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.

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. “It would be futile to delude ourselves that at present, readers find every pathography unsavory.

Innocent mischief