The whole of his chapter “Etiology,” however, dealing as it does with the degeneration of the masses, seems to contradict what he says in his first chapter about the upper classes only being affected by _fin de siècle_ degeneration, while the masses experience only a more or less slight touch of it. It also seems to disprove his theory that degenerate authors and artists are the chief cause of degeneration among the upper classes, a view which leads him to overlook the most palpable and most powerful causes for the production of those psychological phenomena throughout civilized humanity which he notices only among the upper classes. In discussing degeneration it is of the utmost importance to know how the affliction progresses—whether certain authors and artists were degenerated, and then affected the upper classes—or whether the upper classes were degenerated and thus produced the degenerated authors and artists. Nordau seems to vacillate between the two opinions, or he considers the pernicious influence to have been reciprocal. It is however clear that he regards these authors and artists, as well as those members of the upper classes who sympathize with them, as dwellers on the border-land between sanity and madness. The stigmata, or the signs of distorted minds, he divides—as they necessarily must be divided—into bodily stigmata and mental stigmata. The bodily stigmata are of course malformations of the head, and he lays particular stress on the conformation of the ear, its more or less projecting position, the shape of the lobe, or its clinging to the head. It would have been charity and justice on his part to have explained that, while these stigmata are frequently found on lunatics and idiots, there are probably millions of people who bear them without being demented, or even eccentric. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that there are thousands of lunatics who possess well-shaped heads and ears. He relies however but little on the bodily stigmata, and finds them only on a few of his subjects. He deals, of course, chiefly with the mental stigmata, and among these he gives mysticism a prominent place. He quotes from Legrain to the effect that “mystical thoughts are to be laid to the account of insanity and degeneration,” but Legrain adds at once that they are observable in two states—in epilepsy and in hysterical delirium. According to his authority we consequently know that those who suffer from epilepsy and delirium are apt to be mystical. But Legrain would probably be the first to object to the conclusion that all those who are mystically inclined suffer from epilepsy and delirium.