CONCLUSION.

The idea of a universal sickening of the people, of a progressive “degeneration” of the civilized nations, has not merely a few defenders, such as those mentioned in this work. This departure of modern science has found a multitude of adherents, and the advocates of this doctrine have made the concept of degeneration a subject of general popular interest. Beginning with this departure of psychopathology, the doctrine of a gradual retrogression of mankind, a deterioration, generation by generation, of the highly civilized peoples, has extended more and more. Not only in certain professional circles, but even in the educated lay world, we hear of a universal derangement of the nervous system, of a widespread nervous prostration, of mental and bodily deterioration of the present generation as compared with our ancestors.

Art and literature, which have ever expressed the metaphysics of the period, and which consequently now correspond in form and meaning to modern positivism, show of late a decided leaning toward the depicting of degenerative defects of humanity, especially of insanity, as if they were a characteristic of modern society. Although, from the time of Homer to our own, insanity has never dropped from the list of subjects for artistic and poetical treatment, yet each age has had its own reasons for doing so, which have always been closely connected with contemporary metaphysics. In the hallucinatory melancholia of Orestes, Æschylus painted the rage of the Furies following and tormenting their victim: “Behold them, like Gorgons clothed in black, surrounded by the coils of many serpents.”⁠[216] In Ajax Fureus, who, suddenly seized with a somnambulic delirium, falls upon the herds of the Achæans and strangles them with their herdsmen, believing that he is killing the princes of the host, Sophocles exhibits the chastening hand of Athene, against whom this bold mortal had once risen in audacious defiance. The ancient poets thus painted mental derangements which obviously they had observed, and painted them in the colouring of mythology, which was the popular metaphysics of that age, as a dispensation of a higher power, a punishment of the angry divinity.

The multitudinous artistic representations of demoniac possession in the Middle Ages, in myriads of paintings, frescoes, reliefs, carvings in stone, wood, and ivory, bronzes, ironwork, goldsmith’s-work, etc., the manifold scenes of conjurations and diabolic incitements, afford a clear picture of the insanity of those times. According to Charcot and Richer,⁠[217] whom we have to thank for their thorough researches in this field, the dislocations and distortions of those possessed are quite typical of cases of disease that may be observed to-day.

The first poet who recognised insanity as a disease and painted it as such is Shakespeare, whose fine power of observation far outstripped his age. He who could paint the world in all its truth and reality, who was able to reproduce the most diverse characters, unfalsified and true to Nature, succeeded also in painting in a masterly way mental derangements in all their typical phenomena, just as we observe them to-day, and this at a time at which science was far from a correct recognition of psychical disorders. In Shakespeare, the derangements of King Lear, Hamlet, and Lady Macbeth are photographic reproductions of pure objective experience. They fill out certainly the world of the poet who painted all human passions with minute fidelity in his plays, and therefore undertook also to paint according to his observation the human mind under morbid obscuration. In these characters, therefore, we have neither the embodiment of any particular conception of the universe nor an artistic dressing up of any moral or doctrine.

It is very different with the portraiture of insanity in our modern literature. The doctrine of psychiatry has in the interval grown into a distinct branch of science, and the observation of the insane is carried on in an exceedingly thorough and careful manner. In order to paint a case of insanity according to Nature, an artist no longer needs, like Shakespeare, to be leagues in advance of his age. He only need copy a well-reported history of a case, and his purpose is attained. Consequently the simple description of psychical disease no longer comes within the domain of the poet; and if we leave out of view those littérateurs who have in the practice of their art followed the desire for originality and sensational effects, we do not find in modern literature insanity exhibited for the direct interest of it, but only in so far as it affects individual social relations and society collectively.

The idea of a universal psychical degeneration, as it is put forth by many psychiatrists, likewise has its literary defenders. I have already called Zola a “Nordau in the shape of a novelist”; and this is also true of other writers of similar theories. Frau Alving, in Ibsen’s Ghosts, says: “We are all ghosts.... I can not take up a newspaper without seeming to see the ghosts slinking between the lines. Ghosts must live throughout the land. It seems to me they must be as the sands of the sea.” We seem to be hearing Herr Nordau pronouncing upon the immanent Völkerdämmerung, upon the gradual coming and increasing of universal degeneration among mankind. Nordau considers that those writers who share his own opinions show, precisely by that, an infallible mark of their being fools and degenerates. His master, Lombroso, on the other hand, acknowledges that Zola and Ibsen “teach the same thing” that he himself teaches.⁠[218]⁠

It is not Ibsen’s purpose to paint mental sickenings just as they really are. They are the mere vehicles of his ideas, especially of the law of heredity, of the influence of a licentious and dissolute course of life upon the development of the next generation. Neither the painting of the maladies nor the selection of those which are represented as transmitted in procreation correspond to the real facts. But the writer did not mind that. While Nordau makes this a grave matter for reproach and even a ground for psychiatric inferences, Lombroso expressly declares that it is not right to insist upon scientific accuracy from a poet in his painting of insanity, but that it is proper for him to proceed cum grano salis, so as to give his idea an artistic embodiment. At any rate, the exhibition of the clinical picture, as such, is in Ibsen altogether a secondary matter, the purpose of the poetic use of nervous disorders being the moral. Oswald, in Ghosts, is the victim of the dissipations of his father. Dr. Rank, in Nora, says: “My poor innocent spine has to expiate the joyous lieutenant’s life of my father.” He strongly accentuates the moral: “And so such an inexorable retribution governs in one way or another every family.” We thus meet in the poet the same idea that Nordau proclaims—that of a widespread hereditary sickening—a universal degeneration.

The circumstance that Ibsen makes a quite arbitrary choice of diseases to exhibit his concept of heredity and degeneration is not surprising, and as poet he can the less be reproached for it that he follows in that respect the doctrines of one school of scientific men. We may smile at Ibsen’s representing, in Ghosts, general paresis as an hereditary infliction; in Nora, a disease of the spine, tabes; in The Wild Duck, a disease of the eyes; but, after all, this entirely agrees with a certain departure which has lately found place in psychopathology.

The widespread idea of a universal “degeneration” is in great part due to the belief that every mental disease and most nervous sufferings are phenomena of “degeneration”—a belief which is not only general among the laity, but to which many psychiatrists incline. At any rate, they place psychoses in that category which do not belong there at all. It would result from this opinion that any decided increase in the frequency of insanity, disproportionate to the growth of the population, must be a “degeneration,” since, according to them, almost all mental diseases are consequences of the process by which a state of “degeneration” is brought about.

The concept of “degeneration” is, as I have already explained, that of a morbid condition resulting from perturbations of growth of the psychical organ. Degenerates are at a low stage of development; the organic vehicles of their mental action are either merely at that low stage of growth or are deformed and misshapen. The degeneration of a whole people would therefore be due to a universal mental deterioration, an arrest of the psychical organ, and at last, since the completely degenerate, the extreme idiots, are incapable of procreation, if the process which gave rise to the state of degeneration progressed still further, the race would die out. But the history of insanity shows that the increase of it depends in part upon the progress of higher civilization. A heightened mental action, a refinement and elaboration of the psychical organism, has for a consequence a greater disposition to mental derangements. But to infer from this heightened mental action, or, what comes to the same thing, from the increased number of cases of derangement which results from it, that there has been a universal retrogression of mental development, resulting in a “degeneration” of the masses, is just as erroneous as to identify the highest refinement and elaboration of the psychical organism, or genius, with insanity.

The question of a state of universal degeneration, resulting from a process of mental decay, must therefore be treated quite independently from the question of an increase of cases of insanity. Maladies contracted late in life can not be ascribed to disturbances of growth, and have nothing to do with degeneration. When Nordau avers that the diagnosis of degeneration in Baudelaire was “fortified against all attack” by the fact that he “died of general paresis,”⁠[219] he simply shows that he does not know what the word degeneration means. Paresis is a disease occurring most frequently in fully developed men, seldom in degenerates, and never in idiots. Von Krafft-Ebing⁠[220] says of its procatarctic cause, “It is seldom congenital, hereditary; mostly acquired.” If, therefore, we limit the concept of degeneration to such morbid states as can undoubtedly be referred to perturbations of growth, an increase of mental diseases does not indicate a progressive degeneration.

The universal opinion that the sudden revolution in all modes of life, owing to the great inventions of this century—the railway, the telephone, etc.—have had a bad influence on the nervous system, has a certain amount of justification. A number of cases of nervous exhaustion have arisen owing to this unwonted and overstrained bustle of modern life. But the importance attributed to these outward causes is too great by far; and there is especially too much inclination to exaggerate the sudden change of our modes of life, great as it undeniably is. From some descriptions of it, one might think that we had suddenly been carried from the merest sluggard’s life to the supreme development of higher civilization. When Nordau says that “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,” and that to-day “a cook receives and sends more letters than a university professor did formerly,”⁠[221] he simply indulges in ridiculous exaggeration. I know not what intricate mental interests Herr Nordau has discovered in the “humblest village inhabitant.” When he tries to prove this by saying that the villager “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,”⁠[222] he perhaps overestimates somewhat the mental interests of the “humblest village inhabitant.” I fancy that the mental interests of the peasantry to-day, as centuries ago, turn much more on the thriving of their pigs and calves than on revolutionists in Chili or bushwhackers in east Africa. At any rate, we may safely assert that the German peasants are in no present danger of overtaxing their nervous systems by their “numerous and complex intellectual interests.”

We must confess that life to-day makes higher demands upon the individual than in the last century; but it is an exaggeration for Nordau to maintain that every single man does from five to five-and-twenty times as much work as he would have done half a century ago. On the whole, more is accomplished now than used to be done, because, thanks to the great inventions, a workman can now do more in one hour than ten workmen could do in a whole day a century ago. But the expenditure of strength of any one man is not very much greater.

The mental work of the “upper ten thousand,” who are now supposed to be in a state of degeneration, has certainly not been so monstrously increased as many are disposed to think. Besides, mere work does not wear out the nervous system nearly so much as the agitations of the emotions connected with the intensification of the battle of life. These things have, as I have elsewhere shown, an important influence upon the bodily functions, especially those of the vascular system, and thus upon the entire work of nutrition. Wundt⁠[223] says: “Care and sorrow influence nutrition by enduring limitation of the entrance of air and blood.” Quiet intellectual work, even if conjoined with great effort, does far less harm to the nervous system than do such emotions as affliction and anxiety.

Had we, therefore, any reason to presume a universal degeneration of the highly civilized nations, the causes of it should be sought, above all, in the intensification of the daily battle of life, with its train of depressing emotions and anxieties. The increased impressions of the senses, and the heightened demands upon the resistance of the nervous system, occasioned by the sudden revolution—when they do not bring about serious emotional disturbances, vexations, etc.—may cause some fatigue, but are matters to which the human organism quickly becomes habituated by the law of adaptation.

Our social relations undoubtedly draw more upon the powers of the individual than did those of a century ago. Yet that generation likewise thought its tasks more difficult than those of its forefathers. We can not conceive that our grade of civilization determines the limits of human capacity. The demands which will be put upon the life of coming generations will probably be far greater yet; but the human system will contrive to adapt itself to those demands. The weak will go to the wall; the strong will mount to higher grades of development. This law of adaptation and of further development always has operated in Nature, and will still continue to do so.

The arguments of which the sectaries of universal degeneration avail themselves are, as we have seen in the course of our investigations, by no means demonstrative. They rest partly upon erroneous doctrines and partly upon a quite amateurish apprehension of psychological and psychiatrical concepts. Philosophy, art, and literature, in which Nordau thinks he sees signs of universal degeneration, are merely the expression of the modern metaphysics, of religious scepticism, and of philosophical positivism.

Moreover, by a very remarkable contradiction, Nordau himself destroys his whole theory. After having characterized modern art as the principal evidence of universal degeneration, he declares, at the conclusion of his work, that it constitutes a forward step in human development. He says: “The fable and the fairy tale were once the highest productions of the human mind.... To-day they represent a species of literature only cultivated for the nursery. The verse—which by rhythm, figurative expression, and rhyme, trebly betrays its origin in the stimulation of rhythmically functioning subordinate organs, in associations of ideas working according to external similitudes, and in that working according to consonance—was originally the only form of literature. To-day it is only employed for purely emotional portrayal; for all other purposes it has been conquered by prose, and indeed has almost passed into the condition of an atavistic language. Under our very eyes the novel is being increasingly degraded, serious and highly cultivated men scarcely deeming it worthy of attention, and it appeals more and more exclusively to the young and to women.”⁠[224] According to this, we must presume that our art, which has already “conquered” its earlier form, stands upon a higher grade of development, so that there can be no question of degeneration in it. But the idea that the poetry of a Homer, a Dante, a Goethe, has proceeded “from the stimulation of rhythmically functioning, subordinate organs,” and that it ought to-day to be considered as in “the condition of an atavistic language,” is as ridiculous as the contrary thesis of the degeneration of modern art. No subordinate organs, but the idealistic universe-conception of the times, dictated the form of art in each period of the world’s history.

When Nordau asserts that—in case his “therapy” is considered and humanity is thus protected from further arrest and degeneration—“after some centuries art and poetry will have become pure atavisms, and will no longer be cultivated except by the most emotional portion of humanity—by women, by the young, perhaps even by children,”⁠[225] his assertion rests upon ignorance of the psychical constitution of those heroes of the mind whom we call geniuses. Whoever does not persist in the attitude of Moreau and with him stigmatizes genius as a morbid condition, will see that, with the further mental development of humanity, creative genius will continue to produce, as it always has been producing. In discussing the psychology of genius we have seen that “the artist of genius does not create because he would, but because he must.” Hence art will continue to subsist as long as there are men upon the earth.

As to the form which the art of future centuries is to assume, all possibility of divining it fails us. We know that it is always dependent upon the contemporary conception of the universe. But how this will shape itself in the distant future we can not know. It were therefore a vain proceeding to discuss the subject, or to express any decided opinion about the matter.

According to our investigations, we must necessarily come to the conclusion that the authors mentioned have adduced no proof of the alleged universal degeneration in the highly civilized nations. Mankind is not in a “black plague of degeneration”; and the world has as little need to be scared by stories of the Völkerdämmerung as by the prophecy of Herr Falb about the immanent destruction of our planet. On the other hand, the further development of mankind will be greatly benefited if the teachings of science are attended to and the various baneful influences that act upon the nervous system are combated. In that way increase of insanity may be prevented, and a sane and well-developed posterity insured.