We now know the different forms under which the mysticism of degeneration manifests itself in contemporary literature. The magism of a Guaita and a Papus, the Androgyne of a Péladan, the anxiomania of a Rollinat, the idiotic drivelling of a Maeterlinck, may be regarded as its culminating aberrations. At least I cannot myself imagine that it would be possible for mysticism to go beyond, even by the thickness of a hair, these extreme points without even the hysterical, the devotees and the snobs of fashion, who are still in some degree capable of discernment, recognising in it a profound and complete intellectual darkness. BOOK III. _EGO-MANIA._ CHAPTER I. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EGO-MANIA. HOWEVER dissimilar such individualities as Wagner and Tolstoi, Rossetti and Verlaine, may at first sight appear, we have, nevertheless, encountered in all of them certain common traits, to wit, vague and incoherent thought, the tyranny of the association of ideas, the presence of obsessions, erotic excitability, religious enthusiasm, by which we may recognise them as members of one and the same intellectual family, and justify their union into one single group--that of mystics. We must go a step farther and say that not only the mystics among the degenerate, but in the main all the degenerate, of whatever nature they may be, are moulded from the same clay. They all show the same lacunæ, inequalities, and malformations in intellectual capacity, the same psychic and somatic stigmata. If, then, anyone, having a certain number of degenerate subjects to judge from, were to bring into prominence and represent as their exclusive peculiarity merely mystical thought in some, merely erotic emotionalism in others, merely vague, barren, fraternal love and a mania for regenerating the world, or else merely an impulsion to commit acts of a criminal nature, etc., he would manifestly be seeing only one side of the phenomenon, and taking no account of the rest. One or another stigma of degeneration may, in a given case, be especially apparent; but, on duly careful inspection, the presence of all the others, or, at least, indications of them, will be discerned.