Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs and Results

by Eugene S. Talbot

Between the criminal and the insane is a debatable line occupied by moral imbeciles, reasoning maniacs, &c. There are many insane persons in whom the principal deviation from the normal consists in disorder of the moral faculties. In most closer inspection generally reveals signs of degeneracy. The seeming immorality is the striking factor of the case and superficially the mind otherwise appears clear and rational by contrast. As Krafft-Ebing has shown in these cases, the most striking features are moral insensibility, lack of moral judgment and ethical ideas, the place of which is usurped by a narrow sense of loss or profit, logically apprehended only. Such persons may mechanically know the laws of morality, but if such laws enter their conscience these persons do not experience by any real appreciation, still less regard, for them. These laws to them are cold, lifeless statements. The morally defective know not how to draw from them motive for omission or commission. To this “moral colour-blindness” the whole moral and governmental order appears as a mere hindrance to egotistic ambition and feeling, which necessarily leads to negation of the rights of others and to violation of the same.

These defective individuals are without interest for aught good or beautiful, albeit capable of a sentimentality which is shallow cant. Such persons are repellent by their lack of love for children or relatives, and of all social inclinations, and by cold-hearted indifference to the weal or woe of those nearest to them. They are without other than egotistic care for questions of social life or sensibility to either the respect or the scorn of others, without control of conscience and without sense or remorse for evil. Morality they do not understand. Law is nothing more than police regulation. The greatest crimes are regarded as mere transgressions of some arbitrary order. If such persons come in conflict with individuals, then, hatred, envy, and revenge take the place of coldness and negation, and their brutality and indifference to others know no bounds.

These ethically defective persons, when incapable of holding a place in society, are often converted into candidates for the workhouse or the insane hospital, one or the other of which places they reach after they have been, as children, the terror of parents and teachers, through their untruthfulness, laziness, and general meanness, and in youth the shame of the family and the torment of the community and the officers of the law, by thefts, vagabondage, profligacy, and excesses. Finally, they are the despair of the insane hospital, the “incorrigibles” of the prisons, and (Krafft-Ebing might have added) the veritable burdens of the poor-house. If intellectual insanity or crime do not claim them, pauperism or criminality is likely to be their destiny. The moral imbecile may, however, keep within the law, and as in the instance of the “Napoleon of Finance,” cited elsewhere from Kiernan, may achieve business success. His descendants often, however, evince degeneracy in an aggravated form. Many of the supposed reformers of various alleged social evils are often of this class. Their morbid egotism takes the direction of cant and sentimentality, so common at certain states in evolution, as points of least resistance. Like Guiteau, the assassin of President Garfield, they aim at doing a “big thing for humanity and myself,” the humanity being concentrated in “my” ideas. The moral lunatic needs but a slight twist intellectually to become the paranoiac in whom there is, as Spitzka has pointed out,[256] a permanent undercurrent of perverted mental action peculiar to the individual, running like an unbroken thread through his whole mental life, obscured, it may be, for these patients are often able to correct and conceal their insane symptoms, but it nevertheless exists, and only requires friction to bring it to the surface. The general intellectual status of these patients, though rarely of a very high order, is moderately fair, and often the mental powers are sufficient to keep the delusion under check for practical purposes of life. While many are what is termed crochety, irritable, and depressed, yet the sole symptoms of the typical cases of this disorder consist of the fixed delusions. Since the subject matter of the delusion is of such a character that these patients consider themselves either the victim of a plot or as unjustly deprived of certain rights and position, or as narrowly observed by others, delusions of persecution are added to the fixed ideas, and the patient becomes sad, thoughtful, or depressed in consequence. The patient is depressed logically, as far as his train of idea is concerned and his sadness and thoughtfulness have causes, which he can explain, and which are intimately allied with that peculiar, faulty grouping of ideas which constitutes the rendezvous, as it were, of all the mental conceptions of the patient. Nay, the process may be reversed, and the patient, beginning with a hypochondriac or hysteric state, imagines himself watched with no favourable eye. Because he is watched and made the subject of audible comments (hallucinatory or delusional), he concludes that he must be a person of some importance. Some great political movement takes place; he throws himself into it, either in a fixed character that he has already constructed for himself, or with the vague idea that he is an influential personage. He seeks interviews, holds actual conversation with the big men of the day, accepts the common courtesy shown him by those in office as a tribute to his value, is rejected, however, and then judges himself to be the victim of jealousy or of rival cabals, makes intemperate and querulous complaints to higher officials, perhaps makes violent attacks upon them, and being incarcerated in jail or asylum, looks upon this as the end of a long series of persecutions which have broken the power of a skilled diplomatist, a capable military commander, a prince of the blood, an agent of a camarilla, a paramour of some exalted personage, or finally the Messiah Himself. All through this train of ideas there runs a chain of logic and inference in which there is no gap. If the inferences of the patient were based on correctly observed facts and properly correlated with his actual surroundings, his conclusions would be perfectly correct. For years and years many such patients exhibit a single delusive idea as the only prominent symptom. There is hereditary taint in most of these subjects, who are strange in disposition from infancy. As children they frequently shun society and indulge in day-dreams. Their bodily growth is normal, but even trifling disease takes on a cerebral tinge. They may show talent in special directions, but their intelligence rarely passes out of the puerile stage. They often brood over a feminine ideal, a girl who has never encouraged them, and whom they persecute with absurd plans of marriage.

Connecting the paranoiac with the moral imbecile are the so-called “reasoning maniacs.” Here the intellectual power is less than either that of the moral imbecile or of the paranoiac, twisted though the intellect of the latter be. Loquacious or unusually taciturn, heedless or morbidly cautious, dreamers, wearisome to all brought in contact with them, capricious and unmitigated liars, their qualities are often, in a certain manner, brilliant, but are entirely without solidity or depth. Sharpness and cunning are not often wanting, especially for little things and insignificant intrigues. Ever armed with a lively imagination and quick comprehension, they readily appropriate the ideas of others, developing or transforming them and giving them the stamp of their own individuality. But the creative force is not there, and they rarely possess enough mental vigour to get their own living. Passing without the slightest transition from one extreme to the other, they felicitate themselves to-day on an event which they sneered at the night before. In the course of a single second they change their opinions of persons and things, novelty captivates and wearies them almost in the same instant. They sell for insignificant sums things they have just bought, in order to buy others which, in their turn, will be subjected to like treatment; and, strange to say, before possessing these objects, they covet them with a degree of ardour only equalled by the eagerness they exhibit to get rid of them as soon as they become their own. To see, to desire, and to become indifferent are three stages which follow each other with astonishing rapidity.

The intense egotism of these persons makes them, as W. A. Hammond remarks, utterly regardless of the feelings and rights of others. Everybody and everything must give way to them. Their comfort and convenience are to be secured though every one else is made uncomfortable or unhappy; and sometimes they display positive cruelty in their treatment of persons who come in contact with them. This tendency is especially seen in their relations with the lower animals.

Another manifestation of their intense egotism is their entire lack of appreciation of kindness done them or benefits of which they have been the recipients. They look upon these as so many rights to which they are justly entitled, and which in the bestowal are more serviceable to the giver than to the receiver. They are hence ungrateful and abusive to those who have served them, insolent, arrogant, and shamelessly hardened in their conduct toward them. At the same time, if advantages are yet to be gained, they are sycophantic to nauseousness in their deportment towards those from whom the favours are to come.

The egotism of these people is unmarked by the least trace of modesty in obtruding themselves and their assumed good qualities upon the public at every opportunity. They boast of their genius, their righteousness, their goodness of heart, their high sense of honour, their learning and other qualities and acquirements, and this, when they are perfectly aware that they are commonplace, irreligious, cruel, and vindictive, utterly devoid of every chivalrous feeling, and saturated with ignorance. They know that in their ratings they are attempting to impose upon those whom they address and will even subsequently brag of their success.

It is no uncommon thing for the reasoning maniac, still influenced by his supreme egotism and desire for notoriety, to attempt the part of reformer. Generally he selects a practice or custom in which there really is no abuse. His energy and the logical manner in which he presents his views, based as they often are on cases and statistics, impose on many people, who eagerly adopt him as a genuine overthrower of a vicious or degrading measure. Even when his hypocrisy and falsehood are exposed he continues his attempts at imposition, and when the strong arm of the law is laid upon him, he prates of the ingratitude of those he has been endeavouring to assist, and of the distinctiveness and purity of his own motives.

Closely akin to that instability of inter-association resulting in loss of proper checks on action in the types just described, is the sentimentalism which often covers real hardness, but which charms and allures the mass.

This has essentially the same psychological basis as the suspicional tendencies and pessimism with which it is so often associated. Suspicional tendencies arise from states of anxiety resultant on instability of association, dependent on lack of associating fibres. Pessimism (so frequently present in the otherwise healthy degenerate) is often, as Magalhaes has shown, nervous instability with alternations of irritability and prostration. The subject is supersensitive; impressions call forth intense and prolonged reactions followed by exhaustion. The state is characterised by a general hyperæsthesia, which naturally results in an excess of suffering. From instability and hyperæsthesia results discord between the feelings themselves, between the feelings and the intelligence, between the feelings, the ideas and volitions. Discord between the feelings shows itself in a great variety of paradoxes, contradictions, and inconsistencies. To the pessimist possession of a desired object does not atone for former privation. Pain or unsatisfied desire is replaced by the pain of ennui. With inability to enjoy what he has are coupled extravagant expectations regarding that which he does not have. He is extremely susceptible both to kindness and to contempt. He passes suddenly from violent irritability to languor, from self-confidence and vanity to extreme self abasement. His intense sensitiveness results in intellectual disorders. For this involves a great vivacity of the intuitive imagination, which favours the setting up of extravagant ideals, lacking in solid representative elements. Hence a gap opens between his ideal and the actual. He can never realise the ideal he pursues and so his feelings are of a sombre hue. From this excessive realism results a state of doubt, a certain distrust of all this rational objective knowledge. It assumes another form in extreme subjectivism. The pessimist is haunted by images of the tiniest religious scruples, suspicions, fears, and anxieties, resulting in alienation from friends, seclusion, misanthropy. The pessimist is further characterised by an incapacity for prolonged attention, a refractory attention and a feeble will. These result in inaction, quietism, reverie, self-abnegation, abolition of the personality, annihilation of the will, amounting sometimes even to poetic or religious ecstasy. Pessimism is frequently associated with a morbid fear of death. The tramp is one phase of the degenerate in whom the restless wandering tendencies of the neurasthenic and paranoiac are added to the parasitic tendencies of the pauper, and the suspicional egotism of the “reasoning maniac.”