Page:Symonds - A Problem in Modern Ethics.djvu/139

Rh epilepsy, senile brain-softening, in so far as these physical disturbances are complicated with abnormal passions.

The fourth includes the whole class of Urnings, who have been hitherto ignored by medical investigators, and on whose numerical importance Ulrichs has perhaps laid exaggerated stress. These individuals behave precisely like persons of normal sexual proclivities, display no signs of insanity, and have no morbid constitutional diathesis to account for their peculiarity.

Under the existing conditions of European Society, these four categories exist sporadically. That is to say, the members of them are found scattered through all communities, but are nowhere recognised except by the penal code and the medical profession. In the fifth category we are brought face to face with the problem offered by ancient Hellas, by Persia, by Afghan, by the peoples of what Burton calls the Sotadic Zone. However we may account for the origin of sexual inversion, the instinct has through usage, tradition, and social toleration passed here into the nature of the race; so that the four previous categories are confounded, or, if distinguished, are only separable in the same way as the vicious and morbid affections of the ordinary sexual appetite may be differentiated from its healthier manifestations.

Returning to the first four categories, which alone have any importance for a modern European, we perceive