Then again in this connexion it must never be forgotten that the medico-scientific enquirer is bound on the whole to meet with those cases that _are_ of a morbid character, rather than with those that are healthy in their manifestation, since indeed it is the former that he lays himself out for. And since the field of his research is usually a great modern city, there is little wonder if disease colours his conclusions. In the case of Dr. Moll, who carried out his researches largely under the guidance of the Berlin police (whose acquaintance with the subject would naturally be limited to its least satisfactory sides), the only marvel is that his verdict is so markedly favorable as it is. As Krafft-Ebing says in his own preface, “It is the sad privilege of Medicine, and especially of Psychiatry, to look always on the reverse side of life, on the weakness and wretchedness of man.” Having regard then to the direction in which science has been steadily moving in this matter, it is not difficult to see that the epithet “morbid” will probably before long be abandoned as descriptive of the homogenic bias--that is, of the general sentiment of love towards a person of the same sex. That there are excesses of the passion--cases, as in ordinary sex-love, where mere physical desire becomes a mania--we may freely admit; but as it would be unfair to judge of the purity of marriage by the evidence of the Divorce courts, so it would be monstrous to measure the truth and beauty of the attachment in question by those instances which stand most prominently perhaps in the eye of the modern public; and after all deductions there remains, we contend, the vast body of cases in which the manifestation of the instinct has on the whole the character of normality and healthfulness--sufficiently so in fact to constitute this _a distinct variety of the sexual passion_. The question, of course, not being whether the instinct is _capable_ of morbid and extravagant manifestation--for that can easily be proved of any instinct--but whether it is capable of a healthy and sane expression. And this, we think, it has abundantly shown itself to be. Anyhow the work that Science has practically done has been to destroy the dogmatic attitude of the former current opinion from which itself started, and to leave the whole subject freed from a great deal of misunderstanding, and much more open than before. If on the one hand its results have been chiefly of a negative character, and it admits that it does not understand the exact place and foundation of this attachment; on the other hand since it recognises the deeply beneficial influences of an intimate love-relation of the usual kind on those concerned, it also allows that there are some persons for whom these necessary reactions can only come from one of the same sex as themselves.