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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    universal consciousness, has no locus for its existence; there is no place for it in Nature. But if tho.-c is no aim, then one cannot ask the question, * Wherefore am I alive ?' Then life has not a predetermined aim, but only causes. We have then to concern ourselves only with these causes—at least with the more proximate, and which are accessible to our examination since the remote, and especially the first, causes elude ou^ cognition. Our question must then run, 'Why do we live? and we find the answer to it without difficulty. We live because we stand, like the rest of cognizable Nature, under the universal law of causality. This is a mechanical law, whic'u requires no predetermined plan, and no design, consequently also no universal consciousness. According to this law present phenomena are grounded on the past, not on the future. We live because we are engendered by our parents, because we have received from them a definite measure of force, which makes it possible for us to resist for a given time the influence upon us of Nature's forces of dissolution. How our life is shaped is determined by the constant interaction of our inherited organic forces and of our environment. Our life is, therefore, objectively viewed, the necessary result of the law - governed' activity of the mechanical forces of Nature. Subjectively it includes a qi:antity of pleasures and pains. We feel as pleasure the satisfaction of our organic impulses, as pain their fruitless struggles for satisfaction. In a sound organism, possessing a. high capacity for adaptation, those appetites only attain develop- ment, the satisfaction of which is possible—at least, to a certain degree—and is accompanied by no bad consequences for the individual. In such a life pleasure consequently prevails decidedly over pain, and he looks upon existence, not as an evil, but as a great good. In the organism deranged by disease degenerate appetites exist which cannot be satisfied, or of which the gratification injures or destroys the individual, or the degenerate organism is too weak or too inapt to gratify the legitimate impulses. In his life pain necessarily predominates, and he looks upon existence as an evil. My interpretation of the riddle of life is nearly related to the well-known theory of eudsemonism, but it is founded on a biological, not a metaphysical, basis. It explains optimism and pessimism simply as an adequate or inadequate vitality, as the existence or absence of adaptability, as health or illness. Unprejudiced observation of life shows that the whole of mankind stands knowingly or unknowingly at the same philosophical stand- point. Men live willingly, and rather quietly happy than sadly, so long as existence affords them gratification. If the suffer- ings are stronger than the feeling of pleasure conferred by the satisfaction of the first and most important of all organic