society. He took me to his "boudoir" and showed me
his "lingerie." The words quoted are his own. His nightgowns were
marvels of artistic needlework, as far as I was able to judge, and were
made by himself. His nightcaps were "sweetly pretty," and one of them
was a "perfect dream of beauty." On his dressing-table were all the
accessories of a modern society woman's toilet, including rouge, powder,
a complete manicure set, and numerous bottles of perfumes and toilet
waters. In his wardrobe he had displayed on forms, some six or eight
corsets and chemisettes--"corset-covers," as he designated them.
This man's voice and manner of speaking are decidedly feminine; all the
little mannerisms and affectations of a society woman being faithfully
reproduced. I understand from his associates that he is a splendid
business man, and that not a breath of scandal has ever tarnished his
good name. He was reared by his mother, and never associated with boys
until his sixteenth year. I understood from him that she always treated
him as a girl, and consulted him in all things pertaining to her toilet.
He seemed utterly unconscious of his anomalous condition, and as his
business associates are gentlemen, and his intimate friends are ladies,
he may drift through life without a single jar to mar the serenity of
his existence.
Viraginity is, comparatively, an infrequent occurrence, but under its
influence the unfortunate victims are guilty of startling vagaries. The
recent case of Alice Mitchell, who killed Miss Ward, at Memphis, Tenn.,
is an example of pronounced viraginity. We see daily in the newspapers
accounts of women who masquerade as men, and history abounds in like
instances. The celebrated writer Count Sandor V. was a woman who posed
as a man, and who was in fact Sarolta (Charlotte), Countess V. "Among
many foolish things that her father encouraged in her was the fact that
he brought her up as a boy, called her Sandor, allowed her to ride,
drive, and hunt, admiring her muscular energy." At the age of thirteen
she ran away from school, where she had been sent by her mother, and
returned home. "Sarolta returned to her mother, who, however, could do
nothing and was compelled to allow her daughter to again become Sandor,
wear male clothes, and, at least once a year, to fall in love with
persons of her own sex."
Mothers, early in life, though not from any sense of danger to their
daughters, begin to eradicate the tom-boy inclinations in their female
children; hence the comparative infrequency of viraginity. The
congenital viragint will always remain somewhat masculine in her tastes
and ideas, but her inclinations and desires having been turned toward
femininity early in life, she will escape the horrors of complete
viraginity or gynandry. The victim of effemination, however, is saved by
no such accidental forethought. The ignorant mother fosters feminine
inclinations and desires in her effeminate son until his psychic being
becomes entirely changed, and not even the establishment of _vita
sexualis_ will save him from effemination.
An only son, who is in the least degree neurasthenic, runs the risk of
becoming an effeminant under the tutelage of a loving but ignorant
mother who encourages his feminine tastes and inclinations. A young man
of my acquaintance, who is an only son, is so situated. This young man
devotes his entire attention to matters of the toilet. He paints his
cheeks and powders his face; even his eyebrows and eyelashes are
anointed with some dark-colored ointment or pomade.
Effemination and viraginity are more prevalent in the Old World than in
the United States. The civilization and settlement of the United States
are, comparatively speaking, new. The people are, as yet, a young,
strong, and vigorous nation. Years of luxury and debauchery have not yet
brought the penalty of enervation and neurasthenia to the _masses_,
though in certain circles of society, it is becoming painfully evident
that that penalty is being even now exacted.
In this article I have described only mild types of viraginity and
effemination. In the more pronounced types of these singular examples of
atavism or reversion, the victims commit the most unheard of and the
most unnatural acts.
Almost every case of effemination or viraginity can be cured if
recognized and treated in its incipiency. The parents should be the
physicians. They should keep a watchful supervision over their
offspring, and as soon as any evidences of effemination or viraginity
become apparent, treatment, both physical and psychical, should at once
be instituted.
Effemination has occasioned the downfall of many nations; let us guard
against it with all our power. Let us train up our boys to be manly men,
and our girls to be womanly women.
BORDERLANDS AND CRANKDOM.
When that bilious critic and merciless crucifier of human foibles,
Carlyle, himself a degenerate, wrote that nine-tenths of the world were
fools, he was much nearer truth than most men think. When we take an
introspective view of our sane personality, we shudder to see how near
it is to the borderlands of insanity and the bizarre and eccentric world
of crankdom. There hardly lives a man who does not possess some
eccentricity, or who does not cherish, hidden, perhaps, deep within
himself, some small delusion, which he is ashamed to acknowledge to the
outside world. Social relations and the iron rules of custom hold in
place the balance-wheel of many a disordered mind. The mental equipoise
is kept at the normal standard only by the powerful aid of the will,
supported and assisted by extraneous adjuvants, such as fear of
punishment, fear of personal harm, and, above all, by the fear of
ridicule. Many a man hugs his delusions closely to his heart, indulges
them only in the secret recesses of his soul, and, their sole owner and
acquaintance, carries them with him to his grave.
Any man who has a retentive memory, and one capable of minute analysis,
can look back in his life and recall moments when his insane personality
got the better of his will, and ran riot in forbidden pathways. He may
not have committed an insane act; yet the thought, the impulse, the
delusion was there and only outside influences kept it from breaking
forth. Who fails to remember certain times in his life when he has had
an almost overpowering desire to cry out in church, or to laugh on some
sad or solemn occasion; or, having a razor in his hand, has had an
impulse, sudden and intense, to draw it across his throat; or, being on
some high place, has been seized with the desire to hurl himself
downward? This shows how near indeed the healthy mind ever hovers on the
borderlands of insanity.
Man stands so close to the portals of insanity that he can look through
the gateway, when he takes an introspective view of his psychical being,
and can see the phantoms and mental ghosts of his insane personality.
We have every reason to believe that, among civilized races, there is a
vast amount of latent insanity. Taking the tables of our insane asylums,
we find a thousand and one causes given as the exciting factors in the
mental overthrow. Love, religion, anger, disappointment, etc., down
through the long list of psychic and aesthetic emotions, until it seems
as though even a breath of wind would be sufficient to destroy the
mental equipoise.
Among savage and uncivilized races, insanity is of infrequent
occurrence. Only when a race begins to elevate itself and take on a
higher view of morality, when new rules and new laws, new customs and
innovations, tending to place individuals in a state of comparison,
arise, does insanity make its appearance. The untutored savage, living
in a state of communism, is untroubled by the jealousies and
heart-burnings of his civilized congener. He lives in the to-day and
allows the to-morrow to take care of itself. Devoid of ambition, a mere
animal, sensual and indolent, he cares only for the gratification of his
physical desires. The mental attributes of a civilized being are, in
him, wanting.
Psychos is the result of evolutionary development, and the chief reason
why insanity is not as prevalent in the savage as in the civilized man,
is because the brain of the savage lacks development. I do not wish to
convey the idea that insanity is purely psychical in its nature.
Insanity is the result of a material change in the structure of the
brain produced by morbific action. The manifestations of insanity are
merely the symptoms of a disease that involves the brain. The savage has
less development of psychical function, consequently he is less liable
to mental lesion. I mean by psychical function that portion of the brain
in which psychos has its origin. Alienists consider the habits of men as
being the factor in the production of insanity. Habits and heredity are
undoubted factors in the production of diseased minds, and, in fact, are
the chief agents. You cannot, however, expect to find a disordered
function where that function is absent. Savages have paresis, apoplexy,
and imbecility, seldom or never insanity. The reason is patent--they
lack the psychic function, that peculiar element, whatever it may be,
which raises civilized man so high above them. That this element can be
developed in savages I do not for one instant deny. The ploughshare of
evolutionary civilization will bring it to the surface sooner or later,
and when it does insanity follows. I have only to point to the American
negro to prove the truth of my proposition; even he is partially exempt,
simply because his civilization is of such recent date that his brain
has not yet acquired its full quota of the psychic element.
I will venture to assert, so true is the fact that insanity is the
product of civilization, that, if it were not for the combating
influences of social laws, assisted not a little by scientific medical
aid, all North America could not contain the vast and enormous army that
would constitute the civilized world's array of lunatics.
There seems to be in the minds of men an instinctive awe of anything
that appertains to the insane. In olden times a disordered mind was
considered of divine or diabolic origin as it evinced good or evil
tendencies. This belief lasted even until the present century. Many old
women who were the victims of senile dementia and kindred ills, were
accused of witchcraft and intercourse with the devil, here in the United
States, not a century ago. Witches were executed in England and men
burned at the stake in Spain, not two hundred years ago, for the crime
of demoniacal possession. Even in this enlightened age men are
accustomed to consider insanity rather from its psychical standpoint
than from its physical aspect. They do not take into consideration the
fact that insanity is due to a physical lesion, and that its vagaries
are but the symptoms of brain disease or brain deformity. The
inhabitants of the borderlands are invested with a certain shadowy
mystery which separates them from the rest of mankind, and which makes
them appear to us as denizens of another psychical world than ours.
In the Middle Ages, cranks, whose eccentricities took a religious turn,
were considered holy. St. Simon Stylites was a very pronounced crank,
and a very holy man also, because he chose to live the greater portion
of his life perched on a pillar seventy feet high. St. Anthony was
another holy crank who never, in all his life, washed his feet. Poor
Joan of Arc was burned at the stake because she was "possessed of a
false and lying devil." She has been recently proposed for canonization
by the same church that burned her, and thus, in a measure, had justice
done her. I do not think, however, that this is any recompense for the
terrible agony inflicted on this unfortunate victim of hystero-epilepsy.
Says Maudsley in "Responsibility in Mental Disease": "Some of the
prophets of the Old Testament presented symptoms which can hardly be
interpreted as other than the effects of madness; certainly if they were
not mad, they imitated very closely some of its most striking features."
Jeremiah takes a long journey to the river Euphrates and hides a linen
girdle in a hole of a rock. He then returns home and in a few days
makes the same journey, and finds the girdle rotten and good for
nothing. Ezekiel digs a hole in the wall of his house, and through it
removes his household goods, instead of through the door. Hosea marries
a prostitute because he said he had been commanded by God so to do.
Isaiah stripped himself naked and paraded up and down in sight of all
the people.
Some of the greatest changes in the world's history have been effected
by dwellers in the borderlands. Mahomet was an epileptic, and his first
vision was the result on an epileptic convulsion or seizure. The
character of his visions was exactly like that of those visions which an
epileptic sees and describes at the present time. Mahomet believed in
his visions, and, what is more, got more than half the world to believe
in them also. Gautama was a dweller in the borderlands, yet his
followers now number five hundred millions.
The novel mode in which an insane man regards things may be an
inspiration which reflection could never attain, and it sometimes
happens that opinions which seem to the world to be the ravings of a
madman, have turned out to be true. The insane man has the world against
him, and though he may pose for a short time as a reformer, sooner or
later lands in the asylum.
It sometimes happens that the crank will succeed in getting converts. A
notable instance is Schweinfurth, or "the Christ," as he calls himself.
I am firmly convinced that this man believes in his delusions. One thing
is certain, and that is, his disciples believe in him implicitly. This
man is dangerous to society, inasmuch as he has caused the separation of
several wives from their husbands; the wives abandoning their husbands
to follow him to "Heaven," as he calls his farm house.
The crank is, generally, a harmless individual, and is not anti-social
unless his delusions take the form of homicidal impulse, pyromania,
kleptomania, etc.
Homicidal impulse is the most dangerous to society of the many mental
vagaries and derangements which afflict the dwellers in the borderlands.
Its invasion is sudden and its impulse is, generally, overpowering. A
man may be walking the streets presumably in perfect health, and yet
have, all the while, a voice whispering in his ear "kill, kill." His
insane desire at length reaches its acme, and he throws aside every
mental restraint and kills the first individual he may chance to meet.
Again, he may desire to kill some particular individual, and will
carefully and systematically arrange his plans for the successful
enactment of the homicide. The murderers of Garfield and Harrison
probably belong to this latter class, though in the case of Prendergast,
the slayer of Mayor Harrison, this opinion may be erroneous. There is
something about his photograph that leads me to believe that he is a
moral imbecile, rather than an intellectual dyscrasiac.
A clerk in a solicitor's office, at Alton, Hampshire, England, one
afternoon took a walk outside the town, when he met some children. He
persuaded one of these, a girl of nine, to go with him into a
neighboring garden. A short while after, he was seen walking quietly
home; he was seen to wash himself in the river and then go back to his
office. The little girl did not return home, and, search having been
instituted, her dismembered body was found strewn about the garden. The
clerk was arrested, and in his diary was found this entry, recently
made: "Killed a little girl; it was fine and hot." This man was either a
sadistic sexual pervert, or a victim of homicidal impulse. Maudsley
gives this instance as an example of the latter, while Krafft-Ebing
gives it as an example of the former. There is a great difference
between these two mental derangements. The victim of homicidal impulse
kills without any ulterior object, while the sadist kills in order to
gratify his unnatural and perverted sexual appetite.
The victim of homicidal impulse is, to all outward appearances,
perfectly sane otherwise. His impulse frequently leaves him for years
and then returns with overpowering force.
Epileptics who have just passed through violent convulsions, will
frequently attack bystanders with great fury. Some alienists declare
that homicidal mania is frequently only a masked epilepsy. All
epileptics should be carefully watched; they may become dangerous to
society at any moment. Numerous instances are recorded of murder
committed by sufferers from _petit mal_, a form of epilepsy. I once saw
a negro walk up to a white man, who was a stranger and unknown by him,
and fell him to the earth by striking him with a club. The negro was
arrested, and the next day swore that he was entirely unconscious of
having struck anyone. It was proven at his trial that he was subject to
mild epileptic attacks.
I believe that all suicides are due to mental aberration. It may be the
result of a momentary and sudden loss of mental equipoise, or the final
and fatal ending of a premeditated desire carried through days, weeks,
months, and even years.
We see a man, blessed with everything that makes life enjoyable, genial,
gay, with a ready smile and kindly word for everyone, suddenly, in a
moment, pass forever out into the unknown--self-killed, a victim of his
own creation. We stand amazed! Why did he do it? We can find nothing in
his past or present condition to warrant such an action.
He was the victim of momentary aberration, or, perhaps, deep in his
mind, buried and hidden even from himself, there dwelt a desire for
self-slaughter, when a "physical pain, an unexpected impression, a
moral affection, an indiscreet proposition" uncovered this desire, and
he at once committed the deed!
There are epidemics of suicide. Let the papers chronicle some peculiar
method of suicide selected by some unfortunate, and others will
immediately follow his example. Unconscious cerebration also hurls many
souls out of the world. I was called to see a gentleman who had
attempted suicide by slashing the radial artery at the wrist. I found
him holding a compress on the severed vessel and greatly alarmed. He
swore to me that he was totally unconscious how he had come to do the
deed, and that he did not know that he had cut himself until he felt the
pain and saw the blood flowing from the wound!
Viraginity and effemination, while not mental insanities, strictly
speaking, are, nevertheless, mental deformities, and their unfortunate
victims are dwellers in the borderlands. Mild forms of these types of
degeneration are very abundant. The effeminate, cigarette-smoking,
soda-drinking young man of the comic weeklies, and the loud, horsy,
slang-using, vulgar, masculine young woman are seen everywhere.
Effemination and viraginity are the results of the weakening effects of
luxury and consequent debauchery. Nations, time and again, have felt the
dire effects of effemination and have sunk beneath them. The Grecian,
the Roman, the Egyptian nations are familiar examples. The satirists of
the golden age of the Latin people dipped their _stili_, metaphorically,
in gall and bitter wormwood and berated the effeminate nobility time and
again. One of them advised the Roman ladies to look for _men_ among the
gladiators and the peasants! Anacreon's poems are filled with allusions
to effemination and the delights of psychic hermaphroditism.
In the time of Louis XIV., of France, the royal palaces were filled to
repletion with effeminants, who vied with the women in the splendor of
their robes and the salacious eccentricities of their conduct. The case
of Alice Mitchell, who killed Freda Ward in Memphis not long ago, was
one of pronounced viraginity.
Fortunately, for the good of the community at large, there are,
comparatively speaking, few viragints. The careful mother restrains,
tempers, and abolishes the hoydenish habits of her "tom-boy" girl early
in life, and turns her thoughts toward feminine pursuits and desires.
The unfortunate effeminant, however, is encouraged in his feminine
tastes and habits by his unwise mother, who likes her boy to sit beside
her and sew and knit, if he so desires. She discusses matters of the
toilet with him, and, in fact, treats him as she would a daughter. In
the end, his psychic hermaphroditism becomes complete, and one more
unfortunate goes out into the world to swell the ranks of crankdom!
Kleptomaniacs are greatly to be pitied, for they are generally women in
whom the moral sense is very much developed. The victim of kleptomania
will steal any and everything; they are like magpies in this respect. An
acquaintance of mine, a most estimable lady, a devout Christian, and a
most exemplary wife and mother, is the most incorrigible thief I ever
saw. She has often picked my pockets while I was engaged about her
sick-bed. The merchants of the city where she lives know her infirmity,
watch her while she is in their shops, and respectfully and kindly
relieve her of her pilferings when she starts to leave. She expresses
great sorrow for her unfortunate insane impulse, and has often begged
her husband to have her placed in an asylum. This he refuses to do, as
she is perfectly sane otherwise. The husband was called away for several
weeks, and, on his return, took me to his house and showed me her room.
In the room were the objects stolen during his absence. It was the most
miscellaneous collection of valuables and trash I ever saw. She had
gathered together everything from a darning-needle to a tombstone, a
small specimen of the latter forming a unit of this heterogeneous whole.
This form of mental dyscrasia is much more frequent than people suppose,
and the antecedents of shop-lifters and the like should be carefully
examined before a judgment on their criminality is passed.
"Eccentricity is certainly not always insanity, but there can be no
question that it is often the outcome of insane temperament, and may
approach very near to, or actually pass into, insanity." Alienists rely
on the eccentric and peculiar changes which take place in the characters
of their patients, who either present themselves or are brought to them
for treatment, to establish their diagnosis. If a modest and truthful
man suddenly becomes a braggart and a liar; or, if a humane man becomes
cruel, or a neat man slovenly, there is reason to suspect brain trouble.
The intellect may appear intact, so also the reasoning powers, but these
eccentricities indicate a deviation which may lead to mental
destruction. The last faculty to develop in the mind of man is the moral
faculty; this faculty is the one first lost by diseased brains. If a
man, who suddenly becomes dissolute and licentious (who, heretofore, has
led a virtuous, moral life), be examined, in nine cases in ten his brain
will be found to be diseased. The little cloud, which at first is no
larger than a man's hand, grows ever larger and larger, and in the end
overspreads the entire mental sky!
GENIUS AND DEGENERATION.
That the psychical function or intellectuality is frequently developed
at the expense of the physical organism is well known, and that genius
is seldom or never unaccompanied by physical and mental degeneration is
a fact that can be no longer denied. I use the word degeneration in its
broadest sense, and intend it to include all kinds of abnormalities. The
facts noted above are by no means recent knowledge, but were vaguely
recognized and commented on centuries and decades of centuries ago by
the Hebrews and kindred races of people. The Hebrew word _nabi_ means
either madman or prophet, and it is now admitted that most of the
prophets gave evidences of insanity as well as genius. The Greeks and
the Romans recognized this kinship, and we read in the Bible of a
certain Festus, who, when confronted by a man of genius, and being
unable to answer his arguments, said to him, "Paul, much learning hath
made thee mad!" Lauvergne, when speaking of the oxycephalic (sugarloaf)
skull, an unquestionable example of degeneration, wrote many years ago,
"This head announces the monstrous alliance of the most eminent faculty
of man, genius, with the most pronounced impulses to rape, murder, and
theft."
The purpose of this paper is to show that wherever genius is observed,
we find it accompanied by degeneration, which is evinced by physical
abnormalties or mental eccentricities. It is a strange fact, however,
and one not noticed by Lombroso, or any other writer, as far as I know,
that mechanical geniuses, or those who, for the most part, deal with
material facts, do not, as a rule, show any signs of degeneration. I
have only to instance Darwin, Galileo, Edison, Watts, Rumsey, Howe, and
Morse to prove the truth of this assertion. It is only the genius of
aestheticism, the genius of the emotion, that is generally accompanied
by unmistakable signs of degeneration.
Saul, the first king of Israel, was a man of genius and, at times, a
madman. We read that, before his coronation, he was seized with an
attack of madness and joined a company of kindred eccentrics. His
friends and acquaintances were naturally surprised and exclaimed: "Is
Saul among the prophets?" _i. e._, "Has Saul become insane?" Again, we
are told that he was suddenly seized with an attack of homicidal
impulse, and tried to kill David. Before this time he had had repeated
attacks of madness, which only the harp of David could control and
subdue. David himself was a man whose mental equilibrium was not well
established, as his history clearly indicates. He forsook his God,
indulged in licentious practices, and was, withal, a very, immoral man
at times. At his time, the Hebrews had reached a high degree of
civilization. Abstract ethics had become very much developed, and any
example of great immorality occurring during this epoch is proof
positive of atavism or degeneration.
As I have intimated before, many of the ancient Hebrew prophets, who
were unquestionably men of genius, gave evidences of insanity; notably
Jeremiah, who made a long journey to the River Euphrates, where he hid a
linen girdle. He returned home, and in a few days made the same journey
and found the girdle rotten and good for nothing; Ezekiel, who dug a
hole in the wall of his house, through which he removed his household
goods, instead of through the door; Hosea, who married a prostitute,
because God, so he declared, had told him so to do; and Isaiah, who
stripped himself naked and paraded up and down in sight of all the
people. King Solomon, a man of pre-eminent genius, was mentally
unbalanced. The "Song of Solomon" shows very clearly that he was a
victim of some psychical disorder, sexual in its character and origin.
The poems of Anacreon are lascivious, lustful, and essentially carnal,
and history informs us that he was a sexual pervert.
Swinburne's poems show clearly the mental bias of their author, who is
described as being peculiar and eccentric. Many of the men of genius who
have assisted in making the history of the world have been the victims
of epilepsy. Julius Caesar, military leader, statesman, politician, and
author, was an epileptic. Twice on the field of battle he was stricken
down by this disorder. On one occasion, while seated at the tribune, he
was unable to rise when the senators, consuls, and praetors paid him a
visit of ceremony and honor. They were offended at his seeming lack of
respect, and retired, showing signs of anger. Caesar returned home,
stripped off his clothes, and offered his throat to be cut by anyone. He
then explained his conduct to the senate, saying that he was the victim
of a malady which, at times, rendered him incapable of standing. During
the attacks of this disorder "he felt shocks in his limbs, became giddy,
and at last lost consciousness." Moliere was the victim of epilepsy; so
also was Petrarch, Flaubert, Charles V., Handel, St. Paul, Peter the
Great, and Dostoieffsky; Paganini, Mozart, Schiller, Alfieri, Pascal,
Richelieu, Newton, and Swift were the victims of diseases epileptoid in
character.
Many men of genius have suffered from spasmodic and choreic movements,
notably Lenau, Montesquieu, Buffon, Dr. Johnson, Santeuil, Crebillon,
Lombardini, Thomas Campbell, Carducci, Napoleon, and Socrates.
Suicide, essentially a symptom of mental disorder, has hurried many a
man of genius out into the unknown. The list begins with such eminent
men as Zeno, Cleanthes, Dionysius, Lucan, and Stilpo, and contains the
names of such immortals as Chatterton, Blount, Haydon, Clive, and David.
Alcoholism and morphinism, or an uncontrollable desire for alcohol or
opium in some form or other, are now recognized as evidences of
degeneration. Men of genius, both in the Old World and in the New, have
shown this form of degeneration. Says Lombroso: "Alexander died after
having emptied ten times the goblet of Hercules, and it was, without
doubt, in an alcoholic attack, while pursuing naked the infamous Thais,
that he killed his dearest friend. Caesar was often carried home
intoxicated on the shoulders of his soldiers. Neither Socrates, nor
Seneca, nor Alcibiades, nor Cato, nor Peter the Great (nor his wife
Catherine, nor his daughter Elizabeth) were remarkable for their
abstinence. One recalls Horace's line, '_Narratur et prisci Cantonis
saepe mero caluisse virtus._' Tiberius Nero was called by the Romans
Biberius Mero. Septimius Severus and Mahomet II. succumbed to
drunkenness or _delirium tremens_."
Among the men and women of genius of the Old World who abused the use of
alcohol and opium, were Coleridge, James Thomson, Carew, Sheridan,
Steele, Addison, Hoffman, Charles Lamb, Madame de Stael, Burns, Savage,
Alfred de Musset, Kleist, Caracci, Jan Steen, Morland Turner (the
painter), Gerard de Nerval, Hartley Coleridge, Dussek, Handel, Glueck,
Praga, Rovani, and the poet Somerville. This list is by no means
complete, as the well-informed reader may see at a glance; it serves to
show, however, how very often this form of degeneration makes its
appearance in men of genius.
In men of genius the moral sense is sometimes obtunded, if not
altogether absent. Sallust, Seneca, and Bacon were suspected felons.
Rousseau, Byron, Foscolo, and Caresa were grossly immoral, while
Casanova, the gifted mathematician, was a common swindler. Murat,
Rousseau, Clement, Diderot, Praga, and Oscar Wilde were sexual perverts.
Genius, like insanity, lives in a world of its own, hence we find few,
if any, evidences of human affection in men of genius. Says Lombroso: "I
have been able to observe men of genius when they had scarce reached the
age of puberty; they did not manifest the deep aversions of moral
insanity, but I have noticed among all a strange apathy for everything
which does not concern them; as though, plunged in the hypnotic
condition, they did not perceive the troubles of others, or even the
most pressing needs of those who were dearest to them; if they observed
them, they grew tender, at once hastening to attend them; but it was a
fire of straw, soon extinguished, and it gave place to indifference and
weariness."
This emotional anaesthesia is indicative of psychical atavism, and is an
unmistakable evidence of degeneration. Lombroso gives a long list of the
men of genius who were celibates. I will mention a few of those with
whom the English-speaking world is most familiar: Kant, Newton, Pitt,
Fox, Beethoven, Galileo, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Gray,
Dalton, Hume, Gibbon, Macaulay, Lamb, Bentham, Leonardo da Vinci,
Copernicus, Reynolds, Handel, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Schopenhauer,
Camoens, and Voltaire. La Bruyere says of men of genius: "These men have
neither ancestors nor descendants; they themselves form their entire
posterity."
There is a form of mental obliquity which the French term _folie du
doute_. It is characterized by an incertitude in thought cooerdination,
and often leads its victims into the perpetration of nonsensical and
useless acts. Men of genius are very frequently afflicted with this form
of mental disorder. Dr. Johnson, who was a sufferer from _folie du
doute_, had to touch every post he passed. If he missed one he had to
retrace his steps and touch it. Again, if he started out of a door on
the wrong foot he would return and make another attempt, starting out on
the foot which he considered the correct one to use. Napoleon counted
and added up the rows of windows in every street through which he
passed. A celebrated statesman, who is a personal friend of the writer,
can never bear to place his feet on a crack in the pavement or floor.
When walking he will carefully step over and beyond all cracks or
crevices. This idiosyncracy annoys him greatly, but the impulse is
imperative, and he can not resist it.
Those who have been intimately associated with men of genius have
noticed that they are very frequently amnesic or "absent-minded." Newton
once tried to stuff his niece's finger into the bowl of his lighted
pipe, and Rovelle would lecture on some subject for hours at a time and
then conclude by saying: "But this is one of my arcana, which I tell to
no one." One of his students would then whisper what he had just said
into his ear, and Rovelle would believe that his pupil "had discovered
the arcanum by his own sagacity, and would beg him not to divulge what
he himself had just told to two hundred persons."
Lombroso has combed history, as it were, with a fine-tooth comb, and
very few geniuses have escaped his notice. This paper, so far, is hardly
more than a review of his extraordinarily comprehensive work; therefore,
I will conclude this portion of it with a list of men of genius, their
professions, and their evidences of degeneration, as gathered from his
book:
Carlo Dolce, painter, _religious monomania_.
Bacon, philosopher, _megalomania_, _moral anaesthesia_.
Balzac, writer, _masked epilepsy_, _megalomania_.
Caesar, soldier, writer, _epilepsy_.
Beethoven, musician, _amnesia_, _melancholia_.
Cowper, writer, _melancholia_.
Chateaubriand, writer, _chorea_.
Alexander the Great, soldier, _alcoholism_.
Moliere, dramatist, _epilepsy_, _phthisis pulmonalis_.
Lamb, writer, _alcoholism_, _melancholia_, _acute mania_.
Mozart, musician, _epilepsy_, _hallucinations_.
Heine, writer, _melancholia_, _spinal disease_.
Dr. Johnson, writer, _chorea_, _folie du doute_.
Malibran, _epilepsy_.
Newton, philosopher, _amnesia_.
Cavour, statesman, philosopher, _suicidal impulse_.
Ampere, mathematician, _amnesia_.
Thomas Campbell, writer, _chorea_.
Blake, painter, _hallucinations_.
Chopin, musician, _melancholia_.
Coleridge, writer, _alcoholism_, _morphinism_.
Donizetti, musician, _moral anaesthesia_.
Lenau, writer, _melancholia_.
Mahomet, theologian, _epilepsy_.
Manzoni, statesman, _folie du doute_.
Haller, writer, _hallucinations_.
Dupuytren, surgeon, _suicidal impulse_.
Paganini, musician, _epilepsy_.
Handel, musician, _epilepsy_.
Schiller, writer, _epilepsy_.
Richelieu, statesman, _epilepsy_.
Praga, writer, _alcoholism_, _sexual perversion_.
Tasso, writer, _alcoholism_, _melancholia_.
Savonarola, theologian, _hallucinations_.
Luther, theologian, _hallucinations_.
Schopenhauer, philosopher, _melancholia_, _omniphobia_.
Gogol, writer, _melancholia_, _tabes dorsalis_.
Lazaretti, theologian, _hallucinations_.
Mallarme, writer, _suicidal impulse_.
Dostoieffsky, writer, _epilepsy_.
Napoleon, soldier, statesman, _folie du doute_, _epilepsy_.
Comte, philosopher, _hallucinations_.
Pascal, philosopher, _epilepsy_.
Poushkin, writer, _megalomania_.
Renan, philosopher, _folie du doute_.
Swift, writer, _paresis_.
Socrates, philosopher, _chorea_.
Schumann, musician, _paresis_.