Degeneration / by Max Nordau.

  • Nordau, Max Simon, 1849-1923.
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Degeneration / by Max Nordau. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    the entire phenomenon of the universe, or self-abhorrence. These patients, says Morel.* ' feel perpetually compelled to commiserate themselves, to sob, to repeat with the most desperate monotony the same questions and words They have dehrious presentations of ruin and damnation, and all sorts of imagfinary fears.' ' Ennui never quits me,' said a patient of this kind, whose case Roubinovitchf describes, 'ennui of myself.' 'Among moral stigmata,' says the same author,I 'there are also to be specified»those undefinable apprehensions manifested by degenerates when they see, smell, or touch any object/ And he further§ 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-siecle 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 power- lessness 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 im- putes 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 persuad- ing 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 con- summate 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, ♦ Morel, 'Du Ddlire panophobique des AHdnds gdmisseurs,' Annales inddico-psycholo<^iques, 1871. \ Roubmovitch, op. cit., p. 28. J Ilu'd., p. 37. § Il>:d., p. 66.