Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/282

 Italian Jew by race, and as cold to women sexually as he was warm in friendship (especially with one intimate) was similisexual. Among quite modern philosophers whose biography and teaching have uranian currents was Friedrich NietscheNietzsche [sic]. There can be little.doubt that Nietsche's passionate hero-worship of Richard Wagner was homosexual, at its most climatic stage, and that Nietsche'sNietzsche's [sic] bitter disappointment in Wagner's sordid personality, as he came to know it better, and Nietsche'sNietzsche's [sic] feeling that an idol had been shattered—the glory of which had been largely in the worshipper—were factors in the advance of Nietsche's mental distresses and overthrow. We are warned by Coleridge that "to be wroth with one we love doth work like madness in the brain The writings of Nietsche have various references to homosexual love, including the epigrammatic counsel—"Sondern physisch; und wenn möglich dionysisch," in "Zarathustra."

The accent of homosexualism occurs in the personality of Michael Servetus, the Spanish physician and theologian, who during the fierce civil-wars of Calvinism, became so special an object of Calvin's intolerance that his doom to be burned alive at Geneva, in 1553, is constantly charged to Calvin. Servetus was an Aragonese. At first a physician and engrossed in secular life and social concerns, he went in 1530 to Strassburg. The first of his series of Theological polemics attracted so much attention that Servetus gave himself wholly up to disputations in the fields of religion and philosophy. One of the most learned and argumentative minds in dogmatic cross-currents, he was not long permitted to escape the controversial anger of Calvin. His book "Christianismi Restitutio," published at Lyons in 1540, especially drew on Servetus the bitterest denunciations of intolerant Calvinists, and of their chief. Servetus imprudently put himself in the power of his fanatical spiritual adversaries. In Geneva, he was arrested as a dangerous heretic; and