Page:Symonds - A Problem in Modern Ethics.djvu/45

Rh Among "Individual Physical Causes," Moreau treats of malformation of the sexual organs, diseases of those organs, injuries to the organism by wounds, blows, poisons, masturbation, excessive indulgence in venery, and exaggerated continence.

When we come to "General Moral Causes," heredity plays the first part. This may be direct, i.e., the son of a genesiac will have the same tastes as his father, or transformed; what is phthisis in one generation assuming the form of sexual aberration in another. Bad education and exposure to bad examples, together with imitation, are insisted on more vaguely.

The "Individual Moral Causes" include impressions received in early youth, on which I think perhaps Moreau does not lay sufficient stress, and certain tendencies to subjective preoccupations with ideal ideas, certain abnormal physical conditions which disturb the whole moral sensibility.

Passing to Pathological Anatomy, Moreau declares that it is as yet impossible to localise the sexual sense. The brain, the cerebellum, the spinal marrow? We do not know. He seems to incline toward the cerebellum.

It is not necessary to follow Moreau in his otherwise interesting account of the various manifestations of sexual disease. The greater part of these have no relation to the subject of my work. But what he says in passing about "pæderasts, sodomites, saphists," has to be resumed. He reckons them among "A class of individuals who cannot and ought not to be confounded either with men enjoying the fulness of their intellectual faculties, or yet with madmen properly so called. They form an intermediate class, a mixed class, constituting 3