Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Degeneration / by Max Nordau. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
80/596 (page 58)
![presentations, betrays its concrete origin. Language has no word for that which one beheves he sees as through a mist, with- out recognisable form. The mystic, however, is conscious of ghostly presentations of this sort without shape or other qualities, and in order to express them he must either use recognised words, to which he gives a meaning wholly different from that which is generally current, or else, feeling the inadequacy of the fund of language created by those of sound mind, he forges for himself special words which, to a stranger, are generally incomprehensible, and the cloudy, chaotic sense of which is intelligible only to himself; or, finally, he embodies the several meanings which he gives to his shapeless representations in as many words, and then succeeds in achieving those bewildering juxtapositions of what is mutually exclusive, those expressions which can in no way be rationally made to harmonize, but which are so typical of the mystic. He speaks, as did the German mysticc of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of the ' cold fire' of hell, and of the ' dark light' of Satan ; or, he says, like the degenerate in the tweniy'-eighth pathological case of Legrain,^ * that God appeared to him in the form of luminous shadows;' or he remarks, as did another of Legrain's patients :-f- ' You have given me an immutable evening' {soiree imniuahle).X The healthy reader or listener who has confidence in his own judgment, and tests with lucidity and self-dependence, naturally discerns at once that these mystical expressions are senseless, and do but reflect the mystic's confused manner of thinking. The majority of mankind, however, have neither self-confidence nor the faculty of judging, and cannot throw off the natural inclination to connect some meaning with every word. And since the words of the mystic have no definite meaning in themselves, or in their juxtaposition, a certain meaning is arbitrarily imputed to them, is mysteriously conjured into them. The effect of the mystical method of expression on * Legrain, op. cit.^ p. 177. f Ibid., p. 156. X In the chapter which treats of French Neomystics, I shall give a cluster of such disconnected and mutually exclusive expressions, which are quite parallel with the instances cited by Legrain, of the manner of speech among those acknowledged to be of weak mind. In this place only one passage may be repeated from the V^e E. M. de Vogu^, Le Roinajt Russe, Paris, 18S8, in which this mystical author, unconsciously and involuntarily, characterizes admirably the shadowiness and emptiness of mystic diction, while praising it as something superior. 'One trait,' he says (p. 215), 'they' (certain Russian authors) ' have in common, viz., the art of awakenmg series of feel- ings and thoughts by a line, a word, by endless re-echoings [rt'so/inances]. . . , The words you read on this paper appear to be written, not in length, but in depth. They leave behind them a train of faint reverberations, which are gradually lost, no one knows where.' And p. 227: 'They see men and things in the gray light of earliest dawn. The weakly indicated outlines end in a confused and clouded perhaps. . . .*](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21070684_0080.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
