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“Over and over again we find the Church councils complaining that the peasants (and sometimes the priests too) were singing 'wicked songs with a chorus of dancing women,' or holding 'ballads and dancings and evil and wanton songs and such-like lures of the devil' over and over again the bishops forbade these songs and dances but in vain. Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood It is to be regretted that they do this, for they thereby sacrifice the truth to an illusion, and for the sake of their infantile phantasies they let slip the opportunity to penetrate into the most attractive secrets of human nature.” For the sake of this wish they wipe out the individual features in his physiognomy, they rub out the traces of his life's struggle with inner and outer resistances, and do not tolerate in him anything of human weakness or imperfection they then give us a cold, strange, ideal form instead of the man to whom we could feel distantly related. They then devote themselves to a work of idealization which strives to enroll the great men among their infantile models, and to revive through him, as it were, the infantile conception of the father. Frequently they take the hero as the object of study because, for reasons of their personal emotional life, they bear him a special affection from the very outset. One finds them when one bears in mind that biographers are fixed on their heroes in quite a peculiar manner. The real motives for the opposition are quite different. As a matter of fact pathography does not aim at making comprehensible the attainments of the great man no one should really be blamed for not doing something which one never promised. However, this criticism is so clearly unjust that it can only be grasped when viewed as a pretext and a disguise for something.
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This attitude is excused with the reproach that from a pathographic elaboration of a great man one never obtains an understanding of his importance and his attainments, that it is therefore useless mischief to study in him things which could just as well be found in the first comer.
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“It would be futile to delude ourselves that at present, readers find every pathography unsavory.
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