THE manifestations described in the preceding chapter must be patent enough to everyone, be he never so narrow a Philistine. The Philistine, however, regards them as a passing fashion and nothing more; for him the current terms, caprice, eccentricity, affectation of novelty, imitation, instinct, afford a sufficient explanation. The purely literary mind, whose merely æsthetic culture does not enable him to understand the connections of things, and to seize their real meaning, deceives himself and others as to his ignorance by means of sounding phrases, and loftily talks of a ‘restless quest of a new ideal by the modern spirit,’ ‘the richer vibrations of the refined nervous system of the present day,’ ‘the unknown sensations of an elect mind.’ But the physician, especially if he have devoted himself to the special study of nervous and mental maladies, recognises at a glance, in the _fin-de-siècle_ disposition, in the tendencies of contemporary art and poetry, in the life and conduct of the men who write mystic, symbolic and ‘decadent’ works, and the attitude taken by their admirers in the tastes and æsthetic instincts of fashionable society, the confluence of two well-defined conditions of disease, with which he is quite familiar, viz. degeneration (degeneracy) and hysteria, of which the minor stages are designated as neurasthenia. These two conditions of the organism differ from each other, yet have many features in common, and frequently occur together; so that it is easier to observe them in their composite forms, than each in isolation. The conception of degeneracy, which, at this time, obtains throughout the science of mental disease, was first clearly grasped and formulated by Morel. In his principal work--often quoted, but, unfortunately, not sufficiently read[4]--the following definition of what he wishes to be understood by ‘degeneracy’ is given by this distinguished expert in mental pathology, who was, for a short time, famous in Germany, even outside professional circles.[5] ‘The clearest notion we can form of degeneracy is to regard it as _a morbid deviation from an original type_. This deviation, even if, at the outset, it was ever so slight, contained transmissible elements of such a nature that anyone bearing in him the germs becomes more and more incapable of fulfilling his functions in the world; and mental progress, already checked in his own person, finds itself menaced also in his descendants.’