Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/281

, the uranian who was also an anchorite; and the solicitude that he caused the Church and the laity. Johannes Cassianus, Peter Damiani and many more are attentive to him. Sometimes the sexual casuistry is curious, as when we find Dolcino, in his famous "Instructions," of the opinion that "conjuger ventrem ut cesset tentation non est peccatum"—between cloistered religieux.

Modern philosophy offers the names of Erasmus of Rotterdam, of Spinoza, of Sir Isaac Newton, of Bonfadio, of Hegel, of Schopenhauer and NietscheNietzsche [sic], as among those who either were homosexual, personally, or who contemplated the instinct from a liberal standpoint. Almost in our own day, the great nature-student Virchow wrote to Ulrichs in acceptance of the Intersexual theory, Virchow expressing a conviction that the Uranian should be free in making the relationships it invited. Schopenhauer terms homosexuality a passion so "universal and ineradicable" that it must be a part of our inborn human nature, and self-justified ethically. Also the naturalist and explorer, Gustav Jaeger, considered homosexuality a principle "inborn in the individual," through which he originates in an unalterable "disharmony" with woman, and can be in sexual key with only a masculine type; in many instances impossible of alteration as a natural expression.

Among the greater philosophers, perhaps the profoundest humanist of the Renaissance epoch, was Erasmus of Rotterdam. That Erasmus was homosexual is one of the many interesting studies in circumstantial evidence of biography. Again, the eccentricities of life and of vita sexualis on the part of the great English philosopher Sir Isaac Newton, his hatred of women sexually, have cast a colour of uranianism over the personality of the elaborator of the theory of gravitation. There is some ground to infer that Spinoza, gentle natured and noble-hearted, an