Nordau probably feels that Wagner’s anti-semitism, his Anarchism, and his ability to create transcendentally beautiful pictures are stigmata which hardly any of his readers would accept as such, and consequently feels impelled to make much of what it pleases him to call Wagner’s eroticism. Here, as everywhere in his book, in order to impress his readers he counts on the mystical effect which the use of a high-sounding scientific word generally produces upon unscientific readers. A favourite expression of his, when speaking of some psychological phenomenon, is that science knows all about it, and he calls it megalomania, graphomania, echolalia, or some such name. With people who have only a superficial knowledge of science, and who stand in awe of its achievements, such nouns stand for a special definite thing, thoroughly investigated and explained. They do not know that these scientific names have been invented, not in order to designate something real and palpable, but simply for the purpose of bringing order into an arbitrary classification, invented so that the exchange of ideas may be facilitated on the subject thus treated. Such scientific terms might even be classed among mystical symbols, in so far as they often stand for something of which hardly anything is known, but at the same time serve the same useful end as algebraical figures. Psychologists are prone to speak of a man’s consciousness, though scarcely two scientific men would agree as to what it is. But this does not prevent them from dividing consciousness up into divisions and sub-divisions, all with their special names, in order to be able to express their ideas in words. The unscientific reader should bear in mind that consciousness has never been under the microscope, or in the crucible, and that the classification of the scientists has no counterpart in consciousness itself, and that this remains the impalpable and indivisible _Ego_, with its infinite number of attributes inseparably commingled. All the different states, conditions, faculties, perfections, and defects of the _Ego_ are of course known only by the results they produce in the physical world, and it is by these results that they have been classified. It is evident that such methods of classification should leave an immense margin for those who wish, or feel impelled by their own idiosyncrasies, to misuse scientific terms designating psychological phenomena.