[BNP/E3, 134 – 68-69]

1

389 "les déséquilibrés adaptent toujours leurs délires aux idées régnantes et s’emparent avec prédilection, pour les expliquer, des plus récentes découvertes de la science." Yet before they believed already.

389 "Le besoin du merveilleux est presque fatal chez les faibles d’esprit". Legrain  

395 396 397: A very good psychological study of Péladan.

398 X Very important. On the conscious and unconscious in man; as whether Peladán is serious or not. Nordau compares this to a child playing with dolls, and treating as babies, yet knowing them dolls.

403 Sensations of vague fear characteristic of degenerates. Quotes from Dostoievski, Legrain, Kowalewski. Legrain du Saulle and Morel who call it panophobie. Magnan calls it anxiomanie and declares it a very usual stigma of degeneration. A man puts the fear he feels outside him in the exterior world.

[68^v]

2

405 De Maeterlinck: “La conscience n’élabore plus une idée fondamentale ou centrale. Les représentations surgissent telles que l’association d’idées purement mécanique les évoque” (Thus says Nordau of degenerate poets) “Nulle attention {…}

409 The syllable an en aon écholalie common among aliénés. Example of a German. (cf. creada avó Alexander Search).

409 Maeterlinck’s adjectives étrange, vieux, lointain, always of something afar off.

Also lent (which Nordau says reminds the French symbolists of the mass, they using it often by the side of hiératique)

411 Against Walt Whitman. Beastly sensuality. A fou moral, with sensiblerie, stigma of degeneration.

413 Walt Whitman very much like Verlaine, “dont il partageait tous les stigmates de dégénérescence, le genre de destinée et, chose étonnante, même l’ankylose rhumatismale” Nordau

[69^r]

3

425 Maeterlinck always speaking of a princess, of canals and of ill people and illness.

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Vol. II

3. All stigmas of degeneration appear together, examining well, they are never wanting.

5. Monomania does not exist. A idée fixe is always accompanied by other mental alterations: their meaning is Degeneration.

6 Emotivity of degenerates. Morel. Legrain: “obsession, impulsion, voilà ce qu’on trouve au fond de toute monomanie”. To emotivity add (says Nordau) cerebral debility which includes weak apperception, feeble will, memory, judgment, attention and instability – degeneration is completely characterized.

Kowalewski presents thus intellectual troubles of degenerates, une maladie unique or several degrees of gravity, which brings: 1^st neurasthenia (least bad); more seriously, obsessions and unreasonable angoisses; seriousest, folie de la négation ou du doute.