Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/33

 a succession of gradient hues. Each link is, in paradox, both a matter of dependence on the whole system, yet of independence: part of its nearer neighbours, while having its right to be accounted relatively separate and responsible by itself. There is no absolute darkness: there is no absolute light. There is no absolute heat, no absolute cold. In fact, Nature abhors the absolute, delights in the fractional. We have no right to consider any of her works more than a link; though we are logically bound to give to it due fractional autonomy. Hence, equally by logic, we must be on our guard against quarrelling with it because it "ought to be" more complete toward genus, toward type, than it is. For, Nature is continually rebuking our narrow, proud, perverse definitism. She asks why, if we are so exact, we do not blame the dawn because it is rosy instead of glowing white, do not throw down in disgust the hedge-rose because it lacks the petals and colours of so many stately garden-beauties; do not ridicule the bull because he does not boast the antlers of a stag; do not despise the ostrich because it has not the eagle's wings; do not think that the terrible beauty of some tropical serpent is ruined since it has not even as many legs as the tiniest lizard; do not reject as disgracefully incomplete and hesitant in the evolution of existences such intermediaries as we find in the platypus, the porcupine, the whale, the quadrumana, in even the most superiour and complex and firmly-elaborated creations about us. Every where we encounter borrowings from one, loans from the other, strange but natural inter-relations, revolts against conforming to details that seem almost obligations in kind and taste and conduct, crossings of what seem natural boundaries, whole kingdoms of life instituted in an allowed and eternal rebellion from a common law.

We must thus dismiss some popular notions of what constitutes sexual manhood and