A Problem in Modern Ethics: Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion, Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and JuristsSymonds, John Addington
Philosophy
A Problem in Modern Ethics: Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion, Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and Jurists
Symonds, John Addington
Homosexuality
the way of regarding it morally and legally is changed. A scientific
investigator ought not to take changes of public opinion into account
when he is analysing a psychological peculiarity.
This point on which I am insisting--namely, that it is illogical to
treat sexual inversion among the modern European races as a malady, when
you refer its prevalence among Oriental peoples and the ancient Hellenes
to custom--is so important that I shall illustrate it by a passage from
one of Dr. W. R. Huggard's Essays.[20] "It may be said that the
difference between the delusion of the overpowering impulse in the
Fijian and in the insane Englishman is that, in the savage, the mental
characters are due to education and surroundings; while, in the lunatic
they are due to disease. In a twofold manner, however, would this
explanation fail. On the one hand, even if in the Fijian there were
disease, the question of insanity could not arise in regard to a matter
considered by his society to be one of indifference. It would be absurd
to talk of homicidal mania, of nymphomania, and of kleptomania, as forms
of insanity, where murder, promiscuous intercourse, and stealing are not
condemned. On the other hand, the assumption that insanity is always due
to disease is not merely an unproved, but an improbable supposition.
There must, of course, be some defect of organism; but there is every
reason to think that, in many cases, the defect is of the nature of a
congenital lack of balance between structures themselves healthy; and
that many cases of insanity might properly be regarded as a kind of
'throwback' to a type of organisation now common among the lower races
of mankind." Substitute any term to indicate sexual inversion for
"nymphomania" in this paragraph, and the reasoning precisely suits my
argument. It is interesting, by the way, to find this writer agreeing
with Ulrichs in his suggestion of a "congenital lack of balance between
structures themselves healthy," and with Lombroso in his supposition of
atavistic reversion to savagery. Lombroso, we shall see, ultimately
identifies congenital criminality (one form of which is sexual
aberration in this theory) with moral insanity; and here Dr. Huggard is,
unconsciously perhaps, in agreement with him; for he defines insanity to
be "any mental defect that renders a person unable (and not capable of
being made able by punishment) to conform to the requirements of
society"--a definition which is no less applicable to the born criminal
than to the madman.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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