Regeneration

Voltaire said that if all the celestial bodies are inhabited, our earth must be the mad-house of the universe. To us who know the era of the great cynic only as recorded by the...

Nordau’s theory is that the educated classes of the world are degenerating; that the peculiarities in passions, tastes, pastimes, and moods, bear witness to such degeneration; t...

Of the good things contained in Nordau’s book which should secure for it a place in the study of every educated man, his fourth chapter entitled “Etiology” figures conspicuously...

In his chapter entitled “Symbolism” Nordau seeks confirmation for his theory of degeneration in the tendency, more or less perceptible all the world over, on the part of contemp...

The French symbolists, and all poets and artists who move in the world of emotions, are invited by Nordau to “take their place at the table of science, where there is room for a...

With regard to the Russian novelist, Count Leo Tolstoi, Nordau pursues the same mode of criticism as he employed against other writers. He also aims at the same object, firstly,...

In reading Nordau’s chapter on Ibsen, one cannot help wondering why our alienist has given his book the form he has. The feeling which the preceding contents of his work have mo...

We all have met with people who, without being degenerates to any great extent repeat stories of their own invention so persistently, that they end by believing in them. In this...

The term egomania is a welcome present from the scientists, which enriches our language with a verbal representation of a psychological condition which is certainly characterist...

A very large part of the sum-total of the work accomplished by Nordau in _Degeneration_ consists in describing scientifically the psychological phenomena which underlie the idio...

It has come to our knowledge that a great number of people in this country who have read through the whole of Nordau’s bulky volume have carried away an impression far from plea...

If the manifold discussions which have raged around the question of human progress have failed to establish a consensus of opinion, it is largely due to the absence of any exact...