case of the others, however, the feeling is, as said, so deeply rooted and twined with the mental and emotional life that the person concerned has difficulty in imagining himself affected otherwise than he is; and to him at least his love appears healthy and natural, and indeed a necessary part of his individuality. In the second place it has become clear that the number of individuals affected with ‘sexual inversion’ in some degree or other is very great--much greater than is generally supposed to be the case. It is however very difficult or perhaps impossible to arrive at satisfactory figures on the subject,[30] for the simple reasons that the proportions vary so greatly among different peoples and even in different sections of society and in different localities, and because of course there are all possible grades of sexual inversion to deal with, from that in which the instinct is _quite exclusively_ directed towards the same sex, to the other extreme in which it is normally towards the opposite sex but capable, occasionally and under exceptional attractions, of inversion towards its own--this last condition being probably among some peoples very widespread, if not universal. In the third place, by the tabulation and comparison of a great number of cases and “confessions,” it has become pretty well established that the individuals affected with inversion in marked degree do not after all differ from the rest of mankind, or womankind, in any other physical or mental particular which can be distinctly indicated.[31] No congenital association with any particular physical conformation or malformation has yet been discovered; nor with any distinct disease of body or mind. Nor does it appear that persons of this class are usually of a gross or specially low type, but if anything rather the opposite--being mostly of refined, sensitive nature and including, as Krafft-Ebing points out (“Psychopathia Sexualis,” seventh ed., p. 227) a great number “highly gifted in the fine arts, especially music and poetry”; and, as Mantegazza says,[32] many persons of high literary and social distinction. It is true that Krafft-Ebing insists on the generally strong sexual equipment of this class of persons (among men), but he hastens to say that their emotional love is also “enthusiastic and exalted,”[33] and that, while bodily congress is desired, the special act with which they are vulgarly credited is in most cases repugnant to them.[34] The only distinct characteristic which the scientific writers claim to have established is a marked tendency to nervous development in the subject, not infrequently associated with nervous maladies; but--as I shall presently have occasion to show--there is reason to think that the validity even of this characteristic has been exaggerated.