Page:Symonds - A Problem in Modern Ethics.djvu/47

Rh This point on which I am insisting—namely, that it is illogical to treat sexual inversion among the modern European races as a malady, when you refer its prevalence among Oriental peoples and the ancient Hellenes to custom—is so important that I shall illustrate it by a passage from one of Dr. W. R. Huggard's Essays. "It may be said that the difference between the delusion of the overpowering impulse in the Fijian and in the insane Englishman is that, in the savage, the mental characters are due to education and surroundings; while, in the lunatic they are due to disease. In a twofold manner, however, would this explanation fail. On the one hand, even if in the Fijian there were disease, the question of insanity could not arise in regard to a matter considered by his society to be one of indifference. It would be absurd to talk of homicidal mania, of nymphomania, and of kleptomania, as forms of insanity, where murder, promiscuous intercourse, and stealing are not condemned. On the other hand, the assumption that insanity is always due to disease is not merely an unproved, but an improbable supposition. There must, of course, be some defect of organism; but there is every reason to think that, in many cases, the defect is of the nature of a congenital lack of balance between structures themselves healthy; and that many cases of insanity might properly be regarded as a kind of 'throwback' to a type of organisation now common among the lower races of mankind." Substitute any term to indicate sexual inversion for "nymphomania" in this paragraph, and the reasoning precisely suits my