The same position has been taken by Rush,[94] the pioneer American alienist; by Maudsley,[95] by Krafft-Ebing,[96] by Meynert, by Mercier, by Féré,[97] and others. Morel,[98] the chief accepted apostle of the doctrine of degeneracy, remarked, nearly at the same time as Moreau, that "heredity does not mean the very disorder of the parents transmitted to the children with the identical mental and physical symptoms observed in the progenitors, but means transmission of organic disposition from parents to children. Alienists have, perhaps, more frequent occasion than others for observing not merely this hereditary transmission, but likewise various transformations which occur in the descendants. They are aware that simple neuropathy (nervous tendency) of the parents may produce in the children an organic disposition resulting in mania or melancholia, nervous affections which in turn may produce more serious degeneracy and terminate in the idiocy or imbecility of those who form the last link in the chain of hereditary transmission." What is true of the organism as a whole is true of the cells forming its organs. It should be remembered that while cell life is altruistic or subordinated to the life of the organ, through the law of economy of growth, recognised by Aristotle, and through it to the life of the organism as a whole, altruism is not complete enough to prevent entirely a struggle for existence on the part of the cells or the individual organs. With rise in evolution this struggle decreases, to increase with the opposite procedure of degeneracy. From it results the phenomenon of arrested and excessive development.