le-minded
acquaintances.

Thanks to the cheapness of printing, these prophets often publish
their new religious system and sell it among their dupes. I possess a
small library of works of this kind which have been sent me by their
authors; probably with the idea that they might one day be taken for
fools, and to prove to me in advance that they were not.

According to them, God has personally revealed to them the new truth
in which they believe, and has appointed them as prophets. Erotic
images are generally associated with their system. One of them, whose
system is astronomical, divides the planets into males and females.
Another, a lunatic, describes the pathological sexual sensations by
the term of "psycho-sexual contact by action at a distance." These are
phenomena which we meet with at each step in psychiatry, and which
give the clue to what follows.

=The Historical Role of Mental Anomalies which are Not Very Apparent
and Border on Genius. Their Influence on Religious Eroticism.=--These
persons are not always afflicted with paranoia or other grave
psychoses, but often hereditary and constitutional psychopaths who are
only half-crazy or simply hysterical, and who may, in spite of this
defect, possess a certain degree of intellectual power, an energetic
will and the fire of enthusiasm. Things then take an essentially
different course, even when they rest on an analogous basis.

The prophet combines with his exaltation a logic which is often very
concise in its details, although applied on a morbid basis. Moreover,
he clothes his utterances in fine and poetical language, and in this
way succeeds in rallying round him, not a flock of Panurge's ignorant
sheep, but more elevated people and even a considerable proportion of
the surrounding society. In this case pathological exaltation may be
united to a high moral and intellectual ideal, which is very apt to
veil the bizarre fancies of the prophet. We thus meet with the
astonishing but undeniable fact that certain great historical
personalities who have exercised a powerful influence on humanity were
of more or less pathological nature. We discover among them
erotico-religious traits, more or less marked, often even as the
leading threads of their arguments.

This important category of individuals constitutes a whole series of
transitions between the insane prophets of whom we have spoken and
well-balanced men of genius. It is often very difficult to understand
an