Krafft-Ebing's theory seems then to be that all cases of acquired sexual inversion may be ascribed in the first place to morbid predispositions inherited by the patient (Belastung), and in the second place to onanism as the exciting cause of the latent neuropathic ailment.
He excludes the hypothesis of a physiological and healthy deflection from the normal rule of sex. "I think it questionable," he says, "whether the untainted individual (das unbelastete Individuum) is capable of homosexual feelings at all." The importance of this sentence will be apparent when we come to deal with Krafft-Ebing's account of congenital sexual inversion, which he establishes upon a large induction of cases observed in his own practice.
For the present we have the right to assume that Krafft-Ebing regards sexual inversion, whether "acquired" or "congenital," as a form of inherited neuropathy (Belastung). In cases where it seems to be "acquired," he lays stress upon the habit of self-pollution.
This is how he states his theory of onanism as an exciting cause of inherited neuropathy, resulting in sexual inversion. The habit of self-abuse prepares the patient for abnormal appetites by weakening his nervous force, degrading his sexual imagination, and inducing hyper-sensibility in his sexual apparatus. Partial impotence is not unfrequently exhibited. In consequence of this sophistication of his nature, the victim of inherited neuropathy and onanism feels shy with women, and finds it convenient to frequent persons of his own sex. In other words, it is supposed to be easier for an individual thus broken down at the centres of his life to defy the law and to demand sexual gratification from men than to consort with venal women in a brothel.
Krafft-Ebing assumes that males who have been born with neuropathic ailments of an indefinite kind will masturbate, destroy their virility, and then embark upon a course of vice which offers incalculable dangers, inconceivable difficulties, and inexpressible repugnances. That is the theory. But whence, if not from some overwhelming appetite, do the demoralised victims of self-abuse derive courage for facing the obstacles which a career of sexual inversion carries with it in our civilisation? One would have thought that such people, if they could not approach a prostitute in a brothel, would have been unable to solicit a healthy man upon the streets. The theory seems to be constructedin order to elude the fact that the persons designated are driven by a natural impulse into paths far more beset with difficulties than those of normal libertines.
Krafft-Ebing gives the details of five cases of "acquired" sexual inversion. Three of these were the children of afflicted parents. One had no morbid strain in his ancestry, except pulmonary consumption. The fifth sprang from a strong father and a healthy mother. Masturbation entered into the history of all.
It must be observed, in criticising Krafft-Ebing's theory, that it is so constructed as to render controversy almost impossible. If we point out that a large percentage of males who practise onanism in their adolescence do not acquire sexual inversion, he will answer that these were not tainted with hereditary disease. The autobiographies of onanists and passionate woman-lovers (J. J. Rousseau, for example, who evinced a perfect horror of homosexual indulgence, and J. J. Bouchard, whose disgusting excentricities were directed toward females even in the period of his total impotence) will be dismissed with the remark that the ancestors of these writers must have shown a clean record.
It is difficult to square Krafft-Ebing's theory with the phenomena presented by schools, both public and private, in all parts of Europe. In these institutions not only is masturbation practised to a formidable extent, but it is also everywhere connected with some form of sexual inversion, either passionately Platonic or grossly sensual. Nevertheless, we know that few of the boys addicted to these practices remain abnormal after they have begun to frequent women. The same may be said aboutconvict establishments, military prisons, and the like.[23]With such a body of facts staring us in the face, it cannot be contended that "only tainted individuals are capable of homosexual feelings." Where females are absent or forbidden, males turn for sexual gratification to males. And in certain conditions of society sexual inversion may become permanently established, recognised, all but universal. It would be absurd to maintain that all the boy-lovers of ancient Greece owed their instincts to hereditary neuropathy complicated with onanism.
The invocation of heredity in problems of this kind is always hazardous. We only throw the difficulty of explanation further back. At what point of theworld's history was the morbid taste acquired? If none but tainted individuals are capable of homosexual feelings, how did these feelings first come into existence? On the supposition that neuropathy forms a necessary condition of abnormal instinct, is it generic neuropathy or a specific type of that disorder? If generic, can valid reasons be adduced for regarding nervous malady in any of its aspects (hysteria is the mother, insanity is the father) as the cause of so peculiarly differentiated an affection of the sexual appetite? If specific, that is, if the ancestors of the patient must have been afflicted with sexual inversion, in what way did they acquire it, supposing all untainted individuals to be incapable of the feeling?
At this moment of history there is probably no individualin Europe who has not inherited some portion of a neuropathic stain. If that be granted, everybody is liable to sexual inversion, and the principle of heredity becomes purely theoretical.
That sexual inversion may be and actually is transmitted, like any other quality, appears to be proved by the history of well-known families both in England and in Germany. That it is not unfrequently exhibited by persons who have a bad ancestral record, may be taken for demonstrated. In certain cases we are justified, then, in regarding it as the sign or concomitant of nervous maladies. But the evidence of ancient Greece or Rome, of what Burton calls the "sotadic races" at the present time, of European schools and prisons, ought to make us hesitate before we commit ourselves to Krafft-Ebing's theory that hereditary affliction is a necessary predisposing cause.[24]
In like manner, masturbation may be credited with certain cases of acquired homosexual feeling. Undoubtedly the instinct is occasionally evoked in some obscure way by the depraved habit of inordinate self-abuse. Yet the autobiographies of avowed Urnings do not corroborate the view that they were originally more addicted to onanism than normal males. Ulrichs has successfully combated the theory advanced by Tarnowsky, Prager, and Krafft-Ebing, if considered as a complete explanation of the problem.[25]On the other hand, common experience shows beyond all doubt,that young men between 16 and 20 give themselves up to daily self-abuse without weakening their appetite for women. They love boys and practice mutual self-abuse with persons of their own sex; yet they crave all the while for women. Of the many who live thus during the years of adolescence, some have undoubtedly as bad a family record as the worst of Krafft-Ebing's cases show. Finally, as regards the onanism which is a marked characteristic of some adult Urnings, this must be ascribed in most cases to the repression of their abnormal instincts. They adopt the habit, as Krafft-Ebing himself says,faute de mieux.[26]
In justice to the theory I am criticising, it ought to be remarked that Krafft-Ebing does not contend that wherever hereditary taint and onanism concur, the result will be sexual inversion; but rather that wherever we have diagnosed an acquired form of sexual inversion, we shall discover hereditary taint and onanism. Considering the frequency of both hereditary taint and onanism in our civilisation, this is not risking much.Those factors are discoverable in a large percentage of male persons. What seems unwarranted by facts is the suggestion that inherited neuropathy is an indispensable condition and the fundamental cause of homosexual instincts. The evidence of ancient Greece, schools, prisons, and sotadic races, compels us to believe that normally healthy people are often born with these instincts or else acquire them by the way of custom. Again, his insinuation that onanism, regarded as the main exciting cause, is more frequent among young people of abnormal inclinations than among their normal brethren, will not bear the test of common observation and of facts communicated in the autobiographies of professed onanists and confessed Urnings.
The problem is too delicate, too complicated, also too natural and simple, to be solved by hereditary disease and self-abuse. When we shift the ground of argument from acquired to inborn sexual inversion, its puzzlingcharacter will become still more apparent. We shall hardly be able to resist the conclusion that theories of disease are incompetent to explain the phenomenon in modern Europe. Medical writers abandon the phenomenon in savage races, in classical antiquity, and in the sotadic zone. They strive to isolate it as an abnormal and specifically morbid exception in our civilisation. But facts tend to show that it is a recurring impulse of humanity, natural to some people, adopted by others, and in the majority of cases compatible with an otherwise normal and healthy temperament.
Krafft-Ebing calls attention to the phenomenon of permanenteffeminatio, in males unsexed by constant riding and the exhaustion of their virility by friction of the genitals—a phenomenon observed by Herodotus among Scythians, and prevalent among some nomadic races of the Caucasus at the present day.[27]He claims this in support of his theory of masturbation; and within due limits, he has the right to do so. The destruction of the male apparatus for reproduction, whether it be by castration after puberty, or by an accident to the parts, or by a lesion of the spine, or by excessive equitation, as appears proved from the history of nomad tribes, causes men to approximate physically to the female type, and to affect feminine occupations and habits. In proportion as the masculine functions are interfered with, masculine characteristics tend to disappear; and it is curious to notice that the same result is reached upon so many divers ways.
Next he discusses a few cases in which it seems thatsexual inversion displays itself episodically under the conditions of a psychopathical disturbance.[28]That is to say, three persons, two women and one man, have been observed by him, under conditions approaching mental alienation, to exchange their normal sexual inclination for abnormal appetite. In the analysis of the problem these cases cannot be regarded as wholly insignificant. The details show that the subjects were clearly morbid. Therefore they have their value for the building up of a theory of sexual inversion upon the basis of inherited and active disease.
(B) Ultimately, Krafft-Ebing attacks the problem of what he calls "the innate morbid phenomenon" of sexual inversion.[29]While giving a general description of the subjects of this class, he remarks that the males display a pronounced sexual antipathy for women, and a strongly accentuated sympathy for men. Their reproductive organs are perfectly differentiated on the masculine type; but they desire men instinctively, and are inclined to express their bias by assuming characters of femininity. Women infected by a like inversion, exhibit corresponding anomalies.
Casper, continues Krafft-Ebing, thoroughly diagnosed the phenomenon. Griesinger referred it to hereditary affliction. Westphal defined it as "a congenital inversion of the sexual feeling, together with a consciousness of its morbidity." Ulrichs explained it by the presence of a feminine soul in a male body, and gave the nameUrning[30]to its subjects. Gley suggested that a femalebrain was combined with masculine glands of sex. Magnan hypothesised a woman's brain in a man's body.
Krafft-Ebing asserts that hardly any of these Urnings are conscious of morbidity. They look upon themselves as unfortunate mainly because law and social prejudices stand in the way of their natural indulgence.[31]He also takes for proved, together with all the authorities he cites, that the abnormal sexual appetite is constitutional and inborn.
Krafft-Ebing, as might have been expected, refers the phenomenon to functional degeneration, dependent upon neuropathical conditions in the patient, which are mainly derived from hereditary affliction.
He confirms the account reported above from Casper as to the platonic or semi-platonic relations of the Urning with the men he likes, his abhorrence of coition, and his sexual gratification through acts of mutual embracement. The number of Urnings in the world, he says, is far greater than we can form the least conception of from present means of calculation.
At this point he begins to subdivide the subjects of congenital inversion. The first class he constitutes arecalled by him "Psychical Hermaphrodites." Born with a predominant inclination towards persons of their own sex, they possess rudimentary feelings of a semi-sexual nature for the opposite. These people not unfrequently marry; and Krafft-Ebing supposes that many cases of frigidity in matrimony, unhappy unions, and so forth, are attributable to the peculiar diathesis of the male—or it may be, of the female—in these marriages. They are distinguished from his previous class of "acquired" inversion by the fact that the latter start with instincts for the other sex, which are gradually obliterated; whereas the psychical hermaphrodites commence life with an attraction towards their own sex, which they attempt to overcome by making demands upon their rudimentary normal instincts. Five cases are given of such persons.[32]
In the next place he comes to true homosexual individuals, or Urnings in the strict sense of that phrase. With them there is no rudimentary appetite for the other sex apparent. They present a "grotesque" parallel to normal men and women, inverting or caricaturing natural appetites. The male of this class shrinks from the female, and the female from the male.[33]Each is vehemently attracted from earliest childhood to persons of the same sex. But they, in their turn, have to be subdivided into two sub-species. In the first of these, the sexual life alone is implicate; the persons who compose it do not differ in any marked or external characteristics from the type of their own sex; their habits and outward appearance remain unchanged. With the second sub-species the case is different. Here the character, the mental constitution, the habits, and the occupations of the subject have been altered by his or her predominant sexual inversion; so that a male addicts himself to a woman's work, assumes female clothes, acquires a shriller key of voice, and expresses the inversion of his sexual instinct in every act and gesture of his daily life.
It appears from Krafft-Ebing's recorded cases that the first of these sub-species yields nearly the largestnumber of individuals. He presents eleven detailed autobiographies of male Urnings, in whom thevita sexualisalone is abnormal, and who are differentiated to common observation from normal men by nothing but the nature of their amorous proclivities. The class includes powerfully developed masculine beings, who are unsexed in no particular except that they possess an inordinate appetite for males, and will not look at females.
As regards the family history of the eleven selected cases, five could show a clear bill of health, some were decidedly bad, a small minority were uncertain.
One of these Urnings, a physician, informed Krafft-Ebing that he had consorted with at least six hundred men of his own stamp; many of them in high positions of respectability. In none had he observed an abnormal formation of the sexual organs; but frequently some approximation to the feminine type of body—hair sparingly distributed[34], tender complexion, and high tone of voice. About ten per cent. eventually adopted love for women. Not ten per cent. exhibited any sign of thehabitus muliebrisin their occupations, dress, and so forth. A large majority felt like men in their relations to men, and were even inclined toward active pæderasty. From the unmentionable act they were deterred by æsthetical repulsion and fear of the law.
The second of these sub-species embraces the individuals with whom the reader of Carlier is familiar,and whom Ulrichs calls Weiblinge. In their boyhood they exhibited a marked disinclination for the games of their school-fellows, and preferred to consort with girls. They helped their mothers in the household, learned to sew and knit, caught at every opportunity of dressing up in female clothes. Later on, they began to call themselves by names of women, avoided the society of normal comrades, hated sport and physical exercise, were averse to smoking and drinking, could not whistle. Whether they refrained from swearing is not recorded. Many of them developed a taste for music, and prided themselves upon their culture. Eventually, when they became unclassed, they occupied themselves with toilette, scandal, tea, and talk about their lovers—dressed as far as possible in female clothes, painted, perfumed and curled their hair—addressed each other in the feminine gender, adopted pseudonyms of Countess or of Princess, and lived the life of women of a dubious demi-monde.[35]
Yet they remained in their physical configuration males. Unlike the preceding sub-species, they did not feel as men feel towards their sweethearts, but on the contrary like women. They had no impulse toward active pæderasty, no inclination for blooming adolescents. What they wanted was a robust adult; and to him they submitted themselves with self-abandonment. Like all Urnings, they shrank from the act of coition for the most part, and preferred embracementswhich produced a brief and pleasurable orgasm. But some developed a peculiar liking for the passive act of sodomy or the anomalous act of fellatio.
In this characterisation I have overpassed the limits of the fifteen cases presented by Krafft-Ebing. In order to constitute the type, I have drawn upon one reliable, because sympathetic, source in Ulrichs, and on another reliable, because antipathetic, source in Carlier.
Sexual inversion, in persons of the third main species, has reached its final development. Descending, if we follow Krafft-Ebing's categories, from acquired to innate inversion, dividing the latter into psychopathic hermaphrodites and Urnings, subdividing Urnings into those who retain their masculine habit and those who develop a habit analogous to that of females, we come in this last class to the most striking phenomenon of inverted sex. Here the soul which is doomed to love a man, and is nevertheless imprisoned in a male body, strives to convert that body to feminine uses so entirely that the marks of sex, except in the determined organs of sex, shall be obliterated. And sometimes it appears that the singular operation of nature, with which we are occupied in this Essay, goes even further. The inverted bias given to the sexual appetite, as part of the spiritual nature of the man, can never quite transmute male organs into female organs of procreation. But it modifies the bony structure of the body, the form of the face, the fleshly and muscular integuments to such an obvious extent that Krafft-Ebing thinks himself justified in placing a separate class of androgynous beings (with their gynandrous correspondents) at the end of the extraordinary process.
At this point it will be well to present a scheme of his analysis under the form of a table.
What is the rational explanation of the facts presented to us by the analysis which I have formulated in this table cannot as yet be thoroughly determined. We do not know enough about the law of sex in human beings to advance a theory. Krafft-Ebing and writers of his school are at present inclined to refer them all to diseases of the nervous centres, inherited, congenital, excited by early habits of self-abuse. The inadequacy of this method I have already attempted to set forth; and I have also called attention to the fact that it does not sufficiently account for phenomena known to us through history and through every-day experience.
Presently we shall be introduced to a theory (that of Ulrichs) which is based upon a somewhat grotesque and metaphysical conception of nature, and which dispenses with the hypothesis of hereditary disease. I am not sure whether this theory, unsound as it may seem to medical specialists, does not square better with ascertained facts than that of inherited disorder in the nervous centres.
However that may be, the physicians, as represented by Krafft-Ebing, absolve all subjects of inverted sexuality from crime. They represent them to us as the subjects of ancestral malady. And this alters their position face to face with vulgar error, theological rancour, and the stringent indifference of legislators. A strong claim has been advanced for their treatment henceforth, not as delinquents, but as subjects of congenital depravity in the brain centres, over which they have no adequate control.
The fourth medical author, with whom we are about to be occupied, includes sexual inversion in his general survey of human crime, and connects it less with anomalies of the nervous centres than with atavistic reversion to the state of nature and savagery. In the end, it will be seen, he accepts a concordat with the hypothesis of "moral insanity."
Cesare Lombroso."Der Verbrecher in Anthropologischer, Aerztlicher und Juristischer Beziehung."
This famous book, which has contributed no little to a revolution of opinion regarding crime and its punishment in Italy, contains a searching inquiry into the psychological nature, physical peculiarities, habits, and previous history of criminals.[36]It is, in fact, a study of the criminal temperament. Lombroso deals in the main, as is natural, with murder, theft, rape, cruelty, and their allied species. But he includes sexual inversion in the category of crimes, and regards theabnormal appetites as signs of that morbid condition into which he eventually revolves the criminal impulse.
Wishing to base his doctrine on a sound foundation, Lombroso begins with what may be termed the embryology of crime. He finds unnatural vices frequent among horses, donkeys, cattle, insects, fowls, dogs, ants. The phenomenon, he says, is usually observable in cases where the male animal has been excluded from intercourse with females. Having established his general position that what we call crimes of violence, robbery, murder, cruelty, blood-thirst, cannibalism, unnatural lust, and so forth, exist among the brutes—in fact, that most of these crimes form the rule and not the exception in their lives—he passes on to the consideration of the savage man. In following his analysis, I shall confine myself to what he says about abnormal sexual passion.
He points out that in New Caledonia the male savages meet together at night in huts for the purpose of promiscuous intercourse (p. 42). The same occurs in Tahiti, where the practice is placed under the protection of a god. Next he alludes to the ancient Mexicans; and then proceeds to Hellas and Rome, where this phase of savage immorality survived and became a recognised factor in social life (p. 43). At Rome, he says, the Venus of the sodomites received the title of Castina (p. 38).
Lombroso's treatment of sexual inversion regarded as a survival from prehistoric times is by no means exhaustive. It might be supplemented and confirmed by what we know about the manners of the Kelts, as reported by Aristotle (Pol. ii. 6. 5.)—Tartars, Persians,Afghans, North American Indians, &c. Diodorus Siculus, writing upon the morals of the Gauls, deserves attention in this respect.[37]It is also singular to find that the Norman marauders of the tenth century carried unnatural vices wherever they appeared in Europe.[38]The Abbot of Clairvaux, as quoted by Lombroso (p. 43), accused them of spreading their brutal habits through society. People accustomed to look upon these vices as a form of corruption in great cities will perhaps be surprised to find them prevalent among nomadic and warlike tribes. But, in addition to survival from half-savage periods of social life, the necessities of warriors thrown together with an insufficiency of women must be considered. I have already suggested that Greek love grew into a custom during the Dorian migration and the conquest of Crete and Peloponnesus by bands of soldiers.
Cannibalism, Lombroso points out (p. 68), originated in necessity, became consecrated by religion, and finally remained as custom and a form of gluttony. The same process of reasoning, when applied to sexual aberrations, helps us to understand how a non-ethical habit, based on scarcity of women, survived as a social and chivalrous institution among the civilised Hellenes.
Lombroso traces the growth of justice in criminal affairs, and the establishment of pains and penalties, up to the instinct of revenge and the despotic selfishness of chiefs in whom the whole property of savagetribes, including women, was vested. This section of his work concludes with the following remarkable sentence (p. 96): "The universal diffusion of crime which we have demonstrated at a certain remote epoch, and its gradual disappearance as a consequence of new crimes springing up, traces of which are still discoverable in our penal codes [he means revenge, the egotism of princes, and ecclesiastical rapacity], are calculated even more than the criminality of brutes to make us doubt of what metaphysicians call eternal justice, and indicate the real cause of the perpetual reappearance of crime among civilised races, namely atavism."
Having established this principle, Lombroso proceeds to trace the atavism of criminality in children. He shows that just as the human embryo passes through all forms of lower lives, so men and women in their infancy exactly reproduce the moral type of savages. Ungovernable rage, revengeful instincts, jealousy, envy, lying, stealing, cruelty, laziness, vanity, sexual proclivities, imperfect family affections, a general bluntness of the ethical sense, are common qualities of children, which the parent and the teacher strive to control or to eradicate by training. "The child, considered as a human being devoid of moral sense, presents a perfect picture of what doctors call moral insanity, and I prefer to classify as inborn crime" (p. 97). "All species of anomalous sexual appetite, with the exception of those dependent upon senile decadence, make their appearance in childhood, together with the other criminal tendencies" (p. 117).
Lombroso arrives, then, at the conclusion that what civilised humanity calls crime and punishes, is the law of nature in brutes, persists as a normal conditionamong savages, and displays itself in the habits and instincts of children. The moral instinct is therefore slowly elaborated out of crime in the course of generations by whole races, and in the course of infancy and adolescence in the individual. The habitual criminal, who remains a criminal in his maturity, in whom crime is inborn and ineradicable, who cannot develop a moral sense, he explains at first by atavism. A large section of his volume (pp. 124-136, 137-253) is devoted to anthropometrical observations upon the physical structure, the cranial and cerebral development, and the physiognomy of such criminals. Into this part of his work we need not enter. Nor is it necessary to follow his interesting researches in the biology and psychology of "born criminals"—chapters on tattooing, ways of thinking and feeling, passions, tendencies to suicide, religious sentiment, intelligence and culture, capacity of self-control, liability to relapse, and so forth. Many curious facts relating to sexual inversion are treated in the course of these enquiries; and one passage describing the general characteristics of pæderasts (p. 376) ought to be alluded to. Considering this subject solely as a phase of crime, Lombroso reveals a superficial conception of its perplexity.
It is more important to reflect upon his theory of crime in general. Having started with the hypothesis of atavism, and adopted the term "born criminal," he later on identifies "innate crime" with "moral insanity," and illustrates both by the phenomena of epilepsy.[39]This introduces a certain confusion andincoherence into his speculative system; for he frankly admits that he has only gradually and tardily been led to recognise the identity of what is called crime and what is called moral insanity. Criminal atavism might be defined as the sporadic reversion to savagery in certain individuals. It has nothing logically to connect it with distortion or disease—unless we assume that all our savage ancestors were malformed or diseased, and that the Greeks, in whom one form of Lombroso's criminal atavism became established, were as a nation morally insane. The appearance of structural defects in habitual criminals points less to atavistic reversion than to radical divergence from the normal type of humanity. In like manner the invocation of heredity as a principle (p. 135) involves a similar confusion. Hereditary taint is a thing different not in degree but in kind from savage atavism prolonged from childhood into manhood.
Be this as it may, whether we regard offenders against law and ethic as "born criminals," or as "morally insane," or whether we transcend the distinction implied in these two terms, Lombroso maintains that there is no good in trying to deal with them by punishment. They ought to be treated with life-long sequestration in asylums (p. 135), and rigidly forbidden to perpetuate the species. That is the conclusion to which the whole of his long argument is carried. He contends that the prevalent juristic conception of crime rests upon ignorance of nature, brute-life, savagery, and the gradual emergence of morality. So radical a revolution in ideas, which gives new meaning to the words sin and conscience, whichremoves moral responsibility, and which substitutes the anthropologist and the physician for the judge and jury, cannot be carried out, even by its fervent apostle, without some want of severe logic. Thus we find Lombroso frequently drawing distinctions between "habitual" or "born" criminals and what he calls "occasional" criminals, without explaining the phenomenon of "occasional crime," and saying how he thinks this ought to be regarded by society. Moreover, he almost wholly ignores the possibility of correcting criminal tendencies by appeal to reason, by establishing habits of self-restraint, and by the employment of such means as hypnotic suggestion.[40]Yet experience and the common practice of the world prove that these remedies are not wholly inefficacious; and indeed the passage from childish savagery to moralised manhood, on which he lays so great a stress, is daily effected by the employment of such measures in combination with the fear of punishment and the desire to win esteem.
The final word upon Lombroso's book is this: Having started with the natural history of crime, as a prime constituent in nature and humanity, which only becomes crime through the development of social morality, and which survives atavistically in persons ill adapted to their civilised environment, he suddenly turns round and identifies the crime thus analysed with morbid nerve-conditions, malformations and moral insanity. Logically, it is impossible to effect this coalition of two radically different conceptions. Ifcrime was not crime but nature in the earlier stages, and only appeared as crime under the conditions of advancing culture, its manifestation as a survival in certain individuals ought to be referred to nature, and cannot be relegated to the category of physical or mental disease. Savages are savages, but not lunatics or epileptics.
NOTE TO THE FOREGOING SECTION.
At the close of this enquiry into medical theories of sexual inversion, all of which assume that the phenomenon is morbid, it may not be superfluous to append the protest of an Urning against that solution of the problem. I translate it from the original document published by Krafft-Ebing (pp. 216-219). He says that the writer is "a man of high position in London"; but whether the communication was made in German or in English, does not appear.
"You have no conception what sustained and difficult struggles we all of us (the thoughtful and refined among us most of all) have to carry on, and how terribly we are forced to suffer under the false opinions which still prevail regarding us and our so-called immorality.
"Your view that, in most cases, the phenomenon in question has to be ascribed to congenital morbidity, offers perhaps the easiest way of overcoming popular prejudices, and awakening sympathy instead of horror and contempt for us poor 'afflicted' creatures.
"Still, while I believe that this view is the most favourable for us in the present state of things, I amunable in the interest of science to accept the termmorbidwithout qualification, and venture to suggest some further distinctions bearing on the central difficulties of the problem.
"The phenomenon is certainly anomalous; but the termmorbidcarries a meaning which seems to me inapplicable to the subject, or at all events to very many cases which have come under my cognisance. I will concedeà priorithat a far larger proportion of mental disturbance, nervous hyper-sensibility, &c., can be proved in Urnings than in normal men. But ought this excess of nervous erethism to be referred necessarily to the peculiar nature of the Urning? Is not this the true explanation, in a vast majority of cases, that the Urning, owing to present laws and social prejudices, cannot like other men obtain a simple and easy satisfaction of his inborn sexual desires?
"To begin with the years of boyhood: an Urning, when he first becomes aware of sexual stirrings in his nature, and innocently speaks about them to his comrades, soon finds that he is unintelligible. So he wraps himself within his own thoughts. Or should he attempt to tell a teacher or his parents about these feelings, the inclination, which for him is as natural as swimming to a fish, will be treated by them as corrupt and sinful; he is exhorted at any cost to overcome and trample on it. Then there begins in him a hidden conflict, a forcible suppression of the sexual impulse; and in proportion as the natural satisfaction of his craving is denied, fancy works with still more lively efforts, conjuring up those seductive pictures which he would fain expel from his imagination. The more energetic is the youth who hasto fight this inner battle, the more seriously must his whole nervous system suffer from it. It is this forcible suppression of an instinct so deeply rooted in our nature, it is this, in my humble opinion, which first originates the morbid symptoms, that may often be observed in Urnings. But such consequences have nothing in themselves to do with the sexual inversion proper to the Urning.
"Well then; some persons prolong this never-ending inner conflict, and ruin their constitutions in course of time; others arrive eventually at the conviction that an inborn impulse, which exists in them so powerfully, cannot possibly be sinful—so they abandon the impossible task of suppressing it. But just at this point begins in real earnest the Iliad of their sufferings and constant nervous excitations. The normal man, if he looks for means to satisfy his sexual inclinations, knows always where to find that without trouble. Not so the Urning. He sees the men who attract him; he dares not utter, nay, dares not even let it be perceived, what stirs him. He imagines that he alone of all the people in the world is the subject of emotions so eccentric. Naturally, he cultivates the society of young men, but does not venture to confide in them. So at last he is driven to seek some relief in himself, some makeshift for the satisfaction he cannot obtain. This results in masturbation, probably excessive, with its usual pernicious consequences to health. When, after the lapse of a certain time, his nervous system is gravely compromised, this morbid phenomenon ought not to be ascribed to sexual inversion in itself; far rather we have to regard it as the logical issue of the Urning's position, driven as he is bydominant opinion to forego the gratification whichfor himis natural and normal, and to betake himself to onanism.
"But let us now suppose that the Urning has enjoyed the exceptional good-fortune of finding upon his path in life a soul who feels the same as he does, or else that he has been early introduced by some initiated friend into the circles of the Urning-world. In this case, it is possible that he will have escaped many painful conflicts; yet a long series of exciting cares and anxieties attend on every step he takes. He knows indeed now that he is by no means the only individual in the world who harbours these abnormal emotions; he opens his eyes, and marvels to discover how numerous are his comrades in all social spheres and every class of industry; he also soon perceives that Urnings, no less than normal men and women, have developed prostitution, and that male strumpets can be bought for money just as easily as females. Accordingly, there is no longer any difficulty for him in gratifying his sexual impulse. But how differently do things develop themselves in his case! How far less fortunate is he than normal man!
"Let us assume the luckiest case that can befall him. The sympathetic friend, for whom he has been sighing all his life, is found. Yet he cannot openly give himself up to this connection, as a young fellow does with the girl he loves. Both of the comrades are continually forced to hide theirliaison; their anxiety on this point is incessant; anything like an excessive intimacy, which could arouse suspicion (especially when they are not of the same age, or do not belong to the same class insociety), has to be concealed from the external world. In this way, the very commencement of the relation sets a whole chain of exciting incidents in motion: and the dread lest the secret should be betrayed or divined, prevents the unfortunate lover from ever arriving at a simple happiness. Trifling circumstances, which would have no importance for another sort of man, make him tremble: lest suspicion should awake, his secret be discovered, and he become a social outcast, lose his official appointment, be excluded from his profession. Is it conceivable that this incessant anxiety and care should pass over him without a trace, and not react upon his nervous system?
"Another individual, less lucky, has not found a sympathetic comrade, but has fallen into the hands of some pretty fellow, who at the outset readily responded to his wishes, till he drew the very deepest secret of his nature forth. At that point the subtlest methods of blackmailing begin to be employed. The miserable persecuted wretch, placed between the alternative of paying money down or of becoming socially impossible, losing a valued position, seeing dishonour bursting upon himself and family, pays, and still the more he pays, the greedier becomes the vampire who sucks his life-blood, until at last there lies nothing else before him except total financial ruin or disgrace. Who will be astonished if the nerves of an individual in this position are not equal to the horrid strain?
"In some cases the nerves give way altogether: mental alienation sets in; at last the wretch finds in a madhouse that repose which life would not afford him. Others terminate their unendurable situation by thedesperate act of suicide. How many unexplained cases of suicide in young men ought to be ascribed to this cause!
"I do not think I am far wrong when I maintain that at least half of the suicides of young men are due to this one circumstance. Even in cases where no merciless blackmailer persecutes the Urning, but a connection has existed which lasted satisfactorily on both sides, still in these cases even discovery, or the dread of discovery, leads only too often to suicide. How many officers, who have had connection with their subordinates, how many soldiers, who have lived in such relation with a comrade, when they thought they were about to be discovered, have put a bullet through their brains to avoid the coming disgrace! And the same thing might be said about all the other callings in life.
"In consequence of all this, it seems clear that if, as a matter of fact, mental abnormalities and real disturbances of the intellect are commoner with Urnings than in the case of other men, this does not establish an inevitable connection between the mental eccentricity and the Urning's specific temperament, or prove that the latter causes the former. According to my firm conviction, mental disturbances and morbid symptoms which may be observed in Urnings ought in the large majority of instances not to be referred to their sexual anomaly; the real fact is that they are educed in them by the prevalent false theory of sexual inversion, together with the legislation in force against Urnings and the reigning tone of public opinion. It is only one who has some approximate notion of the mental and moralsufferings, of the anxieties and perturbations, to which an Urning is exposed, who knows the never-ending hypocrisies and concealments he must practise in order to cloak his indwelling inclination, who comprehends the infinite difficulties which oppose the natural satisfaction of his sexual desire—it is only such a one, I say, who is able properly to wonder at the comparative rarity of mental aberrations and nervous ailments in the class of Urnings. The larger proportion of these morbid circumstances would certainly not be developed if the Urning, like the normal man, could obtain a simple and facile gratification of his sexual appetite, and if he were not everlastingly exposed to the torturing anxieties I have attempted to describe."
This is powerfully and temperately written. It confirms what I have attempted to establish while criticising the medical hypothesis; and raises the further question whether the phenomenon of sexual inversion ought not to be approached from the point of view of embryology rather than of psychical pathology. In other words, is not the true Urning to be regarded as a person born with sexual instincts improperly correlated to his sexual organs? This he can be without any inherited or latent morbidity; and the nervous anomalies discovered in him when he falls at last beneath the observation of physicians, may be not the evidence of an originally tainted constitution, but the consequence of unnatural conditions to which he has been exposed from the age of puberty.
Noone has yet attempted a complete history of inverted sexuality in all ages and in all races. This would be well worth doing. Materials, though not extremely plentiful, lie to hand in the religious books and codes of ancient nations, in mythology and poetry and literature, in narratives of travel, and the reports of observant explorers.
Gibbon once suggested that: "A curious dissertation might be formed on the introduction of pæderasty after the time of Homer, its progress among the Greeks of Asia and Europe, the vehemence of their passions, and the thin device of virtue and friendship which amused the philosophers of Athens. But," adds the prurient prude, "Scelera ostendi oportet dum puniunter, abscondi flagitia."
Two scholars responded to this call. The result is that the chapter on Greek love has been very fairly written by equally impartial, equally learned, and independent authors, who approached the subject from somewhat different points of view, but who arrived in the main at similar conclusions.
The first of these histories is M. H. E. Meier's articleonPæderastiein Ersch and Gruber's "Allgemeine Encyklopädie:" Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1837.
The second is a treatise entitled "A Problem in Greek Ethics," composed by an Englishman in English. The anonymous author was not acquainted with Meier's article before he wrote, and only came across it long after he had printed his own essay. This work is extremely rare, ten copies only having been impressed for private use.
Enquirers into the psychology and morality of sexual inversion should not fail to study one or other of these treatises. It will surprise many a well-read scholar, when he sees the whole list of Greek authorities and passages collected and co-ordinated, to find how thoroughly the manners and the literature of that great people were penetrated with pæderastia. The myths and heroic legends of prehistoric Hellas, the educational institutions of the Dorian state, the dialogues of Plato, the history of the Theban army, the biographies of innumerable eminent citizens—lawgivers and thinkers, governors and generals, founders of colonies and philosophers, poets and sculptors—render it impossible to maintain that this passion was either a degraded vice or a form of inherited neuropathy in the race to whom we owe so much of our intellectual heritage. Having surveyed the picture, we may turn aside to wonder whether modern European nations, imbued with the opinions I have described above in the section on Vulgar Errors, are wise in making Greek literature a staple of the higher education. Their motto isÉrasez l'infâme!Here the infamous thing clothes itself like an angel of light, and raises its forehead unabashed to heavenamong the marble peristyles and olive-groves of an unrivalled civilization.
Another book, written from a medical point of view, is valuable upon the pathology of sexual inversion and cognate aberrations among the nations of antiquity. It bears the title "Geschichte der Lustseuche im Alterthume," and is composed by Dr. Julius Rosenbaum.[41]Rosenbaum attempts to solve the problem of the existence of syphilis and other venereal diseases in the remote past. This enquiry leads him to investigate the whole of Greek and Latin literature in its bearing upon sexual vice. Students will therefore expect from his pages no profound psychological speculations and no idealistic presentation of an eminently repulsive subject. One of the most interesting chapters of his work is devoted to what Herodotus calledΝοὑσος φἡλειαamong the Scythians, a wide-spread effemination prevailing in a wild warlike and nomadic race. We have already alluded to Krafft-Ebing's remarks on this disease, which has curious points of resemblance with some of the facts of male prostitution in modern cities.[42]
Professed anthropologists have dealt with the subject, collecting evidence from many quarters, and in some cases attempting to draw general conclusions. Bastian's "Der Mensch der Geschichte"[43]and Herbert Spencer's Tables deserve special mention for their encyclopædic fulness of information regarding the distribution of abnormal sexuality and the customs of savage tribes.
In England an Essay appended to the last volume of Sir Richard Burton's "Arabian Nights" made a considerable stir upon its first appearance.[44]The author endeavoured to co-ordinate a large amount of miscellaneous matter, and to frame a general theory regarding the origin and prevalence of homosexual passions. His erudition, however, is incomplete; and though he possesses a copious store of anthropological details, he is not at the proper point of view for discussing the topic philosophically.[45]For example, he takes for granted that "Pederasty," as he calls it, is everywhere and always what the vulgar think it. He seems to have no notion of the complicated psychology of Urnings, revealed to us by their recently published confessions in French and German medical and legal works. Still his views deserve consideration.
Burton regards the phenomenon as "geographical and climatic, not racial." He summarises the result of his investigations in the following five conclusions.[46]
"(1) There exists what I shall call a 'Sotadic Zone,' bounded westwards by the northern shores of the Mediterranean (N. lat. 43°) and by the southern (N. lat. 30°). Thus the depth would be 780 to 800 miles, including meridional France, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy and Greece, with the coast-regions of Africa from Morocco to Egypt.
"(2) Running eastward the Sotadic Zone narrows, embracing Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Chaldæa, Afghanistan, Sind, the Punjab, and Kashmir.
"(3) In Indo-China the belt begins to broaden, enfolding China, Japan, and Turkistan.
"(4) It then embraces the South Sea Islands and the New World, where, at the time of its discovery, Sotadic love was, with some exceptions, an established racial institution.
"(5) Within the Sotadic Zone the vice is popular and endemic, held at the worst to be a mere peccadillo, whilst the races to the North and South of the limits here defined practise it only sporadically, amid the opprobrium of their fellows, who, as a rule, are physically incapable of performing the operation, and look upon it with the liveliest disgust."
This is a curious and interesting generalisation, though it does not account for what history has transmitted regarding the customs of the Kelts, Scythians, Bulgars, Tartars, Normans, and for the acknowledged leniency of modern Slavs to this form of vice.
Burton advances an explanation of its origin. "The only physical cause for the practice which suggests itself to me, and that must be owned to be purely conjectural, is that within the Sotadic Zone there is ablending of the masculine and feminine temperament, a crasis which elsewhere occurs only sporadically."[47]So far as it goes, this suggestion rests upon ground admitted to be empirically sound by the medical writers we have already examined, and vehemently declared to be indisputable as a fact of physiology by Ulrichs, whom I shall presently introduce to my readers. But Burton makes no effort to account for the occurrence of this crasis of masculine and feminine temperaments in the Sotadic Zone at large, and for its sporadic appearance in other regions. Would it not be more philosophical to conjecture that the crasis, if that exists at all, takes place universally; but that the consequences are only tolerated in certain parts of the globe, which he defines as the Sotadic Zone? Ancient Greece and Rome permitted them. Modern Greece and Italy have excluded them to the same extent as Northern European nations. North and South America, before the Conquest, saw no harm in them. Since its colonisation by Europeans they have been discountenanced. The phenomenon cannot therefore be regarded as specifically geographical and climatic. Besides, there is one fact mentioned by Burton which ought to make him doubt his geographical theory. He says that, after the conquest of Algiers, the French troops were infected to an enormous extent by the habits they had acquired there, and from them it spread so far and wide into civilian society that "the vice may be said to have been democratised in cities and large towns."[48]This surely proves that north of the Sotadic Zone males are neitherphysically incapable of the acts involved in abnormal passion, nor gifted with an insuperable disgust for them. Law, and the public opinion generated by law and religious teaching, have been deterrent causes in those regions. The problem is therefore not geographical and climatic, but social. Again, may it not be suggested that the absence of "the Vice" among the negroes and negroid races of South Africa, noticed by Burton,[49]is due to their excellent customs of sexual initiation and education at the age of puberty—customs which it is the shame of modern civilisation to have left unimitated?
However this may be, Burton regards the instinct as natural, notcontre nature, and says that its patients "deserve, not prosecution but the pitiful care of the physician and the study of the psychologist."[50]
Another distinguished anthropologist, Paolo Mantegazza, has devoted special attention to the physiology and psychology of what he calls "I pervertimenti dell'amore."[51]Starting with the vulgar error that all sexual inversion implies the unmentionable act of coition (for which, by the way, he is severely rebuked by Krafft-Ebing, Psy. Sex., p. 92), he explains anomalous passions by supposing that the nerves of pleasurable sensation, which ought to be carried to the genital organs, are in some cases carried to the rectum.[52]This malformation makes its subject desirecoitum per anum. That an intimate connection exists between the nerves of the reproductive organs and the nerves of the rectum is known to anatomists and is felt by everybody. Probably somecinædiare excited voluptuously in the mode suggested. Seneca, in his Epistles, records such cases; and it is difficult in any other way to account for the transports felt by male prostitutes of the Weibling type. Finally, writers upon female prostitution mention women who are incapable of deriving pleasure from any sexual act exceptaversa venus.
Mantegazza's observation deserves to be remembered, and ought to be tested by investigation. But, it is obvious, he pushes the corollary he draws from it, as to the prevalence of sexual inversion, too far.
He distinguishes three classes of sodomy: (1) Perpheric or anatomical, caused by an unusual distribution of the nerves passing from the spine to the reproductive organs and the rectum; (2) psychical, which he describes as "specific to intelligent men, cultivated, and frequently neurotic," but which he does not attempt to elucidate, though he calls it "not a vice, but a passion"; (3) luxurious or lustful, when theaversa venusis deliberately chosen on account of what Mantegazza terms "la desolante larghezza" of the female.[53]
Mantegazza winds up, like Burton, by observing that "sodomy, studied with the pitying and indulgent eye of the physician and the physiologist, is consequently a disease which claims to be cured, and can in many cases be cured."[54]
After perusing what physicians, historians, and anthropologists have to say about sexual inversion, there is good reason for us to feel uneasy as to the present condition of our laws. And yet it might beargued that anomalous desires are not always maladies, not always congenital, not always psychical passions. In some cases they must surely be vices deliberately adopted out of lustfulness, wanton curiosity, and seeking after sensual refinements. The difficult question still remains then—how to repress vice, without acting unjustly toward the naturally abnormal, the unfortunate, and the irresponsible.
I pass now to the polemical writings of a man who maintains that homosexual passions, even in their vicious aspects, ought not to be punished except in the same degree and under the same conditions as the normal passions of the majority.
Itcan hardly be said that inverted sexuality received a serious and sympathetic treatment until a German jurist, named Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, began his long warfare against what he considered to be prejudice and ignorance upon a topic of the greatest moment to himself. A native of Hanover, and writing at first under the assumed name of Numa Numantius, he kept pouring out a series of polemical, analytical, theoretical, and apologetical pamphlets between the years 1864 and 1870. The most important of these works is a lengthy and comprehensive Essay entitled "Memnon. Die Geschlechtsnatur des mannliebenden Urnings. Eine naturwissenschaftliche Darstellung. Schleiz, 1868." Memnon may be used as the text-book of its author's theories; but it is also necessary to study earlier and later treatises—Inclusa, Formatrix, Vindex, Ara Spei, Gladius Furens, Incubus, Argonauticus, Prometheus, Araxes, Kritische Pfeile—in order to obtain a complete knowledge of his opinions, and to master the whole mass of information he has brought together.
The object of Ulrichs in these miscellaneous writings is twofold. He seeks to establish a theory of sexualinversion upon the basis of natural science, proving that abnormal instincts are inborn and healthy in a considerable percentage of human beings; that they do not owe their origin to bad habits of any kind, to hereditary disease, or to wilful depravity; that they are incapable in the majority of cases of being extirpated or converted into normal channels; and that the men subject to them are neither physically, intellectually, nor morally inferior to normally constituted individuals. Having demonstrated these points to his own satisfaction, and supported his views with a large induction of instances and a respectable show of erudition, he proceeds to argue that the present state of the law in many states of Europe is flagrantly unjust to a class of innocent persons, who may indeed be regarded as unfortunate and inconvenient, but who are guilty of nothing which deserves reprobation and punishment. In this second and polemical branch of his exposition, Ulrichs assumes, for his juristic starting-point, that each human being is born with natural rights which legislation ought not to infringe but protect. He does not attempt to confute the utilitarian theory of jurisprudence, which regards laws as regulations made by the majority in the supposed interests of society. Yet a large amount of his reasoning is designed to invalidate utilitarian arguments in favour of repression, by showing that no social evil ensues in those countries which have placed abnormal sexuality upon the same footing as the normal, and that the toleration of inverted passion threatens no danger to the well-being of nations.
After this prelude, an abstract of Ulrichs' theory andhis pleading may be given, deduced from the comparative study of his numerous essays.
The right key to the solution of the problem is to be found in physiology, in that obscure department of natural science which deals with the evolution of sex. The embryo, as we are now aware, contains an undetermined element of sex during the first months of pregnancy. This is gradually worked up into male and female organs of procreation; and these, when the age of puberty arrives, are generally accompanied by corresponding male and female appetites. That is to say, the man in an immense majority of cases desires the woman, and the woman desires the man. Nature, so to speak, aims at differentiating the undecided fœtus into a human being of one or the other sex, the propagation of the species being the main object of life. Still, as Aristotle puts it, and as we observe in many of her operations, "Nature wishes, but has not always the power":ἡ φὑσις Βὁυλεται μἑν ἁλλ' οὑ δὑναται. Consequently in respect of physical structure, there come to light imperfect individuals, so-called hermaphrodites, whose sexual apparatus is so far undetermined that many a real male has passed a portion of his life under a mistake, has worn female clothes, and has cohabited by preference with men. Likewise, in respect of spiritual nature, there appear males who, notwithstanding their marked masculine organisation, feel from the earliest childhood a sexual proclivity toward men, with a corresponding indifference for women. In some of these abnormal, but natural, beings, the appetite for men resembles the normal appetite of men for women; in others it resembles the normal appetite of women formen. That is to say, some prefer effeminate males, dressed in feminine clothes and addicted to female occupations. Others prefer powerful adults of an ultra-masculine stamp. A third class manifest their predilection for healthy young men in the bloom of adolescence, between nineteen and twenty. The attitude of such persons towards women also varies. In genuine cases of inborn sexual inversion a positive horror is felt when the woman has to be carnally known; and this horror is of the same sort as that which normal men experience when they think of cohabitation with a male.[55]In others the disinclination does not amount to repugnance; but the abnormal man finds considerable difficulty in stimulating himself to the sexual act with females, and derives a very imperfect satisfaction from the same. A certain type of man, in the last place, seems to be indifferent, desiring males at one time and females at another.
In order to gain clearness in his exposition, Ulrichs has invented names for these several species. The so-called hermaphrodite he dismisses with the German designation ofZwitter. Imperfect individuals of this type are not to be considered, because it is well known that the male or female organs are never developed in one and the same body. It is also, as we shall presently discover, an essential part of his theory to regard the problem of inversion psychologically.
The normal man he callsDioning, the abnormal manUrning. Among Urnings, those who prefer effeminate males are christened by the name ofMannling; thosewho prefer powerful and masculine adults receive the name ofWeibling; the Urning who cares for adolescents is styled aZwischen-Urning. Men who seemed to be indifferently attracted by both sexes, he callsUranodioninge. A genuine Dioning, who, from lack of women, or under the influence of special circumstances, consorts with persons of his own sex, is denominatedUraniaster. A genuine Urning, who has put restraint upon his inborn impulse, who has forced himself to cohabit with women, or has perhaps contracted marriage, is said to beVirilisirt—a virilised Urning.
These outlandish names, though seemingly pedantic and superfluous, have their technical value, and are necessary to the understanding of Ulrichs' system. He is dealing exclusively with individuals classified by common parlance as males without distinction. Ulrichs believes that he can establish a real natural division between men proper, whom he callsDioninge, and males of an anomalous sexual development, whom he callsUrninge. Having proceeded so far, he finds the necessity of distinguishing three broad types of the Urning, and of making out the crosses between Urning and Dioning, of which he also find three species. It will appear in the sequel that whatever may be thought about his psychological hypothesis, the nomenclature he has adopted is useful in discussion, and corresponds to well-defined phenomena, of which we have abundant information. The following table will make his analysis sufficiently plain:—
Broadly speaking, the male includes two main species: Dioning and Urning, men with normal and men with abnormal instincts. What, then, constitutes the distinction between them? How are we justified in regarding them as radically divergent?
Ulrichs replies that the phenomenon of sexual inversion is to be explained by physiology, and particularly by the evolution of the embryo.[56]Nature fails tocomplete her work regularly and in every instance. Having succeeded in differentiating a male with full-formed sexual organs from the undecided fœtus, she does not always effect the proper differentiation of that portion of the psychical being in which resides the sexual appetite. There remains a female soul in a male body.Anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa, is the formula adopted by Ulrichs; and he quotes a passage from the "Vestiges of Creation," which suggests that a male is a more advanced product of sexual evolution than the female. The male instinct of sex is a more advanced product than the female instinct. Consequently men appear whose body has been differentiated as masculine, but whose sexual instinct has not progressed beyond the feminine stage.
Ulrichs' own words ought to be cited upon this fundamental part of his hypothesis, since he does not adoptthe opinion that the Urning is a Dioning arrested at a certain point of development; but rather that there is an element of uncertainty attending the simultaneous evolution of physical and psychical factors from the indeterminate ground-stuff. "Sex," says he, "is only an affair of development. Up to a certain stage of embryonic existence all living mammals are hermaphroditic. A certain number of them advance to the condition of what I call man (Doining), others to what I call woman (Dioningin), a third class become what I callUrning(includingUrningin). It ensues therefrom that between these three sexes there are no primary, but only secondary differences. And yet true differences, constituting sexual species, exist as facts."[57]Man, Woman, and Urning—the third being either a male or a female in whom we observe a real and inborn, not an acquired or a spurious, inversion of appetite—are consequently regarded by him as the three main divisions of humanity viewed from the point of view of sex. The embryonic ground-stuff in the case of each was homologous; but while the two former, Man and Woman, have been normally differentiated, the Urning's sexual instinct, owing to some imperfection in the process of development, does not correspond to his or her sexual organs.
The line of division between the sexes, even in adult life, is a subtle one; and the physical structure of men and women yields indubitable signs of their emergence from a common ground-stuff. Perfect men have rudimentary breasts. Perfect women carry a rudimentarypenis in their clitoris. The raphé of the scrotum shows where the aperture, common at first to masculine and feminine beings, but afterwards only retained in the female vulva, was closed up to form a male. Other anatomical details of the same sort might be adduced. But these will suffice to make thinking persons reflect upon the mysterious dubiety of what we call sex. That gradual development, which ends in normal differentiation, goes on very slowly. It is only at the age of puberty that a boy distinguishes himself abruptly from a girl, by changing his voice and growing hair on parts of the body where it is not usually found in women. This being so, it is surely not surprising that the sexual appetite should sometimes fail to be normally determined, or in other words should be inverted.
Ulrichs maintains that the body of an Urning is masculine, his soul feminine, so far as sex is concerned. Accordingly, though physically unfitted for coition with men, he is imperatively drawn towards them by a natural impulse. Opponents meet him with this objection: "Your position is untenable. Body and soul constitute one inseparable entity." So they do, replies Ulrichs; but the way in which these factors of the person are combined in human beings differs extremely, as I can prove by indisputable facts. The body of a male is visible to the eyes, is mensurable and ponderable, is clearly marked in its specific organs. But what we call his soul—his passions, inclinations, sensibilities, emotional characteristics, sexual desires—eludes the observation of the senses. This second factor, like the first, existed in the undetermined stages of the fœtus. And when I find that the soul, this element of instinctand emotion and desire existing in a male, had been directed in its sexual appetite from earliest boyhood towards persons of the male sex, I have the right to qualify it with the attribute of femininity. You assume that soul-sex is indissolubly connected and inevitably derived from body-sex. The facts contradict you, as I can prove by referring to the veracious autobiographies of Urnings and to known phenomena regarding them.
Such is the theory of Ulrichs; and though we may not incline to his peculiar mode of explaining the want of harmony between sexual organs and sexual appetite in Urnings, there can be no doubt that in some way or other their eccentric diathesis must be referred to the obscure process of sexual differentiation.[58]Perhaps he antedates the moment at which the aberration sometimes takes its origin, not accounting sufficiently for imperative impressions made on the imagination or the senses of boys during the years which precede puberty.
However this may be, the tendency to such inversion is certainly inborn in an extremely large percentage of cases. That can be demonstrated from the reports of persons whose instincts were directed to the male before they knew what sex meant. It is worth extracting passages from these confessions.[59](1) "As a schoolboyof eight years, I sat near a comrade rather older than myself; and how happy was I, when he touched me. That was the first indefinite perception of an inclination which remained a secret for me till my nineteenth year." (2) "Going back to my seventh year, I had a lively feeling for a schoolfellow, two years older than myself; I was happy when I could be as close as possible to him, and in our games could place my head near to his private parts." (3) "At ten years of age he had a romantic attachment for a comrade; and the passion for people of his own sex became always more and more marked." (4) Another confessed that "already at the age of four he used to dream of handsome grooms." (5) A fifth said: "My passion for people of my own sex awoke at the age of eight. I used to enjoy my brother's nakedness; while bathing with other children, I took no interest at all in girls, but felt the liveliest attraction toward boys." (6) A sixth dates his experience from his sixth or seventh year. (7) A seventh remembers that "while yet a boy, before the age of puberty, sleeping in the company of a male agitated him to such an extent that he lay for hours awake." (8) An eighth relates that "while three years old, I got possession of a fashion book, cut out the pictures of men, and kissed them to tatters. The pictures of women I did not care to look at." (9) A ninth goes back to his thirteenth year, and a school friendship. (10) A tenth records the same about his seventh year. (11) An eleventh says that his inverted instincts awoke in early childhood, and that from his ninth year onward he fell over and over again in love with adult men. (12) A twelfth spoke as follows: "Sofar back as I can remember, I was always subject to this passion. Quite as a child, young men made deeper impression on me than women or girls. The earliest sensual perturbation of which I have any recollection was excited by a tutor, when I was nine or ten, and my greatest pleasure was to be allowed to ride astride upon his leg." (13) A thirteenth: "From the earliest childhood I have been haunted by visions of men, and only of men; never has a woman exercised the least influence over me. At school I kept these instincts to myself, and lived quite retired." (14) A fourteenth can recollect "receiving a distinctly sensual impression at the age of four, when the man-servants caressed him." (15) A fifteenth says that at the age of thirteen, together with puberty, the inversion of appetite awoke in him. (16) A sixteenth confesses that he felt an unconquerable desire for soldiers in his thirteenth year. (17) A seventeenth remembers having always dreamed only of men; and at school, he says, "when my comrades looked at pretty girls and criticised them during our daily promenades, I could not comprehend how they found anything to admire in such creatures." On the other hand, the sight and touch of soldiers and strong fellows excited him enormously. (18) An eighteenth dates the awakening of passion in him at the age of eleven, when he saw a handsome man in church; and from that time forward his instinct never altered. (19) A nineteenth fell in love with an officer at the age of thirteen, and since then always desired vigorous adult males. (20) A twentieth confessed to have begun to love boys of his own age, sensually, while only eight years of age. (21) A twenty-firstrecords that, when he was eight, he began to crave after the sight of naked men.