SEXUAL ETHICS SEXUAL ETHICS BY AUGUST FOREL, M.D., PH.D., LL.D. FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF PSYCHIATRY AT AND DIRECTOR OF THE INSANE ASYLUM IN ZURICH (SWITZERLAND) WITH INTRODUCTION BY Dr. C. W. SALEEBY, F.R.S. Edin. [Illustration] LONDON THE NEW AGE PRESS 140 FLEET STREET 1908 _Translated from the German by Ashley Dukes_ INTRODUCTION By Dr. C. W. SALEEBY, F.R.S. Edin. There is something absurd, as such, in a request for an introduction by any one to the work of one of the greatest of living thinkers, and something still more absurd in the fact that Professor Forel should, at this date, need an introduction to any intelligent audience in any civilised country, as it seems he does to English readers; but if compliance with that request is at all likely to increase, even by one, the number of his readers, it is a duty to comply with it. Not to consider his treatises on philosophy and psychology, nor his long series of original and important researches on the senses and lives of the social insects, Professor Forel has already given to the world a volume entitled _Die Sexuelle Frage_――this has now been published in English[A]――which is by far the best work on the sex question in any language, and has actually received on the Continent something like the recognition which is its due. The gist of its teaching is to be found in this little treatise on Sexual Ethics, and the reader who may find himself or herself unconvinced, or even repelled, by the brief and dogmatic theses of the following pages, may be earnestly counselled to read the larger work. Here, and in that, Professor Forel deals――always from the loftiest moral standpoint, the interests of human life at its highest――with the question which must remain fundamental for man so long as he is mortal, and with which the statesmen of the future will primarily concern themselves, realising as they will, and as the “blind mouths” called statesmen to-day cannot, that there is no wealth but life, that the culture of the racial life is the vital industry of any people, and must so remain so long as three times in every century the only wealth of nations is reduced to dust and raised again from helpless infancy. Professor Forel sees this question from the only standpoint that is worthy of it. The sexual question is concerned with nothing less than the life of this world to come. It is for this reason that every productive sexual union should be a sacrament; it involves nothing less than the creation of a human