Degeneration

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1895 edition. Excerpt: ...strong enough, its consequences are heartless acts and crimes. If it is elaborated by diseased centres with insufficient force, it can be satisfied by imagination alone, by poetic or artistic activity. Of course there have been attempts made to defend aberration as something justified and voluntary, and even to erect it into an intellectual distinction. Thus it is that M. Paul Bourget puts into the mouth of the ' Decadents, ' with little artifices of style which do not permit a moment's doubt that he is expressing his own opinion, the following argument: 'We delight in what you call our corruptions of style, and we delight at the same time the refined people of our race and our time. It remains to be seen whether our exception is not an aristocracy, and whether, in the aesthetic order, the majority of suffrages represents anything else than the majority of ignorances.... It is a self-deception not to have the courage of one's intellectual pleasure. Let us delight, therefore, in our singularities of ideal and of form, even if we must shut ourselves up in a solitude without visitors.' Oswald Zimmermann, Die Wonne des Leids. Beitrdge sur Erkenntniss des menschlichen Empfindens in Kunst and Leben. 2te umgearbeitete Auflage. Leipzig, 1885, p. ill. This book is without value in point of ideas, for it reproduces, in language deliberately inflated, and visibly aspiring to 'depth, ' the most imbecile drivel of the trio, Edward von Hartmann, Nietzsche and Gustave Jager. But the author, who is well read, has carefully compiled some useful materials in certain chapters, particularly in ihat entitled, 'Association of Voluptuousness and Cruelty' (p. 107 et seq.). (The case of Jeanneret, first published byChatelain in the Annales nu'dico-psychologiqucs).