Decadence, and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas

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A rather curious illustration of these principles will be found by examining the present state of sexual morality. This morality, peculiar to Christian peoples, is based upon th...

I am ignorant of their origins, but they are later than the classic languages, which possess no fixed and precise words to express them, though the ancients were as well able as...

M. Marillier has collected and co-ordinated all that which, in the beliefs of the uncivilized, relates to the survival of the soul.[3] The ensemble of the facts shows that the i...

M. Stapfer[8] has attempted to enumerate the works which, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, have lasted--what is called "lasting" in professional critical language....

Success, then, is a fact; but, in the case of those acts which concern us here, it is a contingent fact and one that does not change the essence of the act itself. In this respe...

Two sorts of emotions share in the shaping of the aesthetic sense: emotions of a genesial nature, and all the other emotions whatsoever, in a proportion which varies infinitely...

M. Barrès, in his last novel,[2] makes a deputy of Burdeau's type say: "Virtue, like patriotism, is a dangerous element to arouse in the masses." To these two abstractions shoul...

If this primitive chattering be admitted, it will readily be admitted also that woman must have had a large share in it, while arousing the mind of the males by her laughter and...

These habits are also thoroughly Latin. The Romans, so long as they were Romans only, knew nothing of individualism. Their civilization offers the spectacle of a fine social ani...

Depreciation of "writing"--that is, writing as an art--is a precaution taken from time to time by worthless writers. They believe it sound, but it is the sign of their mediocrit...

M. Albalat shows excellent judgment in suppressing the very amusing distinctions made by the old manuals between the florid style and the simple style, the sublime and the moder...

If there be no science of the common man, still less is there a science of the different man, since the manifestation of this difference makes him solitary and unique, that is t...

How does a sensation become an image, the image an idea? How does the idea develop? How does it assume the form which seems best to us? How, in writing, is contribution levied u...

Truth has been very seriously defined as conformity of the representation of an object with this object itself. But that solves nothing. What is the object itself, since we can...