"Offences connected with sexual matters, from rape downwards, may be viewed from two or three different sides, and are complicated in ways which render the subject difficult of discussion in a work intended for promiscuous circulation. Here, as in the last case--viz. of theft or robbery--we must be careful in considering such offences to eliminate the element of brutality or personal injury, which may sometimes accompany the crime referred to, from the offence itself. For the rest I confine myself to remarking that this class also, though not so obviously as the last, springs from an instinct legitimate in itself but which has been suppressed or distorted. The opinions of most, even enlightened, people on such matters are, however, so largely coloured by the unconscious survival in their minds of sentiment derived from old theological and theosophical views of the universe, that they are not of much value. This is partly the reason why the ordinary good-natured bourgeois, who can complacently pass on by the other side after casting a careless look on the most fiendish and organised cruelty in satisfaction of the economic craving--gain--is galvanised into a frenzy of indignation at some sporadic case of real or supposed ill-usage perpetrated in satisfaction of some bizarre form of the animal craving--lust. Until people can be got to discuss this subject in the white light of physiological and pathological investigation rather than the dim religious gloom of semi-mystical emotion, but little progress will be effected towards a due appreciation of the character of the offences referred to. It is a curious circumstance, as illustrating the change of men's view of offences, that an ordinary indecent assault, which in the Middle Ages--in Chaucer's time, for instance--would evidently have been regarded as a species of rude joke, should now be deemed one of the most serious of crimes."[929]