Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/91

 Uranian sexual passion, in our modern social life.

The existence and characteristics of the Uranian and of his feminine complement, the Uraniad, have already been referred back to the mysterious question of Intersexes between the distinctly male and female ones. This is, no recent query. Plato declares in "The Banquet" that a third sex, hermaphroditic in type, had existed; but had lapsed. Aristotle in his "Ethics" indicates a notion that there was at least one other sex; as part of the premises when Aristotle reasons of sexual manifestations, including love of one man for another. Yet even such comprehensive reasoners, when touching on similisexual love in men, fail to set up an extant, continued Secondary Sex. The early philosophic Latin thinkers on psychology, of the. type of Lucretius and the natural philosophers, even the most profound of the classic speculatists of Borne, did not for a long time affirm in so many words the basis of an existing intersex as the explanation of man's intersexual instincts. Later writers hint at its existence. Thus Alexander Severus, in writing of depravities of his cousin, the grotesquely effeminate Heliogabalus, speaks of such men as Heliogabalus as "a third kind of human being". Dion Cassius, also, declared Heliogabalus a blending of man and woman. In the Scriptures there is an allusion that may refer to such an Oriental theory: where in the First Book of Samuel, Chap. XX, v. 30) Saul throws out the scornful allusion to Jonathan (beyond doubt a homosexual young man) as being the "son of the perverse, rebellious woman", a phrase which has a peculiar underlying sexual bearing.

The theory of the Urning, or Uranian, as a third sex, or at least as not being responsible only to masculine sexual instincts for his passions, would undoubtedly