Such is the world he represents to himself, and which fills him with enthusiasm: not an ‘irregular’ plant, no sun, no stars, no movement, no noise, nothing but metal and glass, _i.e._, something like a tin landscape from Nuremberg, only larger and of more costly material, a plaything for the child of an American millionaire suffering from the wealth-madness of parvenus, with a little electric lamp in the interior, and a mechanism which slowly turns the glass cascades, and makes the glass sheet of water slide. Such must necessarily be the aspect of the ego-maniac’s ideal world. Nature leaves him cold or repels him, because he neither perceives nor comprehends her; hence, where the sane man sees the picture of the external world, the ego-maniac is surrounded by a dark void in which, at most, uncomprehended nebulous forms are hovering. To escape the horror of them he projects, as from a magic-lantern, coloured shadows of the images which fill his consciousness; but these representations are rigid, inert, uniform and infantile, like the morbid and weak cerebral centres by which they are elaborated. The incapacity of the ego-maniac to feel aright external impressions, and the toil with which his brain works, are also the key of the frightful tedium of which Baudelaire complains, and of the profound pessimism with which he contemplates the world and life. Let us hear him in _Le Voyage_: ‘Nous avons vu partout... Le spectacle ennuyeux de l’immortel péché: ‘La femme, esclave vile, orgueilleuse et stupide, Sans rire s’adorant et s’aimant sans dégôut; L’homme, tyran goulu, paillard, dur et cupide, Esclave de l’esclave et ruisseau dans l’égout; ‘Le bourreau qui jouit, le martyr qui sanglote; La fête qu’assaisonne et parfume le sang;... ‘Et les moins sots, hardis amants de la démence, Fuyant le grand troupeau parqué par le Destin, Et se réfugiant dans l’opium immense [!]. --Tel est du globe entier l’éternel bulletin... ‘O Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps! levons l’ancre! Ce pays nous ennuie, O Mort! Appareillons! ‘Nous voulons... Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe? Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!’