Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/100

 model private citizens have lived and died uranistic, for this error to stand. But the fact is proved every day in society, that the more sensuous the Uranian and the more circumscribed his mental horizon, just so weakened or debased is his moral sense. His distinctively similisexual instincts, when his general equipment otherwise is sound, seem to have uncertain bearings on his conduct; while the converse is true of the less fortunate and respectable Uranian. Socrates was similisexual. Not readily can we dismiss the idea that Christ was such—and saints many have been Uranians. But so were Philippe of Orléans, Caligula, de Sade; so is the blackmailing catamite that prostitutes himself for a shilling, incidentally to rob, to murder, to ruin socially some unlucky victim. The reader has seen that he must throw away the unscientific idea that the homosexual, in loving the male with his sexual love, in seeking to satisfy his passion physically, necessarily is committing offence against Nature or an individual morality. He acts absolutely according to Nature, simply working out his fixed, legitimate, sexual sentiment and necessity, exactly as the dionistic man seeks female society to the same end. In the most conclusively Uranian-type homosexuality is inborn; with its concurrent utter sexual indifference to women. Frequently there is an utter horror of such intercourse, a distressing nervous inability toward it. Uranianism has its own excuses for existing, the general ethical furnishment of the man often is analyzable much or wholly apart.

But it is in the nervous fabric of the Uranian that we find more striking data. The uranistic nature, as a German writer has admirably pointed out, is the most sensitive, fine-strung, exquisitely emotional one yet known. We find the homosexual turning emphatically to the aesthetic professions, with alert senses to all that is beautiful. His vivid impressionability, his creative powers are so