Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Degeneration / by Max Nordau. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
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![ability 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 con- sequence 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* 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 M^eeps 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,t even the most insipid and least com- mendable, 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 despondenc}^, which, according to the circumstances of his life, assumes the form of pessimism, a vague fear of all men, and of himself; Westphal has created for this the good term 'Zwangs-Vorstellung,' i.e., coercive idea] and impulsion—both irresistible,' * Morel, ' Du D^lire 6motif,' Archives ge'ne'rales^ 6 serie, vol. vii., pp. 385 and 530. See also Roubinovitch, op. ciL, p. 53. I J. Roubinovitch, op. cit., p. 68 : ' Music excites him keenly](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21070684_0041.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
