Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/45

 over the revelations of medical specialists' pamphlets; or at the testimony in a police-court dock during some "scandal-trial". By our elementary moral education, we have been taught that such a passion to-day is a perverse lapse to pagan and barbarous morals. Homosexual love when met, for instance, in particularly the Oriental and Latin races, we are told should mean imperfect moral education and regrettable racial instincts that are inferior to, especially, the Anglo-Saxon temperament and to Anglo-Saxon ethics; a relic of sheer primitive Eastern and Latin depravity, to which the civilized world lapses, just as a child commits a nastiness or tells a lie, because he has not outgrown evil predispositions. That such similisexual love is, now as ever, capable of agreement with the finest and purest social and moral civilization, the most distinct aestetic superiority, with the strongest religious quality in the race or the individual—these ideas will not be endured for a moment by the average Anglo-Saxon. He regards them as out of discussion. He has not even found it worth while, as a special and ethical problem, to think twice about them seriously, in his life.

It is true that, gradually, a more thoughtful element in general society has reflected uneasily, unwillingly. Confronted with history, with broad anthropologic theories, with startling incidents in all classes of contemporary social life, and with the discussions of foreign psychologic physicians set before them, many men and women have altered their attitude of repugnance even to look into the topic. Some English psychologists have gone so far as to reach, and to remain in, a tolerantly conservative position toward it. They have met with too many facts for feeling honestly clear as to old theories, however long-established. But this conservative class has not gone much further than the admission that "a dark problem in morals", "an unexplainable element in psychology"