The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Sexual Life of Our Time in its Relations to Modern Civilization, by Iwan Bloch.

The author’s aim in writing this book was to write a complete Encyclopædia on the sexual sciences, and it will probably be acknowledged by all who study its pages that the author has accomplished his intention in a very scholarly manner, and in such form as to be of great value to the professions for whom this translation is intended. The subject is no doubt one which appeals to and affects the interests of all adult persons, but the publishers have, after very serious and careful consideration, come to the conclusion that the sale of the English translation of the book shall be limited to members of the legal and medical professions. To both these professions it is essential that a knowledge of the science of Sex and the various causes for the existence of “abnormals” should be ascertained, so that they may be guided in the future in their investigations into, and the practice of attempts to mitigate, the evil which undoubtedly exists, and to bring about a more healthy class of beings. It is the first time that the subject has been so carefully and fully gone into in the English language, and it is believed that the very exhaustive examination which the author has made into the matter, and the various cases to which he has called attention, will be of considerable use to the medical practitioner, and also to the lawyer in criminal and quasi-criminal matters, and probably in matrimonial disputes and cases of insanity.

ERRATA

Page 189, note, line 2, for “Classes in Antiquity,” read “Age Classes.”

Page 361, line 1, for “inflammation of the retina,” read “syphilitic iritis.”

Page 446, lines 6 and 7 from foot, for “reflection,” read “reflective.”

Page 481, note 493, line 5, for “Classes of Antiquity,” read “Age Classes.”

Page 548, note 577, line 1, for “Classes in Antiquity,” read “Age Classes.”

INTRODUCTION

“It seems at first sight as if Nature had endowed man with the procreative impulse solely with a view to the preservation of the species, and regardless of the individual; and yet it is undeniable that in the high estimation of this impulse the individual was not forgotten.” (“On the Art of Attaining an Advanced Age,” vol. i., p. 2; Berlin, 1813).

CONTENTS OF INTRODUCTION

The two constituents of modern love — The purposes of the species and the purposes of the individual — Insufficiency of the former for the understanding of love — The individualization of love through the process of civilization — The organic interconnexion between the bodily and the mental manifestations of love — Possibilities of future development — Victory of the love of civilized man over the elemental force of the sexual impulse — Our own time a turning-point in the history of love.

INTRODUCTION

The sexuality of the modern civilized man—the sum, that is to say, of the phenomena of sexual love dependent upon and associated with the sexual impulse—is the result of a process of development lasting many thousands of years. Therein, as in a mirror, we may see an accurate reflection of all the phases of the bodily and mental history of the human race. Anyone who wishes to understand modern love in all its complexity must, in the first place, succeed in informing himself, not merely regarding the first foundations of the feeling of love in the grey primeval age, but, in addition, as to the manner in which that feeling has been transformed and enriched in the course of the history of civilization. For modern love is a complex of two constituents.

The word “love” is applicable to the sexual impulse of human beings only. Its use implies that in the case of man the purely animal feelings have acquired an importance far greater than that of subserving the purposes of mere reproduction, and aim at a goal transcending that of the preservation of the species. The nature of human love can be understood and explained only with reference to this intimate and inseparable union of its purposes in respect of the preservation of the species and its independent significance in the life of the loving individual himself. Herein is to be found the starting-point of the whole so-called “sexual problem,” and it is necessary that the matter should be clearly understood at the outset of this book. In earlier days human love was mainly concerned with the purposes of the species. Modern civilized man, conceiving history as progress in the consciousness of freedom, has also come to recognize the profound individual significance of love for his own inward growth, for the proper development of his free manhood. To quote a phrase from Georg Hirth, a cultured modern writer, the genuine experienced love of a civilized man of the present day is one of the “ways to freedom.” By love is made manifest, and through love is developed, his inmost individual nature. For this reason Schopenhauer’s “Metaphysik der Geschlechtsliebe” (“Metaphysic of Sexual Love”), which wholly ignores this individual factor, must be regarded, brilliant as it unquestionably is, as a quite inadequate explanation of the nature of love. Again, a recent writer, Arnold Lindwurm, greatly influenced by Schopenhauer’s teaching, in the introduction to his work entitled “Ueber die[4] Geschlechtsliebe in sozial-ethische Beziehung” (“Sexual Love in its Socio-Ethical Relations”), writes: “The fruit of love, children, and marriage as a domestic institution indispensable for the upbringing of children—these constitute the author’s ethical criterion in the field of sexual research; these also form the socio-ethical goal of all sexual love, inasmuch as the sole standard by which sexual love can be judged is the procreation and upbringing of children.” We, however, at the very outset, contest the validity of such a standpoint, for we consider that it fails entirely to do justice to the nature of modern love. For the history of the human sexual impulse teaches us beyond dispute that, in the course of the development of the human species, that impulse, through its progressive association with intellectual and emotional elements to form the complex whole designated by the term “love,” has undergone a progressive individualization, and has attained a more defined significance for the unitary human being. At the present day sexual love constitutes a part of the very being of the civilized man; his sexual life clearly reflects his individual nature, and love influences his development in an enduring manner.

Love conjoins in a quite unique way the two principal classes of vital manifestations—the lower vegetative and the higher animal life; and it thus constitutes the highest and the most intense expression of the unity of life (Schopenhauer’s “focus of the will;” Weismann’s “continuity of the germ-plasma”).

Whoever wishes to understand the developmental tendencies of love as they manifest themselves at the present day in the course of human history, whoever desires to grasp how remarkably love has been developed, enriched, and ennobled in the course of civilization, must at the outset gain a clear understanding of this apparently dualistic, but in reality thoroughly monistic, nature of the passion.

The matter may be expressed also in this way—that he who has scientifically investigated love, who has based his conception of it philosophically, and has personally experienced it, will become a convinced monist in relation to life, at least, and to the organic world, and will be compelled to regard every dualistic division into a physical and a spiritual sphere as something quite artificial. In love above all is manifested this mystery of the life force, as for centuries the poets, the artists, and the metaphysicians have declared, and more especially as the great natural philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have proved—above all Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel. There is, indeed, no more[5] happily chosen metaphor, none that better describes the fundamentally monistic nature of love, than the saying of the old æsthetic J. G. Sulzer—that love is a tree, that it has its roots in the physical sphere, but that its branches extend high above the physical world, expanding more and more, branching more and more abundantly into the sphere of the spiritual.[1] It is certainly impossible to find a more appropriate comparison. Thereby we show clearly the intimate organic connexion between the physical and spiritual phenomena of love; it is rooted for ever in Mother Earth, but it grows always upwards into the subtle ether. Just as the arborescence of the tree has a richer, more manifold, more extensive development than the root, so also it is in the spiritual form that love is first capable of extending upwards and in all directions, compared with which its physical capacity for development is minimal and strictly limited. But just as the arborescence of the tree grows from, and is supplied with nutriment by, the root, so also the higher love is inevitably founded upon a sensory basis. Even while love becomes spiritually richer, it remains as irrevocably as ever dependent upon the physical.[2]

To put the matter briefly, the future developmental possibilities of human love rest purely in the spiritual sphere, but they are inseparably connected with the far less variable physical phenomena of sexuality.

Upon the development, the configuration, and the differentiation, of the spiritual elements of sexual love are alone based the intimate relations of love with the process of civilization. This fact is again reflected in the manifold phases of the evolution of the sentiment of love.

For the human spirit in the course of its development has become not merely lord of the earth and of the elementary forces of Nature: it has become also lord and master, interpreter and guide, of the sexual impulse; for this impulse owes to the human spirit its new and peculiar life, its life capable of further development as manifested in the history of human love. The history of love is the history of mankind, of civilization. For love manifests a continual progress, which can be denied by those only who have failed to understand the deep significance of human love in the entire civilized life of all times, and who, observing the persistence[6] of the primeval and ever-active sexual impulse, elemental in its nature, are led only to a hopeless doubt as to the possibility of all love, and thus justify the pessimism with which Schopenhauer has condemned the significance of human sexual love. Undoubtedly this elemental impulse persists for ever, and to follow it alone leads to death, to utter desolation, to nothingness, as Tolstoi, Strindberg, and Weininger, the bitter opponents of modern “love,” have so vehemently declared. But did these men know true love? Had they become conscious of the inevitable necessity with which civilization in the course of ages and generations had transformed the human sexual impulse into love as it now exists, transformed it in so manifold and so wonderful a way? Had they any idea of the development of love, and of its place and its significance in history?

Let them believe this, these doubting and despairing souls—nothing has been destroyed of all the spiritual relations, of all the wonderful possibilities of development, which have manifested themselves in the course of the long and varied history of the evolution of love. To describe this evolution, it is necessary to draw attention to all those elements of civilization which remain at present influential in love, but it is further indispensable to forecast their future development. Once again we stand at an important turning-point in the history of love. The old separates itself from the new, the better will once more be the enemy of the good. But love regarded, as it must now be regarded, in its inner nature, as a sexual impulse most perfectly and completely infused with a spiritual content, will remain the inalienable gain of civilization; it will stand forth ever purer and more promotive of happiness, like a mirror of marvellous clearness, wherein is reflected a peculiar and accurate picture of the successive epochs of civilization.

CHAPTER I
THE ELEMENTARY PHENOMENA OF HUMAN LOVE

“The critical natural philosopher conceives this process, this ‘crown of love,’ in a very matter-of-fact manner, as the process of conjugation of two cells and the coalescence of their nuclei.”—Ernst Haeckel.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER I

The well-spring of love — The conjugation of the germinal cells as the simplest expression of the nature of the sexes — The active masculine and the passive feminine principles of sexuality — Their representation in ancient mythology — The significance of sexual procreation — The most important principle of progressive development — The significance of sexual differentiation — The development of heterosexuality — Vestiges of an original hermaphroditic state in men and women — New acquisitions — The hymen — Metchnikoff’s hypothesis of the original significance of the hymen — The “third sex” — The attainment of perfection by means of progressive sexual differentiation — The increase in the intensity of the sexual attractive force in the course of human evolution — Its cause — Explanation of Paul Rée — Theory of Havelock Ellis — Elementary psychical phenomena of love — A sensation analogous to one of smell — Theories of Steffens, Haeckel, and Kröner — The specific sexual odours of the capryl group — Odoriferous glands in animals and human beings — An example from Southern Slavonic folk-lore — The position of the nose in relation to the genital system — The sexual rôle of artificial perfumes — Origin of the latter — Reduction in size of the organ of smell in the human species — Primary and secondary elements in human sexuality — Bölsche’s “fusion-love” and “distance-love” — Their different significance.

CHAPTER I

The mystery of sexual love, of this “wonder of life,” from which both religious belief and artistic inspiration have drawn and continue to draw the major part of their force, may ultimately be referred to a single phenomenon in the sexuality of the great group of metazoa to which the major part of the animal world and the human species belong. This process is a conjugation of the female germ cell with the male sperm cell—the “well-spring of love,” to use Haeckel’s expression; in comparison with this conjugation, all other spiritual and physical phenomena, however complicated, are of a subordinate and secondary nature. From this primitive organic process of reciprocal attraction and conjugation of the two reproductive cells has arisen the entire complex of the remaining physical and spiritual phenomena of love. We have, in this process of cell conjugation, a picture in little of love, a greatly simplified representation of the nature of the relations between man and woman; moreover, the highest and the finest psychical experiences and impressions occurring under the influence of love are ultimately no more than the results of this “erotic chemotropism” of the sperm and germ cells.

Sexual differentiation existed already as a natural product in the early stages of organic evolution, and civilization has done no more than develop, increase, and refine that differentiation, which is typified in a manner at once simple and convincing—because directly visible—in the male sperm cell and the female germ cell. Herein the specific sexual differences are made visibly manifest.

Procreation results from the approach of the male sperm cell towards the female germ cell, and from the entrance of the former into the latter.

Thus, the sperm cell represents the active, the germ cell the passive, principle in sexuality. Already in this most important act in the process of procreation the natural relations between man and woman are very clearly manifested. This fact is clearly grasped already in the mythology and the sepulchral symbolism of antiquity. In these the man is always represented as the active principle; woman, on the contrary, as the passive principle.

“Peace reigns in the ovum, but when driven by the desire of creation the masculine god breaks through the shell and begins his work of fertilization, everything at once becomes movement, restless haste,[10] impulsive force, unending circulation. Thus the male generative principle appears as the representative and embodiment of movement in the visible act of creation.... The active principle in Nature appears to be identical with the principle of motion.... Winged is the phallus, quiescent the female; the man is the principle of movement, and the woman the principle of repose; force is the cause of eternal change, woman the picture of eternal repose; for which reason the ‘earth-mother’ is almost always depicted in a sitting posture” (Bachofen).

The appearance of sexual reproduction in the history of the evolution of the organic world is an especially instructive example of the great importance of differentiation and variation as the most effective principle of evolution in general. The lowliest forms of life reproduce their kind in an extremely simple manner by a process of asexual cell division, which has not improperly been regarded as nothing more than a peculiar form of growth; and this simple process of cell division is retained as a mode of growth also in the higher organisms which reproduce their kind by sexual union. In some cases of simple cell division the secondary cell, the “daughter cell,” separates itself from the old cell, the “mother cell,” and forms a new complete individual; in other cases the cell division occurs as gemmiparous reproduction (budding or pululation), the daughter cell remaining united with the mother cell, so that a new organ is built up. Reproduction by cell division is found in many plants and lower animals side by side with sexual reproduction. This latter becomes the exclusive method of production in higher animals and in the human species, whose capacity for the procreation of new individuals by cell division, and for the replacement of lost organs by growth, has been lost. Thus, the progress and the gain which on the one hand are derived from the process of sexual reproduction, whose character we are about to investigate more closely, are balanced on the other hand by a loss. We shall often encounter this fact again in the history of the evolution of the sexual impulse, more especially in mankind and in relation to human love.

With the evolution of sexual reproduction is introduced the opportunity for a great step forward, since an incomparably greater sphere of action is opened to the differentiation and variability of specific forms than was possible in the case of species reproduced asexually (Kerner von Marilaun, R. Martin). By means of the sexual union of two differing independent individuals, each of which, again, has been brought into the world by the sexual union of two differing individuals, the way is freely opened for a progressive differentiation of the individuals of this species. No one of them is exactly similar to any other. Each one exhibits[11] new peculiarities, new capabilities, and all of these play their part in the struggle for existence. This gradually results in a progress towards higher, better, more perfect forms. The persistence of specific type, due to inheritance, is largely counteracted by sexual reproduction, inasmuch as the conjugation of reproductive cells derived from two different individuals induces a tendency to progressive variation and improvement. Moreover, by this sexual mode of reproduction the preservation of the species is rendered much more secure than by asexual reproduction, whilst at the same time the possibility of differentiation or variation is indubitably increased. We have already insisted on the fact that in the striking difference between the sperm cell of the male and the germ cell of the female we must seek for the ultimate cause of the profound difference between the sexes. Those who maintain the theory of the absolute identity of man and woman must continually be reminded of this fact. Unquestionably the greater motility of the male reproductive cell as compared with the more passive quality of the female cell implies the existence of deeply founded psychical differences; and the existence of these may be assumed with more confidence since we know from experience to what a high degree the finest psychical peculiarities of father and mother can be transmitted by inheritance to the child.

For this reason, all attempts, whether initiated by some natural process or by some intentional guidance of the process of civilization, towards the obliteration of the distinction between the specific masculine and the specific feminine, must be regarded as futile, and as antagonistic to the process of development. The production of the so-called “third sex” is unquestionably a step backwards. For bisexual differentiation is an advance upon the more primitive form of sexual differentiation in which both the male and the female sexual elements were produced by a single individual (hermaphroditism). In the phylogeny of the human species unilateral sexual reproduction gave place to the bilateral type, the reproductive elements being formed within the bodies of two distinct individuals—the sperm cells within the body of the male, the germ cells within the body of the female. In this manner originated the contrast between the individuals of the two sexes, or bisexual differentiation, which, in the course of phylogenetic development, has become continually more definite, more extensive, and more characteristic, through the operation of the principle of sexual selection; and thus by inheritance and adaptation the mental and physical characteristics of sexuality, primitive and superadded, have gradually become defined and fixed.[12] In the higher ranks of the animal kingdom and in the human species, this heterosexuality has, through inheritance, become continually more sharply defined; but the traces of the primitive hermaphroditic state have never been wholly obliterated. Love in the human species is manifested by pairing. Such is the normal condition, and the only condition in harmony with the progressive tendency towards perfection. But remnants of hermaphroditism, of bisexuality in a single individual, of the “third sex,” are to be found in every human being, and are disclosed by embryology and comparative anatomy in the form of vestiges of female reproductive organs in the male and of male reproductive organs in the female. Herein exists an indisputable proof of the originally hermaphrodite nature of the human ancestry. But these female organs in the male body, and their converse, the male organs in the female body, are stunted, are rudiments merely; whereas in the course of evolution the masculine reproductive organs of the male and the feminine reproductive organs of the female have been more and more powerfully developed, and more and more sharply differentiated in type, until they have come to constitute the expression of the specific differences between man and woman. They alone represent the more advanced stage. Moreover, these vestiges of an early hermaphroditic condition are in the human species far less extensive than in other mammals; and the sexual discrepancy in the human species, as compared with the lower animals, becomes still more noticeable when we take into account the fact that certain parts of the reproductive system are peculiar to mankind, are new acquisitions, and, above all, the hymen, which is non-existent even in the anthropoid apes.

The original purpose of the hymen, which unquestionably must at the time of its appearance have represented an evolutionary advance, is still undetermined. Metchnikoff has propounded an interesting hypothesis on this subject. According to him, it is very probable that human beings, during the earliest period of human history, began sexual relations at an extremely youthful age, at a time when the external genital organs of the boy were not yet fully developed. In such a case the hymen would not only have been no hindrance to the act of copulation, but rather, by narrowing the vaginal outlet, and thus accommodating its size to the relatively too small penis of the male, would have rendered pleasure in sexual intercourse possible. In such cases, moreover, the hymen would not have been brutally lacerated, but gradually dilated. Laceration of the hymen represents a later and secondary phenomenon.

It is a fact that, even at the present day, among many primitive races, marriages commonly take place in childhood, and it is further true that even in civilized races in a considerable number of cases (15 per cent., according to Budin) the hymen is not always lacerated during sexual intercourse, but is retained; thus some support is given to Metchnikoff’s hypothesis.

It is unquestionable that evolution and the progress of civilization have resulted in an extremely marked differentiation between the two sexes, and for this reason the formation of a so-called “third sex,” in which these sexual differences are obscured, can only be regarded as a markedly retrogressive step. Ernst von Wolzogen, in a well-known romance, to which he gave the name of “The Third Sex,” described a kind of barren, stunted woman, capable, however, of holding her own at work in competition with men; but in our opinion such women represent merely a stage of transition in the great battle of women for the independent, free development of their peculiar personality. Such types as these are certainly not the final goal of the woman’s movement; they are caricatures, products of a false and extreme conception of woman’s development. This “third sex,” which Schurtz very justly compares to the stunted, barren workers among ants and bees, is incapable of prolonged existence, and will give place to a new generation of women, who, while fully retaining their specific feminine peculiarities, will share with men the rights and duties of the great work of civilization; and thus this work will unquestionably be enriched by a number of new and fruitful elements.

It is indeed possible that this “third sex,” that hermaphrodites, homosexual individuals, sexual “intermediate stages,” also play a certain part in the great process of civilization. But their significance is slight and limited, if for this reason alone because from these individuals the possibility of transmission by inheritance of valuable peculiarities is cut off, and hence the possibility of a future perfectibility, of true “progress,” is excluded. There are two sexes only on which every true advance in civilization depends—the genuine man and the genuine woman. All other varieties are ultimately no more than phantoms, monstrosities, vestiges of primitive sexual conditions.

Very ably has Mantegazza described the intimate relationship between these dreams of the “third sex” and the fantastic aberration of the sexual impulse. He writes:

“While the pathology of love recognizes in many sexual aberrations the obscure traces of a general hermaphroditism, imagination, which works faster than science, shows us the possibility that in more complicated[14] creations sexual differentiation might be more than twofold, so that in such worlds sexual reproduction might be effected by a more elaborate division of labour. Thus, in the cynical or sceptical distinction between platonic, sexual, and licentious love, we see the first traces of new and monstrous possibilities of sexual union, on the one hand reflecting the sublimity of the supersensual, and on the other more brutal than the most horrible sexual aberration.”

In reality, it is only for normal heterosexual love between a normal man and a normal woman that it is possible to find an unimpeachable sanction. Only this love, continually more differentiated and more individualized, will play a part in the future course of civilization.

Heterosexuality arises from the reciprocal attraction and the coalescence of the reproductive cells of two individuals of distinct sexes; it forms the foundation and constitutes the most important element of the sexual relations of the higher animal world and of the human species; and it obtains through inheritance continually a more sharply defined expression. Since this fundamental phenomenon of the sexual impulse has been transmitted from the most ancient and simplest forms of the organic world and has been modified only in the direction of heterosexuality, it has come to pass, as Ewald Hering says at the end of his celebrated lecture on “Memory as a General Function of Organic Matter,” that organic matter has the strongest memory of the impulse of conjugation in its most ancient and most primitive form; thus this impulse at the present day continues to dominate mankind as an intensely powerful physical imperative, endowed with the strength of an elemental force, which, notwithstanding the gradually higher development of the brain, has remained during thousands of years undiminished in its potency, and indeed by the accumulative influence extending through thousands of generations has acquired a notable increase in intensity. We must assume that for untold generations always those animals and men have had the most numerous descendants in whom the sexual impulse was the most powerful; this powerful impulse being inherited, was transmitted once more to the next generation, and tended by natural selection continually to increase.

This explanation of the indisputable gradual increase in the intensity of the sexual impulse, first given by the moral philosopher Paul Rée, is more illuminating than the theory propounded by Havelock Ellis of the increase of the sexual impulse by civilization, which was long ago maintained by Lucretius (“De Rerum Naturâ,” V. 1016). In support of this latter theory, it is asserted that among savage people the genital organs are less[15] powerfully developed than among civilized races, but this can by no means be regarded as an established fact. Civilization has done no more than cause a fuller development of all sides of sexual love by a multiplication of physical and psychical stimuli; but it appears extremely doubtful if civilization itself is to be regarded as the immediate causal influence in the increase of the intensity of the sexual impulse.

Having studied the elementary phenomena of human love dependent upon the phylogenetic history of the human race, namely the union of the male and female reproductive cells, the question now arises as to the nature of the psychical processes, the character of the sensations that accompany this union of the sperm cells and the germ cells. What is the most primitive psychical elementary phenomenon of love?

It is apparently that sensation in which the actual contact of the psyche with the material occurs—an immediate sensation of the nature of matter—namely, the sense of smell. The metaphysical significance of the sense of smell has been aptly indicated by describing that sense as the “sublimated thing-in-itself,” as a sense which, like no other sense, allows us to enter immediately into the nature of matter; it is, in fact, the sense of personality.

“Smell,” says Heinrich Steffens, “is the principal sense of the higher animals; it represents for them their own inner world; it envelops their existence. Upon smell, wherein sympathy and antipathy are represented, is based the whole security of the higher animal instinct; for carnal desire is comprehended in this sense.... Indeed, in sexual union the subjective sensation which is developed by means of smell blends completely with the objective, and from the monistic union of the two arises the intenser libido, wherein the unfathomableness of the procreative force and the whole power of sex are absorbed.”

Ernst Haeckel ascribes to the two sexual cells a kind of inferior psychical activity; he believes that they experience a sensation of one another’s proximity; and indeed it is probably a form of sensory activity analogous to the sense of smell that draws them together. The sensation of the two sexual cells, which Haeckel believes to be situated especially in the cell nuclei, he denotes by the term “erotic chemotropism.” He attributes it to an attraction of the nature of smell, and considers that it represents the psychical quintessence, the original being of love.

A later investigator, Eugen Kröner, holds the same view. In the conjugation of two vorticellæ he recognizes the influence of the chemically operative sensation of smell; to him smell is the most important element in the sexual impulse of animals.

This theory is strongly supported, and indeed elevated to the rank of a natural law, by the circumstance that in the higher animals the sense of smell, in the course of phylogenetic development, has attained a continually greater significance in relation to sexuality; and by the fact that, according to the discovery of Zwaardemaker, there exists widely diffused throughout Nature a distinct group of sexual odours, the so-called capryl odours, which have a natural biological connexion with the vita sexualis. These capryl odours, which already in plants play a sexual part, are in animals and in the human species localized in or near the genital organs (odoriferous glands of the beaver, the musk-ox, etc., the secretions of the male foreskin and the female vagina), or in other cases are found in the general secretions, such as the sweat. Recently Gustav Klein has succeeded in proving that a definite group of glands in the female genital organs (glandulæ vestibulares majores, or glands of Bartholin) must be regarded as a vestige from the time of periodic sexual excitement (rutting). At that time in the human species, as now in the lower animals, the sexual impulse was periodic in its activity, and the secretion of these odoriferous glands of the human female then served as a means of alluring members of the male sex. At the present time these glands have for the most part lost their significance as specific stimuli. Now it is rather the exhalation from the entire surface of the female body which exercises the erotic influence. Cases in which such stimuli proceed exclusively from the female genital organs are regarded by Klein as a phylogenetic vestige of the primitive relations between the rutting odours of the female and sexual excitement in the male. Friedrich S. Krauss, in his “Anthropophyteia” (1904, vol. i., p. 224), reproduces a Southern Slavonic story in which a man is described who obtained sexual gratification only by enjoying the natural smell of the female genital organs. The remarkable classification of Indian women according to the various odours proceeding from their genital organs must not be forgotten in this connexion.

That this primitive phenomenon of love has even to-day a certain significance, although, in consequence of the enormous development of the brain and the predominance of purely psychical elements in man, its influence has been very notably diminished, is shown by the existing physiological connexion proved by Fliess to exist between the nose and the genital organs. On the inferior turbinate bones there exist certain “genital areas,” which, under the influence of sexual stimulus and excitement,[17] as in coitus, during menstruation, etc., swell up. From these areas it is also possible to influence directly certain conditions of the genital organs.

It is noteworthy that civilization has to a large extent replaced the natural sexual odours by artificial scents, so-called perfumes, whose origin is partly due to the imitation or accentuation of the natural odours, in part, however, and especially in recent times, to an endeavour to conceal these natural odours, especially when the latter are of a disagreeable character. For this reason, in addition to penetrating perfumes, such as civet, ambergris, musk, etc., we have also mild perfumes, for the most part vegetable in origin. The markedly exciting influence of these artificial scents is employed especially by women, above all by professional prostitutes, in order to excite men.[3] Frequently also the simple perfume of flowers suffices for this purpose. Krauss tells us that in the kolo-dance of the Southern Slavs the girls fasten strong-scented flowers and sprigs in the front of their dress, and thereby excite intense sexual desire in the young men. In the East sexual stimulation by means of the sense of smell plays a far more extensive rôle than in Europe.

In the human species, however, as a specific elementary phenomenon of sexual reproduction, smell has long been thrust into the background by the strong development of other senses, especially that of sight. This fact is very clearly exhibited by the notable reduction which has occurred in the size of the organ of smell. In man the frontal lobes of the brain, the seat of the highest intellectual processes and of speech, have taken the place of the olfactory lobes in the lower animals. Besides, by means of clothing, the natural odours of men and women, which previously had such marked sexual significance, have been rendered almost imperceptible, and nowadays sexual stimulation may result merely from the senses of touch and of sight, so that the hands and the lips and the female breasts have been transformed into erotic organs. Notwithstanding, however, the notable weakening of the sexual significance of smell, this most primitive sense (actually associated, as we have shown, with the activity of the germinal cells) will never completely cease to influence the sexual life.

“Still, there always surrounds us a now gently moving and now stormy sea of odours, whose waves without cessation arouse in us feelings of sympathy or antipathy, and to the minutest movements of which we are not wholly indifferent” (Havelock Ellis).

Inasmuch as we have pointed out as the single primæval basis, as the most important elementary phenomenon, of human love, the conjugation of the male sperm cell with the female ovum (dependent probably upon a sensation analogous to that of smell), we denote this particular phenomenon of sexuality as primary, and we separate all the other phenomena as secondary, as more remote. Wilhelm Bölsche has also expressed this difference by denoting the union of the two reproductive cells as “fusion-love,” whilst all that has occurred later, in the course of many thousands of years of evolution, and that has transformed this primary process, by innumerable new influences, stimuli, and perceptions, into the love of modern civilized man, he denotes by the apt name of “distance-love.”

“the ultimate act of love in a member of the most highly civilized community assumes the form of a sudden withdrawal from the entire world of surrounding artifacts, of alphabets, posts, telephones, submarine cables, etc.... At this instant the principle of union is once again victorious, as it were, in an ultimate posthumous vision in a vital experience of a portion of primæval Nature, of the primæval world, of an instant’s profoundest self-absorption into the great mystery of the obscure original basis of Nature, to which neither time nor old and new is known, but which is ever renewed in us in its elemental force—the procreative principle. At this instant the loving individual must return home to the heart of the all-mother—it is useless to resist. It must draw from the fountain of youth—must descend like Odin to the Norns, like Faust to the Mothers—and there all civilization is swallowed up; there cell body must join cell body, in order in the ardent embrace to reduce to a minimum the distance which usually sunders such large bodies. Indeed, in reality the sexual act goes further and deeper than this reduction of separation to a minimum. Within the body of one of the partners of the sexual act the ovum and the spermatozoon undergo an ultimate perfect fusion of soul and body, in comparison with which even the closest approximation of the great halves of the love partnership is no more than a mere mechanical apposition. The ultimate aim of the loving union is attained only in the coalescence of ovum and spermatozoon.”

To express the matter briefly, fusion-love fulfils the purpose of the species, while distance-love subserves rather the purpose of the individual. Thus the natural course of the development of love, which in the next chapter we propose to follow further, affords already the proof of the thesis propounded in the introduction regarding the duplicate nature of human love.

CHAPTER II
THE SECONDARY PHENOMENA OF LOVE (BRAIN AND SENSES)

“From these considerations it follows that man, in the course of his phylogenetic development extending through lengthy geological periods, has lost numerous advantages; and the question arises whether, in exchange for these, he may not also have gained certain other advantages. Such must, indeed, have been the case if the human species was to remain capable of survival. There has been a process of exchange, by means of which man has gained an equivalent for all the qualities he has lost. And the gain consists in the unlimited plasticity of his brain. By this he is fully compensated for the loss of the large and long series of advantages which his remote predecessors possessed.”—R. Wiedersheim.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER II

The secondary phenomena of sexuality — Their connexion with the nervous system and the sense organs — The brain as criterion of human sexuality — Its development proportional to the retrogression of other parts — Example of the organ of smell and of the mammary glands — Relative retrogression of the female clitoris — Variation of the female genital organs — Reduction of the hairy covering of the skin — Theory regarding the origin of the comparative baldness of the human species — Assumed connexion with climate — With dentition — Influence of artificial clothing — The hygienic and æsthetic significance of the loss of hair — The reason why the axillary and pubic hair have been retained — Sexual influence of the hair of these regions and of the hair of woman’s head — Gradual retrogression of the male beard — The change of bodily type under the influence of the brain — The way of the spirit in love — The pure instinctive in the sexuality of primitive man — His lack of the idea, “love” — Analogy of this state among the lower classes of the present day — Periodicity of the sexual impulse in the time of primitive man — Periodicity amongst savage races of to-day — The researches of Fliess and Swoboda — The twenty-three day “masculine” and the twenty-eight day “feminine” periods — Menstruation — A peculiarity of the human female — The origin of enduring love in mankind — Love rendered more enduring by the spirit — Kant’s views on the subject — Hypothesis of W. Rheinhard and Virey — The complication of the sexual impulse through sensory stimuli — Buddha’s speech to the monks — The prepotency of the higher senses — The sense of touch — The skin as an organ of voluptuous sensation — Erogenic areas of skin — The kiss — Its erotic significance — An Arabian poet (Sheik Nefzawi) on this subject — Burdach’s definition of the kiss — The kiss on the boundary-line between erotism and actual sexual enjoyment — The origin of the kiss — The primitive elements of contact, licking and biting — Its connexion with the nutritive impulse — European origin of the kiss of contact — The smelling kiss of the Mongols — The kiss and sexuality — Voltaire’s genito-labial nerve — The sense of taste and sexuality — The preponderant importance of the higher senses in the love of civilized man — The beautiful explanation of Herder — Liberation from the material in the higher senses — The sense of sight as the true æsthetic sense — Beauty as the product of love — Its perception by the sense of sight — Rôle of the sense of hearing in love — The investigations of Darwin — The voice as a sexual lure — The rhythmical repetition of alluring sounds — Origin of song and music — Greater susceptibility of women to impressions received through the sense of hearing — The charm of woman’s voice — An experience of the natural philosopher Moreau.

CHAPTER II

As we have learnt in the first chapter, the primitive phenomenon of sexual attraction and reproduction, the conjugation of the male and the female germinal cells, persists unaltered in man as the most important part of the act of procreation; but this process of “fusion-love” derived by inheritance from unicellular organisms, is associated in man with a number of new secondary physical and psychical phenomena of sexuality. This inevitably results from the nature of the human organism as a cell society, from the development of man as one of the order of mammalia, and finally from man’s elevation above the other mammalia as a being of enormously enhanced brain powers. The complex of these secondary physical and psychical phenomena of love, dependent upon the process of evolution, has, as we have already said, been denoted by W. Bölsche by the apt name of “distance-love,” which he thus distinguishes from the primary elemental phenomenon of “fusion-love.” These superadded elements play an extremely important part in human civilization, and, indeed, actually characterize that civilization which is in no way dependent on the primitive qualities shared by man with plants and lower animals.

This secondary sexuality of mankind is, in correspondence with the differentiation of the various organs of his body, extremely complicated, and it is by no means solely dependent upon the structure of the special reproductive or copulatory organs; it is also intimately connected with other parts of the body, and more especially with the sense organs and the nervous system. Thus it has accommodated itself to all the external influences to which the species has been subjected in the long course of its development history. We may say that the criterion, the characteristic mark of distinction between the human body and that of the lower animals, is also the distinctive differential characteristic between human sexuality and that of the lower animals. And this criterion is the brain.

The present physical and mental constitution of man is the result of an evolutionary process, of which the most marked characteristic has been a continually more rapid increase in the size and complexity of the brain. Phylogeny and ontogeny clearly demonstrate the evolution of the human body from lower states to higher, the slow but sure improvement in the direction[22] of a continual enlargement and increasing convolution of the brain, which has by no means yet attained finality, but which may be expected to continue into the far-distant future; and associated with this physical development will undoubtedly proceed an equally extensive improvement in the quality of human consciousness.

This progressive development of the brain has resulted in a retrogression and arrest of development of other parts and organs, and among these some more or less closely associated with the sexual functions, and originally of considerable importance. Gegenbaur, in his “Anatomy,” and Wiedersheim, in his interesting work on “The Structure of Man as Bearing Witness to his Past,” recognize in the unlimited plasticity of the human brain the sole cause of the arrest of development and retrogressive metamorphosis of many organs and functions which persist in other members of the animal kingdom.

In the sexual life, also, in correspondence with this preponderating development of the brain, purely psychical elements continually play a larger part, whilst parts and functions at one time intimately related to sexuality have undergone atrophy. Thus, as we have already pointed out, the human organ of smell had unquestionably in earlier times much greater significance in relation to the vita sexualis than it has at the present day. Wiedersheim shows that in the ancestors of the human race this organ was much more extensively developed, and that it must now be regarded as in a state of atrophy. The mammary glands, the original function of which was perhaps the production of odoriferous substances, but which later became devoted solely to the secretion of milk, existed in our ancestors in a larger number than in the present human race. This is clearly shown by the fact that the human embryo normally exhibits a “hyperthelia,” an excess of breasts, of which, however, two only normally undergo development; moreover, the breasts of the male, which are now in a state of arrested development, were formerly better developed, and served, like those of the female, the purpose of nourishing the offspring. These facts are clearly explicable on the assumption that at one time the number of offspring at a single birth was considerable, and that in this way the preservation of the species was favoured (Wiedersheim).

It is a very interesting fact that the principal “organ of voluptuousness” in women, the clitoris, is notably diminished in size absolutely and relatively as compared with the clitoris of apes. It certainly no longer represents an organ so susceptible[23] to voluptuous stimulation and excitement as it was assumed to be by the older physicians and physiologists; so that, for example, Van Swieten, the celebrated body physician of the Empress Maria Theresa, recommended titillatio clitoridis as the most certain means of curing the sexual insensibility of his royal patient.

Moreover, the common variations in the external configuration of the female genital organs, which Rudolf Bergh has very fully and minutely described in his “Symbolæ ad Cognitionem Genitalium Externorum Femineorum,” are largely dependent on such arrests of development, which, indeed, occur also in the male.

A very remarkable phenomenon in the course of human evolution has been the diminution in the hairy covering of the body. As compared with the other mammalia, especially those most nearly allied to man—the anthropoid apes—man is relatively bald. This baldness has been gradually acquired, and seems likely to progress further in the future. Numerous hypotheses have been propounded regarding the purpose and true cause of this progressive atrophy of the hairy covering which originally extended over the entire surface of the body. The effect of tropical climate will not suffice to account for the change, for in the tropics the hairy covering is useful for a covering against the rays of the sun—witness the thick hairy coat of the tropical apes. More apt is the idea of sexual selection, advanced by Darwin in explanation of the loss of hair. According to this theory, the comparatively balder women were preferred by the men to those with a thicker covering of hair. Helbig raises the objection that primitive man in sexual intercourse would observe only the genital organs and the parts in their immediate neighbourhood. Yet in this region the sexually mature woman has retained a portion of the hairy covering of the body. We must therefore, in order to rescue the idea of sexual selection as an explanation of the increasing baldness of the human race, assume that primitive man had cultivated æsthetic tastes, and was not an extremely sensual person, and that in his choice of a partner he would be guided by the appearance of the woman’s entire body. This, however, is a very questionable assumption. Very doubtful also is the suggested connexion between largely developed dentition and the baldness of the skin (Helbig). More apposite is W. Bölsche’s view that the atrophy of the human hairy covering is related to the adoption of an artificial covering. Since that time the thick hairy covering of the skin was felt to be burdensome,[24] since it hindered perspiration beneath the clothing, and also favoured the harbouring of parasites, fleas, lice, etc., which play so large a part in the annoyance of all hair-covered mammals. In these circumstances bareness of skin became an ideal to primitive man. By rubbing away the hair beneath the clothes, by cutting it short, and by pulling it out by the roots, an artificial baldness was produced; this then became an ideal of beauty. Thus it happened in the choice of a partner that those individuals less hairy than others were preferred, and thus gradually by this process of sexual selection the race became continually less hairy, until ultimately the relative baldness of the present day was attained.

In certain parts of the body, especially in the armpits and in the neighbourhood of the external genital organs, the thick hairy covering has been retained. This may, perhaps, be dependent upon the fact that from the axillary and pubic hair certain erotic stimuli proceed, more especially certain odours. In fact, it is possible that the hair of those regions in which strong-smelling secretions were produced have played the part of scent-sprinklers, analogous to the “perfume brushes” of butterflies.

In a similar way, the preservation of an exceptionally rich development of the hair of a woman’s head may be explained by the fact that therefrom erotically stimulating odours unquestionably proceed. This circumstance has influenced sexual selection in the direction of the preservation and continual increase in the length of the hair of a woman’s head; while, in the opposite direction, and equally by the process of sexual selection, the female body has been much more fully deprived of hair than that of the male.

It seems, however, that this process of loss of hair is not yet completed. The male beard has already ceased to play the part of a sexual lure, which it formerly undoubtedly possessed. Schopenhauer’s opinion, that with the advance of civilization the beard will disappear, probably represents the truth; he regarded shaving as a sign of the higher civilization. It is certainly a logical postulate of the natural course of development.[4]

Havelock Ellis, in “Man and Woman,” comes to the conclusion that the bodily development of our race is a progress in the direction of a youthful type. This is merely another way of[25] expressing the fact that in the case of many organs and systems, and more especially in the case of the hairy covering of the skin, an arrest of development has occurred, and it is a recognition of the fact that the retrogressive metamorphosis of these organs is a compensation for the dominating and enormous development of the brain.

Parallel with this development of the brain there has occurred a progressive development of sexuality from the lowest animal instinct to the highest human “love.” The way of the spirit in love becomes predominant pari passu with the development of mankind in civilization. There is a profound meaning in the saying of Schopenhauer that the transformation of the sexual impulse into passionate love represents the victory of the intelligence over the will. And when another writer of genius has described the history of civilization as the history of the progress of mankind from nearer to more remote, more spiritual stimuli of pleasure, this is above all true of human love.

In lower states of human love these spiritual elements are undoubtedly wanting. Amongst primitive men the manifestations of sexuality can have differed in no wise from those of the animals most nearly related to them. Their love was still a pure animal instinct. The Asiatic myth which divided the earliest periods of human history in this way, asserting that the inhabitants of paradise loved for thousands of years merely by means of glances, later by a kiss, by simple physical contact, until ultimately they underwent a “fall” through adopting the debased methods of common animal sexual indulgence—this infantile mythology would be accurate enough if one inverted the series of stages in the evolution of love.

This view is confirmed by the fact that, according to the most recent investigation into the history of primitive man, it is extremely probable that to palæolithic man of the earlier diluvial period the idea of the spiritual was still completely unknown—that palæolithic man was, in fact, purely a creature of impulse—an opinion already maintained by Darwin in his work on the “Descent of Man.” In the sexual instinct, above all, every dualistic division into physical and spiritual was entirely foreign to primitive man. The more primitive the state of civilization, the less is the idea “love” known, a fact first established by Lubbock. Even at the present day, in regard to this matter, there is a notable difference between the upper and the lower classes in a European civilized community. For example, Elard Hugo Meyer, in his excellent “Deutsche Volkskunde” (“German[26] Folk-lore,” p. 152; Strasburg, 1898), states that from Eastern Friesland to the Alps amongst the common people the word “love,” to us so indispensable and so exalted, is entirely unknown; in its place words expressing rather the sensual side of the impulse are employed.

Rousseau suggested that primitive man embraced primitive woman only in the fugitive moments of domination by his instinctive impulse. It is no doubt very probable that primæval man shared with other animals the periodicity of the sexual impulse; this periodicity disappeared only in the subsequent course of human development, and traces of it yet remain. It is probable that this periodicity of the sexual impulse was associated with variations in the supply of nutriment, and was thus, as Darwin assumes, a kind of natural obstacle to too rapid an increase in the population. Later, in consequence of an increase in individual security, and of a more enduring supply of abundant nutriment, such periodic rutting ceased to occur, or was preserved only in the form of menstruation (ovulation) in women, in whom at this period there is a perceptible increase in sexual excitability. Among savage races this periodicity of the sexual impulse, its increase at definite seasons of the year, is still clearly manifested even in the male. Heape and Havelock Ellis have carefully studied this primitive phenomenon, and have adduced numerous proofs of its truth.[5]

Only the human female experiences true “menstruation”; that is to say, only in women is the maturation of the ovum accompanied by a monthly discharge of blood from the genital passage. The so-called menstruation of female apes is limited[27] to a periodic swelling of the external genital organs, with a mucous discharge therefrom. According to Metchnikoff, the menstruation of apes constitutes the intermediate stage between the rutting of the lower animals and the menstruation of the human female. This latter is a new acquisition, the purpose of which is perhaps the limitation of fertility and the prevention of the excessively early marriage of girls.

With the advanced development of the brain, the old periodic rutting, of which rudiments still persist, became more and more subordinate to the conscious will, was transformed more and more into enduring love. Charles Letourneau writes:

“If we go to the root of the matter, we find that human love is in its essence merely the rutting season in a reasoning being; it increases all the vital forces of the human being, just as rutting increases those of the lower animals. If love apparently differs enormously from rutting, this is merely due to the fact that the reproductive impulse, the most primitive of all impulses, becomes in developed nerve centres more diffuse in its sphere of operations, and thus in man awakens and excites a whole province of psychical life which is entirely unknown to the lower animals.”

Philosophers and scientific observers have defined the distinction between human and animal love as consisting in the fact that man can love at all times, the animal periodically only; but this distinction certainly does not apply to the beginnings of human development; it originates beyond question with the first appearance of the spiritual element in love. This alone makes man capable of enduring love, this alone frees him from dependence upon periodic rutting seasons. The prolongation of love by the introduction of the spiritual element was already pointed out by Kant, whose writings (especially the lesser ones) are rich in valuable observations of a similar kind. In his treatise published in 1786, “The Probable Beginning of Human History,” he says regarding the sexual instinct:

“Reason, as soon as it had become active, did not delay to exert its influence also in the sexual sphere. Man soon discovered that the stimulus of sex, which in animals depended merely on a transient and for the most part periodic impulse, was in his own case capable of prolongation, and indeed of increase, by the force of imagination. This influence works more moderately, it is true, but with more persistence and more evenness the more the affair is withdrawn from the dominion of the senses, so that the satiety produced by the gratification of a purely animal passion is avoided.”

This important question regarding the origin of the love of human beings as contrasted with the periodic instinct of the[28] lower animals and primitive man has hitherto, strangely enough, hardly received any attention, notwithstanding the fact that it is one of the most important evolutionary problems in the history of human civilization, and represents to a certain extent the only problem in the primitive history of love.

The principal cause of the perennial nature of human love, as contrasted with the periodic character of the sexual impulse of the lower animals, must, as Kant says, be sought in the appearance of these psychical relations between the sexes. Hypotheses such as that put forward by Dr. W. Rheinhard in his book, “Man considered as an Animal Species, and his Impulses,” according to which the prolonged separation of the sexes, consequent on the increased difficulty in the provision of sufficient nutriment (more especially in the Ice Age), led to an incomplete satisfaction of the sexual impulse during the rutting season, and thus gave rise to an enduring sexual excitement, cannot be treated seriously. The same author suggests that the excessive consumption of meat of the Ice Age, owing to the absence of vegetable food, was responsible for the stronger stimulation of the sexual impulse, and for its prolongation beyond the rutting season.

Unquestionably Kant’s explanation is the only true one; it is the one which Schiller had in his mind when in his essay on the connexion between the animal and the spiritual nature of man, he spoke of the happiness of the animals as of such a kind that

“it is dependent merely upon the periods of the organism, and these are subject to chance, to blind hazard, because this happiness rests solely on sensation.”

The sexual love of primitive man was, like this, purely instinctive and impulsive.

For him, beginning, course, and end, of every love-process was “directly linear, with no to-and-fro oscillations into the indefinite province of the transcendental.” The need for love and the satisfaction of that need were in primitive man entirely limited to the physical process of sexual activity (L. Jacobowski, “The Beginnings of Poetry,” p. 84).

It was the interpenetration of the whole of sexuality with spiritual elements which first interrupted this single line of sensation, making in a sense two lines: hence arose the frequently unhappy dualism between body and mind in our experience of love; and yet at the same time it was the cause of the elevation of human love to purely individual feelings, which, extending far[29] beyond the purposes of reproduction, subserved the spiritual demands of the loving individual himself.[6]

Natural science, and especially the doctrine of descent, have shown that in the higher animal world, to which we have proved primitive man belongs, a complication of the sexual impulse exists as compared to this condition in lower forms; this complication consists mainly in the intimate association of sensory stimuli with the sexual impulse. In a speech to monks, reported in the Pali Canon, Buddha has well described the sexual part played by the various senses:

“I do not know, young men, any other form which fetters the heart of man like a woman’s form.

“A woman’s form, young men, fetters the heart of man.

“I do not know, young men, any other voice which fetters the heart of man like the voice of woman.

“The voice of woman, young men, fetters the heart of man.

“I do not know, young men, any other odour which fetters the heart of man like the odour of woman.

“The odour of woman, young men, fetters the heart of man.

“I do not know, young men, any other taste which fetters the heart of man like the taste of woman.

“The taste of woman, young men, fetters the heart of man.

“I do not know, young men, any touch which fetters the heart of man like the touch of woman.

“The touch of woman, young men, fetters the heart of man.”

Then there follows, in the same rhythmical form, an enumeration of the sexual stimuli emanating from woman through eye, ear, smell, taste, and touch.

Associated with the progress towards “love” of this sexual impulse enriched by sensory stimuli was a preponderance, a prevalence, of certain particular sensory stimuli. Herein are certainly to be found the beginnings of a spiritualization of purely animal instincts and impulses.

The most important part in the amatory life of man is played, even at the present day, by the sense of touch, and by the two[30] higher senses, sight and hearing, these two latter containing so many spiritual elements.

The sense of touch is more widely extended in space than the other senses, and for this reason touch is quantitatively the most excitable of the senses. The stimulation of the sensory nerves of the skin, the enormous number of which suffices to explain the richness of sensation through the skin, experienced as touch, tickling, or slight pain, transmits very similar sensations to the voluptuous sensorium. The relationship between these various modes of sensation is confirmed by the fact that the terminals of the sensory nerves of the skin, the so-called corpuscles of Vater or Pacini, closely resemble in structure the corpuscles of Krause found on the glans penis and glans clitoridis, on the prepuce of the clitoris, the labia majora, and on the papillæ of the red margin of the lip. From this point of view, the entire skin may be regarded as a huge organ of voluptuous sensation, of which the skin of the external organs of conjugation is most strongly susceptible to stimulation.

Mantegazza therefore describes sexual love as a higher form of tactile sensation. In human beings of a baser disposition love is no more than a touch. Between the chaste stroking of the hair and the violent storm of the sexual orgasm there is a quantitative, but not a qualitative difference. The sense of touch is a profoundly sexual sense, which at the present day plays much the same part as was in primitive times played by the sense of smell.

“The skin,” says Wilhelm Bölsche, “became the great procurer, the dominant intermediary of love, for the multicellular animals, in which complete conjugation of the cell bodies had become impossible, so that their sexual gratification had to be obtained by distance-love, by contact-love. Thus the skin was the primitive area of voluptuous sensation, the arena of the supreme bodily triumph of this distance-love.”

It has been well said that the first intentional touching of a part of the skin of the loved one is already a half-sexual union; and this view is confirmed by the fact that such intimate bodily contacts, even when they occur between parts far distant from sexual organs, very speedily lead to states of marked excitement of these organs. Quite rightly, therefore, the pleasurable sensations aroused by means of cutaneous sensibility are regarded by Magnus Hirschfeld as the stages of transition along which the power of self-command and the capacity for resisting the impulses arising out of the transformation of sensory perceptions into movements and actions most commonly break down. He who avoids these first contacts, best protects himself against the[31] danger of being overpowered by his sexual impulse, and of blindly following where that impulse leads—if, for example, he wishes to avoid intercourse with a person whom he suspects to be suffering from some venereal disease.

Areas of skin more especially susceptible to sexual stimulation, the so-called erogenic areas, are those parts of the body where skin and mucous membrane meet—above all therefore the lips, but also the region of the anus, the female genital organs, and the nipples of the female breast. That in certain circumstances even the eye may be an erogenic zone is shown by the remarkable observation of Dr. Emil Bock, that in many female patients a gentle inunction of Pagenstecher’s ointment into the eye gives rise to changes of countenance showing that a sexual orgasm is occurring.

The contact of the lips in the kiss is one of the most powerful stimuli of love.[7] An Arabian author of the sixteenth century (Sheikh Nefzawi) in his work, “The Perfumed Garden,” an Arabian ars amandi, alludes to this fact. He quotes the verses of an Arabian poet:

The physiologist Burdach, influenced by the then dominant natural philosophy of Schelling, defined the kiss as “the symbol of the union of souls,” analogous to “the galvanic contact between a positively and a negatively electrified body; it increases sexual polarity, permeates the entire body, and if impure transfers sin from one individual to the other.” Goethe has very perspicuously described sexual union in a kiss:

It is therefore a true saying, that a woman who permits a man to kiss her will ultimately grant him complete possession.[8] Moreover, by the majority of finely sensitive women the kiss is valued just as highly as the last favour.[9]

The problem of the origin of the kiss, which Scheffel, in his book (“Trompeter von Säckingen”), has treated in humorous verse, has recently been investigated by the methods of natural science. The lip kiss is peculiar to man and in him the impulse to kiss is not innate, but has been gradually developed, and the kiss has only acquired by degrees a relation to the sexual sphere.

Havelock Ellis has recently made an interesting investigation regarding the origin of the kiss, and has proved that the love kiss has developed from the primitive maternal kiss and from the sucking of the infant at the maternal breast,[10] which are customary in regions where the sexual kiss is unknown. Both the sense of touch and the sense of smell play a part in this primitive kiss, and to simple contact primitive man superadded both licking and biting. This primitive physiological sadism of the biting kiss was probably inherited from the lower animals, which when copulating often bite one another (Kleist in “Penthesilea” writes “Küsse”—kissing—rhymes with “Bisse”—biting). Earlier authors—as, for example, Mohnike, in his admirable essay on the sexual instinct—have inferred from the existence of these passionate accompaniments of the kiss that the latter has an intimate connexion with the nutritive impulse. We have indeed[33] the familiar expression, “I could eat you for love.” Indeed, according to Mohnike, the frenzy of the wild kisses of passionate love may actually lead to anthropophagy, as in a case reported by Metzger, in which a young man on his wedding night actually bit and began to devour his wife. Although in this case we doubtless have to do with an insane individual, such sadistic feelings in a lesser degree are so often observed in association with kissing that they may be regarded as physiological.[11]

In the novel “Hunger,” by Knut Hamsun, the author describes a peculiar relationship between hunger and the libido sexualis. Georg Lomer also, in the beginning of his thoughtful work, “Love and Psychosis” (Wiesbaden, 1907), expresses the opinion that hunger and love are not opposites, but that one is rather the completion, the larval state, or the sublimation, of the other. In certain species of spiders the male runs the danger, when performing his share in sexual congress, of being actually devoured by the stronger female.

The kiss by contact between the lips or neighbouring parts of the skin is of European origin, and even here is a comparatively recent practice, for the ancients very rarely allude to it. Its erotic significance was early pointed out by Indian, Oriental, and Roman poets. Amongst the Mongol races the so-called olfactory kiss (“smell-kiss”) is in much more common use. In this the nose is apposed to the cheek of the beloved person, and the expired air and the odour arising from the cheek are inhaled.

With the diffusion of European civilization, the European kiss of contact has also been diffused. It is no longer possible to determine whether the peculiar connexion between the lips and the genital organs, as manifested for example by the growth of hair on the upper lip at puberty in the male sex, and also by the well-known thick “sensual” lips often seen in individuals with exceptionally powerful sexual impulses, is originally primary, or merely a secondary result of the employment of the lips in a sexual caress.[12]

To our consideration of the kiss we may naturally append a few remarks on the rôle of the sense of taste in human love. Inasmuch as taste is almost invariably closely connected with[34] smell, we are rarely able to prove in an individual case whether an impression of taste or an impression of smell more powerfully affects the vita sexualis. In kissing, an unconscious tasting of the beloved person seems often to play a part; and as regards the kissing of other parts of the body, especially the genital organs, at the acme of sexual excitement this undoubtedly often occurs. In Norwegian folk-tales, and in a South Hungarian song published by Friedrich S. Krauss, this tasting of the woman is very realistically described. The taste for sweets has also been largely associated with sexuality. Children who are fond of sweets, who have, as it is called, a sweet tooth, are also sensually disposed, sexually more excitable, and more inclined to the practice of onanism, than other children. The sensory impulses have therefore been classified as the hunger impulse and the sexual impulse respectively. A certain amount of truth appears to lie in these observations.

Much greater influence than these lower senses possess is exerted in the sexual sphere on modern civilized man by the higher, truly intellectual senses, sight and hearing. With the adoption of the upright posture they gained an advantage over the sense of smell and taste.

In his work “Ideas Concerning the Philosophy of Human History” Herder writes:

“In the beginning all the senses of man had but a small area of action, and the lower senses were more active than the higher. We see this among savages of the present day: smell and taste are their guides, as they are in the case of the lower animals. But when man is raised above the earth and the undergrowth, smell is no longer in command, but the eye: it has a wider kingdom, and accustoms itself from early childhood to the finest geometry of lines and colours. The ear, deeply placed beneath the projecting skull, has closer access to the inner chamber for the collection of ideas, whilst in the lower animals the ear stands upright, and in many is so formed as to point in the direction of the sound.”

Smell, taste, and even touch, have but little æsthetic value as compared with the two higher senses, because in the former the material preponderates too greatly, and because they are more closely related with the pure animal impulses than are sight and hearing. Johannes Volkelt, in his valuable work “Æsthetics,” has carried on an interesting investigation of this question, and comes to the conclusion that in sight and hearing perception proceeds without any trace of the material; in touch and taste, on the other hand, the material enormously predominates, whilst smell stands between. Schiller wrote:

“In the case of the eye and the ear the surrounding matter is rejected by the senses; for this reason, these two senses give the freest æsthetic enjoyment unalloyed with animal lust.”

The sense of sight is a true æsthetic sense in relation to the vita sexualis; it is the first messenger of love. By means of this sense, colour and form become sexual stimuli: by the sense of sight the entire impression of the beloved personality is first conveyed; sympathy and sexual attraction are almost always at first dependent upon sight. In regard to love’s choice, sight is unquestionably the sense of the greatest importance.

According to researches guided by the light of the modern doctrine of evolution, we can no longer doubt that the beauty of the living world is intimately connected with the sexual life, and is indeed by this first called into being. All beauty is, to use the words of Darwin and P. J. Möbius, “love become capable of perception,” and, let us ourselves add, love become capable of perception by means of the sense of sight. The figure, the carriage, the gait, the clothing, the adornment, the observation of the beauties of the various parts of the body of the beloved person—all these impressions, received by means of the sense of sight, have the most powerful erotic influence.

Havelock Ellis also comes to the conclusion that for mankind the ideal of a suitable love-partner is based far more upon the data of the sense of sight than upon those of touch, smell, and hearing.

However, in addition to the sense of sight, the sense of hearing plays a part of considerable importance in the amatory life of mankind. A sufficient indication of this fact is given by the change occurring in a man’s voice at the time of puberty. Darwin’s classical investigations prove beyond a possibility of doubt the intimate relationship between the voice and sexual life. The masculine voice, especially, has a sexually stimulating effect upon woman; but the converse influence of a woman’s voice upon man may also be observed. In the other mammalia, it is especially in the rutting season that the voice is used as a means of sexual allurement. The repetition of this vocal lure at measured intervals gives rise to rhythm and song. The rhythmical repetition of the same tone possesses something highly suggestive, fascinating, and so gives rise to sexual attraction and charm in the most powerful manner. Here lies the origin of the profound erotic influence of singing and music. Darwin assumes that the early progenitors of mankind, before they had acquired the faculty of expressing their mutual love in articulate speech, used[36] to charm one another by musical tones and rhythms. Woman is far more susceptible than man to the sexual influence of singing or music, but man himself is by no means indifferent to the charms of the beautiful feminine voice. The soft tones of a woman’s voice are, for many men, the first enthralling disclosure of woman’s nature. The French physician and natural philosopher Moreau relates that he was once compelled to renounce the pleasure of seeing the performance of a beautiful actress, for only thus could he overcome a violent outburst of sexual passion which was evoked in him by the mere stimulus of her voice.

CHAPTER III
THE SECONDARY PHENOMENA OF HUMAN LOVE (REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS, SEXUAL IMPULSE, SEXUAL ACT)

“Sexual passion is a matter of universal experience; and speaking broadly and generally, we may say it is a matter on which it is quite desirable that every adult at some time or other should have actual experience.”—Edward Carpenter.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER III

Origin and purpose of the reproductive organs — Progressive differentiation of these organs — Original identity of their rudiments in the two sexes — Weininger’s theory of the intermixture of the sexual elements — This theory anticipated by Heinse — Bisexuality — The actual significance of bisexuality trifling — Phylogenetic explanation of the organs of sexual congress — Bölsche’s three problems — The “aperture-problem” — Connexion between the genital aperture and the urinary passage — Between the genital aperture and the anus — Significance in relation to certain sexual aberrations — The “member-problem” — Earlier modes of fixation during coitus — Sucking and biting — The action of the limbs (the embrace) — The penis — Its various forms — The penis-bone — The free character of the human penis — The descent of the testicles — The feminine rudiment of the penis — Its original function rendered superfluous by the further evolution of the sexual orifice — Transformation into the clitoris and the labia minora — The “libido-problem” — Voluptuousness a phenomenon of distance-love — Questionable specificity of voluptuousness — Theory of the “sexual sense” and of the “sexual cells” — Relations of voluptuousness to tickling and to painful sensations — A special variety of contact stimuli — Localization to the genital organs — The sexual impulse — Relative independence of the impulse from the reproductive glands — Genesis of sexual excitement — Stage of prelibido (sexual tension) — Terminal libido (sexual gratification) — Symptoms and early appearance of prelibido — Causes of sexual tension — Freud’s chemical theory of sexual tension — The act of sexual intercourse — Roubaud’s description of coitus — Demeanour of woman in coitus — Magendie on this subject — Dr. Theopold’s observations — Physiological phenomena associated with coitus — Sadistic and masochistic elements — The normal position during sexual intercourse — Figuræ Veneris — Significance of the normal position in relation to civilization.

CHAPTER III

As the progressive evolution of the multicellular organism continued, and there occurred an increasing differentiation of the individual portions of the body, it became necessary that the very simple process of reproduction of the unicellular organism (by simple cell-division or by conjugation) should, in the multicellular organisms of the metazoa, be ensured and facilitated by the development of new apparatus. This was all the more necessary because, owing to the differentiation of the other organs, the originally independent reproductive elements became more and more dependent upon the parent organism, and lost their former capacity for obtaining nourishment by means of their own activity. Hence it became necessary that the period of time elapsing between the moment when the reproductive cells were freed from the parent organism and the moment in which they coalesced to form a new individual should be shortened to a minimum. This purpose is subserved by apparatus which renders possible the secure and rapid coalescence of the two reproductive elements, having the form of special excretory canals with contractile walls, through which the two sexual elements pass. These are the “copulatory organs,” by means of which the distance between the two loving individuals is abridged. According to the exhaustive investigations of Ferdinand Simon, the perfection and differentiation of these conducting canals proceeds pari passu with the higher development of the organism.

Simultaneously therewith proceeds the differentiation of the proper internal reproductive organs, the rudiments of which are identical in the two sexes. A portion of these primitively identical structures undergoes further development in the male, another portion undergoes further development in the female, whilst in both sexes rudiments of the earlier condition are retained, and these bear witness to the primitive state in which both reproductive glands were present in a single individual (hermaphroditism). In this sense Weininger’s theory applies—viz., that there is no absolutely male and no absolutely female individual, that in every man there is something of woman, and in every woman something of man, and that between the two various transitional forms, sexual “intermediate stages,” exist. Therefore, according to this view, every individual has in his composition so many fractions “man” and so many fractions “woman,” and according[40] to the preponderance of one set of elements or the other, he must be assigned to one or the other sex. This theory, which Weininger regards as his own discovery, is by no means new, and already finds a place in Heinse’s “Ardinghello,” where we read:

“I find it therefore necessary to assume the existence in Nature of masculine and feminine elements. That man is nearest perfection who is composed entirely of masculine elements, and that woman perhaps is nearest perfection who contains only so many feminine elements as to be able to remain woman; whilst that man is the worst who contains only so many masculine elements as to qualify for the title of man.”

Magnus Hirschfeld, to whom this noteworthy passage in Heinse’s book appears to be unknown, has recently, in his valuable monographs, “Sexual Stages of Transition” (Leipzig, 1905) and “The Nature of Love” (Leipzig, 1906), thoroughly investigated these relations, and quotes, among others, sayings of Darwin and Weismann, according to which the latent presence of opposite sexual characters in every sexually differentiated bion must be regarded as a normal arrangement. Unquestionably the widely diffused phenomenon of “psychical hermaphroditism,” or “spiritual bisexuality,” is connected with the physical facts just enumerated, and provides us with the key for the understanding of the nature of homosexuality. Both these states—the physical and the mental—may be referred to primitive conditions of sexuality. They cannot play any serious part in the future course of human evolution, of which the progressive differentiation of the sexes is so marked a characteristic. In contrast with this differentiation, these rudimentary sexual conditions are practically devoid of significance. Suggestion, indeed, the influence of momentary tendencies of the time and of transient mental states, may temporarily deceive us. And when, for example, Hirschfeld maintains that in the central nervous system of women the more masculine, rational qualities, and in the central nervous system of men the more feminine, emotional qualities, are respectively on the increase, we must answer, in the first place, that this is not generally true, and, in the second place, that, in so far as it is true, it is a passing phenomenon, which has already provoked a powerful reaction in the opposite direction.[13] The exuviæ of a dead condition cannot again be vitalized.

The original purpose of the organs of sexual congress is, then, to safeguard and to facilitate, in the more complicated conditions peculiar to multicellular organisms, the conjugation of the two reproductive cells. They do not exist, as Eduard von Hartmann assumes, as a mere lure to voluptuousness, to induce man to continue the practice of sexual congress, purely instinctive in his animal ancestors, but now endangered by the development of the higher type of consciousness. For animals without organs of sexual congress also experience a voluptuous sensation at the instant of the sexual orgasm and of procreation.

The history of evolution alone solves the riddle of the origin of the organs of sexual congress, and renders their purpose clear to us. In a most ingenious manner, W. Bölsche distinguishes three problems in this history of the genital organs: the “aperture-problem,” the “member-problem,” and the “libido-problem.”

The first problem relates to the character and the position of the two apertures from which the sexual products, the reproductive cells, issue; the second relates to the exact mutual adaptation of the male and the female reproductive apertures; the third relates to the impulse to the intimate apposition of the genital apertures in consequence of a powerful nervous stimulus.

The most remarkable fact that we encounter in our consideration of the first problem—the “aperture-problem”—is the intimate association between the sexual aperture and the excretory canal of the urinary apparatus both in woman and in man—in the latter, indeed, the association is more pronounced. There seems to be a sort of parsimony on the part of Nature to combine so closely these two excretory tubes of the urine and of the products of sexual activity. Phylogenetically, indeed, the reproductive products originally passed with the urine freely into the open, and it was there that their conjugation took place. Among certain worms still existing at the present day we find this “urine-love.” Later, the genital canal became separated from the urinary canal, but the two tubes remained partly united at their outlets, opening side by side at the same part of the body. In man, indeed, the urethra still subserves the double purpose of the excretion of urine and the emission of semen. In woman the two excretory apertures are distinct, but they open in close proximity into the genital fissure between the thighs.

The intimate connexion which thus obtains between the urinary and the reproductive organs is not without significance for the understanding of certain aberrations of the libido sexualis. The same is true of the relations between the orifice of the[42] genital passage and the similarly adjacent aperture of the large intestine, the anus. “Anus,” or, better, “cloaca love,” plays a part, indeed, in many fishes, amphibia, and reptiles; in these the act of procreation and the excretion of urine and fæces all take place by way of the cloaca. Among the mammals, at an early stage of phylogenetic development the intestine became completely separated from the sexual rudiment and the sexual excretory passages; and it is only in the proximity of the respective orifices that we find an indication of the primitive association. The act of pæderasty reminds us of the same fact.

The “aperture-problem” itself leads us, in the course of progressive development, to the “member-problem”—that is to say, to the problem of the more accurate apposition of the two reproductive apertures. The penis, by its introduction into the body of a member of the opposite sex, acts as a means for the shortening of distance-love; it serves for the fixation, for the clamping together, of the copulating pair, which in earlier stages of animal life was effected by sucking and biting; for example, in birds, who for the most part lack an actual penis, the cock holds the hen firmly with his beak during intercourse, and the sucking and biting which often occur in human beings in the sexual act persist as a reminiscence of these relations. In various vertebrates other means of fixation are employed: by the shape of fins, of arms, or of legs, a close “embrace” is rendered possible; finally, the evolution of a special member for sexual purposes closed the long series of means of ensuring union. Originally no more than a peg or a spine, in man the penis is first developed into the form of an absolutely free limb. Dogs, beasts of prey, rodents, bats, and apes, have a strong bone in the organ, the so-called “penis-bone.” In man this bone is lacking; the penis has become entirely free. W. Bölsche writes:

“In relation to the large, heavy, massive trunk and thighs, the sharply individualized, independent, mobile penis appears as a kind of spiritualized central point; as it were, a finger or a small third hand to the trunk, appearing to the eye to stand in rhythmical relation with the hands, right and left.”

In phylogenetic parallelism with the development of the penis, proceeds (from the marsupials upwards) the descensus testiculorum, the descent of the male reproductive glands, the testicles, until they attain their final position in the scrotum, beneath the penis. Here also we can recognize the principle of “limb-mobility,” mentally refined mobility.

In the clitoris woman also possesses a rudiment of a primitive[43] penis. By the apposition of the two limbs, a more complete and rapid conjunction of the reciprocal sexual products must have been effected. But the further development of the large sexual aperture of the female checked the progressive development of this primitive penis, made it to some extent superfluous, since now, by the adaptation of the male penis to the female sexual aperture, a sufficient internal fixation in the act of copulation was rendered possible. Thus the female penis came to subserve other purposes: a portion of it formed the labia minora; another portion, the upper, the clitoris, the name of which sufficiently indicates the fact that, like the penis of the male, its function is connected with the voluptuous sense.

This leads us to the third and last problem, the “libido-problem.” In the human species voluptuous pleasure is almost completely divorced from the process of “fusion-love,” the coalescence of spermatozoon and ovum, and has for the most part become a phenomenon of “distance-love.” It appears extremely doubtful if there is anything specific about the voluptuous sensation—whether there is, in fact, a special “sexual sense.” Magnus Hirschfeld assumes the existence of peculiar “sexual cells,” of receptive areas for sexual stimuli, furnished with a sensory substance endowed with a peculiar specific sensibility. He regards love and the sexual impulse as “a molecular movement or force of a quite specific quality, streaming through the nervous system,” and accompanied by a quite peculiar sensation, or pleasure-tone, arising from a condition of excitement of the sexual cells. But, as we have already pointed out, the voluptuous sensation is merely a special case of general cutaneous sensibility; it is very closely allied with the cutaneous sensation of tickling; properly speaking, it is no more than an excessively powerful tickling.[14] It has also intimate relations with the sensation[44] of pain.[15] The structure and position of the nerve-terminal apparatus of the genital organs, by means of which voluptuous pleasure is rendered possible, exhibit great similarity with the touch corpuscles and sensory end-organs of other parts of the skin. In the sexual orgasm the general cutaneous sensation increases to so high a degree of intensity, becomes so powerful, that for an instant consciousness is actually lost. The association of a momentary loss of consciousness with the acme of sensation indicates the summit of sexual pleasure—it is an abandonment, a dissolution, of individual personality.

Voluptuous pleasure plays its part in the human species entirely in the sphere of distance-love. Bölsche has very beautifully described its significance in this relation:

“All-embracing in its path towards the attainment of its final aim is the love-life also of the great cell societies, such as you yourself are, such as I myself am, such as your beloved is. These higher, more advanced individuals saw one another, approached one another, heard one another, perceived one another through a hundred external media; they became spiritually fused, and attained a condition of wonderful harmony—their principal body walls came at length into immediate contact—they pressed one another’s hands, they embraced one another, kissed one another—they drew ever closer and closer together; to a certain extent the body of one penetrated the body of the other. In all this, their love undertook the whole affair, undertook it a thousand times more effectually than the individual cells seeking conjunction could ever have done; undertook it for the sake of the reproductive cells hidden deep within their bodies. All the pleasurable and painful feelings of love undulated and surged for so long a time throughout the entire organism with intense force; these feelings agitated the entire superior, comprehensive, individual personality, searched its every depth with stormy emotions of desire, complaint, and exultation.

“But at a precise instant this all came to a halt. The seminal cells[45] were ejaculated; one of them conjugated with the ovum; the hidden inward life of a tiny separate organism began within the body of one of the over-individuals. The last separation was bridged, and the true cell-fusion took place. But when this happened, the immediate relationship with the love-life of the great individual man and woman was already completely severed. The bodily act of love was already long at an end; its increase to a climax and its fulfilment had long passed by.

“The instant of supreme voluptuous pleasure, which in the case of unicellular beings naturally occurs at the moment of complete coalescence, must in the case of the multicellular organisms just as naturally be transferred to another stage, as it were, in the great path of love.

“To an earlier stage.

“To that stage of distance-love which is nearest to the true act of fusion of the reproductive elements. To the farthest point, that is to say, attained by the great containers of the genuine unicellular sexual elements (themselves capable of the act of ultimate coalescence)—the farthest point attained by the multicellular over-individuals.”

This farthest point is an act of contact.[16] We have already learnt to regard the skin as a projection of the nervous system, and we have come to understand the significance of the skin in the sphere of sexuality. The other senses which have arisen from the skin must also be taken into account in this matter. In the genital organs, this touch stimulus assumes a quite peculiar character; it gives rise here to the proper voluptuous sensation which is associated with the discharge of the reproductive products. In man this association is most distinctly manifest. The instant of most intense sexual pleasure coincides with ejaculation, with the expulsion of the semen. The character of this voluptuous sensation can hardly be defined; in part, it is like an intense tickling sensation, but, on the other hand, it has an unmistakable relationship to pain. Later, in another connexion, we shall consider this interesting point at greater length. Not inaptly the sexual act has also been compared with sneezing; the preliminary tickling sensation, with the subsequent discharge of nervous tension, in the form of a sneeze, have, in fact, a notable similarity with the processes occurring in the sexual act.

The sexual act depends upon the occurrence of certain stimuli which are connected with the complete development of the internal and external genital organs and of the reproductive glands. The time when this development occurs in man and woman is known as puberty. The sum of these stimuli is known as the “sexual impulse.” Whereas in the lower animals the sexual impulse is for the most part connected with the activity[46] of the reproductive glands, in the human species, in association with the preponderating significance of the brain, it has attained a relative independence of the reproductive glands; whilst the mind has come to influence the sexual impulse very powerfully. Generally speaking, sexual excitement is produced in three ways: first, by the activity of the reproductive glands; secondly, by peripheral excitement derived from the so-called “erogenic” areas; and thirdly, by central psychical influences. S. Freud has recently studied the relations between these three causes of sexual excitement, of the sexual impulse, and has very properly distinguished two stages—the stage of “prelibido” (sexual desire), and the stage of the proper sexual “libido” (sexual gratification).

The stage of prelibido has distinctly the character of tension; the stage of libido, the character of relief. The feeling of tension during the prelibido finds expression mentally as well as physically by a series of changes in the genital organs. The tension is further increased by the stimulation of the various erogenic zones. If this prelibido increases beyond a certain degree, the characteristic potential energy of sexual tension is transformed into the relief-giving kinetic energy of the terminal libido, during which the evacuation of the reproductive products occurs.

Prelibido, which is especially characterized by engorgement, swelling, and erection of the corpora cavernosa of the male and female reproductive organs, occurring as a reflex from the spinal cord, may be experienced long before puberty; it is much more independent of processes occurring in the reproductive glands than is the terminal libido, or sexual gratification, which in the male accompanies ejaculation of the semen, and is associated with conditions attained only at puberty.

The actual origin of the sexual tension which ultimately leads to ejaculation is still obscure; it seems, at first sight, probable that in the male this sensation is connected with the accumulation of semen in the seminal vesicles. Pressure on the walls of these structures may be supposed to stimulate the sexual centres in the spinal cord, and also those in the brain; but this theory fails to take into account the condition in the child, in woman, and in castrated males, in all of whom, notwithstanding the absence of the accumulation of any reproductive products, nevertheless a distinct state of sexual tension may be observed. It is, indeed, an old experience that eunuchs may have a very powerful sexual impulse. It is obvious, then, that the sexual impulse must be, to a very great extent, independent of the reproductive glands.

The nature of sexual tension is still entirely unknown. Freud assumes, in view of the recently recognized significance of the thyroid glands in relation to sexuality, that possibly some substance generally diffused throughout the organism is produced by stimulation of the erogenic zones, that the products of decomposition of this substance exercise a specific stimulus on the reproductive organs, or on the associated sexual centre in the spinal cord. For example, such a transformation of a toxic, chemical stimulus into a special organ-stimulus is known to occur in the case of certain foreign poisonous materials introduced into the body. Freud considers that the probability of this chemical theory of sexual excitement is increased by the fact that the neuroses referable to disturbances of the sexual life possess a great clinical similarity to the phenomena of intoxication induced by the habitual employment of aphrodisiac poisons (certain alkaloids).

The relief of sexual tension occurs in the natural way in the sexual act, in the completion of normal intercourse between man and woman. Notwithstanding the numerous observations of leading natural philosophers and physicians concerning the act of sexual congress, among which I need only refer to those of Magendie, Johannes Müller, Marshall Hall, Kobelt, Busch, Deslandes, Roubaud, Landois, Theopold, Burdach, and many others, we possess, for reasons it is easy to understand, no really exact investigations regarding the different phenomena occurring during the sexual act. More particularly, the demeanour of the woman during this act is a matter which remains extremely obscure.

The French physician Roubaud has given us the most vivid description of sexual intercourse:

“As soon as the penis enters the vaginal vestibule, it first of all pushes against the glans clitoridis, which is situated at the entrance of the genital canal, and owing to its length and to the way in which it is bent, can give way and bend further before the penis. After this preliminary stimulation of the two chief centres of sexual sensibility, the glans penis glides over the inner surfaces of the two vaginal bulbs; the collum and the body of the penis are then grasped between the projecting surfaces of the vaginal bulbs, but the glans penis itself, which has passed further onward, is in contact with the fine and delicate surface of the vaginal mucous membrane, which membrane itself, owing to the presence of erectile tissue between the layers, is now in an elastic, resilient condition. This elasticity, which enables the vagina to adapt itself to the size of the penis, increases at once the turgescence and the sensibility of the clitoris, inasmuch as the blood that is driven out of the vessels of the vaginal wall passes thence to[48] those of the vaginal bulbs and the clitoris. On the other hand, the turgescence and the sensitiveness of the glans penis itself are heightened by compression of that organ, in consequence of the ever-increasing fulness of the vessels of the vaginal mucous membrane and the two vaginal bulbs.

“At the same time, the clitoris is pressed downwards by the anterior portion of the compressor muscle, so that it is brought into contact with the dorsal surface of the glans and of the body of the penis. In this way a reciprocal friction between these two organs takes place, repeated at each copulatory movement made by the two parties to the act, until at length the voluptuous sensation rises to its highest intensity, and culminates in the sexual orgasm, marked in the male by the ejaculation of the seminal fluid, and in the female by the aspiration of that fluid into the gaping external orifice of the cervical canal.

“When we take into consideration the influence which temperament, constitution, and a number of other special and general circumstances are capable of exercising on the intensity of sexual sensation, it may well be doubted if the problem regarding the differences in voluptuous sensation between the male and the female is anywhere near solution; indeed, we may go further, and feel convinced that this problem, in view of all the difficulties that surround it, is really insoluble. So true is this, that it is a difficult matter to give a picture at once accurate and complete of the phenomena attending the normal act of copulation. Whilst in one individual the sense of sexual pleasure amounts to no more than a barely perceptible titillation, in another that sense reaches the acme of both mental and physical exaltation.

“Between these two extremes we meet with innumerable states of transition. In cases of intense exaltation various pathological symptoms make themselves manifest, such as quickening of the general circulation and violent pulsation of the arteries; the venous blood, being retained in the larger vessels by general muscular contractions, leads to an increased warmth of the body; and, further, this venous stagnation, which is still more marked in the brain in consequence of the contraction of the cervical muscles and the backward flexion of the neck, may cause cerebral congestion, during which consciousness and all mental manifestations are momentarily in abeyance. The eyes, reddened by injection of the conjunctiva, become fixed, and the expression becomes vacant; the lids close convulsively, to exclude the light. In some the breathing becomes panting and labouring; but in others it is temporarily suspended, in consequence of laryngeal spasm, and the air, after being pent up for a time in the lungs, is finally forcibly expelled, accompanied by the utterance of incoherent and incomprehensible words.

“The impulses proceeding from the congested nerve centres are confused. There is an indescribable disorder both of motion and of sensation; the extremities are affected with convulsive twitchings, and may be either moved in various directions or extended straight and stiff; the jaws are pressed together so that the teeth grind against each other; and certain individuals are affected by erotic delirium to such an extent that they will seize the unguarded shoulder, for instance, of their partner in the sexual act, and bite it till the blood flows.

[49]

“This delirious frenzy is usually of short duration, but sufficiently long to exhaust the forces of the organism, especially in the male, in whom the condition of hyperexcitability is terminated by a more or less abundant loss of semen.

“A period of exhaustion follows, which is the more intense in proportion to the intensity of the preceding excitement. The sudden fatigue, the general sense of weakness, and the inclination to sleep, which habitually affect the male after the act of intercourse, are in part to be ascribed to the loss of semen; for in the female, however energetic the part she may have played in the sexual act, a mere transient fatigue is observed, much less in degree than that which affects the male, and permitting far sooner of a repetition of the act. ‘Triste est omne animal post coitum, præter mulierem gallumque,’ wrote Galen, and the axiom is essentially true—at any rate, so far as the human species is concerned.”

Kobelt, in his celebrated work on the human organs of sexual pleasure (Freiburg, 1884, p. 55 et seq.), gave a similar description of copulation. In the majority of descriptions of coitus but little attention is usually paid to the demeanour of the woman. Magendie long ago drew attention to the fact that there was much obscurity about this matter, and insisted that, in comparison with the male, the female exhibited extremely marked differences, in respect to her active participation in copulation and to the intensity of her voluptuous sensations.

“Very many women,” says this distinguished physiologist, “experience a sexual orgasm accompanied by very intense voluptuous sensations; others, on the contrary, appear entirely devoid of sensation; and some, again, have only a disagreeable and painful sensation. Many women excrete, at this moment of most intense sexual pleasure, a large quantity of mucus, but the majority do not exhibit this phenomenon. In reference to all these phenomena, there are perhaps no two women who are precisely similar.”

The demeanour of the woman in coitu has been especially studied by gynæcologists, such as Busch, Theopold, and recently Otto Adler. Little known are the observations of Dr. Theopold, based upon his own experience, and published in 1873. He energetically denies the view that the woman is always passive in coitus, and also that the female reproductive organs are inactive during intercourse. During erotic excitement in woman the heart beats more frequently, the arteries of the labia pulsate powerfully, the genital organs are turgid and are hotter to the touch. As the most intense libido approaches, the uterus undergoes erection; its base touches the anterior abdominal wall; the Fallopian tubes can be distinctly felt through the abdominal wall, when these are thin, as hard, curved strings.[50] The vagina, especially the upper part of the passage, undergoes rhythmical contraction and dilation, and complete gratification terminates the act.

As long as the muscle guarding the vaginal outlet (constrictor cunni—bulbo-cavernosus muscle) is intact, the woman is able, by tightly grasping the root of the penis, to expedite the ejaculation of semen, or to increase the stimulation of the male until ejaculation occurs.

These powerful contractions of the vagina, alternating rhythmically with the dilatations occurring during the orgasm, grip the glans penis tightly, and induce a coaptation of the male urethral orifice with the os uteri externum, and the enlargement of the latter orifice facilitates the entrance of the semen. According to O. Adler, sexual excitement of the woman during sexual intercourse begins with very powerful congestion of the entire reproductive apparatus, including even the fimbriæ surrounding the abdominal orifice of the Fallopian tubes; this congestion gives rise to an erection of these parts, and especially of the clitoris, the labia minora, and the vaginal wall. At the same time, the glands of the vaginal mucous membrane and of the vaginal inlet begin to secrete, as is manifest by the moistness of the external genital organs. There now begin gentle rhythmical contractions of the vagina and of the pelvic muscles, and during the orgasm these increase, to become spasmodic contractions, whereby an increased secretion is extruded, and more especially is there an evacuation of uterine mucus.

It is very important to note the various physiological accompaniments of coitus, since they assist us to understand the mode of origin and the biological root of many sexual perversions. Already in normal sexual intercourse sadistic and masochistic phenomena may be observed. The biting and crying out mentioned by Roubaud as occurring in the voluptuous ecstasy are, indeed, of very frequent occurrence. Rudolf Bergh, the celebrated Danish dermatologist and physician, of the Copenhagen Hospital for Women suffering from Venereal Diseases, alludes regularly in his annual reports to the consequences of “erotic bites.” Amongst the Southern Slavs, the custom of “biting one another” is very general (Krauss). The intense dark red coloration of the face and of the reproductive organs and their environment is also a physiological accompaniment of sexual excitement, and this coloration is more marked in consequence of the associated turgescence of the male and female genital organs; it leads, moreover, to associations of feeling in[51] which the blood plays a dominant part. Hence we deduce the biological and ethnological significance of the colour red in the sphere of sexuality. The nature of the sadist “to see red” during sexual intercourse is, therefore, firmly founded upon a physiological basis, and merely exhibits an increase of a normal phenomenon.[17] The crying and cursing in which many individuals find sexual gratification has also a physiological representative in the inarticulate noises and cries frequently expressed in normal intercourse. It is remarkable that an Indian writer on erotics—Vātsyāyana—deduces this verbal sadism from the various noises which are commonly made in normal intercourse. Similarly, in both parties to the sexual act the presence of masochistic elements can be detected: witness the patience with which pain is borne when it has a voluptuous tinge.[18]

Passing to the consideration of the posture adopted during intercourse, we find in civilized man, who in this respect is far removed from animals, the normal position during coitus is front to front, the woman lying on her back with her lower extremities widely separated, and the knee and hip joints semiflexed; the man lies on her, with his thighs between hers, supporting himself on hands or elbows—or often the two unite their lips in a kiss.

Of all other numerous positions during coitus, or figuræ Veneris, some of which, according to Sheikh Nefzawi, are possible only “in words and thoughts,” the postures that demand consideration on hygienic grounds are, lateral decubitus of the woman, dorsal decubitus of the man, and coitus a posteriori (for example, when man and woman are extremely obese); but this subject belongs rather to the chapter on sexual hygiene.

Ploss-Bartels has proved that the position described above as normal was usual already in ancient times and amongst the most diverse peoples. The adoption of this position in coitus undoubtedly ensued in the human race upon the evolution of the upright posture. It is the natural, instinctive position of civilized man, who in this respect also manifests an advance on the lower animals.

CHAPTER IV
PHYSICAL DIFFERENTIAL SEXUAL CHARACTERS

“We have here a primitive inequality, whose primitiveness goes back to the opposition between content and form. From this primeval difference arise all the other secondary differences.”—Alfons Bilharz.[54]

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER IV

Sexual differentiation as the primeval fact of human sexual life — Waldeyer on the significance of sexual differentiation — The biological law of Herbert Spencer — Antagonism between reproductive and developmental tendencies — Example of menstruation in illustration of this contrast — The primitiveness of woman, and her greater proximity to nature — Untenability of the notion of the “inferiority” of woman — Views upon the nature of her physical development — Increased differentiation of the sexes in consequence of civilization — Comparison between medieval and modern pictures of women — Obscuration of the sexual contrast in primitive times — Examples — Change of the voice in consequence of civilization — Return to primitive conditions in certain phenomena of the emancipation of woman (the adoption of a masculine style of clothing, tobacco-smoking) — Sexual indifference in the primitive history of mankind — Connexion therewith of a primordial gynecocracy (according to Ratzel) — Secondary sexual characters — Principal difference between the masculine and the feminine body — New researches on sexual differences — Skeletal differences — The specific sexual differences of the human pelvis — Their dependence upon civilization and upon development of the brain — Differences in body-size and body-weight — In muscular and fatty development — In the constitution of the blood — Sexual differences in the larynx and the voice — The skulls of men and women — The weight of the brain — No ground for the assumption of the inferiority of women — Differences in brain-structure — Researches of Rüdinger, Waldeyer, Broca, G. Retzius, etc. — Recognition of the fact that the feminine type is somewhat infantile — This type due to adaptation to the purposes of reproduction — Masculine and feminine beauty — Men and women different, but neither superior to the other.

CHAPTER IV

The difference between the sexes is the original cause of the human sexual life, the primeval preliminary of all human civilization. The existence of this difference can be proved, alike in physical and psychical relations, already in the fundamental phenomenon of human love, in which, because here the relations are simple and uncomplicated, it is most easily visible.

Waldeyer, in his notable address on the somatic differences between the sexes, delivered in 1895 at the Anthropological Congress in Kassel, drew attention to the fact that the higher development of any particular species is notably characterized by the increasing differentiation of the sexes. The further we advance in the animal and vegetable world from the lower to the higher forms, the more markedly are the male and the female individuals distinguished one from another. In the human species also, in the course of phylogenetic development, this sexual differentiation increases in extent.

In the development of these sexual differences, the antagonism first shown by Herbert Spencer to exist between reproduction and the higher evolutionary tendency plays an important part. Among the higher species of animals the males exhibit a stronger evolutionary tendency than the females, owing to the fact that their share in the work of reproduction has become less important. The more extensive organic expenditure demanded by the reproductive functions limits the feminine development to a notably greater extent than the masculine. In the human species this retardation of growth in the female is especially increased in consequence of menstruation, and this affords a striking example of the truth of Spencer’s law. I quote also in this connexion the remarks of the Würzburg anatomist Oskar Schultze, in his recently published valuable monograph on “Woman from an Anthropological Point of View,” pp. 55, 56 (Würzburg, 1906);

“The undulatory periodicity of the principal functions of the feminine organism, which depends on the processes of ovulation and menstruation, and is invariable in the females of the human species, does not occur in the other mammalia (with the exception of apes). In these latter, as far as we have been able to observe, the secondary sexual characters, in the matter of differences in muscular development and in strength, are not so developed, or sometimes are not so developed, as in the human species. We must in this connexion exclude the differences which appear in domestic animals as a result[56] of domestication (for example, the difference between the cow and the bull). In the human female, the periodicity, which begins to act even on the youthful, still undeveloped body, has during thousands of years increased the secondary sexual differences. Periodicity is, in my opinion, an important cause of the fact that woman is inferior to man, more especially in the development of the muscular system and in strength, and that her organs, for the most part, are more closely approximated to the infantile type.

“The sexually mature body of a woman has always during the intermenstrual period to make good the loss undergone during menstruation. Hardly has this been effected and the climax of vital energy been once more attained, when a new follicle ruptures in the ovary, and the menstrual hæmorrhage recurs; thus continually, month after month, the vital undulation and the vital energy rises and falls. The energy periodically expended in woman’s principal function has for thousands of years ceased to be available for her own internal development. The actual loss on each occasion is so trifling that numerous women hardly find it disagreeable. The effect depends upon summation. The earnings are almost immediately spent, not for the purpose of her own domestic economy, but for the sake of another, in the service of reproduction; this comes first, for the species must be preserved. To accumulate capital for her personal needs has been rendered more difficult for woman than it is for man.”

The previously quoted biological law of Spencer (regarding the antagonism between reproduction and the higher evolutionary tendency), of which menstruation affords so interesting an illustration, explains also the fact pointed out by Milne Edwards, Darwin, Brooks, Lombroso, Alfons Bilharz, and other investigators—to wit, the greater simplicity and primitiveness of woman as compared with the more complicated and more variable nature of man—more variable, because it oscillates within wider boundaries. Paracelsus long ago enunciated the profound saying, “Woman is nearer to the world than man.”

It would be fundamentally erroneous to deduce from these considerations any inferiority or comparative inutility of woman. Rather, indeed, the nature of her bodily structure in relation to the purposes it has to fulfil is comparatively nearer perfection; and this admirable adaptation has undergone an increase in the course of the evolution of civilization. We have already noted the fact that under the influence of the continually increasing predominance of the brain in the male, certain retrogressive processes have also made themselves manifest (as, for example, the increasing loss of hair); and these processes in woman have gone farther than in man, because in her case the progressive development is in its very nature less extensive. Hence recent investigators, such as Havelock Ellis, have actually come to the conclusion that the ideal type, towards which the bodily development[57] of mankind is striving, is represented by the feminine—that is, by a youthful type.[19]

It is, however, very doubtful if this evolution will ever go so far that the primitive difference between man and woman, founded as it is in the very nature of the sexual, will ever pass away. On the contrary, notwithstanding the retrogressive changes associated with the excessive development of the brain, we find that there is an increasing differentiation of the sexes induced by civilization. To this fact, which possesses great importance in connexion with the discussion of the woman’s question and the problem of homosexuality, W. H. Riehl, the historian of civilization, in his work on the family, published in 1885, was the first to draw attention. He devotes the second chapter of this book to the differentiation of the sexes in the course of civilized life. He was astonished by the fact that in almost all the portraits of celebrated beauties of previous centuries the heads appeared to him too masculine in type when compared with the ideal of feminine beauty which now appeals to us.

“The medieval painters, when representing the general type of angels and saints, van Eyck and Memmling in their Madonnas and female saints, paint heads exhibiting the most clearly defined individual characteristics, but into these feeling representations of delicate virginity there intrude certain harsh lineaments, so that the heads strike us as masculine, or as a little too old. Van Eyck’s Madonnas,[58] with the Christ-child at their breast, frequently look to us like women of thirty years old. But the painter must have followed Nature; it is Nature which since his time has changed. The tender virgin of three hundred years ago had more masculine lineaments than she has at the present day, and he who in the portrait of a Maria Stuart expects to find a face like one he would meet in a modern journal of fashion will find himself greatly disappointed by certain traits in the pictures of this celebrated beauty, traits which to the nineteenth century would seem almost masculine.”

The contrast between the sexes becomes with advancing civilization continually sharper and more individualized, whereas in primitive conditions, and even at the present day among agricultural labourers and the proletariat, it is less sharp and to some extent even obliterated. Let the reader familiarize himself with the likenesses of modern women of the working classes; they seem to us almost to resemble disguised men. In the stature, also, of the sexes among savage peoples, and among the lower classes of the civilized nations, the sexual differences are much less marked than in our cultivated large towns. Very characteristic of the differentiating influence of civilization is, moreover, the effect on the voice. Riehl remarks on this subject:

“The tone of the voice even, in simpler conditions of civilization, is generally far more alike in the two sexes. The high tenor, the feminine man’s voice, and the deep alto, the masculine woman’s voice, are among civilized peoples far rarer than among savage races, in whom masculine and feminine varieties sometimes seem hardly distinguishable. Our bandmasters travel to Hungary and Galicia to find clear high tenors, whilst deep alto voices are now increasingly difficult to find, for the reason that among the civilized peoples the masculine-feminine contraltos die out. Dominant, on the other side, is the distinct contrast between the two sexual tones of voices—soprano and bass. This fact has already had a determining influence in our school of song; it affects our vocal tone-teaching—to such a hidden, out-of-the-way path have we been led by our recognition of the continually increasing contrast between man and woman.”

Certain phenomena and aberrations of the movement for the emancipation of women, such as the adoption of a masculine style of dress and the use of tobacco, are no more than relapses into a primitive condition, which among the common people has persisted unaltered to the present day. We need merely allude to the man’s hat, the short coat, and the high-laced boot of the Tyrolese women, and to the tobacco-smoking of the women at the wedding festivals among the German peasantry. A false “emancipation” of this kind is frequently encountered among peasants, vagabonds, and gipsies, to which, moreover, the neuter[59] designation of the women of this class as das Mensch and “woman-fellow,” etc., bears witness; we have herein characteristic indications of the fact that “peculiar to the woman of the people is a self-conscious, actively progressive masculine nature.”

That the comparative obliteration of sexual contrasts among the lower orders of modern society is a vestigial relic of primitive conditions, is shown also by the primeval history of the nations. The idea appearing already in the Biblical creation myth, and the thought later expressed by Plato, and recently by Jacob Böhme, that the first human being was originally both man and woman, and that the woman was subsequently formed out of this primeval human being Adam—this pregnant thought merely expresses the fact of the indifference of the sexes among savage people and in the primitive history of mankind. The hermaphrodite of ancient art is, like the man-woman of the modern woman’s movement, an atavism, a retrogression to these long-past stages, of which we have only the above-mentioned vestiges to remind us.[20]

Friedrich Ratzel, in the introduction to his great work on “The Races of Man,” also alludes to this primitive obscuration of sexual contrasts in earlier stages of civilization, and draws therefrom interesting conclusions regarding the existence of a primordial gynecocracy, a “regiment of women.” I have myself discussed this question in the second volume of my book, “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” and shall return to the subject when dealing with masochism.

W. H. Riehl, and after him Heinrich Schurtz, have laid stress on the dangers to civilization involved in the obliteration of sexual differences. Sexual differentiation stands and falls with civilization. The former is the indispensable preliminary of the latter. Destroy it, and the whole course of development will be reversed.

Sexual differences comprise for the most part the diverse development of the so-called “secondary sexual characters”—that is to say, all the differential characteristics which distinguish man from woman, over and above those strictly related to the work of sex—for instance, stature, skeleton, muscles, skin, voice, etc.

The masculine body has evolved to a greater extent than the[60] feminine body as a force-producing machine, for in man the bones and the muscles have a larger development, whereas in woman we observe a greater development of fat, whereby the plasticity of the body is enhanced, but its mechanical utility and energy are impaired.

According to the most recent scientific representation of sexual differences, as we find them enumerated in the monograph of Oskar Schultze, based upon his own observations, and also on the earlier works of Vierordt, Quetelet, Topinard, Pfitzner, Waldeyer, C. H. Stratz, J. Ranke, E. von Lange, Havelock Ellis, Merkel, Bischoff, Rebentisch, Welcker, Schwalbe, Marchand, and others, the most important physical differentiæ between man and woman are the following:

The supporting framework of the body, the osseous skeleton, exhibits important differences in man and woman. The bones of women are on the whole smaller and weaker. Especially extensive sexual differences are noticeable in the pelvis. Wiedersheim regards these sexual differences of the woman’s pelvis as a specific characteristic of the human species. In all the anthropoid apes they are far less strongly marked than in man. Moreover, these differences exhibit a progressive development, which is to an important extent dependent upon advancing civilization. For this reason, as G. Fritsch, Alsberg, and others, point out, among the majority of savage races the differences between the male and the female pelvis are far less extensive than among civilized nations. The characteristic peculiarities of the pelvis of the European woman, which can be distinguished from the male pelvis at a glance—namely, its greater extent in transverse diameter, the greater depression and the wider opening of the anterior osseous arch—are far less marked among women of the South African races and among the South Sea Islanders.

The enlargement of the female pelvis in the course of human evolution is dependent upon the most important of all the factors of civilization, the brain. Even in the human fœtus the great size of the brain gives rise to a far greater proportionate development of the skull than we find in the fœtus of any other mammal. This influences the pelvic inlet and the sacrum, but also the large pelvis, since, in consequence of the adoption by man of the upright posture, the pregnant uterus expands more laterally, and thus opens out the iliac fossæ. In the lower races of man, it is precisely this plate-like expansion of the iliac fossæ which is so much less developed than in the case of civilized races.

Another physical difference between the sexes concerns stature and body-weight.

The mean stature of woman is somewhat less than that of man. Among Europeans it is about 1·60 metres (5 feet 3 inches), as compared with 1·72 metres (5 feet 7³⁄₄ inches) for the average stature of the male. According to Vierordt, the new-born boy is already on the average from ¹⁄₂ to 1 centimetre (¹⁄₅ to ²⁄₅ inch) longer than the new-born girl. Johannes Ranke characterizes the individual factors which give rise to these differences in the following manner:

“The typical bodily development of the human male is characterized by a trunk relatively shorter in relation to the whole stature; but in relation to the length of the trunk, the upper and the lower extremities are longer, the thighs and the legs longer, the hand and the foot also longer; relatively to the long upper arm and to the long thigh respectively, the forearm and the leg are still longer; and relatively to the entire upper extremity, the entire lower extremity is also longer.

“On the other hand, the feminine proportions, remaining more approximate to those of the youthful state, as compared with those of the fully developed male, are distinguished by the following characteristics: comparatively greater length of the trunk; relatively to the length of the trunk, comparatively shorter arms and lower extremities, shorter upper arm and forearm, shorter thigh and leg, shorter hands and feet; relatively to the shorter upper arm, still shorter forearm, and relatively to the shorter thigh, still shorter leg; finally, relatively to the entire upper extremity, shorter lower extremities.”

This difference in the stature is found also in primitive peoples. Among the savage races of Brazil, who are still living in the stone age, Karl von den Steinen found that the average height of the men was 162 centimetres (5 feet 3·8 inches), whilst that of the women was 10·5 centimetres (4·14 inches) less. This difference corresponds exactly with that given in Topinard’s figures as corresponding to the average male height of 162 centimetres (5 feet 3·8 inches).

In relation to the greater length of the body, the other proportions of the male body also exhibit greater figures. More particularly, the width of the shoulders is greater in man as compared with woman.

The body-weight of man is likewise notably greater than that of woman. According to Vierordt, the average weight of a new-born boy in middle Europe is 3,333 grammes (7·348 pounds), as compared with that of a new-born girl 3,200 grammes (7·055 pounds). The difference, therefore, is 133 grammes (0·293 pounds = about 4¹⁄₂ ounces). In the case of adults, the mean[62] difference amounts to 7 kilogrammes (15 pounds), since the average weight of man is 65 kilogrammes (143 pounds), that of woman 58 kilogrammes (128 pounds).

Corresponding with the slighter development of the skeleton, the muscular system in woman is also less strongly developed; the muscles contain a larger percentage of water than those of man, and in this point also we find a resemblance to the juvenile state.

On the other hand, the development of fat in woman is much greater than in man. Bischoff investigated the relations between muscle and fat in man and woman, and found that in the entire body in the male there was 41·8 per cent. muscle and 18·2 per cent. fat; in the female 35·8 per cent. muscle and 28·2 per cent. fat. In the female two regions of the body are distinguished by a specially abundant deposit of fat, the breast and the buttocks, whereby both parts receive the stamp of extremely prominent secondary sexual characters. Upon this greater deposit of fat depends the softer, more rounded form of the feminine body; whilst the muscular system is less developed than in man. Man, on the other hand, is especially powerful in the head, neck, breast, and upper extremities. The contrast between the typical beauty of man and woman, respectively, is mainly explicable by the differences just enumerated.

More important is the fact that the blood of man contains a notably larger quantity of red blood-corpuscles (erythrocytes) than that of woman. Woman’s blood is richer in water. Welcker found in a cubic millimetre of man’s blood 5,000,000, and in the same quantity of woman’s blood 4,500,000 blood-discs. In correspondence with this, the hæmoglobin content and the specific weight of woman’s blood are both less than those of man’s. Since the red blood-corpuscles play a very important part in the human economy as oxygen-carriers, this sexual difference in the corpuscular richness of the blood is very important, and influences to a high degree the bodily organization of both sexes.

Larynx and voice remain infantile in woman. Woman’s larynx is notably smaller than man’s. After puberty woman’s voice is, on the average, in the deep tones an octave, in the high tones two octaves, higher than man’s.

According to the investigations of Pfitzner, the measurements of the head (length, breadth, height, circumference) are smaller in woman than in man. Woman’s skull remains, in respect of[63] numerous peculiarities of structure, strikingly like the skull of the child.[21] This infantile quality of a woman’s skull, we must again point out, justifies no conclusion regarding the inferiority of woman. Schultze, when presenting these data for our consideration, rightly reminds us of the well-known fact that the man of genius is also frequently distinguished by infantile peculiarities.

Woman’s skull is absolutely smaller than man’s; hence, of course, her brain is also absolutely smaller. Waldeyer gives as the mean weight of a man’s brain 1,372 grammes (44·12 ounces), and of a woman’s brain, 1,231 grammes (39·58 ounces); Schwalbe’s figures are respectively 1,375 grammes (44·21 ounces) and 1,245 grammes (40·03 ounces).

“The question immediately arises, whether we are justified in speaking of the mental ‘inferiority’ of woman, because her brain weighs less than that of man.

“Now, in the first place, it is obvious that the greater body-weight of man demands a greater weight of brain. And there is nothing remarkable about the fact that the greater size exhibited by many organs of the male should be exhibited also by the brain. It seems very natural that the unquestionably greater functional activity which has distinguished the masculine brain for many thousand years should be manifested by the notably greater size of that organ, just as a larger muscle generally performs more work than a small one.

“As a matter of fact, among the numerous investigators occupied with this question, many have assumed that differences in the psychical power of human brains are dependent upon differences in their size. But this is an assumption merely, and with Bischoff, who as long as forty years ago conducted an exhaustive investigation into the problem of the relations between brain-weight and intellectual capacity, we must say also to-day that ‘the proof of any such connexion has not yet been offered us.’”

Whether the study of the finer structure of the brain in man and woman will enable us to form more trustworthy conclusions regarding their respective intellectual valuation, is a question whose answer must for the present be postponed. According to Rüdinger and Passet, in new-born boys and girls there exist very remarkable differences in the formation and development of the brain. In the male fœtal brain the frontal lobes are larger, wider, and higher; the convolutions, especially those of the[64] parietal lobe, are better formed than in the female fœtal brain. Waldeyer was able to confirm this observation, and he considers it of great importance, especially in view of the large share which the frontal lobes have in the performance of purely intellectual functions. Broca, however, was unable to detect a lesser development of the frontal lobes in woman. Eberstaller and Cunningham even believed that they could establish that this portion of the brain was more powerfully developed in woman! Finally, the great Swedish cerebral anatomist, G. Retzius, made an exact investigation of the sexual differences between the brains of man and woman in the adult state. According to O. Schultze, his results can be regarded as authoritative. Retzius stated that hitherto no specific invariably recurrent peculiarity had been found by which the female brain could always with certainty be distinguished from the male; still, he was inclined to attribute to woman’s brain a greater simplicity of structure; it showed less divergence from the fundamental type.

This coincides with the fact to which we have already alluded, that woman as compared with man possesses less variability, that she is the simpler, more primitive being. Similarly, experience teaches ethnologists that the men of a race differ from one another to a much greater extent than the women.[22]

If we wish to sum up in a word the nature of the physical sexual differences, we must say: Woman remains more akin to the child than man.

This, however, in no way constitutes an inferiority, as Havelock Ellis and Oskar Schultze have convincingly shown. It is only the expression of a primitive difference in nature, brought about by the adaptation of the female body to the purposes of reproduction. This is the cause of the more infantile habitus of women (according to the above-quoted biological law of Herbert Spencer).

The observation of the physical differences between man and woman also teaches us the futility of the old dispute as to whether man’s body or woman’s was the more beautiful.[23] The different[65] tasks which lie before the male and female bodies respectively give rise to different development of individual parts. If this development is complete in its kind, the body is beautiful. Stratz, in the introduction to his book on “The Beauty of the Female Body,” has rightly identified perfect beauty with perfect health. Man’s body and woman’s will alike be beautiful if all secondary sexual characters are developed in a harmonious and not excessive degree, if the idea of “manliness in man” and “womanliness in woman” have attained full expression, and have not been unduly limited by isolated peculiarities and variations.

Masculine and feminine beauty are different. There can be no question regarding the superiority of one or the other.

CHAPTER V
PSYCHICAL DIFFERENTIAL SEXUAL CHARACTERS—THE WOMAN’S QUESTION
(Appendix: SEXUAL SENSIBILITY IN WOMAN)

“Among all the higher activities and movements of our time, the struggle of our sisters to attain an equality of position with the strong, the dominant, the oppressive sex, appears to me, from the purely human point of view, most beautiful and most interesting; indeed, I regard it as possible that the coming century will obtain its historical characterization, not from any of the social and economical controversies of the world of men, but that this century will be known to subsequent history distinctively as that in which the solution of the ‘woman’s question’ was obtained.”—Georg Hirth.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER V

The fact of psychical sexual differences — Attempts to deny their existence — Rosa Mayreder’s “Critique of Femininity” — The sexual nuances of the psyche — Ineradicability of these — Condemnation of psychical bisexuality — Expression of psychical difference in the demeanour of the sperm cell and the germ cell — Original representatives of the differing natures of man and woman — Recent researches regarding psychical sexual differences — Sensory sensations — Intellectual differences — Experiments of Jastrow, Minot, and others — Inquiries of Delaunay and Havelock Ellis — Readier suggestibility of women — Tendencies to independent activity on the part of women — Higher spiritual activities in man and woman — Woman’s talent for politics — Emotivity of woman — Greater susceptibility to fatigue — Decline of emotivity in the modern woman — Artistic talents of man and woman — Greater variability of man — Influence of menstruation on the feminine physique — Psychological experiments of H. B. Thompson — Woman and man heterogeneous natures — Comparison by Alfons Bilharz — The enigmatical in woman — Poets and thinkers on this question — A saying of Theodor Mundt — Antipathy of the sexes — Love as the solution of the enigma — Significance of psychical differences for the woman’s question — Part played by women in civilization — Retrospect of primeval history — Women as the discoverers of handicrafts and arts — As the teachers of man — Thomas Henry Huxley on the woman’s question — The value of work for woman — Improvement of domestic service according to Schmoller — The woman of the future.

Appendix: Sexual Sensibility in Woman. — An old topic of dispute — Sexual sensibility in man — Feminine erotic types — Theory of Lombroso and Ferrero — Adler’s monograph — Refutation of the theory of the lesser sensual sensibility of woman — Diffuse character of the feminine sexual sphere — Researches of Havelock Ellis regarding the sexual impulse in woman — Experience of alienists regarding sexuality in woman — A case of temporary sexual anæsthesia — Causes of sexual frigidity.

CHAPTER V

The unquestionably existing physical differences between the sexes respectively, correspond equally without question to existing psychical differences. Psychically, also, man and woman are completely different beings. We must not employ the word “psychical,” as it is so often employed, in the sense of pure “intelligence”; we must understand the term to relate to the entire conception and content of the psyche, to the whole spiritual being—the spiritual habitus, emotional character, feelings, and will: we shall then immediately be convinced that masculine and feminine beings differ through and through, that they are heterogeneous, incomparable natures.

Under the influence of Weininger’s book, the attempt has recently been made to deny the existence of sexual differences in the psychical sphere, and especially to contest the origin of these differences from the fundamentally different nature of the masculine and feminine types. (Weininger himself not only went so far as to declare the obliteration and equalization of sexual differences, but he even asserted that all feminine nature was a personification of nothingness, of evil; he wished to annihilate femininity, in order to allow the existence of one sex only, the male, this being to him the embodiment of the objective and the good.) I recently read with great interest a most intelligent book, one full of new ideas, by Rosa Mayreder—“Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit” (A Critique of Femininity), Jena, 1905—in which the author maintains what she calls the “primitively teleological character of sexuality”; that is, she considers the different sexual functions of man and woman to be comparatively unimportant for the determination of their spiritual nature, and regards the individual psychical differentiation as independent of sexuality and of the different sexual natures. In her opinion, sexual polarity does not extend to the “higher nature” of mankind, to the spiritual sphere. She offers as a proof of this, among other points, the fact that by crossed inheritance spiritual peculiarities of the father can be transmitted to the daughter. Very true. Moreover, no objective student of Nature will deny that a woman can attain the same degree of individual psychical differentiation as a man, or that she can bring her “higher nature” to an equally great development. But quite as incontestable is the fact which Rosa Mayreder keeps too much in[70] the background: that everything psychical, the entire emotional and voluntary life, receives from the particular sexual nature a peculiar characterization, a distinctive colouring, and a specific nuance; and that these precisely constitute the heterogeneous and the incomparable in the masculine and the feminine natures.

The attempts to annihilate sexual differences in theory are very old,[24] but they have always proved untenable in practice. They have invariably been shattered by contact with—sexual differences.

Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret (You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but she will inevitably return). And this return of Nature is, in fact, a step forward, in advance of primitive hermaphroditic states. Sexual differences are ineradicable; civilization shows an unmistakable tendency to increase them. There is also an individual differentiation of sexual characters. It is proportional to the differentiation of the psychical characters of man and woman. And the problem is this: How is it possible for woman to ensure the development and perfectibility of her higher nature, without eliminating and obscuring her peculiar character as a sexual being?

When Rosa Mayreder herself, at the end of her book (p. 278), comes to the conclusion—

“In the province of the physical, about which no doubt is possible, the development towards ‘homologous monosexuality,’ towards the unconditional sexual differentiation of individuals, constitutes the most desirable aim. Every divergence from the normal renders the individual an imperfect being; physical hermaphroditism is repulsive because it represents a state of insufficiency, an inadequate and malformed structure. It appertains to the qualities of beautiful and healthy human beings that the body should be that of an entire man or an entire woman, just as it is desirable that the body should be intact in all other respects”

—she has at the same time expressed a judgment regarding the value of psychical bisexuality which must ever be a rudiment merely in the “entire man” or the “entire woman,” and can[71] never attain the transcendent importance, can never represent the progress towards higher altitudes, which the author, in her singular misunderstanding of the true relations, wishes to ascribe to that condition. We may admit that the bisexual character is more or less strongly developed in the individual male or female, without thereby abandoning the fundamental natural difference between man and woman, which involves not merely the physical, but also the psychical sphere.

I disbelieve, therefore, in Rosa Mayreder’s “synthetic human being,” who is “subordinate alike to the conditions of the masculine and the feminine” but I do believe, as I have already stated in earlier writings, in an individualization of love, in an ennobling and deepening of the relationship between the sexes, such as is possible only to free personalities. This is easily attainable in conjunction with the retention of all bodily and mental peculiarities, as these have developed during the process of sexual differentiation between man and woman.

There can be no possible doubt that psychically woman is a different creature from man. And quite rightly Mantegazza declares the opinion of Mirabeau, that the soul has no sex, but only the body, to be a great blunder.

Let us now return to the directly visible elementary phenomenon of love, to the process of coalescence of the spermatozoon and the ovum. From our study of other natural processes we feel we are justified by analogy in drawing the conclusion that the observed kinetic difference between the spermatozoon and the ovum is the expression also of different psychical processes. Georg Hirth draws attention to these remarkable differences in respect of their modes of energy between spermatozoa and ova.[25] He also infers from the greater variability of the spermatozoa in the different animal species, as compared with the usual spherical form of the ova, that to the spermatozoon is allotted the most important kinetic function in the process of reproduction, to which opinion its aggressive mobility would also lead us, whereas the ovum rather represents potential energy.

“We can indeed hardly believe that anywhere in the entire organic world is there anything, of the same minute size, endowed with like energy and enterprise as these so-called spermatozoa (‘little sperm animals’), which are indeed not animals, and which yet prepare for us more joy and more sorrow than any animal does. There everything is busy. With what turbulence they hurry along until they attain their ardently desired goal, and having attained it, thrust themselves[72] head first into the interior of the ovum! In this we have a drama for the gods. To doubt the energy of these structures would be preposterous.”

Spermatozoa and ova are the original representatives of the respective spiritual natures of man and woman. Disregarding all further differentiation and individualization, the fundamental lineaments of the masculine and feminine natures harmonize with the demeanour of the reproductive cells; and we are able to recognize that for each is provided a different task, and yet that the task of each is no less important than that of the other. Quite rightly Rosa Mayreder points out, that the male sex stands biologically no higher than the female from the reproductive and procreative point of view; that in the continued reproduction of life male and female have equal share.

No less true, on the other hand, is the remark of Havelock Ellis, whose position in relation to the woman question is throughout objective:

“As long as women are distinguished from men by primary sexual characters—as long, that is to say, as they conceive and bear—so long will they remain unequal to man in the highest psychical processes” (“Man and Woman,” p. 21).

The nature of man is aggressive, progressive, variable; that of woman is receptive, more susceptible to stimuli, simpler.

Numerous exact, scientific, ethnological, and psychological investigations concerning the sexes, among the most important of which we may mention those of Darwin, Allan, Münsterberg, C. Vogt, Ploss-Bartels, Jastrow, Lombroso and Ferrero, Shaw, Havelock Ellis, and Helen Bradford Thompson, have confirmed the existence of these differences in the nature of the two sexes. Many individual points still remain obscure, but the above-mentioned sexual difference is everywhere recognizable, and can never be entirely eradicated, even by a higher psychical differentiation. Even the author of the “Critique of Femininity,” who would open an unlimited perspective to the freedom of individuality, is still compelled to admit that the majority of women differ from men, no less in character than in intellect.

Havelock Ellis, in his classical work “Man and Woman” (London, 1892), has given a summary of the psychical differences between the sexes, based upon the most recent anthropological and psychological investigations. This work forms the foundation for all later researches.

Of the individual psychical phenomena in man and woman,[73] the sensory sensations first demand consideration. In these no absolute and general superiority of one sex over the other can be shown to exist. The assumption that women have a more delicate power of sensory receptivity cannot be sustained; indeed, the contrary appears the truer view. It is true that women can be more readily excited by sensory stimuli, but they do not possess a more delicate sensory receptivity.

As regards the general intellectual endowment of the sexes, the interesting experimental researches of Jastrow into the psychology of woman show that she possesses a greater interest in her immediate environment, in the finished product, in the decorative, the individual, and the concrete; man, on the other hand, exhibits a preference for the more remote, for that which is in process of construction or growth, for the useful, the general, and the abstract.

In agreement with these views is a report in the Berliner Städtischen Jahrbuch (1870, pp. 59-77), concerning the knowledge possessed by several thousands of boys and girls at the time of their entry into school. The report states:

“The more usual, the more approximate, and the easier an idea is, the greater is the probability that the girls will excel the boys, and vice versa. In boys more frequently than in girls do we find that they know nothing of quite common things in their immediate environment.”

Professor Minot arranged that persons of both sexes should cover ten cards with sketches of any subject they chose. It appeared from this experiment that the sketches of the men embraced a greater variety of subjects than those of the women.

In respect of quickness of comprehension and intellectual mobility woman is distinctly superior to man. Women, for example, read faster than men, and can give a better account of what they have read. From this fact, however, no conclusion can be drawn regarding their higher intellectual capacity, for many men of exceptional intelligence read very slowly.

Delaunay inquired of a number of merchants regarding the industrial capacity of the two sexes, and was informed that women are more diligent than men, but less intelligent, so that they can be trusted only in routine work.

In general, the experience of the postal service coincided with what has already been stated. Havelock Ellis regarded the result of an inquiry made at several of the large English post-offices as “typical and trustworthy.” One of the chief postmasters was of the opinion that as counter and instrumental clerks, doing[74] concurrently money-order and savings-bank business, taking in telegrams and signalling and receiving, and in attending to rough and illiterate persons, women clerks were preferable to men. Women telegraphists work as intelligently and as exactly as their male colleagues. They do not, however, like the men, exhibit an interest in the technical working of telegraphy; and, owing to a lack of staying power, they are unable to compete with the men in times of pressure. The comparatively slighter strength of the wrist made it difficult for women telegraphists to write at the desired speed, and to produce the requisite number of copies.

“Women are more docile and amenable to discipline, they do light work as well as men, and are steadier in some respects; on the other hand, they more often remain away from work on the ground of trifling indisposition, are more likely to fail to meet severe demands, and show less intelligence in respect of tasks lying outside the course of their current work, and in general show less desire and less capacity for self-culture.”

Unquestionable is the greater suggestibility of women, doubtless dependent on organic peculiarities, in consequence of which they so quickly become subject to the influence of persons and opinions, when the latter exercise a sufficiently powerful effect upon their emotional life. The independent, the poietic,[26] are more distant from women, are more foreign to their nature, than in the case of men. But that these are quite impossible to them I am compelled to doubt. And when, for example, Havelock Ellis considers it unthinkable that a woman should have discovered the Copernican system, I need merely call to mind the widely known physical discoveries of Madame Curie, whose thoroughly independent work qualified her to succeed her husband as professor at the Sorbonne. We cannot therefore exclude the possibility that in the sphere of the natural sciences notable discoveries and inventions may be made in the future in consequence of the independent work of women.

Very interesting are the observations of Paul Lafitte on the differences between the higher intellectual qualities of man and woman. After drawing attention to the greater receptivity of woman, he says:

“When children of both sexes are educated together, during the first year the girls lead; at this time they have to do chiefly with the reception and retention of impressions, and we see every day that women put men in the shade by the vividness of their impressions and the excellence of their memory. In addition to this we must take into[75] account the inborn sense of women for symmetry, from which it is readily explicable that they generally receive geometrical instruction with very beneficial results. In correspondence with this, we find that woman students of medicine excel in the examinations in physiology and general pathology, and show a clearness of apprehension of series of facts which is really remarkable; on the other hand, they are distinctly inferior in clinical investigations, in which other intellectual qualities are involved. In general, women are more receptive for facts than for laws, more for the concrete than for general ideas. If we chance to hear an opinion expressed regarding someone with whom we are acquainted, a man’s opinion will probably be more accurate in the general outlines, but a woman’s will show a clearer perception of the nuances of character.”

Thus it is that among women concrete philosophers are greater favourites than abstract metaphysicians. According to the experience of a London bookseller, ladies of the West End of London prefer Schopenhauer, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Renan; that is to say, the most concrete, the most personal, the most poetical, and the most religious of thinkers. This last quality especially fascinates the mind of woman. At the same time, want of relationship between the strong suggestibility of woman and her slight power of independent production also strikingly manifests itself in woman’s position with regard to the religious phenomena of the spiritual life. Havelock Ellis shows that ninety-nine in every hundred of the great religious movements of the world have received their initial impulse from men. And yet it has always been women who have been the first to attach themselves to the founders of religions.

In contrast with this, women appear to possess more independent significance in the sphere of politics, as is shown by the fact that there has been such a large number of celebrated women rulers. Diplomatic adroitness, finesse, and self-command, to the extent to which these qualities favour political activity, are indeed specific feminine peculiarities.

The above-mentioned greater suggestibility of woman is connected with her greater emotivity; that is, woman reacts to physical and psychical stimuli more quickly than man. The “vasomotor theory” of the emotions, originated by Mosso and C. Lange, is true to a greater extent of woman than of man. Woman’s neuro-muscular system is more irritable, as is especially shown in the case of the pupil of the eye, and in that of the urinary bladder. By Mosso and Pellacani the bladder is termed the most sensitive psychometer in the body. Contraction of the bladder is well known to occur in many emotional states, such as fear, expectation, tension, and bashfulness. This is much commoner[76] in women and children than in men. The fact that in women under the influence of strong excitement there arises a powerful impulse to urinate, is a fact extremely well known to medical men and others with special opportunities for observation.

The greater neuro-muscular irritability of woman may also be explained as the result of the relatively greater size of her abdominal organs.

To this greater irritability of woman there corresponds a greater susceptibility to fatigue. It appears as a result of any long-lasting task; it is, in fact, a safeguard against over-exertion, which in man so commonly leads to complete exhaustion, because he works too long. The ease with which a woman becomes exhausted is no doubt partly dependent upon the physiological anæmia to which we alluded in the last chapter—to the larger quantity of water and the smaller quantity of red blood-corpuscles (erythrocytes) in her blood.

Havelock Ellis has detected a decline in the emotivity of modern woman, under the influence of custom and education, especially as a result of the great diffusion of bodily sports among girls. But he does not believe that anything of the kind can lead to a complete abolition of the emotional differences between the sexes, since these depend upon firmly established bodily differences, such as the greater extension of the sexual sphere and of the visceral functions in woman, upon woman’s physiological anæmia, and upon the more marked periodicity of her vital processes.

“So many factors work in combination, in order to give a basis for the play of the emotions, whose greater extension can be overcome by no alteration of the milieu, or of custom. The emotivity of woman may be reduced to finer and more delicate shades, but it can never be brought down to the level of the emotivity of the male sex.”

In respect of artistic endowment the male sex is unquestionably superior to the female. The long series of male poets, musicians, painters, sculptors, of the highest genius cannot be matched by any notable number of striking female personalities in the same sphere of artistic activity. Even the art of cooking has been further developed by men. Without doubt the differences in sexuality are the principal causes of this deficiency. The impetuous, aggressive character of the male sexual impulse also favours poietic endeavours, the transformation of sexual energy into higher plastic activity, as it fulfils itself in the moments of most exalted artistic conception. The greater variability of the[77] male also serves to explain the greater frequency of male artists of the first rank.

John Hunter, Burdach, Darwin, Havelock Ellis, and others, have shown that there exists a greater tendency on the part of man to divergence from type. In the course of evolution, man represents the more variable and progressive, woman the more monotonous and conservative, moiety of mankind. These differences find no less clear expression in the psychical sphere. Notwithstanding increasing individual differentiation—in truth, affecting only the minority, the élite among women, as Rosa Mayreder very rightly insists—this great difference in the variability of the sexes will ever continue. This biological fact is certainly of great importance in respect of civilization and of the relation between the sexes.

In a comparison between man and woman, the important fact of menstruation must never be forgotten. Menstruation is only the expression, only a phase, of a continuous undulatory movement in the entire feminine organism. The intellectual and emotional state of woman is, beyond question, a different one in different phases of the monthly cycle. Icard, and recently Francillon (“Essai sur la Puberté chez la Femme”—“Essay on Puberty in Woman,” pp. 189-198; Paris, 1906), have given us exact information on this subject.

“In all tests of strength and cleverness,” says Havelock Ellis, “the woman’s degree of strength and exactitude is related to the level of her monthly curve. Moreover, in every criminal procedure, the relation between the time of occurrence of the alleged crime and the accused’s monthly cycle should invariably be taken into consideration.”

The results obtained by Helen Bradford Thompson by experimental research in her “Comparative Psychology of the Sexes” (Würzburg, 1905) agree in general with the details we have already given as the result of earlier researches. In her experiment also

“man proved better developed in respect of motor capacity and accuracy of judgment. Woman had, indeed, sharper senses and a better memory. The opinion, however, that emotional excitement plays a greater part in the life of woman has not been confirmed. On the contrary, woman’s greater tendency towards religion and towards superstition is a proof of her conservative nature, of her function to guard established beliefs and modes of action.”

Thus we cannot expel from the world the fact that man and woman are eminently different alike physically and mentally. Whether, as Alfons Bilharz declares, they are really throughout[78] equivalent opposites, or, as he expresses the comparison, like +1 and -1, their sum is equivalent to nil, must remain at present undetermined. But that ineradicable differences exist is certain. There is no question here of an inferiority to man. What woman lacks on one side she has more of on another. She is through and through a creature constructed on other lines, standing nearer to Nature than man, and for this reason, like Nature, problematical, the great guardian of the secrets of Nature (Bärenbach).

says Platen, thus touching an aspect of ancient German sentiment, which has also found expression in the sanctum aut providum of Tacitus. Ovid, Byron, Börne, and Rousseau, have also described the wonderful and mysterious influence of woman’s nature, fundamentally different from that of man. Most beautifully has it been described by Theodor Mundt in the following magnificent passage of his book on Charlotte Stieglitz:

“The most secret elements of woman’s nature, in association with the magic mystery of her organization, indicate the existence in her of peculiar and deep-lying creative ideas, and in this wonderful riddle of love we find the sympathetic of the entire universe expressed. The sympathetic, which attracts and binds forces, the silent music in the innermost being of the world’s soul, by means of which the stars, the suns, bodies, spirits, are compelled to move in this eternal, changeable rhythm, and in this continuous opposition—is the feminine of the universe. This is the eternal feminine, of which Goethe says that it draws us heavenward. Therefore there is nothing deeper, more gentle, more unsearchable, than a woman’s heart. All-movable, it extends into that wonderful distance of existence, and hears with fine nerves the most hidden elements of existence. Touched and shaken by every sound, like a spiritual harp, the most hidden aspects of nature and of life often evoke in its strings prophetic oscillations. The feminine is something common to all life, the most gentle psyche of existence, and hence the fine connexion of the feminine nature with the general organizations, operations, and world forces; hence the mysterious force of attraction which exercises itself in such a magic manner as the true pole of sex, as though each one only in, and with, the true feminine could first find peace.... The ancients made a remarkable use of this idea of a common feminine element in human nature, inasmuch as by the name they gave to the pupil of the eye they expressed the idea that a young girl was to be found in every man’s eye. Young girls (pupillæ, κοραι)—these formed the centre of the human eye, as Winkelmann points out; and is it possible to describe the eye more aptly and distinctively, this radiant chiaroscuro of the hidden basis of the soul, than by ascribing femininity to it—femininity, which rises from that hidden basis of the soul as an Anadyomene rises from the deep?”

Nietzsche speaks also of the “veil” of beautiful possibilities with which woman is covered, and which makes the charm of her life. This undefinable spiritual emanation, this dark, irrational element in woman, led von Hippel to coin the clever phrase that woman is a comma, man a full-stop. “With man, you know where you are—you have come to an end; but with woman, there is something more to be expected.” From this inward nature of woman there proceed immense results: the feminine essence is a civilizing factor of the first rank; were woman wanting, civilization would be non-existent. Very beautifully has the great Buckle drawn attention to the indispensability of woman for the spiritual progress of mankind. He remarks that men, the slaves of experience and of fact, have only the women to thank for the fact that their slavery has not become much more complete and more narrowing. Women’s way of thinking, their spiritual care, their intercourse, their influence, diffuse themselves unnoticed through the whole of society, and take their place throughout its entire structure. By means of this influence, more than by any other cause, we men have been conducted, says Buckle, to a completely thought-out world.

This obscure, wonderful nature of woman has, however, its shadowy side. Upon it depends that primitive, deeply-rooted antipathy of the sexes, which is due to their profound heterogeneity, to the impossibility that they can ever really understand one another. Herein lie the roots of the brutal enslavement of woman by man in the course of history; of the belief in witchcraft; of contempt for women, and the continued renewal of theoretical misogyny. The victory of sexual love over this contrast is often apparent only. Leopardi, and Theophile Gautier (in “Mademoiselle de Maupin”), have shown how little woman understands the inner nature of man; how little man understands woman has been poetically described by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff.

For this reason, true love is an understanding of the contrasted natures, a solution of the riddle. “Être aimé, c’est être compris,” says Delphine de Girardin.

What significance for the so-called “woman’s question” has the determination of the existence of psychical sexual differences? We answer: The nature of woman, completely developed in all her peculiarities, and enriched throughout her being by all the spiritual elements of our times adequate to her being, ensures her an equal share in civilization and in the progress of humanity.

Complete equality between man and woman is impossible.[80] But are all sides of woman’s nature as yet adequately worked upon, fully developed? Is not the civilized woman of the future still to be created? The true nucleus of the woman’s movement is, I conceive, to be found in the emancipation of woman from the dominion of pure sensuality, and from the not less disastrous dominion of masculine spiritual arrogance. Have we men really any right to pride ourselves to such a degree upon our knowledge and intelligence? Should we without woman have advanced anything like so far?

A glance at the beginnings of human civilization should teach us a little modesty, for there we see that woman was equal, if not superior, to man in productive, poietic activity. Gradually only, in the progress of civilization, man supplanted woman, and monopolized all spheres of productive activity, whilst woman was limited more and more to domestic occupations. According to Karl Bücher, to women were originally allotted all the labours connected with the obtaining and subsequent utilization of vegetable materials, also the provision of the apparatus and vessels necessary for this purpose; to man, on the other hand, were allotted the chase, fishing, herding, and the provision of weapons and tools. Thus woman was engaged in threshing and grinding the grain, in baking bread, in the preparation of food and drink, in the making of pots, and in spinning. Since these occupations are largely conducted in a rhythmical manner, and the women worked together in the fields or in their huts, while the men hunted singly in the forests, it resulted that women were the first creators of poetry and music.

“Not,” writes Bücher, “upon the steep summits of society did poetry originate; it sprung rather from the depths of the pure strong soul of the people. Women have striven to produce it; and as civilized man owes to woman’s work much the best of his possessions, so also are her thought and her poetry interwoven in the spiritual treasure handed down from generation to generation. To follow the traces of woman’s poetry farther, in the intellectual life of the people, would be a valuable exercise. Although these traces have to a large extent disappeared, during the subsequent period of man’s poetic activity, which appears to have gained predominance in proportion as men monopolized the labours of material production, still, in a number of races the influence of woman’s poetry can be followed for a long way into the literary period.”

To a large extent men first learned from women the elements of the various handicrafts. For instance, as Mason says, primeval woman gave her “ulu”[27] to the saddler, and taught him the mode of preparing leather. Women were the first discoverers[81] of numerous industries and handicrafts. The further development of these in later times was the work of men; men alone understood how to differentiate their work, while from the first it was inevitable that motherhood should greatly limit the working powers of woman.

In the middle ages there still existed in Europe, especially in Germany and France, certain industries which were exclusively in the hands of women—for instance, the silk-spinners, silk-weavers, tailoresses, and girdle-makers. In all these occupations there were mistresses, maids, and female apprentices. It was not until the sixteenth century that manufactures became a monopoly of the male sex. In the eighteenth century women were actually forbidden by law to take part in manufactures, until in recent times a reaction in their favour took place.

Therefore we must not from the present conditions judge the capacity of women for practical activity outside the home. I quite agree with Gerland, who assumes that during this oppression of the female sex for thousands of years, a certain deteriorating influence must have been exercised, and I agree also with Havelock Ellis, who hopes much from the development in the civilization of the future of an equal freedom for man and woman, and who demands that we should acquire experience by unlimited experiment regarding the qualifications of the female sex for all departments of activity. Golden words as to the necessity for a comprehensive emancipation of woman were uttered in 1865 by the celebrated anthropologist Thomas Huxley, in his essay on “Emancipation—Black and White,” in which he strongly condemns the present system for the education of girls:

“Let us have ‘sweet girl graduates’ by all means. They will be none the less sweet for a little wisdom; and the ‘golden hair’ will not curl less gracefully outside the head by reason of there being brains within. Nay, if obvious practical difficulties can be overcome, let those women who feel inclined to do so descend into the gladiatorial arena of life, not merely in the guise of retiariæ, as heretofore, but as bold sicariæ, breasting the open fray. Let them, if they so please, become merchants, barristers, politicians. Let them have a fair field, but let them understand, as the necessary correlative, that they are to have no favour. Let Nature alone sit high above the lists, ‘rain influence and judge the prize.’”

And that men would maintain their old position cannot be doubted. The only change would be that women, too, would take part in the work of civilization.[28] They would introduce a[82] new and fresh element into this work; and inasmuch as every woman would be brought up systematically with a view to her life’s work, the physically and psychically disastrous idleness of unmarried young girls, of “old maids,” and of “misunderstood women,” would come to an end, and these unattractive types would pass away for ever. The work of mother and housewife must, in correspondence with these changes, be more highly esteemed than has hitherto been the case. The technique and the theory of domestic economy can even now, with sufficient intelligence devoted to the question, be remodelled and transformed to a satisfying activity.[29]

Woman is an integral constituent of the processes of civilization, which, without her, becomes unthinkable. The present moment is a turning-point in the history of the feminine world. The woman of the past is disappearing, to give place to the woman of the future; instead of the bound, there appears the free personality.

Appendix: SEXUAL SENSIBILITY IN WOMAN

An old and still unsettled subject of dispute is the strength and nature of sexual sensibility in woman. Whilst the manifestation of sexual appetite and sexual enjoyment in the male are fairly simple—and in man, as A. Eulenburg has proved, the copulatory impulse is much more powerful than the reproductive impulse—the sexual sensibility of woman is still involved in obscurity. Magendie remarked that no two women are exactly alike in respect of their sexual sensations and perceptions. There is no question that among women the varieties of erotic type are far more numerous than among men. Rosa Mayreder, for instance, distinguishes an erotic-eccentric, an altruistic-sentimental, and an egoistic-frigid type. The attempt has been made to prove that the last-named type is the most widely diffused—that it is, in fact, the characteristic type of woman. Lombroso and Ferrero were the first to maintain the slight sexual sensibility of woman; Harry Campbell took the same view; and recently a Berlin physician—Dr. O. Adler—has published a book on the “Deficient Sexual Sensibility of Woman,” the conclusions of which are that

“the sexual impulse (desire, libido) of woman is, alike in its first spontaneous origin and in its later manifestation, notably less intense than that of man; and further, that libido must first be aroused in a suitable manner, and that often it never appears at all.”

Albert Eulenburg, in an article in Zukunft (December 2, 1893), and later in his “Sexual Neuropathy,” pp. 88, 89 (Leipzig, 1895), first opposed this doctrine of the physiological sexual anæsthesia of woman, and quoted in support of his view the following passage from the writings of the celebrated gynæcologist Kisch:

“The sexual impulse is so powerful, in certain life periods it is an elementary force which so overwhelmingly dominates the entire organism of woman, that it leaves no room in her mind for thoughts of reproduction; on the contrary, she greatly desires sexual intercourse even when she is very much afraid of becoming pregnant or when there can be no question of any pregnancy occurring” (see Kisch, “The Sexual Life of Woman,” English translation, Rebman, 1908).

I have myself asked a great many cultured women about this matter. Without exception, they declared the theory of the lesser sexual sensibility of women to be erroneous; many were[84] even of opinion that sexual sensibility was greater and more enduring in woman than in man.[30]

When we actually consider the physical bases of feminine sexuality, we must admit that women’s sexual sphere is a much more widely extended one than that of men. The author of “Splitter” has very well characterized this fact when he says:

“Women are in fact pure sex from knees to neck. We men have concentrated our apparatus in a single place, we have extracted it, separated it from the rest of the body, because prèt à partir. They (women) are a great sexual surface or target; we have only a sexual arrow. Procreation is their proper element, and when they are engaged in it they remain at home in their own sphere; we for this purpose must go elsewhere out of ourselves. In the matter of time also our part in procreation is concentrated. We may devote to the matter barely ten minutes; women give as many months. Properly speaking, they procreate unceasingly, they stand continually at the witches’ cauldron, boiling and brewing; while we lend a hand merely in passing, and do no more than throw one or two fragments into the vessel.”

It is possible, however, that the greater extension of the sexual sphere in woman gives rise, if one may use the expression, to a greater dispersal of sexual sensations, which are not, as they are in man, closely concentrated to a particular point, and for this reason the spontaneous resolution of the libido (in the form of the sexual orgasm) is rendered more difficult.

Recently Havelock Ellis has made a searching investigation into the nature of the sexual impulse in woman. He found the following differences by which it was distinguished from the sexual impulse of the male:

2. It is more complicated, less readily arises spontaneously, more frequently needs external stimulus, while the orgasm develops more slowly than in man.

3. It develops in its full strength only after the commencement of regular sexual intercourse.

4. The boundary beyond which sexual excess begins is less easily reached than in man.

5. The sexual sphere has a greater extension, and is more diffusely distributed than in man.

6. The spontaneous appearances of sexual desire have a marked tendency to periodicity.[31]

7. The sexual impulse exhibits in woman greater variability, a greater extent of variation, than in man—alike when we examine separate feminine individuals, and when we compare the different phases in the life of the same woman.

This great extension of the feminine sexual sphere is illustrated, for example, by the case reported by Moraglia, of a woman who was able to induce sexual excitement by the masturbation of fourteen different areas of her body.

How much more woman is sexuality than man is can be observed in asylums, where the conventional inhibitions are withdrawn. Here, according to Shaw’s observations, the women greatly exceed the men in fluency, malignity, and obscenity; and in this relation there is no difference between the shameless virago from the most depraved classes of London and the elegant lady of the upper circles. Noise, uncleanliness, and sexual depravity in speech and demeanour, are much commoner in the women’s wards of asylums than on the male side. In all forms of acute mental disorder, according to Shaw, the sexual element plays a much more prominent part in woman than in man.

Another experienced alienist, Dr. E. Bleuler, confirms this permeation of woman with sexuality. In a recently published work he remarks:

“The whole ‘career’ in the average woman depends on sexuality; marriage, or some equivalent of marriage, signifies to her what to man a position in business signifies—viz., her ambition in all relations, the happily conducted struggle for simple existence, as well as for pleasure and for all else that life can bring, and only after these, sexuality also, and the joy of having children. Not to marry, and also extra-conjugal sexual indulgence, induce in woman inevitable consequences, with strongly marked emotional colouring; to the average man all this is a trifling affair, or it may even be a matter of absolute indifference. And we have further to consider the limits imposed by our civilization, which make it impossible for the well-brought-up woman to live, and even to think, as she pleases in sexual matters, and which demand the actual suppression of sexual emotions, not merely of the[86] outward manifestation of these emotions. Is it to be wondered at that in these circumstances, in mentally disordered women, we encounter once more the suppressed sexual feelings, those sexual feelings which really comprise at least half of our natural existence?—I say at least half, for the analogous impulse, the nutritive impulse, seems really to be inferior in strength to the sexual impulse, in civilized as well as in savage human beings.”

In the majority of cases the sexual frigidity of woman is, in fact, apparent merely—either because behind the veil prescribed by conventional morality, behind the apparent coldness, there is concealed an ardent sexuality, or else because the particular man with whom she has had intercourse has not succeeded rightly in awakening her erotic sensibility, so complicated and so difficult to arouse.[32] When he has succeeded in doing so, the sexual insensibility will in the majority of cases disappear. A striking example of this is seen in the following case:

Case of Temporary Sexual Anæsthesia.—Girl twenty years of age. Early awakening of the sexual impulses. Already practised onanism at the age of five years; often for the sake of sexual stimulation introduced hairpins into the vagina, until one day one of these remained, and had to be removed by operation. Notwithstanding this, she soon resumed masturbation, using for this purpose a finger, a candle, etc. Ultimately this became a daily practice, which she continued until she was eighteen years of age. She then first had sexual intercourse with a man, in which, however, she remained quite cold; this was the case also in subsequent attempts with this man and with others. Finally she met a man with whom she was in sympathy, who succeeded in inducing in her sexual gratification, by exchange of rôles, and corresponding alteration in the position in intercourse. Later, intercourse in the normal position also induced complete sexual gratification; since then onanism has been entirely discontinued, and in coitus the orgasm occurs speedily in one or two minutes.

Where sexual frigidity in woman is enduring in character, we have to do either with inherited influences, with sexual developmental inhibition, the psycho-sexual infantilism of Eulenburg, or with some disease (especially hysteria and other nervous disorders), and with the consequences of habitual masturbation.

Speaking generally, the sexual sensibility of woman is, as we have seen, of quite a different nature from that of man; but in intensity it is at least as great as that of man.

CHAPTER VI
THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT IN LOVE—RELIGION AND SEXUALITY

“The more dearly we understand how the indeterminate sexual attractive force of the most lowly organisms has, by a continuous addition of psychical elements, slowly developed into the love of the higher species of animals and of mankind, the sooner shall we be inclined to attribute to this sentiment the importance which it deserves. Then we shall no longer be able to regard it as an individual imagination, which has no relation to reality and no roots in the depths of life. It will become to us a measuring rule for the stage of evolution to which we have attained.”—Charles Albert.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER VI

Influence of the development of the brain upon the sexual impulse — Relations between speech and love — The psychic-emotional roots of love — Love as a product of civilization — Relation between the physical and the spiritual poietic impulse — The “function-impulse” of Dr. Santlus — Psychical sexual equivalents — Schopenhauer, Hirth, and Mantagazza, on this subject — Rôle of sexuality in the feelings of life — The organic necessity of love — Sexual philosophy — The Marquis de Sade — Otto Weininger — Max Zeiss — Relations of love to the individual feelings of personality — The reproductive impulse and the conjugative impulse — Love and love’s embrace as a personal aim.

The psychogenetic fundamental law of love — The way of the spirit in love — Its tendency from the general to the individual — From the remote to the proximate — Love as a transcendental and as a personal relationship.

The association of religio-metaphysical ideas with the sexual life — A general anthropological phenomenon — Anthropomorphistic-animistic explanation of the relation between religion and the sexual life — Billroth’s scientific analysis of religious perception — L. Feuerback, M’Lennan, and Tylor on this subject — My own description of the psychological processes in the association between the religious and the sexual life — The deification of love according to E. von Mayer — Strongest in women — Vicarious religions and sexual perceptions — History of religio-sexual phenomena — Religious prostitution — Single and repeated acts of religious prostitution — Sexual self-surrender to the deity or his representative — Defloration by divine symbols — Defloration deities among the Indians, the Jews, and the Romans — Religious defloration by representatives of the deity — The Babylonian Mylitta-cult — Diffusion and explanation thereof — Religious prostitution in India — Among primitive peoples — Bachofen’s brilliant explanation of religious prostitution as a counteraction to the individualization of love — Contempt for virginity among primitive peoples — Permanent religious prostitution — Sexual intercourse as a consecrated act — The temple-girls of the Greeks, Phœnicians, and Indians — The Indian “nautch-girls” — The sense of eternity in the religious and the sexual impulse — Sexual mysticism — Religio-erotic festivals — Their wide diffusion — Examples from antiquity, from India, and from Central and South America — Sexual mysticism in Christianity — Religio-sexual sects — The “unio mystica” — The primiz, or mystical marriage — Mariolatry — A religious poem.

Asceticism — Its origin — Metchnikoffs explanation of the origin of asceticism — Disharmonies of the sexual life — Psychology of ascetics — Their hypersexuality — Great antiquity and ubiquity of asceticism — The asceticism of the Indians, Mohammedans, and Christians — Preoccupation of Christian ascetics with sexual matters — Sexual visions — Dissolute sects — Monastic and cloistral life — Modern asceticism — Its difference from ancient asceticism — Its connexion with actual experiences — Example of Schopenhauer — Hitherto unpublished evidence of the relationship between his ascetic views and his own life — Tolstoi on the sorrows of voluptuousness — His relative[89] asceticism — Weininger’s renewal of early Christian asceticism — Its cause — Characteristics of Weininger’s book.

The belief in witchcraft — The principal source of all misogyny and contempt of women — Not a Christian discovery — Primeval association between sexuality and magic — The sexual origin of the belief in witchcraft — Devil’s mistresses — The predisponents of the medieval belief in witchcraft — Continuance of this belief into our own times — Rôle of sexuality in pastoral medicine — External and internal causation of the theological treatment of sexual problems — Sexual casuistic literature — The religious factor in the sexual life of the present day — Sexual excesses of modern sects — The revival of romanticism — Experiences of an elderly physician regarding religion and sexuality — Deprivation of love and satiety of love as sources of religious needs — Significance of the religious factor in the history of love — Subordinate rôle of this in the individualization of the sentiment of love.

CHAPTER VI

If, with Friedrich Ratzel, we understand by civilization the sum total of all the mental acquirements of a period, then also human love, this specific product of civilization, is merely a mirrored picture of the mental activities of the existing epoch of civilization. We can follow this way of the spirit in love from the primitive age down to the present day, and we can detect, in each successive epoch of civilization, the association with sexuality of peculiar spiritual states; and after thus passing in review the thousands of years of human history, we can discern once more in our own epoch the individual psychical elements which characterize the love of modern civilized man.

The increasing spiritualization and idealization of sensuality in the course of civilization, notwithstanding the persistence of the elementary intensity of the sexual impulse, is associated with the fact to which we have already alluded—namely, the preponderance of the brain characteristic of the genus homo—a preponderance which was unquestionably gradually acquired, and arose in consequence of an accumulation of original variations which gave their possessors a certain advantage in the struggle for existence.

Thus very gradually the primary, instinctive, still powerful animal ego underwent expansion into the secondary ego (in Meynert’s sense), into the spiritual personality, to which a fixed foundation was given by the possession of speech. With some justice the origin of speech has been singled out as extremely significant for the development of the feeling of love; and the conquest of the primitive animal instinct has been, above all, attributed to this faculty. A. Cabral, in his interesting work, “La Vénus Génitrix” (Paris, 1882, p. 155), expresses the opinion that speech and song developed solely on account of sexual relations; and he alludes in support of this view to the well-known manifold noises made by various animals in conditions of sexual excitement. It is very significant in this connexion that anthropological science has proved, as an important fact in racial psychology, that the development of poetry preceded that of prose.[33] The original form of speech was rhythmical noise, a[91] poem, a song. And we saw above that this was subservient to more suggestive purposes, and, above all, to sexual allurement. Thus the primitive natural connexion between speech and sexuality appears somewhat probable. With these earlier erotic noises and alluring tones were subsequently associated the first elements of intellectual comprehension, the first thoughts.

This “withdrawal of mankind from pure instinct,” which Schiller, in his essay on the earliest human society, describes as the “most fortunate and most important occurrence in human history,” from which time the struggle towards freedom may be said to begin, gradually enabled the higher feeling-tones of sensation to become more predominant. The elementary impulses became associated with sensations of pleasure and pain as psychical reactions. The “organic sensations” entered the sphere of consciousness, and so gave rise, in association and reciprocal working with the higher sensory stimuli, to the psychico-emotional roots of the impulses. Thus, in the sexual sphere, out of pure voluptuousness, the simple instinctive impulse towards copulation, arose love, whose essence is an intimate association of physical sensations with feelings and thoughts, with the entire spiritual and emotional being of mankind.[34]

“Love,” says Charles Albert, “is the result of all the forward steps of human activity in all departments, and in every direction, as manifested in their effects upon the sexual life. It is an advance which goes hand in hand with all other advances. Man is an inseparable whole, and in theory only can he be subdivided into separate faculties. In reality, indeed, all departments of human development are so intimately associated that progress in any one of them must place something to the credit of all.”

Increasing psychical refinement and differentiation of the human type, domination of the intelligence and of emotion over brute force, transformation of the social relations between man and woman in consequence of economic conditions or of religious and moral ideas, respect for personality, a secured provision for the most pressing vital needs, and a consequent elevation and complication of the sexual life, the influence of a longing for ideal beauty in a psychical and moral sense—all these and much more have contributed to constitute sexual love in the sense in which we understand and experience it at the present day. The speech[92] of the lover of our own time is the comprehensive expression of all human progress. The difference between animal rutting and the lofty sensation of love corresponds exactly to the gulf which separates primitive man, capable only of chipping for himself a few almost useless flint tools, from civilized man who, with the aid of innumerable machines, has tamed to his service the elementary forces of Nature.

We must recur to the earliest beginnings of the evolution of the human psyche in its association with sexuality, in order to understand the profound and primitive connexion between the bodily and the spiritual formative impulse; this connexion has been expressed by the saying that the sexual impulse is the father of all those intellectual impulses peculiar to man which have made him a thinker and a discoverer. In the time of Schelling’s natural philosophy, they went so far as to speak of the “testicular hemispheres” as analogous to the hemispheres of the brain. And is not this connexion also expressed etymologically (in German) in the verbal association of Zeugung (procreation) and Ueberzeugung (certainty, i.e., higher, or intellectual, procreation), and, further, by the fact that in the Hebrew tongue the ideas of “procreation” and “cognition” are jointly represented by a single term? And, returning to the physical sphere, it may be mentioned that, according to Moebius (“Ueber die Wirkungen der Kastration”—“Concerning the Effects of Castration,” Halle, 1906), sexuality is the common product of testicular and cerebral activity.

Plato was already aware of this relationship when he called thought a sublimated sexual impulse, and Buffon likewise when he described love as “le premier essor de la sensibilité, qui se porte ensuite à d’autres objets.” In more recent times, Dr. Santlus, in his valuable essay, “On the Psychology of the Human Impulses” (Archiv für Psychiatrie, 1864, vol. vi., pp. 244 and 262), alluded to this combination of the sexual sphere with the highest spiritual interests of mankind under the name of the “function-impulse.”

From these intimate relations between sexual and spiritual productivity is to be explained the remarkable fact that certain spiritual creations may take the place of the purely physical sexual impulse; that there are psychical sexual equivalents into which the potential energy of the sexual impulse may be transformed. Here belong numerous emotions, such as ferocity, anger, pain, and the productive spiritual activities which find their vent in poetry, art, and religion—in short, the whole[93] imaginative life of mankind in the widest sense is able, when the natural activity of the sexual impulse is inhibited, to find such sexual equivalents, the importance of which in the evolutionary history of human love we shall have later to study in further detail.

Interesting observations regarding this intimate connexion between the spiritual and the physical procreative impulse are to be found in the work of a thinker who made no secret of his intense sensuality, and in whose life and thought sexuality played a peculiar part—in the work of Schopenhauer. In his “New Paralipomena” he lays stress on the similarity between the work of productive genius and the modification of the sexual impulse peculiar to the human race. In another place in which, as Frauenstädt also insists, he is speaking from personal experience, he writes: “In the days and hours when the voluptuous impulse is most powerful, not a dull desire, arising from emptiness and dullness of the consciousness, but a burning longing, a violent ardour, precisely then also are the highest powers of the spirit available, the finest consciousness is prepared for its intensest activity, although at the moment when the consciousness has given itself up to desire they are latent; but it needs merely a powerful effort to turn their direction, and instead of that tormenting, despairing lust (the kingdom of darkness), the activity of the highest spiritual powers fills the consciousness (the kingdom of light).”

Georg Hirth, who, in the section of his “Ways to Love” entitled “Stark-naked Thoughts,” gives in aphorisms an interesting account of the psychology of love, affirms the “delightful phenomenon of a peculiarly active enhancement of our impulse to thought and production,” after erotic satisfaction, after a fortunate love-night. Very ably, also, has Mantegazza described the spiritual activity produced by a happy and victorious love.[35]

Many great thinkers have complained of the alleged impairment of pure spirituality by the sexual life, and have recommended asceticism in order to arrive at a truer internal enlightenment. This, however, would imply pulling up the roots of spiritual poietic [36] activity, the suppression of a rich inner life of[94] thought and feeling, the destruction of all true poetry and art. There would be left behind only the wilderness of a cold abstraction. Look at the letters of Abelard before and after his emasculation. Sexuality first breathes into our spiritual being the warm and blooming life.

“The world,” says Philipp Frey, “would be conceived by us in sharply bounded intellectual pictures, unless we saw it in the changing lights of our sexuality. From the green of gently dreaming desire, through the yellow of surging emotion, and from the blood-red of eager desire to the cool blue of satisfaction—all things appear to us in the light of our sexuality. Life would be better ordered if we were purely intelligible machines for the purposes of nutrition, work, and production. But without the dualism of desire and satisfaction, the world would become torpid in a great yawn.”

This intimate connexion between the psychic-emotional being and the sexual impulse gave rise to a deepening, a concentration, and an increasing intensity, of the feeling of love, whereby the latter becomes the most powerful influence affecting mankind in bodily and spiritual relations. Voltaire, in his “Pensées Philosophiques,” says aptly: “L’amour est de toutes les passions la plus forte, parce qu’elle attaque à la fois la tête, le cœur, et le corps.” That it is in love that the immediate admixture of organic processes most clearly manifests itself is a fact pointed out already by Aristotle, and among modems emphasized by Griesinger.[37]

Thus love discloses itself as a nucleus, the axis of the individual, and therewith also of the social life, a fact indicated already in Schopenhauer’s phrase, describing love as the “focus of the will,” and in Weismann’s expression “the continuity of the germ-plasma.” And we can easily understand that there are literary advocates of a consequent “sexual philosophy,” who base their view of the universe solely and entirely upon the sexual. To them the sexual problem becomes a world problem, eroticism expands into metaphysics. These sexual philosophers start from love to unveil the mysteries of life. The most celebrated advocate of such a sexual philosophy was the Marquis de Sade, of whom I have myself given an account in a pseudonymous[95] work entitled “New Researches concerning the Marquis de Sade” (Berlin, 1904). According to de Sade, it is only through the sexual that the world can be grasped and understood.

In a certain sense the antipodes of the Marquis de Sade is a remarkable sexual philosopher of our own time, the author of “Sex and Character,” Dr. Otto Weininger. His whole circle of thought also revolves exclusively round the sexual. It forms the basis, the starting-point of his exposition; though, indeed, it does so in a purely negative sense. For Weininger is the apostle of asexuality; to him the highest type of human being is the non-sexual, the one who renounces all sexuality. And woman, as the incorporation of sexuality, is to him “nothingness,” the “radically evil” which must be annihilated.

A positive sexual philosopher of a nobler kind than these two anomalous spirits is Max Zeiss, whose book, “Ragnarök, a Philosophico-Social Study,” was published at Strasburg in 1904. He regards work, effort, creation, the strife for material position, for honour and renown, only as subordinate aims for the attainment of one aim—love.

The ever more intimate association of love with the spiritual life, its increasing depth, the inclusion within its sphere of influence of all feelings and thoughts, necessarily give rise to a stronger development of the feeling of individual personality, which, in contrast with the earlier instinctive impulse, came more and more to dominate the amatory life. Now love gained at least an equal importance for the individual that in former conditions it had for the purposes of reproduction, and therewith subjectively the reproductive idea was unquestionably thrust into the background, in comparison with the idea of personal living, of personal enrichment and development, by means of love. Hegel says aptly (“Æsthetics,” Berlin, 1837, vol. ii., p. 186): “The sorrows of love, these frustrate hopes, the very state of being in love, the never-ending pains which the lover actually experiences, this never-ending happiness and joy to which he looks forward in imagination—these are matters devoid of all general interest; they concern only the lover himself.” Schleiermacher also insists, in his letters concerning “Lucinde,” on the great importance of love for the spiritual development of the individual.

The individualization of love has certainly resulted in a great decline in the predominance of the reproductive idea, of the subjective sense of race, without it ever being possible for it to lose its eminent objective significance. Nietzsche, therefore,[96] declares a “reproductive impulse” to be pure “mythology;”[38] and Carpenter, also, in his book, “Love’s Coming of Age,” says that human love is mainly a desire for complete union, and only in much less degree a wish for the reproduction of the race. The profound significance of individual love in the promotion of civilization is exceedingly well described by him when he says:

“Taking union as the main point, we may look upon the idealized sex-love as a sense of contact pervading the whole mind and body—while the sex-organs are a specialization of this faculty of union in the outermost sphere: union in the bodily sphere giving rise to bodily generation, the same as union in the mental and emotional spheres occasions generation of another kind.”

Proof of the fact that love, in its purely individual relations, is also of great importance for human civilization, that it is profoundly significant for the higher evolution of humanity, in addition to its importance for the perpetuation of the species—the proof of this thesis is very important in view of certain problems connected with the theory of population and in view of the practical conclusions deduced from that theory, as, for example, the doctrine of neo-malthusianism. Love and love’s embrace do not exist only for the purposes of the species: they are also of importance to the ego; they are necessary for the life, the evolution, and the internal growth of the individual himself.

And we must not fail to recognize to what extent the fact that the individual has gained much from love ultimately reacts also to the advantage of the species. For the species, as well as for the individual, the true path of progress lies in the direction of the individualization of the sexual impulses.

When we study in detail the gradual permeation of sexuality with spiritual elements, the gradual development of love, and its advance towards perfection by means of civilization, we ascertain that for the love of the modern civilized man there exists a kind of biogenetic, or rather psychogenetic, fundamental law. In[97] modern love we encounter all the spiritual elements which were actively operative in the love of past times; the love of the civilized man of the present day is an extracted, shortened, compressed repetition of the entire developmental course of love from the earliest times to the present day. And the general course of this development reappears also in the love of the individual.

This course is, to put the matter shortly, from the general to the individual, from the remote to the proximate. We can further divide the history of human love into two great epochs. In the first epoch, love was, above all, a transcendental relationship of a religio-metaphysical nature. The transcendental relationships played a more important part than the purely human and personal. Everywhere an ulterior element played its part. In the second epoch, love underwent an evolution into a more personal relationship, in which the human being himself took foremost place, as compared with any transcendental considerations. The history of love is, in fact, an illustration of Compte’s replacement of the theologico-metaphysical epoch of mental development by the anthropological. In individual love, however, there still remain active and demonstrable many transcendental elements. The oldest spiritual elements of love continue to form a portion of the content of modern love, and to play a more or less dominant part in its genesis.

To this primeval and psychical phenomenon belongs, above all, an intimate association between religious ideas and feelings and the sexual life. In a certain sense, the history of religion can be regarded as the history of a peculiar mode of manifestation of the human sexual impulse, especially in its influence on the imagination and its products.

Certain modern writers, members of the laity far from learned in the history of civilization, have considered the Roman Catholic Church pre-eminently responsible for the appearance of this sexual element in ritual and dogma. This, however, is grossly unjust. A scientific study of these relations teaches us that all religions exhibit to a greater or less degree this sexual admixture, and if this appears more prominent in the Roman Catholic Church, it is due, in the first place, to the fact that this religion is nearer to us in time than many of the religions of antiquity, and, in the second place, it is explicable on the ground that the Roman Catholic Church has always displayed greater openness and less hypocrisy than, for example, the Protestant pietists, who, as the Königsberg scandal, the Eva van Buttler affair, etc., show, are no less blameworthy in respect of sexual vagaries.

A really objective basis for an opinion regarding the relations between religion and sexuality can only be obtained when we cease to consider these relations as an affair of dogma and of the confessional, and study them upon the basis to which they properly belong—to wit, the anthropological. For these relationships are peculiar to the genus homo as such. The sexual element is quite as prominent in the religions of primitive peoples as in those of modern civilized nations.

Anthropological science has hitherto been occupied more with the fact than with the explanation of the remarkable relations between religion and sexuality. There can, however, be no doubt that these relations arise out of the very nature of mankind. The various anthropologists and physicians who have occupied themselves with these problems are in agreement upon this point: that the connexion between religion and the sexual life can be explained only on anthropomorphic-animistic grounds—that is, by the same kind of ideas which Tylor has proved to be the foundation of the primitive mental life.

Thus, the great physician and anthropologist Theodor Billroth doubts the existence of any pure religious perception entirely free from all sensual elements. In a letter to Hanslick, dated February 21, 1891, he writes:

“In my opinion, it is nonsensical to speak of a special religious perception. What we call by this name is either a purely fanciful and imaginative opinion, which may rise to the intensity of hallucination, and has for substratum any kind of imaginative product which excites a yearning in the believing or loving individual—or else, in fanatics, it is an actual erotic excitement, like the rhythmical prayer-movements of the Mohammedans, the dancing of the Dervishes, or the jumping of the Flagellants. The Church as bridegroom for the nun, as bride for the monk, has a similar signification. It is, in a certain sense, the continuation of the service of Isis, and of the festivals of Aphrodite and Bacchus. Man has always created his gods or his god in his own image, and prays and sings to him—that is, properly speaking, to himself—in the artistic forms of the period. Since the so-called divine is always a mere abstraction or personification of one or several human attributes in the highest conceivable potency, it follows that human and divine, worldly and religious, cannot really be of differing natures. Man cannot, in fact, think anything supernatural, nor can he do anything unnatural, because he never can think or act except with human attributes.”

This explanation coincides with the view of Ludwig Feuerbach, who has especially insisted on the anthropomorphistic element in religio-sexual phenomena in his essay “Concerning Mariolatry.”

M’Lennan and Tylor were among the chief discoverers of the animistic aspect of religio-sexual ideas. In a way analogous to[99] his attitude towards other phenomena, primitive man assumed the activity of spirits in explanation of the sexual impulse and everything associated therewith; and he paid divine worship to the sexual impulse, as the visible and palpable manifestation of those spirits.

I myself have more fully described this physiological process in a somewhat different manner (“Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. i., pp. 76, 77), and I quote here my account of the primitive deification of the sexual.

As something elemental, incredible, supernatural, the sexual impulse made its appearance in man’s life at the time of puberty; by its overwhelming force, by the intensity, spontaneity, and multiplicity, of the perceptions to which it gave rise, it awakened feelings which enriched, vivified, and inflamed the imagination in an unexpected manner. This phenomenon, overwhelming him with elemental force, filled primitive man with a holy fear. He ascribed it to a supernatural influence, and this supernatural influence became associated in his circle of perceptions with those others which he had previously experienced, and which had aroused in him the feeling of dependence upon one or several higher powers, before which he knelt in worship. To what an extent the metaphysical invaded the whole sexual life of man, Schopenhauer has clearly shown in his “Metaphysic of Sexual Love.” Religion and sexuality come into the most intimate association in this perception of the metaphysical and in this feeling of dependence; hence arise the remarkable relations between the two, and that easy transition of religious feelings into sexual feelings which is manifest in all the relations of life. In both cases the surrender, the renunciation, of the individual personality is experienced as a pleasurable sensation. Schopenhauer has described in a classical manner the metaphysical impulsive force of love striving onward towards the infinite and the divine, whose analogy with the religious impulse we cannot fail to recognize.

In his thoughtful book, “The Vital Laws of Civilization” (Halle, 1904, p. 52), Eduard von Mayer has also discussed the religio-sexual problem. He starts from the idea that man regarded as higher than himself that which he was unable to master, and, above all, hunger and love.

“The pains of ungratified hunger or love plough deep furrows, into which falls the seed of voluptuousness, of satisfied hunger, or of the joys of love. And to primitive man, to whom the entire universe is full of living beings, hunger and love also appear as divine powers, which pain and plague him until their will is satisfied.”

The association of sexuality with religion affects both sexes equally, although the phenomenon appears more intense in woman, and is more enduring in her, owing to the greater depth of her emotional life. The brothers de Goncourt, in their diary, describe religion as simply a portion of woman’s sexual life. Feminine sexual activity thus appears something religious, pious, holy. And those priests who pretended to “sanctify” by their love the women whom they seduced, were certainly more accurate, from the physiological point of view, than the Church was in its condemnation of carnal lust as sin and the work of the devil. In the middle ages it was a view commonly held in France that women who had intercourse with priests were in some sort sanctified thereby. The mistresses of priests were called the “consecrated.”

The identity of religious and sexual perceptions explains the frequent transformation of one into the other, and the continuous association between the two. A sexual emotion will often function vicariously for a religious emotion, in part or wholly.

The unusually interesting history of the complicated and remarkable religio-sexual phenomena renders clear to us individual processes of this kind and certain peculiarities of racial psychology; and thereby we are led to understand the powerful after-effects of these phenomena in the customs, the morals, and the conventions of our time, and we are enlightened as to the rôle still played by the religio-sexual factor in the life of many men even of our own day.

One of the oldest, if not the oldest, of religio-sexual phenomena is religious prostitution—the “lust-sacrifice,” as Eduard von Mayer happily expresses it—since therein the sexual act is regarded as a sacrifice made to the deity. We have here the unrestricted offering by a woman of her body to every chance comer without love, as an act of simple sensuality, and for payment, and thus we find all the characteristics of what at the present day we term “prostitution.”

According to the researches I have myself previously published regarding religious prostitution, this may be divided into two great groups:

A single act of religious prostitution mostly consists in the offering of virginity; sometimes also in the single, not repeated, offering of an already deflowered woman. In the single act of religious prostitution, the woman either offers herself directly to[101] the deity, the bodily act of defloration being effected by a divine physical symbol—as, for instance, by a penis made of stone, ivory, or wood—or by direct intercourse with the statue of the god; or else the woman gives herself to a human representative of the deity—for instance, to the king, to a priest, to a blood-relative (not seldom to her own father, this being a variety of religious incest), and sometimes to a passing stranger.[39]

With regard to the first mode of defloration, by means of a divine symbol, we have especially full reports from the East Indies. Here, in the sixteenth century, in the Southern Deccan, the Portuguese Duarte Barbosa first saw the religious defloration of girls effected by means of the “lingam,” the divine phallus. Girls aged ten years only were sacrificed to the deity in this brutal manner. From a later time come the accounts of Jan Huygen van Linschoten and Gasparo Balbi, regarding the customs of the inhabitants of Goa. The bride was taken into the temple, where a penis of iron or ivory was thrust into the vagina, so that the hymen was destroyed. In other cases, the girl’s genitals were brought into contact with the stone penis of an image of the god, at a shrine eighteen miles distant from Goa. W. Schultze, in his “East Indian Journey” (Amsterdam, 1676, p. 161a), relates:

“By means of this priapus, with the assistance of friends and relatives, the maiden was deprived of her virginity with force and in a painful manner; at the same time the bridegroom rejoiced that the foul and accursed idol had done him this honour, in the hope that as a result of this sacrifice he would enjoy greater happiness in his marriage.”

This process of defloration of Indian virgins by the lingam idol is confirmed by the reports of John Fryer, Roe, Jeon Moquet, Abbé Guyon, Démeunier, and others.

The god Baal Peor, worshipped by the Moabites and Jews, seems also to have possessed such a divine power of defloration. His name, “Peor,” “to open,” is supposed to relate to the destruction of the hymen.[40]

This relationship is more distinctly expressed in the names of certain gods of the ancient Romans, such as Dea Perfica, Dea Pertunda, Mutunus Tutunus, regarding whose functions in connexion with defloration, shown unquestionably by the etymology of their names, I have referred to at greater length in my[102] essay on “Ancient Roman Medicine” (published in Puschmann’s “Handbook of the History of Medicine,” p. 407; Jena, 1902).

For the honour of the sexual divinities, the bride was compelled, as Augustine, Lactantius, and Arnobius report, to seat herself upon the “fascinum”—that is, the membrum virile of the priapus statue—and in this way, either physically, or at least symbolically, sacrifice her virginity to the deity. According to the legend, the conception of Ocrisia was actually effected in this way![41]

According to the second method by which single acts of religious prostitution are effected, a representative of the deity exercises the latter’s right of defloration. It is a form of religious jus primæ noctis, which is given to the king, the priest, the father, and, above all, to a casual stranger, before the girl becomes the property of her husband or master. In cases in which the husband has effected defloration, the deity may be satisfied by the woman later giving herself once to his representative.

The best-known form of religious prostitution is the Mylittacult of the Babylonians, the worship of that goddess who, according to Bachofen, represents the uncontrolled life of Nature in its fullest creative activity, unchecked by any man-made laws—the goddess whose free nature is opposed to the constraining bonds of marriage. For this reason the goddess, as representative of the unrestrained nature principle, demands from every girl a free gift of herself to any man wishing to have intercourse with her. This demand is made in the name of Mylitta and in the temple devoted to her. The money paid by the man in return for his sexual indulgence belongs to the goddess, and is added to the treasures of the temple.[42]

Herodotus and Strabo give us additional accounts of this remarkable service of Mylitta. Women of rank, as well as those of the lower classes, must allow themselves to be possessed once by a stranger, and were not permitted to return home until they had given their tribute to the goddess. Moreover, the woman might not refuse herself to any stranger, whilst the man, on the other hand, had a free choice. Thus in this account we find all the characteristics of “prostitution” according to our present ideas.

This custom was abolished by the Emperor Constantine, as Eusebius informs us, in his biography of this Emperor. The accounts of Strabo and of Quintus Curtius show us that it had[103] persisted from the time of Herodotus to the time of Constantine; in Cyprus, Phœnicia, Carthage, Judea, Armenia, and Lokris, the Mylittacult was diffused.[43]

The true origin of this cult was a consecration to the deity, a tribute to the goddess of voluptuousness. Secondarily only, other elements may have entered into the practice, as, for instance, the later widely diffused assumption of the uncleanness and poisonous properties of the blood which was shed in the act of defloration. At the same time the religious idea of a “sacrifice” may have become associated with the idea of “self-surrender” to an utterly strange and unloved man, so that it is possible that at the root of this peculiar custom there lay a kind of masochism on the part of the woman, whilst we cannot fail to recognize the existence of a sadistic basis in the demeanour of the betrothed man or husband, surrendering the woman to a strange man; both of these elements—sadism and masochism—having here a religious signification.

In Eastern Asia, and among many savage races, priests played the part of representatives of the deity to whom the defloration of the girls and the newly-married was assigned; for instance, in the Indian sect of the “Mahārājas,” founded by Vallabha, in which “immorality was elevated to the level of a divine law.”[44]

These “great kings” assumed the part of deities who had an unlimited right of possession over the wives of the faithful—above all, the right of defloration. They proclaimed as the most perfect mode of honouring the god a complete surrender of the woman to the spiritual chief of the sect, for purposes of carnal lust—in exact imitation of the shepherdesses (“gopis”), the mistresses of the god Krishna. This took place during the pastoral games “rasmandali” in the autumn.[45] In addition, on account of his activity as deflorator, the priest received a present in the name of the deity. Abel Rémusat reports in his “Nouveaux Mélanges Asiatiques” (Paris, 1824, vol. i., p. 16 et seq.), following the account of a Chinese author of the thirteenth century, the peculiar methods employed in Cambodia for the purpose of religious defloration. Here the priests of Buddha or the priests of the Tao religion were carried in sedan-chairs to the girls awaiting them. Each girl had a candle with a mark on it. The “tshin-than[104]” (= adjustment of posture—that is, sexual intercourse) must be finished before the candle had burnt down to this mark!

The medicine-men and wizards among the Caribs of Central and South America, the “piaches” or “pajes,” had to effect the defloration of the young girls;[46] whilst among other primitive peoples this right was assigned to the chiefs.[47]

The talented and far-seeing Bachofen, one of the greatest of our investigators into the history and psychology of civilization, in his classical works upon “Matriarchy” and upon “The Legend of Tanaquil,” has very cleverly pointed out that religious prostitution in general arises from the primitive opposition to the individualization of love, instinctively felt by primitive peoples. In fact, in the religious view of sexual matters more value is placed upon the act than the person, the individual. Hence arises the slight esteem—so strongly opposed to our modern view—felt for physical and moral virginity in woman, which to us (whether rightly or not we will not now discuss) appears the symbol of feminine individuality. Waitz, Bachofen, Kulischer, Post, Ploss-Bartels, Rottmann, and other ethnologists, give additional accounts of the contempt, to us so remarkable, felt in primitive states for the virgin woman. The tragi-comic position of our own “old maids” is closely connected with this primeval sentiment.[48]

The facts we have just given regarding single acts of religious prostitution will pave the way for the understanding of permanent temple prostitution as a historical phenomenon.

Sexual self-surrender as a purely sensual act is associated with religious feeling. Thus in some cases a woman would experience a combination of ardent sensuality with intense religious feeling, would devote herself wholly to the service of the god, and in his name would permanently surrender her body; whilst in other cases the idea of a divine harem—in Indian belief every god has a harem—would find its earthly exemplar in temple prostitution, by means of which the deity would enjoy a number of women through the intermediation of men; or, finally, this custom would arise out of the primitive practice, according to which sexual intercourse, regarded as a religious act, customarily took place in a temple, or in some[105] consecrated room of a house. In support of this view, we may quote a significant utterance from Herodotus (chapter lxiv. of the second book of his “History”), who in ethnological matters had such accurate discrimination. He reports that among the Egyptians intercourse was strictly forbidden in the temples, and then says:

“For people of all nations, except the Egyptians and the Hellenes, are accustomed to copulate in holy places, and proceed after intercourse unwashed into the holy places; and they are of opinion that men resemble animals, and every one sees beasts and birds copulating in the temples of the gods, and in the consecrated groves. Now, if this were displeasing to the gods, the animals would not do it. Men, therefore, do this, and give this reason for it.”

This custom arose, without doubt, from the need for a religious sentiment, and from the wish to enter into direct communion with the deity, by remaining in the temple during the sexual act. When later the divine beings obtained their own consecrated women in the form of the temple-girls, it was no longer necessary for a man to take his own wife or some other woman into the temple, for now communion with the deity could be obtained by means of intercourse with the temple-girls. In the case of feminine deities a fourth cause or influence comes into operation in the production of temple prostitution, inasmuch as the courtesans, on account of their extreme beauty and their remarkable intellectual powers, were often regarded as representatives of the goddess. This explains how it happened that among the Greeks beautiful hetairae served as models for Praxiteles and Apelles, when these sculptors were making statues for the temple.

The sacred priests of Venus, the “kade-girls” of the Phœnicians, and the “hierodules” of the Greeks, were the servants of Aphrodite, and dwelt within the precincts of the temple. Their number was often very great. Thus in Corinth more than 1,000 female hierodules prostituted themselves in the precincts of the temple of Aphrodite Porne, and even within the temple.[49]

India, where the primitive phenomena of the amatory life can best be studied, is also the favourite seat of temple prostitution, since the religious view of the sexual life is nowhere so prominent as in the Indian beliefs.[50] The temple girls of India are known as “nautch-girls,” or “nautch-women.” Warneck writes regarding them:

“Every Hindu temple of any importance possesses an arsenal of nautch-girls—that is, dancing-girls—who, next to the sacrificial priests, are the most highly respected among the personnel of the temple. It is not long since these temple-girls (just like the hetairae of Ancient Greece) were among the only educated women in India. These priestesses, betrothed to the gods from early childhood, were under the professional obligation to prostitute themselves to every one without distinction of caste. This self-surrender is so far from being regarded as a disgrace that even the most highly placed families regarded it as an honour to devote their daughters to the service of the temple. In the Madras Presidency alone there are about 12,000 of these temple prostitutes.”[51]

Shortt gives further interesting details of these temple prostitutes, who are also known as “thassee.”

Religious prostitution is to a certain extent still practised in Southern Borneo; and in a newspaper published at Amsterdam—The German Weekly News of the Netherlands—the following account of the practice appears in the issue of July 30, 1907:

“In the Dyak country there are to be found in nearly every kampong (village) individuals known as ‘balians’ and ‘basirs.’ The balians are prostitutes who also perform medical services. The basirs are men who dress in women’s clothing, and in other respects perform the same functions as the balians, but not all the basirs act in this way. Balians and basirs are also commonly employed to perform certain religious ceremonies, on festal occasions, at marriages, funerals, births, etc. According to the nature of the festivity, five to fifteen of them officiate. The president of the balians and basirs goes by the name of the ‘upu’; usually the oldest and most experienced is chosen for this office. The upu sits in the middle, with the others to right and left. At an important festival the upu receives from twenty to thirty gulden; the others one to fifteen gulden. The further away that a balian sits from the upu, the smaller is her honorarium; the honorarium is called ‘laluh.’ The principal balians and basirs are known as ‘bawimait maninjan sangjang’—that is, ‘holy women.’ At the present time the basirs no longer exercise the immoral portions of their duties, because the Government inflicts severe penalties if they do so; moreover, they are not allowed now to appear in public in women’s clothing.”

Religion shares with the sexual impulse the unceasing yearning, the sentiment of everlastingness, the mystic absorption into the depths of life, the longing for the coalescence of individualities in an eternally blessed union, free from earthly fetters. Hence the longing for death felt by lovers and by mystically enraptured pietists, which has been so wonderfully described by Leopardi.[107] “The yearning for death felt by lovers is identical with the yearning for sexual union,” aptly remarks H. Swoboda, and he very rightly points out that many a suicide ascribed to “unfortunate love” is rather the result of a happy love.

Among primitive peoples, and in ancient times, religio-erotic festivals first gave an opportunity for the manifestation of this religio-sexual mysticism. In this the transition of religious ecstasy into sexual perceptions is very clearly visible, and in the sexual orgies in which these religious frenzies often found an appropriate finale we see the crudest expression of the relationship between religion and sexuality. In such cases sexual ardour appears to be equivalent to a prolongation and an increase of the religious ardour—fundamentally, radically coincident, as the natural earthly discharge of an ecstatic tension directed to the sphere of the remote and the metaphysical.

The fact that such sexual excesses are throughout the world found in association with religion, that since the very earliest times they have been connected with the most various forms of religion, proves once more that the origin of this relationship is dependent on the very nature of religion as such, and that it is not in any way due to the individual historic character of any one belief. It is, moreover, quite uncritical and altogether without justification for any modern writer to endeavour to make Roman Catholicism responsible for such an association; Roman Catholicism as such has as little to do with the matter as all other beliefs. Religio-sexual phenomena belong to the everywhere recurring elementary ideas of the human race (elementary ideas in the sense of Bastian); and the only way of regarding such phenomena that can be considered scientifically sound, is from the anthropological and ethnological standpoint.

This sexual religious mysticism meets us everywhere—in the religious festivals of antiquity, the festivals of Isis in Egypt, and the festivals of imperial Rome, both alike accompanied by the wildest sexual orgies; in the festivals of Baal Peor, among the Jews, in the Venus and Adonis festivals of the Phœnicians, in Cyprus and Byblos, in the Aphrodisian, the Dionysian, and the Eleusinian festivals of the Hellenes; in the festival of Flora in Rome, in which prostitutes ran about naked; in the Roman Bacchanalia; and in the festival of the bona dea, the wild sexual licence of which is only too clearly presented to our eyes in the celebrated account of Juvenal.

In India, the sect of Caitanya, founded in the sixteenth century,[108] celebrated the maddest religio-sexual orgies. Their ritual consisted principally of long litanies and hymns, stuffed full with unbridled eroticism, and followed by wild dances, all leading up to the sexual culmination, in which “the love of God” (bhakti) was to be made as clearly perceptible as possible.[52] Even worse were the Sakta sects (the name is derived from sakti, force—that is, the sensuous manifestation of the god Siva). They gave themselves up with ardent sensuality to the service of the female emanations of Siva, all distinctions of caste being ignored, and wild sensual promiscuity prevailing. Divine service always preceded the act of sexual intercourse.

Among the Kauchiluas, one of these Sakta sects, each of the women who took part in these divine services threw a small ornament into a box kept by the priests. After the termination of the religious festival, each male member of the congregation took one of these articles out of the box, whereupon the possessor of the article must give herself to him in the subsequent unbridled sexual excesses, even if the two should happen to be brother and sister.[53]

Ancient Central and South America were also familiar with wild outbreaks of a sexual-religious character. In Guatemala, on the days of the great sacrifices, there occurred sexual orgies of the worst kind, men having intercourse promiscuously with mothers, sisters, daughters, children, and concubines; and at the “Akhataymita festivals” of the ancient Peruvians, the religious observances terminated in a race between completely nude men and women, in which each man overtaking a woman immediately had sexual intercourse with her.[54]

Sexual mysticism found its way also into Christianity. When the renowned theologian Usener, in his work “Mythology,” writes in relation to these matters, “the whole of paganism found its way into Christianity,” we must point out that in our view what “corrupted” Christianity was not “paganism,” but the fundamental phenomena of primitive human nature, the primordial connexion between religion and sexuality, which by a natural necessity manifested itself in Christianity not less than in other religions.

Thus down to the present day we encounter the most peculiar manifestations of sexual mysticism in the most diverse Christian sects, and not merely in Roman Catholicism.

In the fourth century of our era, the Jewish-Christian sect of the Sarabaïtes concluded their religious festivals with wild sexual orgies, which are graphically described by Cassianus. This sect persisted into the ninth century. The later history of the Christian sects is full of this religio-sexual element. Religious and sexual ardour take one another’s place, pass one into the other, mutually increase one another. I need merely allude to certain points familiar in the history of civilization, and investigated and described by many recent students: the religio-erotic orgiastic festivals of the Nicolaitans, the Adamites, the Valesians, the Carpocratians, the Epiphanians, the Cainites, and the Manichæans. Dixon, in his “Spiritual Wives” (2 vols., London, 1868), has described the sexual excesses of recent Protestant sects, such as the “Mucker” of Königsberg, the “Erweckten” (“the awakened”), the Foxian spiritualists of Hydesville, etc. Widely known also is the peculiar association between sexuality and religion in Mormonism, polygamy being among the Mormons a religious ordinance.

Not only do Roman Catholicism and Protestantism exhibit such phenomena, but in the Greek Church also sexual mysticism gives rise to the most remarkable offshoots. Leroy-Beaulieu gives an account of the Russian sect of the “Skakuny,” or “Jumpers,” who at their nocturnal assemblies throw themselves into a state of erotic religious ecstasy by hopping and jumping, like the dancing Dervishes of Islam. When the frenzy reaches a climax, a shameless, utterly promiscuous union of the sexes occurs, of which incest is a common feature.[55]

Quite apart from these sectarian peculiarities, religio-sexual perceptions play a definite part in the ideas of present-day, truly pious Christians. The idea of a “unio mystica” between man and the Deity manifests itself everywhere.[56]

Albrecht Dieterich, in his learned work, “A Mithraist Liturgy,” contributes valuable material to the history of civilization concerning these mystical unions. The oldest heathen cults were familiar with the idea of love unions as a representation of the union of man with God; and in the New Testament the ideas of the bridegroom and the marriage feast play a leading part. Christ is the “bridegroom” of the Church, the Church is His “bride.” Pious maidens and nuns are happy to call themselves the brides of Christ. This ecstatic union has always as its substratum a sexual imagination. Augustine says: “Like a bridegroom[110] Christ leaves His bridal chamber; in the mood of a bridegroom He bestrides the field of the world.”

The literature, the theology, the visions, and the plastic art of the middle ages abound in embellishments of the mystical marriage. St. Catherine of Siena and St. Theresa were favourite objects of this form of art. The baroque artist Bernini, in his representation of St. Theresa, in the Church Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, has painted a truly modern “alcove scene,” so that a mocking Frenchman, President de Brosses, said, speaking of this picture, “Ah, if that is divine love, I know all about it.”

On October 8, 1900, when Crescentia Höss, of Kaufbeuren, was canonized in the Peterskirche, a picture was exhibited in which was depicted the mystical union between the new saint and the Redeemer. To the picture was attached a Latin inscription signifying, “Our Lord Jesus Christ presents to the virgin Crescentia, in the presence of the most holy Mother of God and of Crescentia’s guardian angel as groomsman, the marriage ring, and weds her.” The novice about to become a nun appears before the altar dressed as a bride, in order to wed herself eternally to Christ; and in the life of the common people we find an even more realistic view is taken of this mystical marriage. A celibate priesthood appears to the peasant, notwithstanding all the respect that he has for the clerical vocation, as something strange and incomprehensible; he regards the “primiz,” the first mass of the newly ordained priest, as a marriage which the most reverend priest celebrates with the Church, and for this purpose the Church is represented by a young girl. This is at the present day still a popular custom in Baden, Bavaria, and the Tyrol. In this ceremony, which does not lack a poetic aspect—it is admirably described by F. P. Piger in the Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde, 1899—the peasants who are present make the coarsest and most pointed jokes, and as soon as the celebration is finished, they withdraw, in the company of the “holy” bride, to a public-house, where “they need not be embarrassed by the presence of the reverend priest.”

The intimate association between sexuality and religion in these mystical unions and marriages has been shown by Ludwig Feuerbach in his treatise, “Ueber den Marienkultus” (“On Mariolatry”), Complete Works, Leipzig, 1846, vol. i., pp. 181-199. A very interesting instance of this is also afforded by the following religious poem, which appears in a poetical devotional work, at one time very widely diffused among the feminine[111] population of France (“Les Perles de Saint François de Sales, ou les plus belles Pensées du Bienheureux sur l’Amour de Dieu,” Paris, 1871):

In addition to religious prostitution and to sexual mysticism, two other religious manifestations show an intimate relationship with the sexual life, are, indeed, in part of sexual origin—namely, asceticism and the belief in witchcraft.

Neither of these is, as has often been maintained by superficial writers, peculiar to the Christian faith. As Nietzsche says, Eros did not poison Christianity alone; asceticism and the belief in witchcraft are common anthropological conceptions, met with throughout the history of civilization, and arising from the primitive ardour of religious perceptions.

To what degree is the high estimation of asceticism—that is, the view that earthly and eternal salvation are to be found in[112] complete sexual abstinence—associated with the religious sentiment? Religion is the yearning after an ideal, a belief in a process of perfectibility. To such a belief the sexual impulse and everything connected with it must appear as the greatest possible hindrance to the realization of the ideal, because nowhere else is the disharmony of existence so plainly manifest as in the sexual life.

In the fifth chapter of his work on “The Nature of Man,” Metchnikoff has collected all the numerous disharmonies of the reproductive organs and the reproductive functions, in consequence of which the modern man, become self-conscious, suffers so severely. Among these disharmonious phenomena in social life, Metchnikoff enumerates, inter alia, the troublesome, painful, and unæsthetic menstrual hæmorrhage in women, which all primitive peoples regarded as something unclean and evil; the pains of childbirth; the asynchronism between puberty and the general maturity of the organism, the latter occurring much later than the former, and thus giving rise to temporal inequalities of development in different parts of the sexual functions, causing, for example, masturbation actually before the development of spermatozoa; the long interval that commonly elapses between the onset of sexual maturity and the conclusion of marriage; the numerous disharmonious phenomena occurring in connexion with the decline of reproductive activity at a later stage of life, when marked specific excitability and sexual sensibility often persist after the capacity for sexual intercourse has been lost; and finally the disharmonies in sexual intercourse between man and woman.

According to Metchnikoff, this disharmony of the sexual life, from the earliest to the most advanced age, is the source of so many evils, that almost all religions have harshly judged and severely condemned the sexual functions, and have recommended abstinence from coitus as the best means for the harmonious and ideal regulation of life.

In addition to this, we have to take into consideration the opposition between spirit and matter, deeply realized already by primitive man. The sexual, as the most intense and most sensuous expression of material existence, was opposed to the spiritual, and was regarded as an unclean element, which must be fought, overcome, and, when possible, utterly uprooted, in favour of the spiritual life. In one of the most ancient of mythologies the first recorded instance of the gratification of sexual desire resulted in excluding man for ever from “Paradise”—in excluding[113] him, that is to say, from the highest kind of spiritual existence. The principal psychological characteristic of asceticism is therefore to be found, not only in the vow of poverty, but, in addition, and even more, is it found in sexual abstinence, in the battle against the “flesh” (“caro,” to the fathers of the early Church, always denoted the genital organs).

What is, however, the inevitable consequence of this continual battle with the sexual impulse? Weininger expressed the opinion (“Sex and Character,” p. 469, second edition; Vienna, 1904): “The renunciation of sexuality kills only the physical man, and kills him only in order, for the first time, to ensure the complete existence of the spiritual man”; but this is entirely false, and proceeds from an extremely deficient knowledge of human nature. For the “renunciation of sexuality” is, in truth, the most unsuitable way of securing a complete existence for the spiritual man. Just as little will it annihilate the physical man. For he who wishes to overcome and cast out the sexual impulse (powerful in every normal man, and at times overwhelming in its strength) must keep the subject constantly before his eyes, for ever in his thoughts. Thus it came to pass that the ascetic was actually more occupied with the subject of the sexual impulse than is the case with the normal man. This was favoured all the more by the ascetic’s voluntary flight from the world, by his continuous life in solitude—a life favourable to the production of hallucinations and visions, and one which becomes tolerable only by a sort of natural reaction in the form of a luxuriance of imaginative sensuality. For

This “inquiétude,” this intensification of the nervous life in all relations, was especially noticeable in the sexual sphere. Visions of a sexual character, erotic temptations, mortifications of the flesh in the form of self-flagellation, self-emasculation and mutilations of the genital organs, are characteristic ascetic phenomena. On the other hand, the excessive valuation and glorification of the pure spiritual led not only to the view that matter was something in its nature sinful and base, but also led[114] directly to sexual excesses, for many ascetic sects declared that what happened to the already sinful body was a matter of indifference, that every contamination of the body was permissible. Hence is to be explained the remarkable fact of the occurrence of natural and unnatural unchastity in numerous ascetic sects.

Sexual mortification and sexual excesses—these are the two poles between which the life of the ascetic oscillates, so that we see in each case a marked sexual intermixture. Asceticism is, therefore, often merely the means by which sexual enjoyment is obtained in another form and in a more intense degree.

Asceticism is as old as human religion, and as widely diffused throughout the entire world. We find individual ascetics among many savage peoples; ascetic sects, especially among the ancient and modern civilized races, in Babylon, Syria, Phrygia, Judæa, even in pre-Columbian Mexico, and most developed in India, in Islam, and in Christianity.

The Indian samkhya-doctrine, demanding increased self-discipline, “yoga,” which was based upon the opposition between spirit and matter, led to the adoption of asceticism in Buddhism and in the religion of the Jains, also to the foundation of ascetic sects, such as the “Acelakas,” the “Ajivakas,” the “Suthrēs” or “Pure,” who, according to Hardy, “are in their life a disgrace to their name.” Yogahood attained its highest development among Sivaitic sects of the ninth to the sixteenth centuries; these alternated between uncontrolled satisfaction of the rudest sexual impulses and asceticism pushed to the point of self-torture.

In Islam it was the sect of the Sufi in which the relation between sexuality and asceticism was especially manifest; but before this Christianity had developed asceticism into a formal system, and had deduced its most extreme consequences. To the early Christians, only the nutritive impulse appeared natural; the sexual impulse was debased nature; physical and psychical emasculation were actually recommended in the New Testament writings (cf. Matt. xix. 12). Already in the second century of the Christian era numerous Christians voluntarily castrated themselves, and in the fourth century the Council of Nicæa found it necessary to deal with the prevalence of this ascetic abuse, and with the predecessors of the modern “skopzen.”[57]

Numerous ascetics and saints withdrew into solitude in order to attain salvation by castigation of the body. But it is very noteworthy that they almost all lived and moved exclusively in the sexual, and that, in the way already explained, they came to occupy themselves incessantly with all the problems of the sexual life.

The writings of the saints are full of such references to the vita sexualis, and are, therefore, a valuable source for the history of ancient morals. Nothing was so interesting to these ascetics as the life of prostitutes and the sexual excesses of the impious. Numerous legends relate the attempts of the saints to induce prostitutes to abandon their profession, and to turn to a holy life, and the work of Charles de Bussy, “Les Courtisanes Saintes,” shows the result of these labours. St. Vitalius visited the brothels every night, to give the women money in order that they might not sin, and prayed for their conversion.

Thus, in the case of the ascetics, whose thoughts were continually occupied with sexual matters, the sole result of their castigation, self-torture, and emasculation, was to lead their sexual life ever wider astray into morbid and perverse paths. The monstrous sexual visions of the saints reflect in a typical manner the incredible violence of the sexual perceptions of the ascetics. To use the words of Augustine, how far were these unhappy beings from the “serene clearness of love,” how near were they to the “obscurity of sensual lust!” These visions, these “false pictures,” allured the “sleepers” to something to which, indeed, in the awakening state they could not have been misled (Augustine, “Confessions,” x. 30). The forms of beautiful naked women (with whom, moreover, the ascetics often really lay in bed in order to test their powers) appeared to them in dreams. Fetichistic and symbolic vision of an erotic nature pestered them, and led to the most violent sensual temptations, until in the sects of the Valesians, the Marcionites, and the Gnostics they resulted in sexual excesses. Marcion, the founder of the well-known sect named after him, preached continence, but maintained that sexual excesses could not hinder salvation, since it was only the soul that rose again after death! The Gnostics oscillated between unconditional celibacy and indiscriminate sexual indulgence. As late as the nineteenth century an ascetic mystic led the Protestant sect of Königsberg pietists into the grossest sensual excesses.

From asceticism arose monasticism and the cloistral life, to which the considerations above given fully apply. The undeniable[116] unchastity of the medieval cloisters, which found its most characteristic expression in denoting brothels by the name of “abbeys,” and, above all, in popular songs and in folk-tales, also shows us very clearly the relations between religious asceticism and the vita sexualis.

The idea of asceticism has not lost its primitive force even at the present day, and retains it for certain men not under the influence of the Church. But the character and origin of this modern asceticism are different. We understand it when we remind ourselves of the saying of Otto Weininger, this typical adherent of “modern” asceticism, that the man who has the worst opinion of woman is not the one who has least to do with them, but rather the one who has had the greatest number of bonnes fortunes (“Sex and Character,” p. 315).

The ascetics of early Christianity first denied sexuality—for example, by self-castration, or by flight into solitude—in order subsequently to affirm it the more strongly. Our modern fin-de-siècle ascetics, above all, the three most successful literary apostles of asceticism—Schopenhauer, Tolstoi, and Weininger—at first affirmed their sexuality most intensely, in order subsequently to deny it in the most fundamental manner. They studied voluptuousness, not merely in the ideal, but also in reality. For this reason, also, they have furnished us with more valuable conclusions regarding its nature and its significance in the life of individual men than we can obtain from the visions of the early Christian ascetics. This is true above all of Schopenhauer and Tolstoi.

Schopenhauer had first to endure in his own person the whole tragedy of voluptuousness, to experience the elemental force of the sexual impulse, the “enmity” of love (see his own account given to Challemel-Lacour), before he proceeded to grasp the full significance of the ascetic idea. His asceticism is intimately associated with his sensuality, and with the consequences of its activity. I believe that I have myself recently furnished a striking proof of this fact by the publication of a hitherto unknown holograph manuscript of the philosopher,[58] by which it is clearly established that he had suffered from syphilitic infection. In this connexion we find the explanation of the close relationship which Schopenhauer himself postulated between the “wonderful venereal disease” and asceticism. From his own utterances[117] regarding syphilis, and, above all, from the fact that he himself had suffered from the disease, we are able to grasp the significance that syphilis had in the conception of his ascetic views, which were developed under the immediate influence of his experiences, sorrows, and passions; whereas in old age, when the elemental force of the sexual impulse, and the unhappy consequence of yielding to it, no longer troubled him, there appeared in his thought a distinctly happier colouring.

Tolstoi also recognizes without reserve how much he had been affected by voluptuousness. “I know,” he says, “how lust hides everything, how it annihilates everything, by which the heart and the reason are nourished.” Lack of continence on the part of men is, in his view, the cause of the stupidity of life. Tolstoi’s conception of asceticism is, however, by no means identical with the early Christian, the Buddhistic, and the Schopenhauerian asceticism. In the beautiful saying, “Only with woman can one lose purity, only with her can one preserve it,” lies the admission that absolute chastity is an unattainable ideal, and that man can reach only a relative asceticism. We should hold fast to this utterance in Tolstoi’s teaching, which is in no way systematically developed, and should ignore his insane doctrine of the unchastity of married life. Later, during our discussion of the so-called “problem of continence,” we shall return to this idea of a relative continence, and of the good that lies therein.

Weininger, whose views are unquestionably strongly pathological, recurs wholly to the ideas of early Christian asceticism. According to him, “coitus in every case contradicts the idea of humanity”! Sexuality debases man, reproduction and fertility are “nauseating.”[59] Man is not free, only because he has originated in an immoral manner! In woman he denies again and again the idea of humanity. The renunciation, the conquest of femininity, it is this that he demands. Since all femininity is immorality, woman must cease to be woman, and must become man![60]

Georg Hirth has described Weininger’s book as “an unparalleled crime against humanity.”[61] Since, however, Probst, in his psychiatric study of Weininger, has brought forward evidence to[118] show that in Weininger’s book we have to do with the work of a lunatic, the author of this crime cannot at any rate be held responsible. It is only to be regretted that so many readers have been led astray by the presence of isolated thoughtful passages in the book to take Weininger in earnest as a “thinker,” and even in company with the bizarre August Strindberg to believe that Weininger has solved “the most difficult of all problems”!

Very significant and influential even down to the present day are the relations between religion and sexual sentiments exhibited in the belief in witchcraft.[62] This belief, extending backwards to the most remote age, is the principal source of all misogyny and contempt for women—of which fact we cannot too often remind our modern misogynists, in order to make clear to them the utter stupidity, the primitiveness, and the atavistic character of their views.

Here, again, we must first show the falsity of the view that the belief in witches is a specifically Christian experience. To the diffusion of this error the celebrated work of J. Michelet, “La Sorcière,” has especially contributed, for in this book the witch is represented as a Christian medieval discovery. But the Christian religion, as such, is as little blameworthy for this belief as are all the other confessions of faith. The belief in witches, with its religio-sexual basis, is a primitive general anthropological phenomenon, a fixture, a part of primitive human history arising from the primeval relations between religious magic and the sexual life.

“When we look deeply into the province of psychology,” says G. H. von Schubert, “we not only suspect, but recognize with great certainty, that there exists a secret combination between the activities of the animal carnal sexual impulse and the receptivity of human nature for magical manifestations.

“We stand here in the depths of the abyss in which the lust of the flesh becomes inflamed to the lust of hell, and in which the flesh, with all its indwelling forces of sin and death, celebrated its greatest triumph over the spirit appointed by God to command the flesh.”[63]

The animism of primitive man, and of savage man at the present day, sees in all frightful natural phenomena shaking his innermost being to its foundation the manifestation and action of demons and sorcerers. The rutting impulse also, which[119] attracts primitive man to woman, appears to him to be due to the influence of a demon, and soon woman herself came to seem to man something uncanny, something magical. Thus, in its origin the belief in witchcraft arises from the sexual impulse, and throughout its history sorcery in all its forms remained associated with the sexual impulse.

This sexual origin of the belief in witches and in magic has been carefully described by the celebrated ethnologist K. Fr. Ph. von Martius, on the basis of his observations amongst the indigens of Central Brazil. “All sorcery arises from rutting,” said an old Indian to him.

Magic propagates itself by means of sexual desire, and, according to Martius, will predominate among primitive peoples as long as these remain unchaste.[64] Secret arts, voluptuousness, and unnatural vice are inseparable one from another. This is proved by the entire history of human civilization and morals. Among the indigens of Brazil, the “pajé” or “piache,” the sorcerer or medicine-man, plays the same part as the medieval or Christian witch.

Sorcerers and witches are, above all, experienced in the sexual province; popular belief always turns first to this subject. The witches of ancient Rome resemble those of the middle ages in respect of their evil practices in sexual relations. According to J. Frank, the word “hexe” (witch) is derived from “hagat”—that is, “vagabond woman.” The ascetic view of the middle ages, formulated principally by men, saw in woman one who seduced man to sensual, sinful lust, the personification of the Evil One, the “janua diaboli,” and, ultimately, a female demon and a witch, whose very being is an impersonation of the obscene and the sexual. The doctrines of Original Sin and of the Immaculate Conception had unquestionably an important share in this conception of woman.

The idea of woman as a witch turned almost exclusively on the sexual, and the witch was for the most part represented as a “mistress of the devil” (cf. W. G. Soldan, “History of Witch-Trials,” pp. 147-159; Stuttgart, 1843), in which sexual perversion plays the principal part, since, instead of simple sexual intercourse, the most horrible unnatural vice was assumed to occur.

Holzinger, in his valuable lecture on the “Natural History of[120] Witches,” characterized the spiritual and moral condition of the time, which brought forth such an idea, in a few apt words:

“Whilst in the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, as those well acquainted with the state of morals during this period can all confirm, a most unbounded freedom was dominant in sexual relations, the State and the Church were desirous of compelling the people to keep better order by the use of actual force, and by religious compulsion. So forced a transformation in so vital a matter necessarily resulted in a reaction of the worst kind, and forced into secret channels the impulse which it had attempted to suppress. This reaction occurred, moreover, with an elemental force. There resulted widespread sexual violence and seduction, hesitating at nothing, often insanely daring, in which everywhere the devil was supposed to help; every one’s head was turned in this way, the uncontrolled lust of debauchees found vent in secret bacchanalian associations and orgies, wherein many, with or without masquerade, played the part of Satan; shameful deeds were perpetrated by excited women and by procuresses and prostitutes ready for any kind of immoral abomination; add to these sexual orgies the most widely diffused web of a completely developed theory of witchcraft, and the systematic strengthening by the clergy of the widely prevalent belief in the devil—all these things woven in a labyrinthine connexion, made it possible for thousands upon thousands to be murdered by a disordered justice and to be sacrificed to delusion.”

The study of the witch-trials of the middle ages and of recent times—for it is well known that in the seventies of the nineteenth century (!) such trials still occurred [65]—would without doubt afford valuable contributions to the doctrine of psychopathia sexualis, and at the same time would throw a remarkable light upon the origin of sexual aberrations.

What a large amount of sexual abnormality arises even to-day from this common, human, obscure, superstitious impulse dependent upon the intermixture of religious mysticism and sexual desire, and which in the medieval belief in witches attained such astonishing development!

As Michelet proved in his great work on “Sorcery,” it was the religious imagination straying into sexual by-paths, which for the most part animated the belief in witchcraft, and thus led to the most horrible aberrations, principally of a sadistic nature.

Like superstition, so also the sexual-religious obsession of the[121] middle ages, still persists in many persons, even at the present day, and gives rise to sexual anomalies.

Apart from asceticism and the belief in witchcraft, theological literature offers numerous instances of the relationship between religion and sexuality.

In an essay published six years ago,[66] I showed the important part which sexual questions have played in the so-called pastoral medicine—that is to say, in those theological writings in which the individual facts and problems of medicine are studied from the theological standpoint, and their relation to dogma is determined. We find here theological casuistry carried to its extreme limits, in relation to all possible problems of the vita sexualis. The experiences of the confessional are employed in a remarkable manner, the religious imagination wandering, in a peculiar combination of scholasticism and sensuality, in the obscure fields of human aberration.

The ostensible inducement to the theological consideration of sexual problems is in part offered by the statements of perverse individuals in the confessional, and in part by public scandals. In both cases casuistry endeavours, from the religious standpoint, to formulate certain normal rules for the judgment of the various matters relating to the sexual life. This would, however, have been impossible, had there not existed an intimate connexion between sexuality and religion.

Only in this way is it possible to explain the origin of the gigantic literature of sexual casuistry in theology, and especially in pastoral medicine. A comprehension of these facts has led certain writers to launch bitter invectives against the system of which the confessional formed so essential a part. This is a narrow and prejudiced view, which we mention only to condemn. There is, however, ample justification for the representations of physicians and anthropologists, who are able to observe matters in the great connexion sketched above, and who have recognized the relations between religion and the sexual life to be something common to all humanity, not the artificial products of any particular spiritual tendency. It is precisely the frequent endeavours of the Catholic Church to overcome the worst outgrowths in this direction, which teach us, notwithstanding their failure to eradicate sexual aberrations, that these relationships depend upon the very nature of religion.

There is not a single sexual problem which has not been discussed[122] in the most subtle manner by the theological casuists,[67] so that their writings offer us a most instructive picture of imaginative activity in the sexual sphere.

The most detailed discussion, verging on the salacious, of the degree to which sexual contact is permissible, gave rise to the name “theologiens mammillaires,” because some of them—Benzi, for example, and Rousselot—sanctioned “tatti mammillari” (mammillary palpation). This doctrine was condemned by Pope Benedict XIV., which proves that the Catholic Church as such has not invariably sanctioned these things.

In the “Golden Key” (“Llave de Oro”) of Antonio Maria Claret, the Archbishop of Cuba, in Debreyne’s “Moechialogie,” in the writings on moral theology of Liguori, Dens, and J. C. Saettler, in the “Diaconales,” widely diffused in France, and in many similar works, all possible sexual problems which have come before the confessional, or possibly might come there, have been thoroughly discussed—even the most improbable and impossible. Coitus interruptus, irrigatio vaginæ post coitum, pollutions (nocturnal seminal emissions), bestiality, necrophilia, figuræ Veneris (positions in which coitus is effected), procuration, various kinds of caresses, conjugal onanism, abortion, varieties of masturbation, pæderasty, intercourse with a statue (!), psychical onanism, pædication, etc.—all have been subjected to a subtle critical theological analysis. In a sense, these writings are really valuable mines for the study of psychopathia sexualis. Later we shall have frequently to touch on the religious etiology of the individual sexual aberrations.

From the preceding discussion it appears quite clearly that the relations between religion and the vita sexualis are to be regarded as general anthropological phenomena, and not as peculiarities arising by chance, the accidental results of beliefs, time, or race. The modern physician, jurist, and criminal anthropologist must therefore pay the most careful attention to the religious factor in the normal and abnormal sexual life of mankind, if he wishes to arrive at an unprejudiced and undisturbed knowledge of sexual anomalies. Havelock Ellis has also laid stress on the leading significance of religious sexual perceptions. He proved that small oscillations of erotic feelings accompany all[123] religious perceptions, and that in some circumstances the erotic feelings overwhelm the religious perceptions.[68] We still meet with sexual excesses under the cloak of religion, as occurred recently (1905) in Holland, and (1901) in England. In the English instance young girls were initiated into the most horrible forms of unchastity in the religious association founded by the American Horos and his wife, and known by the name of “Theocratic Unity.”[69]

Friedrich Schlegel, as Rudolf von Gottschall remarks, proclaimed in his “Lucinde” the new evangel of the future, in which voluptuousness—as during the time of Astarte—is to form a part of religious ritual. The reawakened tendency of our own day towards romantic modes of perception would certainly seem to involve the danger of a renewal and strengthening of religio-sexual ideas.

For as long as the feelings of love carry with them an inexpressible, overwhelming force, like that of religious perceptions, the intimate association between religion and sexuality will persist both in a good and a bad sense. An elderly physician, who in his interesting book detailed the experiences derived from forty years of practice,[70] made very apposite remarks regarding this religious sexualism. According to him, unbounded piety is “often no more than a sexual symptom,” proceeding from deprivation of love or satiety of love, the latter reminding us of the saying “Young whore, old devotee.” Moreover, this is true alike of man and woman. Piety dependent upon deprivation of love can often be cured by “castor, cold douches, or a well-arranged marriage with a robust, energetic man,” who drives away for ever the “heavenly bridegroom.”[71]

The religious perception is a completely general yearning, and the same is the case with the associated sexual feelings. The boundless everlasting impulsion which both contain does not admit of any individualization. For this reason, the religio-sexual perceptions can play only a subordinate part in the individual[124] love of the future; they constitute only the first step in the history of the idealization of the sexual impulse, and of its spiritualization to form love.

In the romance “Scipio Cicala,” by Rehfues, the Neapolitan abbess calls out “I love love,” after she has gone through the enumeration of all the phases of passionate love towards God. The modern man, however, says to the woman, and the woman says to the man, “I love you”; the general religious love has capitulated to the individual love.

This is clearly the direction taken by “the way of the spirit” in love, which we shall now pursue further.

CHAPTER VII
THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT IN LOVE—THE EROTIC SENSE OF SHAME (NAKEDNESS AND CLOTHING)

“Shame has made no change in man as regards his bodily outlines, but shame has played a very important part in the entire province of clothing, and it has acquired such spiritual power that the entire amatory life of the higher human beings is dominated by it. It is, in the first place, in consequence of this sense of shame that man’s amatory life has ultimately and individually separated from that of other animals.”—Wilhelm Bölsche.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER VII

The individualizing influence of the sentiment of shame — Recent anthropological researches regarding the origin and nature of the erotic sense of shame — The animal and the social factor of shame — Shame as a biological sense of warding off — Coquetry — The fundamental social element of the sense of shame — Lombroso’s theory of shame — The dread of arousing repulsion — Connexion of the sense of shame with clothing — Conditions among the indigens of Central Brazil — Nudity as a natural condition — The coverings of the genital organs among the primitive races have a protective function, and are not portions of clothing — Origin of clothing — The original purpose of decoration and adornment — Relation of clothing to the feeling of love — Tattooing a preliminary stage to clothing — Prehistoric painting of the body — Tattooing as a sexual lure — Tattooing of the genital organs — Sexual effect of colours — Occurrence of tattooing amongst modern civilized nations — Recent anthropological researches regarding this subject — Erotic tattooing — Tattooing in women of the upper classes — The colour element in clothing — Its connexion with sexual charm — With jealousy — With sexual allurement — Sexual influence of concealment — The stimulus of the unknown — The two fundamental elements of fashion — Accentuation and display of portions of the body — Influence of partial concealment, of retroussé — The two principal forms of clothing — Accentuating and enlarging influences of clothing — H. Lotzes’s theory of the nature of clothing — Reciprocal influence between clothing and personality — “Physiognomy” of clothing — Clothing as an expression of the psyche — Denuding of portions of the body as a sexual stimulus — Fashion — Its absence in antiquity — Difference between ancient and modern clothing — Diaphanous raiment of the ancient half-world — Analysis of clothing — Upper and under clothing — The waist — Further differentiation into clothing proper and more intimate articles of dress — Dressing and undressing — Separation of the body-spheres by the waist — Beginnings of fashion in the middle ages — The corset as a witness of Christian teaching — Contest between medieval fashion and asceticism — Victory of fashion — Accentuation of the bosom — Décolleté — Views of the æsthetics on this subject — Harmfulness of the corset — A sin against æsthetics and hygiene — Its deleterious influence upon the thoracic and abdominal organs — The corset and anæmia — Atrophy of the mammary glands — Other serious consequences — Its influence on the female reproductive organs — The corset and “fluor albus” — The corset and sterility — Pre-Raphaelite flat-breastedness — Accentuation of the regions of the hips — Tournure (cul de Paris), the “crinolette” — Indication of the abdominal region and of pregnancy — The farthingale and the crinoline — Waldeyer’s views regarding the cause of the difference between men’s clothing and women’s — Greater simplicity of men’s clothing — Connexion of this with the greater mental differentiation of man — Former anomalies of men’s clothing — The breeches-flap — Feminine men’s clothing — Present predominance of the English style in men’s clothing — Influence of clothing on the skin — Venus im Pelz (Venus in fur) — Sacher-Masoch’s explanation of the sexual influence of furs — The face and clothing — Sexual[127] differentiation of the features — The relation of clothing to the environment — Enlargement of the conception of “fashion” — Theory of fashion — The two functions of fashion — Social equalization and individual differentiation — The demi-monde and fashion — Fashion as a safeguard of personality — Economic theories of fashion — Their connexion with capitalism — The reform of women’s clothing — “Rational dress.”

The relation between the feeling of shame and nudity as a problem of modern civilization — Prudery — Natural and lascivious nakedness — Prudery is concealed lust — Schleiermacher’s talented characterization of the sexual element in prudery — Psychiatric observations — Unnatural increase in the sense of shame — Importance to civilization of the genuine, natural feeling of shame — False fig-leaf morality — Natural views regarding nudity and sexual matters the watchword for the future.

CHAPTER VII

The first step on the road to the individualization of love was effected at the very outset of the grey primeval age by the origination of the sexual sense of shame. Recent researches have for the first time established the fact that the sense of shame is not innate in man, but that it is a specific product of civilization—that is to say, a mental phenomenon arising in the course of progressive evolution, and as such is peculiar to man—present already, indeed, in the naked man, but, above all, characteristic of the clothed man. Clothing and the sense of shame have developed proportionally side by side, and in dependence each on the other; and originally both subserved the same purpose, to develop more strongly, and to bring to expression the individual, personal, peculiar nature of the individual man. They mirror the first individual activities in the amatory life of primitive man.

Georg Simmel has recognized very clearly this individualizing influence of the sense of shame by saying: “The entire sense of shame depends upon the self-uplifting of the individual.”[72]

By means of the recent critical investigations of leading anthropologists and ethnologists, we have obtained most important conclusions regarding the erotic sense of shame. Above all worthy of mention are the clear-sighted investigations of Havelock Ellis, and these have been supplemented by the researches of C. H. Stratz, Karl von den Steinen, etc.

Havelock Ellis distinguishes an animal and a social factor of shame. The former is specifically of a sexual nature, and is the simplest and most primitive element in the sense of shame. It is unquestionably more strongly developed in woman than in man; originally, indeed, it was peculiar to the female sex, and was the expression of the endeavour to protect the genital organs against the undesired approach of the male. In this form we may observe the sense of shame in other animals.

The sexual sense of shame of the female animal, declares Havelock Ellis, is rooted in the sexual periodicity of the female sex in general, and is an involuntary expression of the organic fact that the present time is not the time for love. Since this fact persists throughout the greater part of the life of the females[129] of all animals kept under man’s control, the expression of this sense of warding off becomes so much a matter of custom that it manifests itself also at times when it has ceased to be appropriate. We see this, for example, in the bitch, which, when on heat, herself runs up to the dog, but then turns round again and tries to run away, and finally permits copulation only after the most delicate approaches on the part of the dog. In this manner the sense of shame becomes more and more a simple manifestation of the proximity of the male; it comes to be expected by the male, and takes its place among his ideas of what is sexually desirable in the female. Thus the sense of shame would appear to be also explicable as a psychical secondary sexual character. The sexual sense of shame of the female, continues Havelock Ellis, is, therefore, the unavoidable by-product of the naturally aggressive demeanour of the male being in sexual relations, and of the naturally repellent demeanour of the female; and this, again, is founded upon the fact that—in man and in nearly all the species allied to him—the sexual function of the female is periodic, and must always be treated with circumspection by the other sex; whereas in the male any care of this kind in regard to the exercise of his own sexual functions is seldom or never needed.

Groos very rightly points out that the great biological and psychological importance of coquetry is dependent upon this protective nature of the sense of shame, coquetry arising from the conflict between the sexual instinct and the innate sense of shame. It is to some extent the turning to account of the sense of shame for sensual purposes, a seldom failing speculation on the sexual impulse of the male, and in this sense it is the outcome of a genuine gynecocratic instinct, which we shall again encounter in our study of masochism.

Since, then, it is no longer possible to question the data of the most recent researches, by which we are assured of the existence of a primitively organic animal basis for the sexual feeling of shame, it is quite as little open to doubt that the true psychic individual importance of the feeling of shame arises out of a second fundamental element of that feeling, out of the social factor; and this factor also affords an explanation of the origin of the sense of shame in man. This phenomenal form of the sense of shame is, moreover, specifically human.

This second social fundamental element of the sense of shame is the fear of arousing disgust.

In this connexion we must refer to the interesting and[130] thoroughly naturalistic theory of Lombroso regarding the origin of the sense of shame. Lombroso starts from the observation that in many prostitutes there exists a kind of remarkable equivalent of the sense of shame—namely, the dislike to permit of an inspection of their genital organs when they are menstruating, or when for any other reason the organs are not clean. Now, the Romance term for shame is derived from “putere,” which indicates the origin of the sense of shame from the repugnance to the smell of decomposing secretions. If we connect with this the fact that the kiss was originally a smell, Lombroso declares that this pseudo-shame of prostitutes represents the original, primitive sense of shame of primeval woman—that is, the fear of being disgusting to man.[73] Sergi also accepts this hypothesis of Lombroso’s.

According to Richet’s studies regarding the origin of disgust, the genito-anal region, with its secretions and excrements, is an object of disgust among most primitive races, for which reason they carefully conceal it even from their own sex, but more particularly from the other sex. Later, quite commonly the fear of arousing dislike or disgust plays a prominent part in the production of the sense of shame. This fear relates not only to the actual sexual organs, but also to the buttocks. Among many primitive races the latter alone are covered.

The idea also of ceremonial uncleanness, aroused especially by the process of menstruation, and associated with ritual practices, plays a part in the genesis of the sense of shame.

Incontestably, however, the sense of shame has most intimate relations with clothing; but clothing is in part only to be referred to the above-described primary factors of the sense of shame. In the later course of the development of civilization, however, clothing has come to play a peculiar independent rôle in the further development of a refined sexual sense of shame.

Karl von den Steinen is led, as the result of his own observations among the Bakäiri of Central Brazil, to the most remarkable conclusions.

“I find it,” he writes, “impossible to believe that the sense of shame, which is entirely wanting among these naked Indians, can in other men be a primary sense. I am compelled to believe that this sense first made its appearance after certain parts of the body had been covered by clothing, and that the nakedness of women was first[131] concealed from the gaze of others when, perhaps, in very slightly complicated economic and social conditions, the value of marriageable girls had increased, in consequence of more active intercourse, as is now the case among the principal families in Schingu. I am also of opinion that we make the explanation more difficult than it really is when we theoretically believe ourselves to possess a greater sense of shame than we practically have.”[74]

Thus we find that among the Bakäiri, who go completely naked, our (sexual) sense of shame is almost completely undeveloped; more especially, a sense of shame due to disclosure of parts does not exist, whilst the purely animal, physiological sense of shame is clearly manifested by these people.[75]

Where nudity is customary, the erotic sense of shame is very slightly developed. Civilized man also accustoms himself with incredible quickness to nudity, as if it were an entirely natural condition.

“The feeling of being in the presence of nudity is no longer noticed after a quarter of an hour, and when those who witness it are intentionally reminded of it, and are asked whether naked men and women, fathers, mothers, and children, who are standing about or walking unconcernedly, should be condemned or regarded with compassion on account of their shamelessness, the observer only feels inclined to laugh, as at something quite absurd, or to protest at a preposterous suggestion.... With what rapidity in unfamiliar regions it is possible to become accustomed to a purely nude environment is most clearly shown by the fact that I myself, in the night from the 15th to the 16th September, and again on the following night, dreamed of my German home, and there in my dream I saw all my acquaintances as completely nude as the Bakäiri with whom I was sojourning. I myself felt astonished at this, but my neighbour at table at a dinner-party at which in my dream I was a guest, a lady of quality, at once bade me compose myself, and said, ‘Now we all go like this.’”[76]

The Bakäiri, who go completely naked, have no “private parts.” They jest about these parts verbally and pictorially with complete indifference. It would be ridiculous for this reason to regard them as “indecent.” The onset of puberty is celebrated in the case of both sexes by noisy popular festivals, in which the “private parts” receive a demonstrative and joyful attention. A man who wishes to inform a stranger that he is the father of one of those present, a woman who wishes[132] to declare herself to be the mother of a child, grasps the genital organs with an earnest and unconcerned demeanour, intending by this gesture to indicate that they themselves are the procreators. The cloth covering the penis of the male, and the three cornered apron of the female, are not for purposes of concealment, but are simply intended to protect the mucous membranes—as a bandage or an apron in the women, and in the men as an apparatus for the mechanical treatment of phimosis.

It is only in jest that such things can be regarded as “articles of clothing,” the principal object of which is to subserve the sense of shame. Sexual excitement is not concealed by this simple covering. The red threads of the Trumai, the vari-coloured cloths of the Bororo, are adornments, by which attention is attracted to this region rather than repelled.[77] The completely naked Suyá women wash their genital organs in the river in the presence of Europeans.[78]

Thus among these Caribs of Central Brazil, who are still living in the stone age, we observe in all their simplicity the results of complete nudity, and we are able to determine that this nudity entirely prevents the origination of an erotic sense of shame in our meaning of the term. The physiological factors of the sense of shame are not, taken alone, sufficiently strong to lead to the appearance of this sense in its full strength as a special psychical phenomenon. It is first in association with clothing that these physiological factors have any great significance in the production of the sense of shame.

C. H. Stratz, in a historical and anthropological study regarding women’s clothing (Stuttgart, 1900), has compared the data of[133] the more recent ethnological investigations with the facts already known in the history of civilization and art, and has noticed a remarkable agreement between the two. According to him, “the first original purpose of clothing was, not the covering, but simply and solely the adornment of the naked body.”[79] The naked man feels little or no shame; the clothed man is the first to feel shame—he feels it when the customary ornament is lacking. This is true alike for primitive and for civilized man. For Stratz very rightly points out that any manifestation of nudity which is prescribed by fashion—that is to say, by the then dominant code of beautification—is never felt as nudity. On the contrary, a lady in a high-necked dress amongst the décolletée ladies of a ballroom, “would feel deeply ashamed because her breast was not bare.”

The history of clothing and of fashion, which is so closely associated therewith, affords us the most important elements for the understanding of the sense of shame of modern man, and for the judgment of its importance and of its natural limitations. Moreover, clothing has most intimate relations to love as a psychical phenomenon. “How great an influence,” says Emanuel Herrmann, “love exercises, in all its stages, upon clothing, and how clearly, on the other hand, love is expressed by clothing!”[80] Clothing more especially satisfies the general human need, proved by Hoche and myself to exist, for variety in sexual relationships, which continually demands new allurements and new stimuli.

The preliminary stage of clothing, a kind of symbolic clothing for primitive man, is the staining, painting, and tattooing, of the skin, regarding which recent ethnological researches, especially those of Westermarck,[81] Joest,[82] and Marquardt,[83] have afforded us noteworthy conclusions.

It is a fact of great interest that the tendency to painting and adorning the body existed already in prehistoric times, thus[134] affording a notable illustration of the truth of Herbert Spencer’s opinion that the vanity of uncivilized man was much greater than that of civilized man. In palæolithic dwellings coloured earths have actually been discovered, and coloured pastes made by mixing iron rust with reindeer fat, which unquestionably were employed for the colouring of the human body. Moreover, as Ludwig Stein remarks, the history of cosmetics, which Lord Bacon, in his “Cosmetica,” dated from the days of Biblical antiquity, can be traced back with certainty to the man of the ice age, upon whose individual and moral qualities this fact throws a significant light. According to Klaatsch, palæolithic man was not contented simply with painting his skin; he also tattooed himself by means of fine flint knives.[84]

Painting and tattooing of the body must, then, be regarded as a primitive stage of clothing. Ploss-Bartels remarks: “I find it impossible to doubt that the original meaning of tattooing is to be found in the endeavour to cover nakedness”; and Joest, the most learned student of tattooing, is of the same opinion. He writes: “The less a man clothes himself, the more he tattoos his skin; and the more he clothes himself, the less he tattoos.”[85]

We must also regard the coloration of the skin produced by tattooing as a means of allurement; tattooing was, in fact, principally carried out for the purpose of sexual allurement and stimulation. The tattooed man is the more beautiful, the more worthy object of desire. Even in cases in which painting and tattooing were originally undertaken for other purposes—for instance, with some therapeutic aim, or perhaps to serve as means of social or political differentiation—still, these signs and visible changes in the skin of the body speedily exerted a powerful influence upon the other sex, and by sexual selection were converted into sexual lures.[86]

This sexual character of tattooing is indicated also by the fact that amongst numerous savage people of the South Seas, in the Caroline Islands, in New Guinea, and in the Pelew Islands, the girls, in order to attract the men, were accustomed to tattoo exclusively the genital region, and especially the mons Veneris;[135] thus, by tattooing, they made this region markedly apparent. It is characteristic that Miklucho-Maclay at the first glance received the impression that the girl tattooed in this manner wore on the mons Veneris a three-cornered piece of blue cloth, so closely can tattooing simulate clothing.

The sexual nature of tattooing is also shown by its association with phallic festivals. In Tahiti there is a very characteristic legend regarding the sexual origin of tattooing.[87] Among many primitive peoples the first appearance of menstruation gives the signal for tattooing, and for priapistic festivals.

An important sexual relationship is also manifested by the colour element of tattooing. It appears that the sense of love in primitive man is closely connected with the sight of particular colours. According to Konrad Lange, the sensual voluptuous value of these colours obtained its peculiar character from the feeling of love associated with viewing them; and, speaking generally, we can prove the existence of a certain association between the love of colour and the sexual impulse. Lange records an experience of his own youth, that when, about fourteen years of age, he was glancing at a vari-coloured necktie he had feelings which were not very different in their nature from sexual desire. He rightly draws attention to the fact that in primitive man this association of ideas is especially vivid, for the reason that, as already stated, the painting of the body is usually first undertaken at the time of the commencement of puberty.[88]

It is a significant fact that among modern civilized peoples the practice of tattooing is generally confined to certain lower classes of the population, such as sailors, criminals, and prostitutes, among whom the primitive impulses remain active in a quite exceptional strength, as Lombroso has more especially shown in his “Palimsesti di Carcere,” and in his works on the criminal and the prostitute. Very frequently obscene tattooings were found in such persons.[89] Marro, Lacassagne, Batut, and Rudolf Bergh, have also studied the tattooings of prostitutes and criminals, and have observed the same objects and ornaments in both classes. Salillas in Spain, Drago in the Argentine, Ellis and Greaves in England, and Tronow in Russia, obtained similar results. In 12·5 per cent. of the inmates of reformatories in Brieg, Kurella found that the skin was tattooed. According to[136] him, cynicism, revenge, cruelty, remorselessness, gloomy or indifferent fatalism, bestial lewdness, with a dominant tendency to unnatural vices of every kind, “constituted the principal psychical manifestations exhibited by these tattoo-pictures.”

“Pæderastic symbols among the men, and tribadistic among the female prostitutes, are of especially frequent occurrence, and among these we often find a mackerel sketched on the vulva, denoting the souteneur; still more perverse sexual representations even French authors such as Batut have not ventured to reproduce; we see things which would send the police des mœurs out of their minds. Already in quite young vagabonds, frequently sons of prostitutes, we see representations of this kind.”[90]

Not only, however, in criminals and prostitutes, but also in the non-criminal members of the lowest classes of the population, we often observe erotic tattooings of the most obscene character, which, without doubt, serve as sexual lures and stimuli. J. Robinsohn and Friedrich S. Krauss recently published an interesting account of these matters.[91]

Cases of Tattooing in Women of the Upper Classes.—It appears that the primitive tendency to tattooing as a sexual stimulus and means of allurement has recently revived in certain circles of the refined sensual world. René Schwaeblé, in his celebrated book based on his own observations and moral studies, and entitled, “Les Détraquées de Paris” (Paris, 1904), gives an account of the increasing diffusion of tattooing among both men and women of the upper classes of Parisian society, for which purpose a specialist has opened an atelier in the Rue Blanche, in Montmartre. Schwaeblé devotes a special chapter to the “tatouées” (pp. 47-57), and describes an assembly of some of these distinguished libertines in a house in the Rue de la Pompe in Passy. In one of these ladies, tattooing imitated in a most deceptive manner a pair of stockings, thus affording a characteristic instance of the above-mentioned association between tattooing and clothing. Another woman had inscriptions tattooed on the thighs and hips; in two the legs were adorned with garlands of vine-leaves, birds were billing on the abdomen, and on the back were depicted many coloured bouquets of flowers, with the inscription, “X. pinxit, after Watteau.” A marchioness had her family coat-of-arms depicted between the shoulder blades; another great lady had had tattooed on her body the maddest[137] and most obscene drawings of a satanistic character! Two unmistakably homosexual women had a common tattooing—that is to say, one was complementary to the other; only when they were side by side had the picture a meaning. The most remarkable of all the tattooings, however, was that of the hostess. On her body was the picture of a complete hunt, the individual scenes of which wound round her body; it was in the most vivid colours; carriages, packs of hounds and hunters were all shown. The final goal of the hunt was a fox tattooed in the genital region.

Tattooing leads on to the consideration of many-coloured clothing, which is especially common in primitive conditions of mankind. Such clothing, in such conditions, serves chiefly to accentuate particular portions of the body, in order to stimulate the sexual appetite of members of the opposite sex. According to Moseley, the savage begins by painting and tattooing himself for the sake of adornment. Then he takes a movable appendage, which he throws round his body, and on which he places the ornamentation which he had previously marked on his skin in a more or less ineradicable manner. Now a greater variation is rendered possible than was the case with tattooing and painting. Thus, by means of vari-coloured and bright bands, fringes, girdles, and aprons, which for the most part are attached in the genital region, attention is drawn to this part—and here a contrast of colours is found extremely effective. The Indians of the Admiralty Islands have as their only article of clothing a brilliant white mussel-shell, which exhibits a striking contrast to the dark colour of their skin. The Areois of Tahiti, a class of privileged libertines and voluptuous individuals, manifested this character in public places by wearing a girdle made of “ti-leaves.”[92]

The first and most primitive form of clothing was this pubic ornament, the original purpose of which was adornment, not concealment. The latter significance it acquired only in proportion as the genital organs became the object of a superstitious feeling of fear and respect, and were regarded as the seat of a dangerous magic.[93] The above-mentioned connexion between sexuality and magic here made itself apparent. It was necessary that this wonderful, daimonic region should be concealed, in order to protect an onlooker from its evil and influence, or, contrariwise, to protect the genital region from the evil glance of the observer. Both ideas are ethnologically demonstrable. According to Dürkheim, the genital organs, and especially those of women, were covered in primitive times, in order to prevent the perception[138] of any disagreeable emanations from these regions. Finally, Waitz, Schurz, and Letourneau propounded the theory that the jealousy of primitive man was the primary ground of clothing, and was indirectly also the cause of the sense of shame. This view is supported by the interesting ethnological fact that in many races only the married women are clothed, whilst the fully-grown unmarried girls go completely naked. The married woman is part of the property of the husband; to the latter, clothing appears to be a protection against glances at his property—to unclothe the wife is a dishonour and a shame. When the idea of possession was extended to the relationship between the father and his unmarried daughters, these latter also were clothed; thus the idea of chastity and the feeling of shame were developed.[94]

We can, however, adduce numerous considerations in support of the view that the first covering of the genital organs, in association with the pubic ornament, did not arise out of the feeling of shame, but, on the contrary, that it served as a means of sexual allurement. By all kinds of striking ornaments, such as cat’s tails, mussel-shells, or strips of hide, fastened either in front or behind, every possible attention was attracted to the genital region or the buttocks.[95] Concealment made itself felt as a more powerful sensual stimulus than nudity. This is an old anthropological experience which still possesses great significance in our modern civilized life.

Virey believed that human beings had more intense and manifold sexual enjoyments than the lower animals, because these latter see their wives at all times without any kind of adornment, whereas the half-opened veil with which the human female conceals or partially discloses her charms increases a hundredfold the already boundless lust of mankind. “The less one sees, the more does imagination picture.”[96] That which causes a refined and sensual stimulus is not the entirely naked, but the half-naked or partial nudity. Westermarck remarks:

“We have numerous examples of races who generally go about completely naked, but sometimes employ a covering. In such cases they always wear the latter in circumstances which make it perfectly clear that the covering is used simply as a means of allurement. Thus, Lohmann relates that among the Saliras only prostitutes wear clothing, and they do this in order to stimulate by means of the[139] unknown. Barth informs us that among many heathen races in Central Africa, the married women go entirely naked, whilst the girls ripe for marriage clothe themselves (in order that they may appear worthy of desire). The married women of Tipperah wear no more than a short apron, while the unmarried girls cover the breasts with vari-coloured cloths with fringed edges. Among the Toungta, the breasts of the women remain uncovered after the birth of the first child, but the unmarried women wear a narrow breast-cloth.”[97]

The significance of clothing and partial clothing as a sexual stimulus, proved by K. von den Steinen and Stratz to exist among primitive peoples, can be shown to form an element in the “fashion” of civilized races, which provides the imagination with entirely new sexual stimuli, by means of the two fundamental elements of the accentuation and disclosure of certain parts, and speaks to man of “hidden joys.” Moses made use of this psychical sexual influence of clothing. He wished to increase the numbers of his small people, and therefore he ordered the concealment of the feminine charms, “in order to stimulate the senses of the male members of his community, and thus increase the fertility of his people.”[98] Nudity, rejected by him as unsuitable, came in the Christian teaching to be regarded as “immoral”; for such a change in the point of view, we can find numerous examples in the public life of the present day.

The greatest sensual stimulus is exerted by the half-clothing or partial disclosure of the body, the so-called retroussé—that is, the art of bringing about a refined mutual influence between the charms of clothing and the charms of the body.[99] This plays a very important part in the origination of the so-called “clothes fetichism,” which we shall describe at greater length when we come to the consideration of these sexual anomalies.

There are two fundamental forms of clothing, the tropical (coat and sash) and the arctic (doublet and hose), and these, in addition to their simple function of protecting in the tropics from the powerful rays of the sun, and in the northern climates of protecting from cold, serve also in both sexes as a means of sexual allurement. The changeful phenomena and phases of “fashion in clothing” afford the most certain proofs of this fact; they may, in fact, be regarded as the most valuable sexual psychological documents of the successive epochs of civilization.[140] The celebrated writer on æsthetics Friedrich Theodor Vischer has regarded them especially from this point of view in his original work, distinguished by its pithy style, “Fashion and Cynicism: Contributions to the Knowledge of the Forms of Civilization and of our Moral Ideas” (Stuttgart, 1888). He regards “the rage to excel in man-catching” as “the most powerful of impulses, capable of inflaming to fever-heat the madness of fashion, with its brainless changes, its furious inclinations, its raging distortions.” In a certain sense we may also speak of some of the fashions of men’s clothing as an art of “woman-catching.” Still, on the whole, this feature is much less manifest here than in relation to woman’s clothing.

Clothing has a sexually stimulating influence in a twofold manner: either certain parts are especially accentuated and enlarged by the shape or cut of the clothing and by peculiar kinds of ornamentation, or else particular portions of the body are directly denuded. Both of these have a sexual influence.

The accentuation and enlargement of certain parts of the body by means of clothing takes its origin in man’s belief that by this means he really produces certain enlargements of his personality, as though these portions of clothing were actually a part of himself. This remarkable theory of clothing, according to which the latter represents a strengthening of the body, a kind of outwardly projected emanation of the human personality, a direct continuation of the body, was first enunciated by the celebrated philosopher Hermann Lotze. He writes:

“Everywhere when we place a foreign body in connexion with the surface of our body (for not the hand alone develops this peculiarity), the consciousness of our personal identity is in a certain sense transmitted into the ends and outer surface of this foreign body, and there arise feelings, partly of an enlargement of our personal ego, partly of a change in form and in extent of movement, now become possible to us, but naturally foreign to our organs, and partly of an unaccustomed tension, firmness, or security of our carriage.”[100]

Naturally the reciprocal influence of one person upon another is not wanting, and the observer believes that in the clothing he actually finds the body. Parts that otherwise would not have attracted attention now appear as important objects. For example, the tall hat, as a prolongation of the head, seems to give the latter a certain height and worth. Gustave Flaubert, in “Madame Bovary,” very beautifully describes this remarkable transition, this identification of clothing with the body:

“Beneath her hair, which was drawn upwards towards the top of the head, the skin of the nape of her neck appeared to have a brownish tint, which gradually became paler, and lost itself in the shadows of her clothing. Her dress spread out on either side over the chair on which she was sitting; it fell in many folds, and spread out on the floor. When he chanced to touch it with his foot, he immediately drew the foot back again, as if he had trodden on something living.”

The same association of ideas has led to the idea that clothing “is, as it were, a complete skin to man,” as if it must represent a kind of “ideal nudity.”[101] Clothing represents the person, shelters the nature, the soul. It can, therefore, become the means of expression of human peculiarities, of individual traits of character. There exists a “physiognomy” of clothing; it is a mirror of the physical and spiritual being.[102] Very rightly is it asserted, in a pseudonymous essay on the “Erotics of Clothing,” that clothing, in the course of the many thousand years of the development of civilization, has taken up into itself so much of the spirit of mankind that we should find a solution for all the problems of human civilization if we were able completely and immediately to understand the spirit of clothing. The form of clothing is at the same time also the most subtle and accurate measuring apparatus for the peculiar and personal in a man—for the individual in him.[103]

If the accentuation of certain parts is the first sexual stimulus of clothing the denuding of certain parts is the second. When once the custom of concealing the body has been introduced, the denuding of portions of the body has acquired a sexually stimulating effect which it did not previously possess, and which it does not now possess among primitive communities. In the saying of a thoughtful writer, that there is a great difference from an erotic point of view between a glance at the naked leg of a sturdy peasant girl and a glance at the naked leg of a fashionable young lady, this different conception of nudity finds very clear expression. There is, in fact, a natural, sexually indifferent nudity, and an artificial, erotically stimulating nudity. It is the latter only which plays a part in the history of clothing and of fashion; and it is this, in association with the erotic accentuation of certain portions of the body, which has from early times been cultivated for the allurement of men, and above all by the world of prostitution and by the half-world.

This first occurred in classical antiquity, to which, however, true “fashion” was unknown, because clothing was not then, as it is in modern times, fused with the body, and therefore did not appear to be a continuation and representation of the bodily personality. In general, the refined quality of the modern “mode” was lacking, in regard to the accentuation of particular parts of the body by means of clothing. Very aptly has Schopenhauer, in the second volume of his “Parerga and Paralipomena,” pointed out the thorough-going difference between antique and modern clothing in this relationship. In the days of antiquity clothing was still a whole, which remained distinct from the body, and which allowed the human form to be recognized as distinctly as possible in all its parts. Sexual stimulation could be effected only by the employment of diaphanous fabrics, which were preferred in the circles of the half-world and by effeminate men. Varro, Juvenal, and Seneca chastise with biting words this immorality of “coacæ vestes,” and of the network clothing imported from Egypt. Then there appeared for the first time as a peculiar type the woman in man’s clothing, a proof of the wide diffusion of the love of boys, on which those prostitutes who went about clothed as men must have speculated when they assumed this dress.

The analysis of clothing into upper-clothing and under-clothing signifies a differentiation of clothing very effective as regards erotic influence. For the first time could the individual portions of the body appear in definite significance in relation to the body as a whole. And the indication of the waist became characteristic of fashion in clothing.[104]

The analysis of clothing was carried a stage further in the separation of clothing, properly speaking, from that which lies beneath it, the more intimate covering of the body, the washable underclothing—shirt, chemise, petticoat, etc. More especially had this differentiation a great erotic significance. It was the increase in the number of individual articles of clothing which first gave rise to the erotically tinged idea of the gradual “dressing” and “undressing,” to the idea of the intimate “toilet.” The possibilities of disclosure, half concealment, and semi-nudity were notably increased, and a much larger playground was opened to the erotic imagination.

In association with this, the waist, especially in the case of[143] woman, indicated a separation of the bodily spheres into an upper sphere, associated chiefly with the intellectual, and a lower sphere, belonging rather to the purely sexual.

“The waist, which is already, roughly speaking, indicated by the sash or girdle, but which, in consequence of the progressive differentiation of feminine clothing, comes to play a principal part in women’s dress, divides the woman’s body into thorax and abdomen. The fully clothed woman becomes an insect, a wasp, with two sharply defined emotional and sexual spheres, with a heavenly and an earthly division.”[105]

With this classification and differentiation of clothing there now developed a fertile field for the activity of “fashion,” which therefore, as such, first really takes its rise in the middle ages. According to Sombart,[106] it was in the Italian States of the fifteenth century that it first became a living reality. Fashion is a product of the Christian middle ages; the specific element that this period introduced into feminine clothing—the corset—is a witness to Christian doctrine.

“Strange as it may seem, it is very remarkably true that the corset derives its origin from the Christian worship of God. Owing to the strict ecclesiastical control in the middle ages—strict, at least, as regards public life—the dominant ascetic point of view demanded the fullest possible covering of the feminine body, and the mortification of the flesh; it insisted, at any rate, that those portions of the body should be withdrawn from the view of sinful man which are regarded as especially characteristic of the female sex. Through woman sin had entered the world, and therefore woman must, above all, take care to conceal as much as possible the sinful characteristics of her baser sex. Whilst man, by the greatest possible increase in breadth of shoulders and chest, endeavoured to suggest a more powerful and warlike aspect, we find that among women from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, the endeavour was dominant to make the breasts as flat and childlike and as narrow as possible, and for this purpose, for the compression and obliteration of the breasts, an early form of the corset was employed.”[107]

It is characteristic that fashion later employed the corset in precisely the opposite sense—namely, in order to make the breasts “stand out more prominently above the upper margin of the corset, which continually became shorter.” Thus there arose a conflict between medieval fashion and the ascetic tendencies[144] of the times. Fashion was victorious along the whole line, as we can learn in detail in Ritter’s interesting essay regarding the nudities of the middle ages.[108]

Since the middle ages, two portions of the body have in the female sex been especially accentuated by clothing—the breasts, and the region of the hips and the buttocks.

As we have already pointed out, the corset was especially employed to accentuate the breasts, the corset having already produced the stimulating contrast between the prominence of the breast and the slenderness of the waist, increased by lacing. At the same time, at an early date the denuding of the upper part of the breasts was associated with this accentuation, the top of the dress being cut away in front à la grand’ gorge, whilst the corset, strengthened by rods of whalebone or steel, produced a bonne conché. This accentuation of the breasts dominated feminine fashion down to the present day. Besides the use of the corset in this matter, the region of the breasts was also rendered more prominent by the use of artificial breasts made of wax, by ornaments in the form of breast-rings, etc.

The partial denuding of the breasts represents the true décolleté of our balls and parties, a custom which a man so tolerant in other respects as H. Bahr condemns on æsthetic grounds.[109]

“The art of undressing and enjoying in imagination beautiful girls and women,” says Georg Hirth, “is learnt chiefly at Court and other balls, at which the feminine guests are compelled by fashion to bare the upper part of the body. It is astonishing how quickly, how invariably, the girls of the upper classes accustom themselves to this exhibition, which exercises so stimulating an effect upon us of the opposite sex. And yet they would turn up their noses if, at the parties of non-commissioned officers and servants, the women allowed such extensive glimpses of their charms. I once heard a girl three years of age express a naive surprise when she saw the décolletage of her mother, who was about to go to a ball. What a scolding would the poor servant-girl get if she were to exhibit her nudity to the children in such a manner!”[110]

Fr. Th. Vischer also severely criticizes this exposure of feminine nudities coram publico. Moreover, the free enjoyment of alcohol customary among men at these evening entertainments is likely to induce a frame of mind in which the charms[145] thus freely displayed before their eyes will receive an attention not purely æsthetic.

As regards the corset more particularly, it is not only unæsthetic, but also unhygienic.

The corset draws in the beautiful outline of the feminine body in the most disagreeable manner; the wasp waist which it produces is an ugly exaggeration of the natural condition. The lady editor of the Documents of Women instituted an inquiry amongst a number of artists in regard to the corset. One of these, the architect Leopold Bauer, replied as follows:

“Nature has endowed the feminine body with a most beautiful outline. It is almost incomprehensible that the ideal of beauty should during so lengthy a period aim at the destruction of this wonderful and unique perfection. The corset makes an ugly bend in the vertebral column, it makes the hip shapeless, it suggests an unnatural and even repulsive development of the breasts, which transforms our sentiment of the sacred beauty of the human body into the lowest sexual and perverse impulses. That the corset does not really make the body appear slender is no longer open to doubt. All the suggested advantages of the corset are prejudices.... It is only when women’s dress is freed from the tyranny of this detestable corset that it will be able to develop in a free and artistic manner.”[111]

Physicians are unanimous regarding the unhygienic nature of the corset. The deleterious influence of tight-lacing upon the form and the activity of the thoracic and abdominal organs has been thoroughly elucidated by many authors. I need refer only, among many, to the writings of Hugo Klein,[112] Menge,[113] and O. Rosenbach,[114] regarding the dangers of the corset. The corset hinders the sufficient inspiration, which is so necessary for the adequate activity of the respiratory and circulatory organs, and herein we find a principal cause of anæmia (O. Rosenbach); it exercises the most harmful pressure on the abdominal organs, especially on the stomach and the liver, and presses them out of their natural situation, so that it gives rise to a descent of the kidneys, the liver, and the genital organs. The extremely ugly “pendulous belly” is also dependent on the influence of the corset. The pressure of the corset also often gives rise to an atrophy of the mammary glands, and to abnormal changes in the nipples. Thence ensues, further, a serious hindrance to the function of lactation, which may indeed be rendered completely[146] impossible. For this reason, Georg Hirth, in his admirable essay upon the indispensable character of the maternal breast, exclaims: “Away with the corset!”[115]

The dorsal and abdominal muscles also undergo partial atrophy in consequence of the habitual wearing of the corset, because this garment to some extent relieves these muscles of their natural function. Anæmia, gastric and hepatic disorders, and intercostal neuralgia are also dependent upon this “most disastrous error of woman’s dress,” as von Krafft-Ebing calls the corset. Menge has very thoroughly studied the hurtful influence of the corset on the feminine reproductive organs. He enumerates, as a result of wearing it, among many evil results, inflammatory states and enlargement of the ovaries, relaxation of the uterine muscles, atrophy and excessive proliferation of the uterine mucous membrane, the onset of the extremely disagreeable fluor albus, premature termination of pregnancy, displacements of the uterus (retroflexion, anteversion, prolapse), abnormal stretching of the entire pelvic floor, retention of urine, constipation, and nervous troubles of the most varied character. Very often, also, sterility in woman is causally dependent upon the constriction and pressure exercised by the corset.

Rightly, therefore, the abandonment of the corset plays a principal part in the “reformed dress” of woman—a subject to which we shall later return.

In addition to the accentuation of the breast by the corset and by other apparatus,[116] another aim of feminine fashion has been most persistent in very various forms, namely, the exaggeration of the hips, or the buttocks, or both—in fact, of all the visible parts of the clothed body which are directly related to the sexual functions of woman; that is to say, there has been a persistent endeavour to indicate in the most prominent manner, in a way to stimulate the male, the secondary sexual characters of the female in this region of the body.

“The thoroughly modern women,” says Heinrich Pudor, “coquet at the present day less with their breasts than with their hind-quarters—for this reason, because for the most part they have a masculine[147] type (?). It began with the cul de Paris. Nowadays, clothes are cut in such a way that in the view from the back the gluteal region is especially prominent. This is how the fashionable wife of a German officer strikes us at present.

“‘Tailor-made’ is the phrase that has for some time been in use in England. The tailor has made it—not the milliner. No, the tailor, who perhaps is at the same time bath-master and masseur.... Certain species of baboons are distinguished by their brightly coloured and prominent hind-quarters—there seems to be no doubt that our modern ladies in high life have taken these for their example. Or can it be that they wish to avail themselves of the homosexual inclinations of their male acquaintances? Beyond question this is so. Here we find the fundamental ground of the type of clothing of our own day by which so much attention is drawn to the region of the buttocks. What is repulsive here is not the homosexuality, but the misuse that is made of clothing. In fact, that which is most repulsive to a refined sentiment is this—that women have their clothes cut as tightly as possible round the hips, in order that the broad pelvis, which is especially characteristic of women as a sexual being, shall be as far as possible visibly isolated.”[117]

Similarly Fr. Th. Vischer has castigated the immorality of the gross accentuation of kallipygian charms,[118] which in the eighteenth century was inaugurated by the invention of the so-called tournure (cul de Paris), against which Mary Wollstonecraft inveighed so severely. By the tension of the clothing, not only the buttocks, but also the hips and the thighs, were rendered grossly apparent. In certain epochs, also, the feminine abdomen was very markedly indicated by the mode of dress; for instance, in the middle ages, down to the sixteenth century, fashion provided women and girls with the insignia of pregnancy, as is apparent in the pictures of Jan van Eyck (“The Lamb,” “Eva”), Hans Memling (“Eva”), and Titian (“The Beauty of Urbino”). The fashion of the “thick abdomen” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was only another variation of the same theme.

In close relation to the variations of fashion we have just described is the farthingale (montgolfière) or crinoline. It was first adopted in the sixteenth century by courtesans and prostitutes, who thus exhibited rounded and provocative forms, wishing to allure men by these vertugales, which, according to the bon mot of a Franciscan, expelled vertu, leaving behind only the gale (syphilis). The aptest remarks regarding the repulsive and dirty fashion of the crinoline were made by Schopenhauer.[119][148] It seems as if the crinoline, which is well known to have celebrated its greatest triumph during the period of the Second Empire in France—who is not familiar with the characteristic daguerrotypes of that period?—has recently endeavoured to come to life once more, for it appears that attempts have actually been made towards the rehabilitation of this monstrosity of clothing.

The physical difference between man and woman is also beyond question the principal cause of the difference between masculine and feminine clothing. According to Waldeyer (Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Congress of Anthropologists at Kassel, 1895, published in the Journal of the German Society of Anthropologists, No. 9, p. 76), it is especially the difference in the length and position of the thigh-bones that is responsible for the differentiation between masculine and feminine clothing. In woman, the upper ends of the femora are, in consequence of the greater width of the pelvis, more widely separated than in the male; and since in both sexes these bones are closely approximated at the knees, in women their position appears more oblique. This, in combination with the comparative shortness of women’s thighs, has a manifest influence upon the gait, especially in running, in which man distinctly excels woman. In this purely anatomical difference is to be found the reason why the masculine mode of dress, which makes the lower extremities very manifest, is not adapted for woman, especially when in the upright posture. This is an important cause for the differentiation between masculine and feminine clothing.

A further fundamental difference between the clothing of man and that of woman is the much greater simplicity and monotony, on the whole, of masculine clothing. This has, with good reason, been associated with the greater intellectual differentiation of man, who, therefore, stands less in need of any peculiar accentuation of the individual personality by means of clothing. Woman, who earlier was only a sexual being, utilized clothing in manifold ways as a means of sexual allurement, as the chief means of compensation for the life of activity denied her by Nature and custom, whereas to man, on the whole, the employment of sexual stimulation by means of clothing was superfluous.

Georg Simmel writes from another point of view. He is of opinion that woman, in comparison with man, is, on the whole, the more constant being, but that precisely this constancy, which expresses the equability and unity of her nature on the[149] emotional side, demands, on the principle of compensation of vital tendencies, a more active variability in other less central provinces; whereas, on the contrary, man, in his very nature less constant, who is not accustomed to cleave with the same unconditional concentration of all vital interests to any once experienced emotional relationship, precisely in consequence of this, stands less in need of such external variability. Man, as regards objective phenomena, is, on the whole, more indifferent than woman, because fundamentally he is the more variable being, and therefore can more easily dispense with such objective variability.[120]

Notwithstanding this, down to the beginning of the nineteenth century there were not wanting, in the fashion of men’s clothing, attempts to employ certain parts of dress for the purpose of sexual stimulation. I refer in this connexion to my earlier contributions.[121] Here I shall allude only in passing to the peculiar and characteristic variations of men’s clothing in the form of marked attention drawn to the male genitals by the breeches-flap (braguettes); to the shoe, à la poulaine, which imitated the form of a male penis; to certain effeminate tendencies in the dress of man which have recurred very often since the days of the Roman Empire,[122] which are connected with the wide diffusion of homosexual tendencies, and which sometimes have given men’s dress so variegated a character, have involved such frequent changes and such occasional nudities, that at these times it could enter into competition with women’s clothing. In this respect, clothing enables us to draw conclusions not merely regarding the nature of the men who wore it, but also regarding the character of the time. There exists also the modern dandyhood, which recalls many peculiarities of earlier times; but, on the whole, fashion in men’s clothing tends to simplicity and sexual indifference. This movement originated in England, and the English fashion in men’s clothing has become dominant throughout the whole world, whereas women’s clothing now, as formerly, receives its fashionable stimulus from Paris.

In addition to the indirect relations of clothing with the vita sexualis, which we have already described, there is a direct relationship, and this is the effect of certain fabrics upon the skin, from which certain associations of ideas and certain[150] abnormal tendencies may arise. Thus, for example, the contact of woollen stuffs and of furs has a sexually stimulating influence. Ryan compared their influence with that of flagellation.[123] In this sense, also, furs and the whip go together—these two symbols of “masochism”; velvet has a similar effect. The celebrated author of “Venus im Pelz,” Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, in his well-known romance bearing this name, deals fully with the sexual significance of furs. According to him, they exert a peculiar, prickling, physical stimulus, perhaps dependent upon their being charged with electricity, and upon the warmth of their atmosphere. A woman in a fur coat is like a “great cat,[124] a powerful electric battery.” Influences of smell also appear to be associated herewith. For, in a letter to his wife, Sacher-Masoch once wrote to tell her what voluptuous pleasure it would give to him to bathe his face in the warm odour of her furs.[125] With the description of the stimulating effect of fur dependent upon sensations of contact and smell, he associated also the fact that fur gave woman a dominant, masterful, magical influence. His “Venus im Pelz” is also to him “one who commands.” Titian found for the rosy beauty of his beloved one no more costly frame than dark fur. It is doubtless the strong contrast-effect between the delicate charm and the shaggy surroundings that evokes that remarkable symbolical relationship to longings for power and cruel despotism. In a thoughtful essay, “Venus im Pelz” (Berliner Tageblatt, No. 487, September 25, 1903), the idea is developed and explained, that the love of woman for furs results from her inward nature. It is the secret longing for an increase of her power and influence by means of contrast.[126]

Men’s and women’s clothing comprises the covering of the entire body with the exception of the face—the idea does not, as a rule, include the head-covering and the way the hair is dressed. In a recent work, H. Pudor brings the face into a peculiar sexual relationship with the clothing. His remarks on this subject, which contain many valuable observations, notwithstanding the fact that much of what he says is overdrawn, run as follows:

“There is no doubt that the face is a bearer of the sexual sense in the second and third degree. Not only the mouth or the larynx. The[151] nose, especially in virtue of the mucous membranes by which odours are perceived. The eye, in virtue of the magnetic currents, the perception of light, and the chemical activity of the retina. But even the cheeks and the ears. Let some one you are fond of whisper something into your ear—notice the emotional wave you will feel, and observe how from the ear there are paths of conduction to the sexual cells [!]. Above all, however, naturally the mouth. We speak of the labia of the female genital organs, and therewith already we indicate the relationship to the lips of the mouth. We can, in fact, prove the existence, not only of a parallelism in the structure of the mouth and that of the sexual organs, in man just as in woman. We can go even further: we can regard the sacral region as the forehead, the anal region as the nose, the pudendal region as the mouth, and the gluteal region as the cheeks [!].

“If we regard the sexual differentiation of the features of the face as established, from this standpoint we gain an interesting light upon the deeper lying causes of the wearing of clothes. Civilized mankind conceals the sexual organs of the first degree; the sexual organs of the third degree—that is, the features of the face—are left naked; in fact, on account of the thorough way in which the parts of the body adjacent to the face are covered, stress is actually laid upon the nakedness of the face as bearing sexual organs of the third degree—now we recognize the rôle played by the hat—and by means of that which we call coquetry, we see mirrored in the features the proper sexual organs, or we have our attention drawn to the sexual organs by means of the features, and by the latter we are made aware of certain peculiarities of the former. In this connexion, let us remember certain facial adornments which serve to limit still more the naked area of the face, and to clothe a larger portion of that region, such as the locks of hair covering the ears which the dancer Cléo de Mérode introduced, ringlets such as were worn in youth by our grandmothers, or the chin-band drawn across the middle of the chin. Perhaps even other ornaments of the face (neck-band, ear-rings, and even eyeglasses and lorgnette [!]) also play a certain part in this connexion. Think, above all, of the stand-up collar and all other varieties of high collar by which the clothing is carried up as high as the chin. But those parts of the face which remain naked must now be as naked as possible; for this reason hairs, unless they belong to the beard as sexual organs of the second degree, must be removed, and society determinedly insists that faces shall be clean-shaven.”[127]

The relation of the face to the clothing already makes clear to us the idea of “costume” as an extension of clothing beyond the mere covering of the body. All which surrounds man, which has a relation to his appearance, is costume in the widest sense of the word; thus, sitting-room, workshop, study, dressing-room, park, library, etc.

“We take pains regarding all that we have nearest to us and round about us, our toilet, because therein we are at home, therein we suffer and we rejoice. Where we feel ourselves at home, we shall endeavour[152] so to arrange matters that everything is comfortable to us, down to the furthest manifestations of our existence, so that our sitting-room, our bedroom, our house and our garden, constitute a prolongation, an extension of our clothing” (A. von Eye).[128]

Thus it happens that fashion is concerned, not merely with clothing, but also with an abundance of customary details of environment. The arrangement and furnishing of rooms, artistic objects, bodily exercises, social intercourse, sports, etc., are subject to the caprices of fashion. On this extended idea of fashion is based Fr. Th. Vischer’s definition: “Fashion is a general term to denote a complex of temporary current forms of civilization.”

The theory of fashion has been elaborated especially by Sombart [129] and Simmel.[130] In the work of W. Fred,[131] also, we find some thoughtful observations.

According to Simmel, fashion fulfils a double task. On the one hand, it is the imitation of a given example, and thus satisfies the need for social dependence; it leads the individual along the path on which all are going. But, on the other hand, it satisfies also the need for difference, the tendency to differentiation, to variation, to self-assertion. This fashion effects by means of frequent changes, and by the fact that first of all it is always a class fashion. The fashions of the upper classes are distinguished from those of the lower classes, and are instantly abandoned when the lower classes adopt them. Thus, according to Simmel’s definition, fashion is nothing else than a peculiar form among many forms of life, by means of which the tendency towards social equalization is connected with the tendency towards individual differentiation and variation to constitute a unitary activity.

In Paris, the centre of fashion, the associated work of these two tendencies may be studied most accurately and purely. We can there observe how at first always a portion only of society adopts the fashion, whilst the commonalty are still only on the way towards its adoption. If the fashion has become entirely general, if it is followed without exception, it is already over, it is no longer “fashionable,” because this class difference has ceased to exist.

“By means of this interplay—between its tendency to general diffusion on the one hand, and, on the other, the annihilation of its significance which this very diffusion brings about—fashion exercises the peculiar charm of the border-line, the charm of simultaneous beginning and ending, the charm of that which is at the same time new and obsolete” (Simmel).

In connexion with this fact we find that from the earliest times the “demi-monde” has always given the impulse to new fashions. Owing to the peculiarly uncertain position occupied by this class, everything conventional, everything long in use, is detested by its members; only newness and change are agreeable.

“In the continuous endeavour to find new, hitherto unheard-of fashions, in the heedlessness with which precisely that which is opposed to what has gone before is passionately grasped, there lies an æsthetic form of the destructive impulse, which all pariah existences appear to possess, so long, at any rate, as they are not completely enslaved” (Simmel).

On the other hand, the equalizing tendency of fashion serves delicate, sensitive natures as a kind of protection of their personality, as Simmel has shown in a masterly manner. To such persons fashion plays the part, as it were, of a mask.

“Thus it is a delicate shame and shyness, lest by a peculiarity in outward aspect, some peculiarity of the subjective character might perhaps be betrayed, that leads many natures to seek with eagerness the concealing equalization of fashion.... It gives a veil and a protection to all that lies within, and that thereby becomes more perfectly free.”

That modern fashion is, for the most part, a child of the nineteenth century, and is most intimately dependent upon the nature of capitalism, has been directly proved by W. Sombart. He indicates as a decisive fact in the process of the formation of fashion the perception that the participation of the consumer is thereby reduced to a minimum, that, on the contrary, the driving force in the creation of modern fashion is the capitalistic entrepreneur. If, for example, a Parisian cocotte discovers a new style of dress, or if, as the newspapers recently reported, the King of England introduces the fashion of a white hat or white shoes for men, these actions have, according to Sombart, the character only of intermediate assistance. The true driving agent for the rapid general diffusion of fashion, and for the frequent changes of fashion, remains the capitalistic entrepreneur, the producer, or merchant. Sombart proves this convincingly by striking examples. This economic aspect of fashion must receive no less consideration than the psychological.

If men’s clothing, as we have already said, is, in the gross, far less subject to the dominion of fashion than women’s clothing, still recently efforts have been apparent to simplify women’s clothing also, to make it independent of the caprices of fashion, and, above all, to subordinate it to hygienic principles. It is noteworthy that these efforts proceed more particularly from the leaders of the modern woman’s movement, an interesting proof of the connexion already alluded to between personality and clothing. The more differentiated and the more inwardly rich the personality, the simpler and more monotonous is the clothing. To this extent, therefore, the desire for simplification of feminine clothing is an entirely logical postulate of the emancipation of women. But this demand finds a justification also from the point of view of hygiene. This fact has been discussed especially by Paul Schultze-Naumburg in his book on “The Culture of the Feminine Body as the Basis of Women’s Clothing” (Leipzig, 1901). He insists above all on the complete abandonment of the corset, and of the “small waist,” and on a return of women’s clothing to the free, simple outlines of the antique. He makes, also, very noteworthy observations on the unhygienic footgear of both sexes.

The idea that woman’s clothing should unconstrainedly represent the form of her body has been admirably realized in the different varieties of the so-called “reformed dress.” Not without influence on these deserving attempts has been the recognition of the distinguished simplicity and hygienic purposefulness of the Japanese women’s clothing.

For the present, however, fashion, as of old, remains dominant, and celebrates annually its triumph in respect of new discoveries and refinements of the dress of women of the world, employing for this purpose the familiar means of accentuation and disclosure, and of coloured and ornamental stimuli. The “woman’s movement” has as yet had little ostensible and practical influence in liberating women’s dress from the all-powerful control of fashion.

Now that we have considered clothing and fashion in their relations to the sexual life, and have learned to understand how they combine in action as means of sexual stimulation of a peculiar nature, we are in a position to grasp the relations between the sense of shame and nudity, as it presents itself to us as a problem of modern civilization.

While, as Simmel also maintains, and as we have thoroughly explained above, clothing, through the intermediation of fashion, gives rise to shamelessness as a group manifestation, or, as we are accustomed to say at the present day, seriously impairs the[155] sense of shame in such a manner as would be repelled with disgust if it were adopted by the personal choice of an isolated individual,[132] clothing has, on the other hand, led astray the natural biological sense of shame, since it is the sole cause of the “exaggerated sense of shame” known as prudery. Prudery recognizes the existence of clothed human beings only; it will not recognize the existence of naked man; it refuses to admit the purely moral-æsthetic influence of natural nudity—to prudery this is something immoral and repulsive.

To prudery alone we must ascribe the fact that we modern civilized human beings have completely lost the taste for natural nudity, and also for the natural sense of shame, and thus we show little understanding of the ennobling, civilizing influence of both.

Natural nudity, the state in which every human being is born into this world, not artificial nudity, with its lascivious influence dependent upon clothing, posture, and gesture, is purely an object of simple contemplation for the human being of normal perceptions, who sees in the unclothed human body precisely the same individual natural object as he sees in the bodies of other living beings. People, in other respects extremely prudish, admit this when they have the opportunity—at the present day certainly very rare—of seeing completely naked human beings in natural surroundings, as, for instance, when bathing.

It is only when we introduce intentionally a sensual or, speaking generally, an artificial influence, that nudity has an effect of lascivious stimulation. Prudery is, however, nothing more than such a way of looking at nudity, with concealed lustful feelings. The talented Schleiermacher already recognized this fact. He unmasked prudery as a lack of the sense of shame, and very clearly pointed out the sexual and lascivious element which it conceals. In his “Vertrauten Briefen über die Lucinde” (edition of K. Gutzkow, Hamburg, 1835, pp. 63-65) we find the following beautiful passage:

“What, then, shall we think of those who pretend to be in a condition of quiet thought and activity, and yet are so intolerably sensitive that as a result of the most trivial and most remote impulse, passion arises in them, and who believe themselves to be the more fully equipped with the sense of shame the more readily they find in everything something worthy of suspicion? They do not really find what they pretend to find in every occurrence; it is their own crude lust which lies always on the watch, and springs forward as soon as anything shows itself in[156] the distance akin to themselves, and which therefore they find it possible to condemn; and they will quickly seize an opportunity for blaming anything of which the motives were absolutely blameless. Ordinarily, indeed, blamelessness appears to them a pretence. Youths and maidens are represented as knowing nothing as yet of love, but none the less as full of yearnings which every moment threaten to break out, and which clutch the slightest opportunity in order to grasp the forbidden fruit. But this is absurd. True youths and maidens are, indeed, the ideals of this kind of modesty, but in them it takes another form. Only that which has no other purpose than to arouse desire and passion can do them any harm; but why should they not be allowed to learn love and to understand Nature, both of which they see everywhere round them? Why should they not, without restraint, understand and enjoy what is thought and said about these matters, since in this way so much the less would passion be aroused in them? Such anxious and limited modesty as is at the present day characteristic of society is based only upon the consciousness of a great and widespread perversity, and upon a deep corruption. What will be the end of all this? If matters were left to themselves, they would become worse and worse; when we so persistently hunt out that which in reality is not shameful, we shall at last succeed in finding something immodest in every circle of ideas; and finally all conversation and all society must come to an end; we must separate the sexes so that they may not look at one another; we must introduce monasticism, or even something more severe. But this is not to be borne, and it will happen to our society as it happened to our wives when morality confined them ever more and more strictly, until at last it became improper for them to show the tips of their fingers—and then in despair they suddenly turned round, and they exposed their necks, their shoulders, and their breasts to the rude winds and to lascivious eyes; or, like the caterpillars, they cast off their old skin by a predetermined movement. Thus will it be; when corruption has reached its climax, and the crude impulses become so dominant that it is no longer possible to keep them within bounds, all these false appearances will break down of themselves, and behind them we shall see youthful shamelessness which has long intimately entwined itself round the body of society, so that this has become the true skin in which society naturally and easily moves. Complete corruption and completed culture, by way of which we return to blamelessness—both of these make an end of prudery.”

Fine words from a theologian! This thoroughly just description of the nature of prudery and of its dangers should be laid seriously to heart by our modern theological bigots and moral fanatics. How truly Schleiermacher has depicted the nature of prudery is shown by the observations of the alienist J. L. A. Koch, that it is precisely the women who were formerly prudish and “moral” when they become insane—for example, in mania—who are much more shameless than women who in everyday life had taken a more natural view of sexual relationships.

The eternal concealment of the most natural things is what first makes them appear unnatural, first awakens desire, where[157] otherwise they would have been passed by quietly and harmlessly without attention. At the present day the natural justifiable sense of shame has been intensified to an unnatural degree, and has been falsified to such an extent that this exaggeration of the sense of shame, this unceasing objective suppression of natural harmless activities and feelings, has really increased the hidden desires to an immeasurable degree; it is this, in fact, which heaps fuel on the fire of fleshly lust.[133]

The genuine, natural, biological sense of shame sets bounds to lust. To this shame we owe the ennobling and spiritualizing of the crude sexual impulse; it is the preliminary stage to the individualization of that impulse. It is intimately related to that voluntary, temporary, and relative continence which has so great an importance for the individual life. The sense of shame has civilized the sexual impulse without denying its essential basis.

Complete culture returns to complete innocence. It knows no fig-leaves; it does not go about, as did recently in the Dresden Museum a clergyman affected with the psychosis of hyper-prudery, knocking off the genital organs from naked statues; nor does it castrate the human spirit, as we find most biographers do even now in the case of the great men whose lives they describe. It recognizes the sexual as something noble and natural.

The sense of shame is an inalienable acquirement of civilization; it is self-respect. But, as Havelock Ellis rightly remarks, in completely developed human beings self-respect keeps a tight rein on any excess of the sense of shame. Knowledge and culture give the death-blow to all false prudery. The cultured man looks the natural in the face; he recognizes its value and its necessity. To him the sexual is the indispensable preliminary of life; hence in its essential nature it is something harmless, wholly comprehensible; something that must not be underrated, but above all must not be overrated, as our virtuous hypocrites and fanatics of prudery invariably overrate it.

The true league against immorality is the league against prudery. The apostles of the nude do more service to true morality than the men of the “Lex-Heinze,” than those who hold conferences on morality, than the German Christian League of Virtue. A natural conception of the nude—that is the watchword of the future. This is shown by all the hygienic, æsthetic, and ethical endeavours of our time.

CHAPTER VIII
THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT IN LOVE—THE INDIVIDUALIZATION OF LOVE

“Above all, we must avoid the widely diffused error of regarding love as a simple and single feeling. The exact opposite is the truth—love consists of an entire group, and, indeed, of an extremely complex, incessantly varying, group of feelings.”—H. T. Finck.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER VIII

The individualization of love a product of recent times — Finck’s “romantic” love too narrow a conception — Rôle of the idealization of the senses — First beginnings of individual love — The Platonism of the Greeks and of the Renascence — Distinction between the plastic and the romantic — The love of the minnesinger — The connexion between the nature-sense and love — The secret elements in love — Love and gallantry — The slavery of love — The imaginative element in love — Predominance of tender feelings in the days of chivalry — The development of the conventional in the relationships of love — True and false gallantry — Love as presented by Shakespeare — Conventional life of pleasure in the days of Louis XIV. and XV. — The belief in woman (“Manon Lescaut”) — Rousseau’s “Julie” and Goethe’s “Werther” — The nature-sense and sentimentality in love — Difference between “The New Héloïse” and “Werther” — The first beginnings of Weltschmerz — Its physiological connexion with the vital feelings of puberty — The vital energy in the Weltschmerz of Goethe and Heine — The modern Weltschmerz — Nietzsche’s connexion with this matter — The love of the romantic period — A mirroring of the past — Dreams and emotions — Moonshine reverie — Conflict with conventional Philistine morality — Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde” — Apotheosis of individual love — Individual love in relation to genius — Rôle of the emotional in romantic love — Love mysticism — The modern renascence of romanticism — The Dionysiac element in modern romantic love — Difference between romantic and classical love — Theodor Mundt on this subject — Goethe’s “Tasso” — Gretchen and Helena in “Faust” — Heine’s “Ardinghello,” a combination of romantic and classical love — The prototype of “young Germany” — Discussion of all modern love problems in young German literature — Gutzkow’s overwhelming importance — Among writers of the nineteenth century, Gutzkow’s knowledge of women is the most profound — His characteristic girls and women — Brings for the first time the problem of love upon the stage — The problem of personality in Gutzkow’s writings — The young German poetry of the flesh — Self-analysis and reflection in love — French precursors — Replacement of the medieval “sin” by self-reflection — Gutzkow’s “Wally” and “Seraphine” — The love of the emancipated woman — Kierkegaard’s and Grillparzer’s diaries — “Free love” and “free marriage” in modern literature — Influence of the Second Empire — The satanic and artistic elements in love — Pessimism. — Grisebach’s “New Tanhäuser” — The affirmation of life in this work — A glance at the present day.

CHAPTER VIII

The individualization of love is principally a product of recent times. A talented author, H. T. Finck, has dealt with this fact in a comprehensive work in two volumes.[134] This individual love, containing the spiritual elements of all the successive epochs of civilization, he denotes by the term “romantic” love, whereas we ourselves generally understand by that term a special variety of the more comprehensive individual love.

Every one who is interested in the numerous “overtones” of individual love will find in Finck’s book a rich, though not very well arranged, supply of material.

Independently of Finck, I shall endeavour in this chapter to describe very briefly the most important elements and the developmental phases of modern love.

First, however, let us consider the “idealization of the senses,” this expression being used by Georg Hirth to denote the capacity of the senses for self-government; for independent feelings of pleasure and pain; for the development of peculiar imaginations, ideas, and talents; and for the utilization at will of other sensory areas and foci of impulse—indeed, of the entire individual—for the purposes of purely sensual self-command. The lower senses, among which Hirth also reckons the sexual impulse, can only be idealized in consequence of the centripetal spontaneous activity of the higher senses.[135]

This artistic idealization of the senses and impulses also plays an important part in the process of the individualization and spiritualization of love. The sexual impulse becomes “the source of rich joys and imaginative tragedy” by means of the “veil of imagination,” the “heaping up of emotions,” and the “helmet of reason” (Hirth). The libido sexualis also takes part in the idealization of all the human senses and impulses. This is the indispensable preliminary and foundation of the transformation of the sexual impulse into love.

The first important enrichment of the sexual inclinations by means of a higher spiritual, individual element, which continues to-day to form a constituent of modern love, is, I consider, the[162] Platonism of Greek antiquity and of the Italian renascence. It is a metaphysic of love resting upon the individual, æsthetic contemplation of the beloved personality.[136] For that is the true sense of “Platonic love.” It ennobles physical love to the heavenly Eros, which is nothing else than the idea of beauty in the highest sense of the word. Kuno Fischer, in his first published writing, “Diotima” (Pforzheim, 1849), has erected a beautiful monument in honour of this Platonic love. And did not the immortal Darwin restate the thought of Plato, when he described beauty as the testimony of love? In Platonism, at any rate, is to be found the first intimation of a higher individual significance of love. In Dante’s Beatrice, in Petrarch’s Platonic lyrics, this idea is reillumined after the long night of the middle ages, to shine forth still more clearly at the time of the renascence in the new Platonism and in the cult of the beautiful, thus attaining a much more powerful individual colouring than it had among the Greeks.

In the sphere of love, as elsewhere, the plastic genius of the Greeks manifested itself in the form of peaceful æsthetic contemplation; romantic individualism, on the other hand, was foreign to the Greek mind. The latter is a modern sentiment. Jean Paul, in his “Vorschule der Aesthetik” (Hamburg, 1804, vol. i., p. 139), has aptly characterized the difference between antique and modern sensibility in the words: “The plastic sun (of the ancients) illuminates universally, like waking; the romantic moon (of the moderns) gleams fitfully, like dreams.”

These first traces of romantic-individual love may be detected already in Christian medievalism, among the troubadours and the minnesinger. The heartfelt song, “Thou art mine, I am thine,” gives the clearest expression to the individual, purely personal nature of the love-relations between man and woman, and discloses also the “romantic” sentiment, as in “Thou art locked within my heart; lost is the key: now must thou stay there for ever,” and discloses the intimate association peculiar to romanticism between the nature-sense and the feeling of love. It is the beloved who first fills for us the joy of summer; her love is like the rose. An enormous range is thus opened to the subjectivity of this sentiment. The romanticism of the secret[163] element in love is first perceived at this time, and finds perception in the words:

The age of chivalry now arrives, the epoch of minne[138] (love) and gallantry. What a new and remarkable change in the spiritual physiognomy of love! This also has left deep traces in the love of modern civilized man; this period represents an important stage in the developmental history of individual eroticism.

In the middle ages the honour of the knight and the love of woman, “the most beautiful radiance coming down to us from the life of this wonderful period,” as Wienberg says, belong together. Since that time man’s honour has been associated in a peculiar manner with woman’s love.

Boldly but aptly the far-sighted Herder has described the knightly minne (love) as a reflex of the Gothic. The same immeasurability of the imagination, the same indescribable sentiment, constructed the huge cathedral, and disclosed the unrivalled worth and beauty of the beloved—created minne and its outward expression, gallantry.

In deifying supplication, the knightly spirit elevated the beautiful sex to the heavens, raised woman far above man, and placed man far beneath woman. The knight sacrificed himself for the mistress of his heart, subjected himself to her judgment before the cours d’amour (courts of love), and in the lists. He became the slave of love and of the beloved woman; he wore her fetters, he obeyed her slightest nod, he endured chastisement and pain for her sake. But was this all reality? Was it not rather pure imagination? There was, indeed, as Johannes Scherr says, a worm at the heart of all this romanticism. The ideal deification of woman did not affect a corresponding elevation in her true social position; minne was but too often a mere[164] “pose,” and was often associated with unbridled sexual licence in relation to women of lower degrees.

The domination of the imaginative element characterized the aberrations of minne, debasing itself for the honour of the beloved. The masochistic element concealed in all love was here for the first time elevated into a system. We shall return to this subject in the chapter on “Masochism.”

And yet there is another side to the matter, and by the spirit of chivalry there was aroused a nobler view of woman’s nature.

“The cause and the secret of this dominance (of women) is this, that woman, with her complete, noble womanliness, entered wholly and fully into life; that she controlled a kingdom which was hers by right, the world of feeling and emotion, but controlled this kingdom and no more. As mistress of feeling, as guardian of feeling, she brought poetry into life; and into art she brought that lofty impetus, the above-described fanciful ideal or feminine tendency, which, when observed and perceived, reacts on the emotional mood of the observer.”[139]

To this time also belongs the development of the conventional in the amatory relations of the sexes, which came to be governed by definite rules; since that time, for example, it has been regarded as improper and scandalous for an unmarried woman to remain for any considerable time alone with a man, a view which has persisted to the present day. The social intercourse of the sexes was based upon “gallantry” or “courtesy,” upon a refined behaviour towards “ladies,” regulated by the laws of beauty, propriety, and social tact. In the sequel there developed out of this that exaggerated modern gallantry, characterized by little real delicacy of feeling, because it exhibits an undertone of contempt which makes woman feel only too clearly that she is the representative of a “weaker,” inferior sex, and is in no way the possessor of any proper individual, personal value. Intelligent, eminent women have always protested against this modern gallantry. Mantegazza, in his “Physiology of Woman,” p. 442 (Jena, 1893), ably describes the hypocrisy underlying this evil form of gallantry.

The first intimation of modern individual love is to be found in Shakespeare, to whom love was in general, indeed, only a “superhuman” passion, something lying beyond good and evil, which seized hold of man against his will; but none the less he embodies in his work the romantic ideal life of his time in feminine characters possessing the fullest individuality—as, for example,[165] Ophelia, Miranda, Juliet, Desdemona, Virginia, Imogen, and Cordelia, whilst in Cleopatra he has described the daimonic-bacchantic traits of the love of woman. In Juliet, who sees in “true love acted simple modesty,” we observe the passionate emotion of the primordial natural impulse, and the first awakening of woman as a personality.

False gallantry, in association with conventional propriety, both of which were developed to the fullest degree at the Courts of Louis XIV. and Louis XV., subordinated love to rules, and was very well compatible with the most frivolous and epicurean sensual life. And this occurred at the expense of deeply-felt natural sentiment, the place of which was taken by mere flirtation and coquetry. Here, also, the contempt of woman clearly shows itself. Especially in regard to this period, the opinion has been maintained that the modern Frenchman has never suspected, understood, recognized the divine in woman’s nature. Still, the general truth of this assertion is belied by the amatory life of the celebrated heroines of the salons, such as Du Deffand, Lespinasse, Du Chatelet, Quinault, and above all of the celebrated Ninon de l’Enclos [140]; and the Abbé Prévost, in his immortal “Manon Lescaut,” proved that even in that period the indestructible belief in woman persisted, at least as an ideal.

It was, in fact, in France that the higher individual love underwent a new spiritual enrichment; Rousseau’s “Julie” appeared on the horizon of Love’s heaven. And in the background was disclosed the German “Werther,” a book strangely influenced by that of Rousseau. The nature-sense on the one hand, sentimentality on the other, are the new elements in the love of the period of Héloïse and Werther.

In Rousseau’s “New Héloïse,” passionate love and a complete self-surrender were described without the artificiality, and also without the coquetry and wantonness, of which the literature of the time was full. It was love in a grander style than people were then accustomed to see. For this reason, the book constituted a turning-point in literature. That love is an earnest thing, that it can become “la grande affaire de notre vie,” has perhaps never been more deeply and thoroughly depicted than in the character of “Julie.” In maintaining the essential purity of the love relationship, when the voice of Nature is really expressed therein, Rousseau speaks of the principal theme of his own life.

“Is not true love,” asks Julie, “the chastest of all bonds?... Is not love in itself the purest as well as the most magnificent impulse of our nature? Does it not despise low and crawling souls, in order to inspire only grand and strong souls? And does it not ennoble all feeling, does it not double our being and elevate us above ourselves? In contrast to social inequalities, the love relationship points to a higher law, before which all are equal.”[141]

The love of Rousseau is, in fact, not social; it is not a product of civilization, but it is a creation of nature; it is one with nature. The nature-sense and the love-sense are here most intimately associated. And he observes both, nature and love, with feeling. The sensibilité de l’âme finds in nature and in love objects of the most glorious delight, of the sweetest pain, of the most burning tears.

“Out of the perceptions of mingled pain and ecstasy which the vision of nature, of beauty, or of a fine action, induced in him, he wove the web of sensibility with which he enveloped the creatures of his imagination. Incessantly thrust back into himself, his heart bleeding from wounded friendship or from unrequited love, self-tormentingly dissecting his own wishes and illusions, his own faculties and impossibilities, he became one of the first heralds of the Weltschmerz, of the woes of Werther and René, to which Byron and Heine had only to add self-mockery.”[142]

The sentimentality of the eighteenth century took its rise in England, as I have explained at some length in my pseudonymous work, “The Sexual Life in England,” vol. ii., pp. 95-107 (Berlin, 1903). In that country it found its most characteristic expression in the romances of Richardson and Sterne, and in landscape-gardening; but it was by Rousseau and Goethe that for the first time it was really brought into contact with the realities of life.

For the history of Julie, the history of Werther—this was the history of all happily or unhappily loving youths and maidens of that day; each maiden had her Saint Preux, each youth his Lotte.

The profound influence exercised by Rousseau, especially on women, has been described by H. Buffenoir in a very careful study.[143] The significance which “Werther” had for the emotional life of the time has been explained with the most cultivated understanding by Erich Schmidt in a well-known monograph.[144]

He shows that the nature-sense and sentimentality are much more deeply felt in Goethe’s “Werther” than in Rousseau’s[167] “Nouvelle Héloïse.” Goethe himself says in “Wahrheit und Dichtung,” speaking of this poetical, rational, intimate, and loving absorption into nature:

“I endeavoured to separate myself inwardly from everything foreign to me, to regard the outward world lovingly, and to allow all beings, from the human onwards, to influence me, each in its kind, as deeply as was possible. Thus arose a wonderful alliance with the individual objects of nature, and an inward harmony, a harmony with the whole; so that every change, whether of places and of regions, or of days and seasons, or of any possible kind, moved me to my inmost soul. The painter’s view became associated with that of the poet; the beautiful country landscape through which the friendly river was wandering, increased my inclination to solitude, and favoured my quiet attitude of contemplation extending itself in every direction.”

Werther’s feeling for nature is intimately related to his love passion. The two harmonize, and each exercises a reciprocal influence upon the other. Nature is to Werther a second beloved. The youth of nature, the spring of nature, are also the youth and the spring of his love.

In the peculiar association of love with the nature-sense and sentimentality, which is so characteristic of the time of Julie and Werther, are to be found the first beginnings of the “Weltschmerz,” with its erotically significant “ecstasy of sorrow.” The following words in Goethe’s “Stella” appear to me to bind Weltschmerz and eroticism in an extremely distinct relationship. Stella says of men:

“They make us at once happy and miserable! They fill our heart with feelings of bliss! What new, unknown feelings and hopes fill our souls, when their stormful passion invades our nerves! How often has everything in me trembled and throbbed, when, in uncontrollable tears, he has washed away the sorrows of a world on my breast! I begged him, for God’s sake, to spare himself!—to spare me!—in vain!—into my inmost marrow he fanned the flames which were devouring himself. And thus the girl, from head to foot, became all heart, all sentiment.”

Here we find clearly described the erotic element in mental pain; and we observe the remarkable increase of passion by means of sorrow, tears, and a profound perception of the evil of the world. This Weltschmerz fans the flames of eroticism, increases love, and ultimately gives rise to a peculiar sense of power; it is, indeed, most frequently in the first bloom of love, in the years of puberty, that its relations with sexuality are most distinctly manifested. The celebrated alienist Mendel has described this almost physiological Weltschmerz of the age of puberty as “hypo-melancholia.” An indefinite, passionate[168] longing, which seeks relief in tears, a by no means negligible inclination to suicide—of which Werther is the classical exemplar—characterizes this condition, which is connected with the complete revolutionizing of the spiritual and emotional life by means of the sexual. The Weltschmerz of youth is a latent sexual sense of power.

How the nature-sense and love combine to constitute a perception of Weltschmerz has been most beautifully expressed by Byron and Heine in their poetry. With quite exceptional clearness, Heine also describes it in a letter to Friedrich Merckel (written at Nordeney on August 7, 1826), in which he described a nightly recurring scene with a beautiful woman on the seashore:

“The sea no longer appeared so romantic as before—and yet on its strand I had lived through the sweetest and most mystically dear experience of my life which could ever inspire a poet. The moon seemed to wish to show me that in this world happiness yet remained for me. We did not speak—it was only a long, profound glance, the moonlight supplied the music—as we walked to and fro, I took her hand in mine, I felt the secret pressure—my soul trembled and glowed—afterwards I wept.”

How different were these tears from the floods of tears in Miller’s “Siegwart,” and in other similar productions of the Werther epoch, which, with their weakly sentimentality, their emotionally happy “sensibility,” had nothing whatever in common with the much more natural Weltschmerz of Goethe and Heine—more natural because based on a physiological foundation.

In modern love also, the Weltschmerz continues to live. The only difference is that by means of the pessimistic philosophy it has to some extent obtained a logical foundation. And Nietzsche has shown us the force which lies hidden in this ecstasy of sorrow. Precisely on account of the pains of the world, he affirms joyfully life and love. Anyone who wishes to write the history of Weltschmerz, from a psychological point of view so profoundly interesting, must not overlook Nietzsche as a most important turning-point in that history.

The passion inspired by genius, the excess of vital energy in the “Sturm und Drang” epoch of German literature, was admirably consistent with that genuine, primitive Weltschmerz. Rousseau’s more indeterminate sensibility had, on the other hand, a more powerful influence upon the mode of feeling of romanticism, and this movement appears more closely related to him than to Goethe.

Romantic love combines the elements of feeling of the previous[169] epochs in an increased subjectivism. Not nature alone, but history also, folk-tales, legends, poetry, and the wonderful secrets of the primeval age—all these are reflected in romantic love, and awaken singular dreams and emotions. The “mondbeglänzte Zaubernacht” (“moon-illumined magic night”) is much more than a mere feeling of nature; it is the recognition of a connexion with the past and with its secret, sweet, half-forgotten stories. Fonqué’s “Undine” is the classical type of all this. Romantic love delights in this wonder-mood of the heart; reality becomes, as it were, a dream. The obscure, the problematical—these attract the romanticist. It is for this reason that he loves the night and the night-mood of nature, rather than the clear daylight. Moonshine reverie is a characteristic trait of romantic love. Everything flows away into the indeterminate, the cloudy, the boundless. This love knows no limitation or narrowing, no fetters. It is the sworn enemy of the conventional, narrow-hearted, philistine morality, and of all limitations of personality. In Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde” this most celebrated monument of romantic love, the campaign against philistinism, as the greatest enemy of a free, noble amatory life, is most energetically carried on. It is utterly untrue to describe “Lucinde” as a romance in which there is a cult of suggestive nudity—as the poetry of the flesh. It certainly preaches the free natural conception and perception of the nude and the sexual, and is a glorious protest against the artificial and hypocritical separation of body and soul in love; but, on the other side, it unlocks in love the entire kingdom of the emotional and spiritual life, and discloses its significance for the individual man as a free personality.

More than Rousseau’s “Julie” and Goethe’s “Werther” is Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde” the apotheosis of individual love. Romantic love is the mirror of personality; it is changeable, filled with the highest spiritual content, and, above all, like personality, is capable of development. In a masterly manner Schlegel has represented the intimate connexion between true love and all vital energy. The relations of love to genius have never before been so admirably described.

“Here,” says Karl Gutzkow, “there is no question of artificiality; we have to do rather with the yearning of a youth who loves, who sees the one and only beloved in many different forms, in the metamorphoses of his own ego, which yearns to reconcile egoism and love.”

Schleiermacher, in his “Confidential Letters regarding Lucinde,” Gutzkow in his preface to the new edition of this[170] work, and recently H. Meyer-Benfey,[145] have supplied us with conclusions regarding the true significance of “Lucinde,” conclusions in harmony with our own view.

We must allude here to a new element in romantic love, which since that time has played an important part in modern eroticism. It is l’art pour l’art of love, the revelling in pure moods and emotions as the means of enjoyment. The emotional frequently grows luxuriantly and chokes the natural feeling of love. Jean Paul, for example,

“regards eroticism purely as a method of cultivation. Human beings are not to be actually loved, but are to be used to strike sparks from, by which one’s own inward life may be illuminated.... He is the exemplar of that artist-love which, vampire-like, drinks the souls of those who become its prey. This love sees in the hearts offered to it only the stuff for pictures; and in their warm blood it finds only an intoxicating, stimulating drink.”[146]

This unqualified search for personal emotional experiences in love, without regard to the love-partner, is especially represented in Jean Paul’s “Titan.”

Wackenroder, in his “Phantasien über die Kunst” (“Imaginative Studies concerning Art”), has already warned us of the dangers of this purely erotic-emotional love. Karl Joel has recently described very vividly how the romanticists ultimately reduced all vital relationships to the emotions of love.[147] This attempt must lead finally to mysticism, the poetical representative of which is Novalis.

It is very interesting to find that all the diverse elements of romantic love may also be detected in the latter-day renascence of romanticism. In his admirable book on “Nietzsche and Romanticism,” Karl Joel has clearly shown the existence of this romantic element in modern love, and, above all, has insisted upon the intimate connexion which the philosophy of Nietzsche has with the joy in battle and the vital energy of the romanticists. Both are apostles of the Dionysiac, not of the Apollinian.[148]

This also is the difference by which “romantic” love is distinguished from “classical” love—a difference and a distinction[171] which I find indicated for the first time in Theodor Mundt’s romance “Madelon oder die Romantiker in Paris” (Leipzig, 1832).

“I am therefore of opinion that there can be a romantic and a classical poetry; there are also romantic and classical love; and it is only by means of this twofold nature that it is possible to discover and understand this contrast in poetry....

“This wild and yet so sweet disturbance of the heart, in which love subsists, this rejoicing and revelry of the aroused imagination which, originated by the charm of the beloved, lead to an intoxication with all the sensual dreams of a delightful, ethereal happiness; and as in the flower-bud in which a burning ray of sunshine has suddenly awakened the impulse to bloom, give rise to the desire and longing of sensual impulsion—all these tears and sighs of the lovers, pains and joys, this love-happiness and love-misery at the same time, this star-flaming night-side of passion, to which after a vagrant drunken frenzy, an ice-cold, unwelcome morning follows—all this, my friend, is romantic love....

“And shall I now describe also classical love?... Believe me, there are faces which at the very first glance seem to us so trustworthy and so near akin, they draw us to them, as if we had spent years with them in sympathy, asking for love and receiving love. By the sight of this girl’s face there was induced in me so suddenly a sense of peace, such as never before in my life had I experienced; and this gentle feeling which drew me towards her, I may call true love and true happiness. In her loving eyes there glowed no seductive fire, no repellent pride like that of our romantic Madelon; in the simple beautiful German girl, all is clear and true; out of her gentle features speaks her gentle soul; and all for which I have longed in passionate, aberrant hours of my life—a definite, unalloyed happiness in existence—seemed to me, as I saw her for the very first time, to shine on me out of her blue true eyes. My friend, is not that classical love?”

It is the Apollinian-Platonic element of modern love which Theodor Mundt here describes as “classical” love, and certainly he wrongly places it before romantic love, which is the expression of modern subjectivism and individualism. Such classical love found in Goethe’s “Tasso” its most complete representation. Here love was conceived as “possession, which should give peace”; the beloved being influences after the manner of an already understood picture. As Kuno Fischer remarks, in the world of Goethe’s “Tasso” the Platonic Eros is the fashion. Love is here the pure, quiet contemplation of beauty in and with the beloved.

Gretchen and Helena in “Faust” embody very clearly the contrast between romantic and classical love. We find these contrasts united in Wilhelm Heinse’s celebrated “Ardinghello,” a romance which even to us at the present day seems so modern.[172] In this work we find the Dionysiac-Faustian impulse of the loving individual, and the Apollinian-artistic contemplation of the loved one, described with equal mastery.

In regard to love, Heinse was the prototype of “Young Germany.” And we are young Germany.

For all the problems of amatory life which to-day occupy our minds have already been made topics of public discussion by the authors of young Germany. In young German love-philosophy, the “Knights of the Spirit” as well as the “Knights of the Flesh,” come to their full rights. Only the ignorant can regard the so-called “emancipation of the flesh,” the apotheosis of lascivious sensuality, as the sole characteristic of the efforts and battles of our own time. No, he who wishes to understand modern love, in all its spiritual manifestations and relationship, let him read the writings of young Germany, especially the works of Laube, Gutzkow, Mundt; and also those of Heine, who has a more intimate relationship to young Germany than he has to romanticism.

More especially Gutzkow,[149] who appears to me the greatest and most comprehensive spirit of the young German literature—indeed, of the more recent German literature in general—overlooks no single riddle and problem of modern eroticism. Of all the writers of the nineteenth century, he has the profoundest knowledge of women. How stimulating are his girl characters; how true, notwithstanding their manifoldness! Wally, riding proudly upon a white palfrey, outwardly an image of beauty, but, like so many modern emancipated women, inwardly tormented by the demon of doubt; Seraphine the dreamer, uncertain about herself and her love, of whom the poet himself later admitted that her character was based on reality; Idaline,[150] full of majesty, the ideal “bride of the waves,” a typical figure of conventional high life, who yet in sudden revolution against this conventionalism gives her whole being to a chance love, a love of the moment,[151][173] which alienates her from her betrothed and later husband, and drives her to death; then, again, all the brilliant feminine characters in the great romances, “Die Ritter vom Geiste,” Melanie, Helene, Selma, Pauline, Olga—all are characters bearing the stamp of reality in their spiritual and emotional life, so various and yet so true, and, above all, in their manifold, differentiated relationships to men, genuinely modern women.

Gutzkow was also the first to bring upon the stage the modern woman and the problems of modern love, long before the French dramatists and before Ibsen.

As Karl Frenzel pointed out as early as 1864, Gutzkow made the stage the battlefield of modern ideas. The inward contrasts of love, the psychological problem of the heart—he first ventured to deal with these in the dramatic form.

“We all of us felt the wounds which ‘the world’ inflicted on Werner; we all wandered from the quiet violet, Agathe, to the brilliant rose, Sidonie; as in Ottfried, so in ourselves, the love of the heart battled with the love of the spirit. Who would admit himself to be so miserably poor as never to have revelled, lived, and suffered, in the play of these feelings? What wife has not, at least in imagination, hesitated for a moment, like Ella Rose, between the lover and the husband? Such figures as these bear in themselves the essence of truth, and do not lose their lofty value because, perhaps, their garments are not draped with sufficient harmony. They touch us, because we recognize in them our own flesh and blood; and they fulfil, in so far as the form of the society drama allows, Shakespeare’s canon of dramatic art—they hold the mirror up to nature.”

In his tragedies, “Werner,” “Ottfried,” “Ella Rose,” Gutzkow presents in a masterly manner the inner life of the time; we see in them the pulsing wing-beats of the souls, which in pain, as it must be in these days, soar upwards in the effort to attain beauty and freedom.[152]

Of all the young German authors, Gutzkow has best grasped the problem of problems in love—the problem of personality. In the painful question asked of Helene d’Azimont, in “Die Ritter vom Geiste”—

—this inalienable right to the safeguarding and development of the individual personality, notwithstanding all the self-sacrifice of passionate love, is most forcibly maintained. This is, indeed, the true nucleus of all higher individual love between man and woman.

Gutzkow has been accused, by those who had in mind only the purely symbolic nudity scene in “Wally,” of preaching the “emancipation of the flesh”; the same accusation has been levelled against other young German authors, such as Lambe (in “Jungen Europa”), Theodor Mundt (in the “Madonna”), Wienbarg (in the “Aesthetische Feldzüge”), Heine (in the “Neue Gedichte”). The charge is unjust. It is only the poetry of the flesh which they wish to bring to its rights. Notwithstanding his enthusiastic hymn of praise to Casanova, Theodor Mundt declares in his “Madonna” that the separation of flesh and spirit is the “inexpiable suicide of the human consciousness.”

Much more important, the true characteristic of all the authors of young Germany, appear to me the parts which self-analysis and reflection here for the first time play in love, visible beneath the influence of the offshoots of French romanticism, in which, however, we also encounter the same phenomenon, as in George Sand’s “Lelia,” in Alfred de Musset’s “Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle,” in Balzac’s “Femme de Trente Ans”—in which last romance we find the following passage:

“Love assumes the colouring of every century. Now, in the year 1822, it is doctrinaire. Instead of, as formerly, proving it by deeds, it is argued, it is discussed, it is brought upon the tribune in a speech.”

Just as in the middle ages the idea of “sin” was the disturbing principle of love, so for the modern civilized man, since the days of young Germany, this cold self-reflection, this critical analysis of one’s peculiar passionate perceptions and feelings, is the modern disturbing principle. This is the worm which gnaws unceasingly at the root of our love, and destroys its most beautiful blossoms. Gutzkow’s “Wally the Doubter” and “Seraphine” are the classical literary documents for this destructive ascendancy of pure thought in love. Very noteworthy is it that in both these romances it is woman who destroys life and love by reflection, whilst from earliest days this danger has always lain in the path of man. It is the fate of the modern woman, of individual personalities, which is here depicted; this fate makes its appearance from the moment when woman comes[175] to take a share in the spiritual life of man. The cold dialectic of Seraphine, who, as Gutzkow makes one of her lovers say, reverses the natural order of man and woman, is a necessary product of the love of woman ripening in the direction of a free personality—happily, however, it is only a transient phenomenon. The fully developed personality will return to the primitiveness of feeling, and will no longer endure within herself any kind of division or laceration. The corresponding phenomena in man have been described by Kierkegaard and Grillparzer in their diaries, which are classical documents of “reflection-love.”

The love of the present day contains within itself, and nourishes itself upon, all the above-described spiritual elements of the past. More especially at the present day is the question of the so-called free love or free marriage, disregardant of the legally binding forms of civil and ecclesiastical marriage, representative of all the heartfelt needs of highly civilized mankind, hitherto held back, oppressed, and fettered by the materialism of the time, and still more by its conventionalism still active beneath its covering of outlived forms. The problem of free love was first formulated in “Lucinde,” but found in the young German literature, especially in the writings of Laube, Mundt, and Dingelstedt, its theoretical foundation; and in the Bohemian life of the Second Empire free love obtained its practical realization, although the purely idyllic character of this Bohemian life, and its limitation to the circle of the dolce far niente students and artists, in truth makes it differ widely from the most intensely personal free love, taking its part fully in the struggle for life, as it presents itself in the ideal form to modern humanity.

The Second French Empire, whose significance for the spiritual tendencies of our time was a very great one, allowed two elements of love, to which we have earlier alluded, to appear with marked predominance—elements still influential at the present day: the satanic-diabolic element of eroticism, which found its most incisive expression in the works of Barbey d’Aurevilly (strongly influenced by the writings of de Sade), of Baudelaire, and more particularly of the great Félicien Rops; and the purely artistic element, as it appears in the works of the authors just mentioned, but more especially in the writings of Théophile Gautier. This “Young France” (to use the name of a novel of Gautier’s) has influenced the amatory life and the amatory theory of the present day almost as strongly as young Germany.

At the same time, in the sixties of the nineteenth century Schopenhauer’s philosophy was dominant in Germany, and his[176] metaphysic of love, which considered the individual not at all, but the species as all in all—this pessimistic conception of all love found its poetic expression in Edward Grisebach’s “New Tanhäuser,” published in 1869. Here, also, it would be a grave error to condemn these erotic poems of the day, on account of their glowing sensuality, as mere glorifications of carnal lust. The poet himself was the new Tanhäuser. He wished, as he often told me, to find expression in these poems for the life-denying as well as for the life-affirming forces. He sang the pleasure and the pain, the hopes and the disappointments of modern love. For him love is indeed the rose with the thorns. For this reason the motto of the poem is a saying of Meister Eckart: “The voluptuousness of the creature is intermingled with bitterness;” and this is the theme of the poets, though expressed in numerous variations: “There is no pleasure without regret.”

But for this reason Grisebach—and in this respect he resembles Nietzsche—wished none the less joyfully to affirm this life, filled as it is with pain, and in all its activity bringing with it regrets. In this sense he is no exclusive pessimist, but an apostle of activity, like the men of young Germany, in whose footsteps, and especially in those of Heine, he follows. The beautiful saying of Laube, in his “Liebesbriefen” (Leipzig, 1835, p. 29), “He who has never been shaken to the depths by any profound sorrow is also ignorant of all deep rejoicing, he knows no single verse of that enthusiasm which woos the denied heaven, he experiences no sort of religion, he is capable of no sacrifice, of no greatness,” is suited also to the “new Tanhäuser,” which so powerfully influenced German youth during the seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century.

He who wishes to understand how the various love-problems are represented in the literature of the present, strongly influenced as it is by the problem-poems of Ibsen, by Zola’s naturalism, and by the French symbolism [153] dependent on him, will find it described later in a special chapter devoted to love in the literature of to-day.

In the following chapter we have to consider one additional influence which is especially apparent in the love and eroticism of the present day, and possesses great importance for the individualization of love. This is the artistic element in modern love.

CHAPTER IX
THE ARTISTIC ELEMENT IN MODERN LOVE

“I am of opinion that love bears within itself, more than any other moral relationship, the sense of the beautiful, and when anywhere a heavy heart begins to move its wings and to strive towards the ideal, it is in the time when it loves. Without doubt an æsthetic perception always accompanies the eye of the lover, and in a greater degree than it ever accompanies the dispassionate eye.”—Kuno Fischer.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER IX

Ennoblement and reform of the amatory life as a demand of our time — The battle with the elemental forces of the sexual impulse and of asceticism — The artistic element in modern love — Erotic rhythmotropism — Sexuality and æsthetics — The awakening of æsthetic sensibility at the time of puberty — Importance of sensuality to life and to the poietic impulse — The example of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff — Sensuality of great poets and artists — Views of recent æsthetics regarding the relations between sexual love and artistic perception — Rôle of the erotic need for illusion in social life — Emerson, Konrad Lange, and William Scherer, on the æsthetic eroticism of social life — The liberating and vitalizing elements therein — Significance of modern individual beauty — Misnamed “nervous” beauty — The English “Pre-Raphaelites” and the ideal of beauty — Masculine beauty — Why women love ugly men — Caroline Schlegel, Goethe, Eduard von Hartmann, and Swedenborg, on this subject — The attractive force of the poietic and the spiritual in man.

CHAPTER IX

At the present day, notwithstanding all the adverse opinions and jeremiads of infatuated apostles of morality, the epoch of our amatory life through which we are passing is by no means one of decadence. On the contrary, we are now actually engaged in its re-constitution, reform, and ennoblement. All the tendencies of the time proceed towards such a radical perfectionment of love, towards its free, individual configuration, not by the unchaining of sensuality, but by its idealization; and when we have once attained a natural view of sensuality, it loses all its terrors. We fight at first against the elemental force of the wild impulse, and against the elemental force of life-denying asceticism. In this struggle the artistic element in modern love plays a notable part. By this we do not signify “sugary” æstheticism, nor yet the completely non-sensual Platonic Eros, but that æsthetic tendency in human love, bringing about an intimate association of the bodily and spiritual, which W. Bölsche denotes by the term “rhythmotropism.” It is “an impulsive, forced reaction of the higher animal brain to rhythmical beauty,” to which art also owes its origin. This æsthetic natural impulse is of great importance to love, as Darwin recognized many years ago. It was he who expressed the great thought that beauty is love become perceptible.

The sexual is in no way hostile to æsthetic contemplation, as the unhappy Weininger quite erroneously maintained in the confused chapter “Erotism and Æsthetics” of his book. He curtly denies that sexuality has any æsthetic value whatever, yet Plato himself deduced from the physical Eros the highest æsthetic contemplation of a spiritual nature. In the world of the senses he discovered the reflection of the Divine.

The well-known fact that with the awakening of the sexual life, spiritual creative activity also awakens, and an artistic tendency becomes kinetic, that at the time of puberty every youth is a poet, confirms the suggested existence of this intimate relationship between sexual and æsthetic perception.

“There appears to me to be no doubt,” says J. Volkelt in his “Æsthetics” (vol. i., p. 523; Munich, 1905), “that in the youth or the maiden the awakening of sexuality induces an individualization and invigoration of artistic perception. Hand in hand with the first love of youth, somewhere about the sixteenth or seventeenth year, the[180] sense of grace and beauty in the landscape, the appreciation of the charm of poetry, painting, and music, are strengthened and refined to such a degree, that in comparison with what is now felt, all earlier experiences and enjoyments seem to be as nothing.”

Sensuality first gives life colour, brings out the nuances and the finer tones of feeling, without which life would be tinted a uniform grey, would be a monotonous waste, and lacking which the joy of existence and creative activity would be annihilated, or, at least, would be reduced to a minimum. Even the most ideal love must be nourished upon sensuality, if it is to remain poietic and full of vitality. Of this Annette von Droste-Hülshoff is an interesting example—a woman and poet in whom in other respects sexual influences can have played only a very modest part. But she lost on the instant all poetic capacity, all artistic creative power, when her lover, Lewin Schücking, became engaged to Louise von Gall. The mere idea of the possibility of physical possession was to her a spur to poetic activity without its being necessary for this possibility to be translated into reality. But when the possibility was for ever removed, her muse at once became dumb.

An absolutely convincing proof of the intimate connexion between sexuality and æsthetics is the fact that great artists and poets have, in the majority of cases, possessed thoroughly sensual natures. The previously described relationship between the sexual impulse and the poietic impulse, comprised in the “function impulse” of Santlus, is especially manifest in the case of artists. In these artistic natures the perceptive æsthetic power is associated with an ardent sensuality, which derives its most powerful impulse directly from the beautiful. We agree with von Krafft-Ebing when he denies the possibility of genius, art, and poetry except upon a sexual foundation. We do not believe in a so-called purely æsthetic contemplation and perception without any sexual admixture. Even Volkelt, who is inclined to sever art and the sexual impulse each from the other, is unable to deny the genetic connexion between the two. Oskar Bie makes the interesting observation that “in æsthetic relationships the cord of the will does not become thinner to the breaking point, but stronger, until it becomes blind passion” (Neue Deutsche Rundschau, 1894, p. 479). Nietzsche and Guyau have also declared themselves opposed to Schopenhauer’s theory regarding the absence of a will-element in æsthetic perception. Nietzsche speaks even of an “æsthetic of the sexual impulse.” Guyau bases his æsthetic upon the love of life and upon sexual[181] love (“Les Problèmes de l’Esthétique Contemporaine,” Paris, 1897). Magnus Hirschfeld alludes in his “Wesen der Liebe” (“The Nature of Love”), p. 48, to a work by G. Santayana entitled “The Sense of Beauty,” in which the theory is propounded that “for human beings the whole of nature is an object of sexual perception, and it is chiefly in this way that the beauty of nature is to be explained.” Finally, Gustav Naumann (“Sex and Art: Prolegomena to Physiological Æsthetics,” Leipzig, 1899) says most convincingly that the sexual is the root of all art, of all æsthetics.

But whatever view may be held regarding the relationship between sexuality and art, it is a quite incontestable fact that our latter-day life is characterized by a need “for erotic illusion” (to use the expression of Konrad Lange), that the slighter degree of eroticism, as it exhibits itself in social intercourse between the two sexes, is principally of an artistic nature. I do not speak here merely of the dance as the artistic transfiguration of the erotic phenomena of courtship, or of dress and fashion and the whole milieu as æsthetic means of expression of the personality (as they were described in earlier pages of this work), but I refer above all to social intercourse as a whole, which to-day represents a free and facile æsthetic element, in which modern love receives its most manifold suggestions.

Emerson, in his essay on Love, has very beautifully described the importance to our civilized life of these slight, imponderable influences of an erotic-æsthetic nature; and Konrad Lange, in his “Wesen der Kunst” (vol. ii., p. 23; Berlin, 1901), refers the pleasure of social intercourse ultimately to the sexual impulse, even though therein sensuality is mitigated by illusion and is elevated to a purer sphere. Erotic enjoyment is modified into a “love-play,” sensuality is refined, spiritualized, dematerialized. It is precisely this æsthetic eroticism which at the present day becomes of increasing importance in the emotional life of civilized humanity, in the life of those engaged in the hard struggle for existence, to whom time and leisure are lacking for the “great” love-passion. For such as these, these gentler suggestions constitute the true charm of life, into the dreary monotony of which they bring light and colour.

In his excellent “Remarks on Goethe’s Stella,” Wilhelm Scherer has assigned its true value to this erotic æstheticism and æsthetic eroticism of society and social intercourse. He speaks of a charm of personal presence, which brings out all that is best in two human beings. He speaks of an enthusiastic and[182] complete surrender of the spirit and the emotions, in which the souls seem to enter into inseparable union—and yet only seem. For in reality this surrender occurs for weeks, for days, for minutes, for moments, and to various persons. These frequent, individual, purely spiritual contacts between the two sexes have completely the character of æsthetic joy; they give rise to a perception of freedom, of liberation from the power of the senses. Who does not know the happy freedom of spirit which is aroused by the glance of a beautiful girl, by the smile of a sympathetic face?

This æsthetic incitation by means of eroticism has, moreover, in it something vitalizing, something which spurs on the will, because its cause—eroticism itself—contains within it such an element of action and vital energy. The modern love ideals of the sexes have a peculiar impulsive force. Classical beauty taken by itself, and without the individual, personal characteristic element, is valueless. And woman herself also is no longer the patient Gretchen of yore. She must have temperament, character, passion—she must be a personality.

More than by the beautiful are we allured by the characteristic, by the developed personality, by the passionate, the subjective in woman—by that which, in pursuance of a false connotation, is often now termed “nervous” beauty. The pale Josepha of the days of Heine’s boyhood is an example of this type.

In her “Buch der Frauen” (“Book of Women”) (Paris and Leipzig, 1895), Laura Marholm has described in the figures of Marie Bashkirtzeff, Anna Charlotte Loeffler, Eleonore Duse, George Egerton, Amalie Skram, and Sonja Kowalewska, well-marked and characteristic types of modern woman as a personality.

This attraction to the characteristic, to the personal, in the aspect of woman conflicts to some extent with the preference arising under the influence of the English “Pre-Raphaelites,” of Burne-Jones and Rossetti, for straight lines, for slender, ethereal, unduly spiritual, supersensual forms, which no longer express the free personality of the mature, complete woman, but approximate rather to the infantile, asexual habitus. In this case, however, we have to do with a mere transient fashion, which cannot countervail the above characterized general tendency towards the personal.

This personal, individual has in man even greater importance than actual beauty. It is a distinctive fact that, throughout the history of civilization, men have always had a clearer understanding[183] of “masculine beauty” than women. Women have preferred power, intelligence, energy of will, and marked individuality. Caroline Schlegel, in a letter to Luise Gotter, writes of Mirabeau: “Hideous he may have been—he says so himself frequently in his letters—but Sophie loved him, for what women love in men is certainly not beauty” (“Letters of Caroline Schlegel,” vol. i., p. 93; edited by G. Waitz, Leipzig, 1871). This conception also elucidates the words in the second part of Goethe’s “Faust”:

It explains, too, the opinion of Eduard von Hartmann (“Philosophie des Unbewussten”—“Philosophy of the Unconscious,” p. 205; Berlin, 1874), that the most powerful passions are not aroused by the most beautiful, but, on the contrary, by the ugliest, individuals. The influence of powerfully developed individuality is, in fact, notably greater than that of physical beauty. The mystic Swedenborg long ago declared that in man woman desired truth, spiritual significance, not beauty alone.[154]

Herein we see a suggestion of the fact that true beauty is ultimately spiritual beauty, the expression of the force of will, of poietic activity, and of free personality.

CHAPTER X
THE SOCIAL FORMS OF THE SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP—MARRIAGE

“The individualistic tendency, in the most decisive and characteristic form peculiar to our system of civilization, is most happily represented in the monogamic form of marriage; for here, on the woman’s side also, the development of individuality is gently and imperceptibly accomplished.”—Ludwig Stein.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER X

The disputed question of sexual promiscuity — The fact of its existence — Westermarck’s defective criticism of the doctrine of promiscuity — Persistence of promiscuity until the present day — Ethnological proofs of this fact — The researches of Friedrich S. Krauss — Marriage an artificial product — Group-marriage — A form of limited promiscuity — Diffusion of group-marriage — Connexion of polygamy and group-marriage — The loan and the exchange of wives — Matriarchy and patriarchy — Progress from lower to higher social forms of sexual relationship — Transition from matriarchy to patriarchy — Formation of the patriarchal family — Marriage by capture and marriage by purchase — The bright side of patriarchy — Patriarchal forms of marriage — Polygamy and the patriarchal family — Levitical marriage — Monogamic marriage — Coexistence with monogamic marriage of a facultative polygamy — The conventional lie of marriage — Hegel’s definition of marriage — Criticism of this definition — Combination of the matriarchal and the patriarchal forms of the sexual relationship — Revival of the idea of matriarchy — Transformation of the ancient patriarchal form of marriage to freer forms — Introduction of civil marriage and divorce — Chief grounds for marriage reform — Duplex sexual morality — Its origin — Criticism thereof — Relationship between prostitution and the conventional coercive marriage — Necessity of, and justification for, freer forms of marriage — Lecky’s views on this subject — Roman concubinage, and the morganatic marriage — Significance of the sacramental character of marriage — Sanction by the State of a freer form of marriage (civil marriage, mixed marriage, divorce) — Psychology of love in the marriage problem — Inconstancy of human love — The eternity lie — Transient character of youthful love — Gutzkow, Kierkegaard, and Rétif de la Bretonne on this subject — The poetical character of the first stages of every love — The sexual need for variety as an anthropologico-biological phenomenon — This simply an explanatory principle, not an ideal — Rarity of the “only” love — The psychologist Stiedenroth on this subject — The possibility of love felt simultaneously for several persons — Explanation of this fact — Examples — Difficulty of complete harmony between man and wife — The ideal of the “one” love — Schleiermacher on the necessity for experiments in love — The examples of Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient and Caroline Schelling — The need for love unaffected by disillusion — Dangers of habituation — The double rôle of habituation in marriage — Danger of intimate life in common — The common bedroom — Unfavourable conditions with regard to the relative ages of husband and wife — Increase in premature marriages — Connexion of this phenomenon with the premature awakening of sexuality — Too great a difference in age between husband and wife — Consequent physiological disharmony — Postponement of marriage in consequence of civilization — Diminution of marriages in various European countries — Economical factors — Mercenary marriage a vestige of earlier times — Disappearance[187] of the economic background to marriage with the further advance of civilization — Marriage and the price of corn — Part played by mercenary marriage in various classes — Importance of economic factors in marriage — Summary of the causes of the diminution of the “marriage impulse” — “Conjugal rights” — Justification and misuse of these — Boredom in married life — Marriage and disease — Opinion of an alienist on the calamities of marriage — Statements of a wife — Schiller and Byron upon love and marriage — A dictum of Socrates — Growing disinclination to the coercive character of the marriage bond — Great increase in the number of divorces in recent years — § 1568 of the Civil Code — Legal possibility of several successive divorces on the part of the same individual — A kind of civil sanction of free love — Dependence of the consciousness of duty upon freedom — Grounds for divorce — Marriage reform in France — Composition and programme of the French committee for marriage reform — The idea of sexual responsibility.

Appendix: Report of one hundred typical marriages, and twelve characteristic more detailed pictures of married life, after Gross-Hoffinger.

CHAPTER X

Since the subject first engaged my close attention, it has always seemed to me incomprehensible that a dispute should ever have arisen among anthropologists, ethnologists, and historians of civilization as to whether, among the primitive forms of the sexual relationship, marriage was the first, or whether it was preceded by a state of sexual promiscuity.

Whoever knows the nature of the sexual impulse, whoever has arrived at a clear understanding regarding the course of human evolution, and, finally, whoever has studied the conditions that even now prevail, alike among primitive peoples and among modern civilized races, in the matter of sexual relations, can have no doubt whatever that in the beginnings of human development a state of sexual promiscuity did actually prevail.[155]

“The ideal goal,” says Heinrich Schurtz, “towards which, more or less consciously, civilized humanity is undoubtedly advancing, involuntarily also becomes the standard by which the past is judged, and sentiment and mood take the place of a single-minded endeavour to arrive at truth.”

Thus it has happened that the ideal of permanent marriage between a single man and a single woman, which, in fact, as we shall proceed to explain, must persist as an ideal of civilization never to be lost, has been employed as a standard for the judgment of bygone conditions. This error is one into which Westermarck more especially has fallen in his “History of Human Marriage” (Jena, 1893)—a work of considerable value from its richness in ethnological detail. Hence Westermarck’s criticism of the[189] doctrine of promiscuity, based as it is upon false premises, “has ultimately remained barren,” as Heinrich Schurtz has proved.[156] Westermarck, for example, simply ignores the fact that within the group-marriage of sexual associates, within the totem, promiscuity undoubtedly existed.

Since, as we shall see, among the tribes and races living in social unions, sexual promiscuity can be proved to have existed side by side with, and commonly in advance of, the development of marriage, it is indubitable that primitive man, in whom the sexual impulse was still purely instinctive, had simply no knowledge of “marriage” in the modern sense of the term. Otherwise, indeed, the “mother-right” would not have been necessary, for matriarchy was the typical expression of the uncertainty of paternity which resulted from sexual promiscuity.

The great freedom of sexual intercourse in primitive times is denoted by various investigators by many different terms; sometimes it is called “promiscuity,” sometimes “free-love,” sometimes “group-marriage,” “polyandry,” “polygamy,” “religious and sexual prostitution,” etc. The classical works of Bachofen, Bastian, Giraud-Teulon, von Hellwald, Kohler, Friedrich S. Krauss, Lubbock, MacLennan, Morgan, Friedrich Müller, Post, H. Schurtz, Wilcken, and others, have proved beyond question the existence of this primordial hetairism.

When modern critics at length find it convenient to admit the overwhelming force of the enormous mass of evidence that has been collected concerning this subject, they still exhibit a great dislike to the conception and the term sexual “promiscuity,” whereby is understood the boundless and indiscriminate intermingling of the sexes. They admit the possibility of group-marriage, although this is merely a socially limited form of promiscuity; they admit even the existence of polyandry and polygamy, and of indiscriminate religious prostitution; but they refuse to believe in the existence of genuine promiscuity.

And yet, if they only chose to make use of their eyes, they could observe sexual promiscuity at the present day among the modern civilized nations. In certain strata and classes of the population, such an indiscriminate and unregulated sexual intercourse, in no way leading to the formation of enduring relationships, can be observed to-day. Ask a young man, even of the better classes, with how many women he has had connexion during[190] a single year—not one of these need have been a prostitute—and, if he speaks the truth, you will be astounded at the number of the “objects of lust”! This last expression is suitable enough, because in most cases there is no individual relationship between such casual partners. Ask certain girls also—maidservants, for example, or girls engaged in the manufacture of ready-made clothing—and you will obtain analogous information regarding the number of their annual lovers. Phillip Frey (“Der Kampf der Geschlechter”—“The Battle of the Sexes,” p. 51; Vienna, 1904) bases on similar grounds the assumption of a primitive sexual promiscuity; he refers especially to the condition of the seaports:

“Ports in which ocean-going vessels come to harbour are familiar with the sexual impulse in its most completely animal form, and devoid of every refinement and concealment. We find ourselves transported into the depths of an urgent primitiveness and savagery, which gives the lie to the advance in civilization, and this will enable us to form a clearer idea of the bestial indifference in sexual matters that must have obtained amongst the herds of primitive man. Intercourse between man and woman promoted by the lust of the moment, dependent solely upon reciprocal animal desire, the various male and female individuals of the human herd differing too little each from the other to make it worth while to strive for permanent rights of possession, the absence of any ownership of land amongst those wandering to and fro through the primeval forest, the common ownership of children by the herd or tribe—that such was the primitive, ape-like condition of the human race, one actually inferior to that of many other mammals, is a belief amply justified by the polygamous and polyandrous instincts of homo sapiens, recurring again and again in all the stages of civilization.”

Fortunately, ethnology furnishes us with incontrovertible proofs of genuine promiscuity.

“When a Nasomonian man takes his first wife, it is the custom that on the first night the bride should be visited by each of the guests in turn, and each one, as he leaves, gives her a present which he had brought with him to the house.”

Diodorus Siculus makes a similar report regarding the inhabitants of the Balearic Islands (v. 18). Have we not here an echo of primeval custom, of sexual promiscuity prior to marriage?

Very interesting are the accounts recently given by Melnikow regarding the free sexual relationships customary among the Siberian Buryats. There before marriage unregulated sexual intercourse between men and girls prevails. This is especially to be observed at festival seasons. Such festivals occur usually late in the evening, and can rightly be called “nights of love.[191]” Near the villages bonfires are lighted, round which the men and women dance monotonous dances termed “nadan.” From time to time pairs separate from the thousands of dancers, and disappear into the darkness; soon they return and resume their place in the dance, to disappear again by and by into the obscurity; but they are not the same couples that disappear each time, for they continually change partners.[157]

Is this not promiscuity? In a mitigated form we can see the same among ourselves. A case recently came under my notice in which two friends made an exchange of their “intimates”; moreover, the “intimacy” in each case had been of very brief duration. This, indeed, happened in the full light of day; while among the Buryats the darkness concealed a completely indiscriminate promiscuity.

Marco Polo reports as a remarkable custom of the inhabitants of Thibet, that there a man would in no circumstances marry a girl who was a virgin, for they say a wife is worth nothing if she has not had intercourse with men. Girls were offered to the traveller, and he was expected to reward the courtesy with a ring or some other trifle, which the girl, when she wished to marry, would show as one of her “love-tokens.” The more such tokens she possessed, the more she was in request as a wife.[158]

Of especial importance, as proving the existence of sexual promiscuity, are the investigations of the student of folk-lore, Friedrich S. Krauss, regarding the sexual life of the Southern Slavs. Krauss has, indeed, rendered most valuable aids to the scientific study and anthropological foundation of the human sexual life; a place of honour among the founders of “anthropologia sexualis” must be given to Krauss, and also to Bastian, Post, Kohler, Mantegazza, and Ploss-Bartels.

Dr. Krauss first published his pioneer investigations in “Kryptadia,” vols. vi. and vii. (Paris, 1899 and 1901); but later he founded an annual for the record of researches into the folk-lore and ethnology of the sexual life, entitled “Anthropophyteia: Jahrbuch für folkloristische Erhebungen und Forschungen zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der geschlechtlichen Moral”—“Anthropophyteia: Annual for Folk-lorist Investigations and Researches in the History of the Evolution of Sexual Morality.” This has been published now for four years, 1904-1907, Krauss having the[192] co-operation of anthropologists, ethnologists, folk-lorists, and medical men, such as Thomas Achelis, Iwan Bloch, Franz Boas, Albert Eulenburg, Anton Herrmann, Bernhard Obst, Giuseppe Pitré, Isak Robinsohn, and Karl von dem Steinen. It constitutes a most important addition to the hitherto very scanty works for the scientific study of sexual problems. Later, I shall have occasion to refer again to this important undertaking. Krauss, who, as he himself says, is insensitive to the romantic appeal of folk-lore, but has an open mind for the realities and possibilities of human history, has proved in this publication the unquestionable existence of sexual promiscuity among the Southern Slavs. As he himself declares, such an abundance of trustworthy proofs, obtained by a professional folk-lorist, regarding the existence of a form of sexual promiscuity within the narrow sphere of a single geographical province of research, has not hitherto been available.

It is, moreover, perfectly clear that the human need for sexual variety, which is an established anthropological phenomenon,[159] must in primitive times have been much stronger and more unbridled, in proportion as the whole of life had not hitherto risen above the needs of purely physical requirements. Since even in our own time, in a state of the most advanced civilization, after the development of a sexual morality penetrating and influencing our entire social life, this natural need for variety continues to manifest itself in almost undiminished strength, we can hardly regard it as necessary to prove that in primitive conditions sexual promiscuity was a more original, and, indeed, a more natural, state than marriage.

For from the purely anthropological standpoint—only from this standpoint, since with questions of morality, society, and civilization we are not now concerned—permanent marriage appears a thoroughly artificial institution, which even to-day fails to do justice to the human need for sexual variety, since, indeed, vast numbers of men live de jure monogamously, but de facto polygamously—a fact pointed out by Schopenhauer. This criticism is, of course, based upon purely physical sensual considerations; it does not touch marriage as an ideal of civilization possessing a spiritual and moral content.

The other social forms of sexual intercourse, forms whose existence is admitted even by the critics of promiscuity, are characterized by frequent changes in sexual relationships. This is[193] especially true of the oldest form of marriage, the so-called “group-marriage.”[160]

Group-marriage is not a union in marriage of isolated individuals, but such a union between two tribal groups, composed respectively of male and female individuals, a union between the so-called totems.

The social instinct, the impulse towards companionship, upon which even to-day the State and the family depend, united mankind at one time into tribes of a peculiar kind, which felt themselves to constitute single individuals, and believed themselves to be inspired by an animal spirit, their protective spirit. Their union was known as the totem.

Group-marriage is the marriage of one totem with another—that is, the men of one totem-group marry the women of another, and vice versa. But no individual man has any particular wife. On the contrary, if, for example, twenty men of the first totem espoused twenty women of the second totem, then each one of the twenty men had an equivalent share of each one of the twenty women, and vice versa. This was indeed an advance over unrestricted sexual promiscuity, limited by no social forms; but it afforded no possibility of any individual relationships of love, it remained promiscuity within narrow bounds. Group-marriages exist at the present day in Australia in a well-developed form among certain tribes; whilst, as an occasional custom, in the form of an exchange of wives among friends, guests, and relatives, it appears to be almost universally diffused throughout Australia. Schurtz regards Australian group-marriage as a kind of partial taming of the wild sexual impulse.

Well known is the description of group-marriage in ancient Britain given by Julius Cæsar: “The husbands possess their wives to the number of ten or twelve in common, and more especially brothers with brothers, or parents with children.” Here we have a special variety of group-marriage.

According to Bernhöft, polyandry is also to be regarded as the[194] vestige of a primitive form of group-marriage, arising from a deficiency of women in a totem, so that one woman was left as the representative of the totem married to several husbands. Marshall has, in fact, amongst the polyandrous Toda in Southern India, actually observed group-marriage side by side with polyandry.

Among certain Indian tribes we find even at the present day indications of group-marriage. For example, the husband will have a claim on the sisters of his wife, or even on her cousins or her aunts, and gradually he may marry them. In this case we see that polygyny has developed out of the group-marriage.

The widely diffused practice of wife-lending and wife-exchange is also connected with the conditions of group marriage. In Hawaii, in Australia, among the Massai and the Herero in South Africa, we encounter this custom, but more especially in Angola and at the mouth of the Congo, also in North-Eastern Asia, and among many tribes of North American Indians.

Schurtz points out that similar conditions may arise among European proletariat in consequence of inadequate housing accommodation.

In this state of a somewhat limited promiscuity the only natural tie was that between mother and child. The child belonged exclusively to the mother, and therefore, in the wider sense, belonged to his mother’s totem. As Bachofen proved in his celebrated work,[161] in primeval times, and among many primitive tribes even at the present day, the “mother-right” (matriarchy), founded upon purely sensual, non-individual relations, was predominant; and only with the appearance of freer, more spiritual, more individual relations between the sexes (though this did not necessarily involve the development of monogamy) was “mother-right” first superseded by “father-right” (patriarchy).

These recent ethnological researches have proved the untenability of Westermarck’s criticism of the doctrine of promiscuity; it is no longer possible to doubt the fact of a primitive sex-companionship, taking the form of a more or less limited promiscuity of sexual intercourse. Ludwig Stein also lays stress on this view.[162] The sexual relationships of the primeval hordes were either quite unregulated, or regulated only to a very small extent.

In this view of the matter there is nothing in any sense degrading to the human race; on the contrary, in the development of[195] individual, enduring relationships between man and woman out of a condition of primitive promiscuity, we see manifested a continuous progression from lower to higher social forms of the sexual relationships, a gradual improvement and ennoblement of these relationships, until the development of monogamic marriage (which even to-day is merely an ideal state, since the reality does not correspond to it, or the original pure idea has been falsified and obscured).

The transition from matriarchy, resting on a purely natural basis, in which women assumed a leading social position, and often also a leading political position, to patriarchy, in which the spiritual and the individual relationships were brought into the foreground, signified a great step forward in the developmental history of marriage. Bachofen was the first to recognize the profound importance in the history of civilization and for the spiritual and social life of humanity of this transition of the mother-right to the father-right, from matriarchy to patriarchy. Schurtz found the following formula to express the change:

“Woman is the central point of the natural groups arising from sexual intercourse and reproduction; man, on the other hand, is the creator of free forms of society based upon the sympathy of like kinds.”

The development of the individual personal marriage is most intimately dependent upon patriarchy. In this sense, but only in this sense, Eduard von Mayer is right when he points to man as the true creator of the family. For under the matriarchal system the “family” was incomplete: it consisted only of mother and child. Only with the development of patriarchy could the family become a complete whole. This patriarchal family, which is also our modern family, is thus “the masculine form of the human tendency to social aggregation.”[163]

The father-right consisted in the right of the father over the wife and her children; it was a right of domination acquired by a severe struggle. The rape of women and marriage by capture belong to the beginnings of patriarchy; later, when woman, completely enslaved, had fallen to the position of a mere chattel, marriage by purchase was introduced. The debased position of women under the domination of the primitive father-right can be best studied among the Greeks, where free sexual relationships were possible only in connexion with hetairæ and the love of boys. To the Greeks of classical antiquity the love of boys was precisely[196] that which to the modern civilized man hetero-sexual love is, resting upon the most personal, most individual, most spiritual contact and understanding.

Kohler has beautifully described the bright side of the complete and unrestricted father-right:

“Now for the first time the man founds his home; he is the master of the domestic herd, he is the priest of sacrifice at the domestic altar; his ancestors are present in the spirit; he honours them; the house is permeated by them. In his house nothing unclean shall exist; he teaches the children propriety and dependence on the family; and the wife, at the moment when, as a bride, she crosses the threshold of her husband’s house, or is carried across it, gives up her household gods; his home is now her home. Now, at the domestic hearth, the virtues flourish—those virtues which become the preliminaries of national greatness. In the bosom of his family the man gains power, which fits him for the most important functions, whether in the life of the State or in the life of science; and a township or an agricultural community based upon such conditions constitutes the necessary foundation upon which to erect the structure of ethical, scientific, and political life. The wife passes into the background, but in the house she develops new virtues; self-sacrifice to the family, a domestic sense, joy in the home, amiability in narrower circles, are the bright sides of her influence, for the wife knows how to develop everywhere beautiful traits of character, so long as her lot is not cast amidst rude or degenerating conditions.”

The most ancient form of marriage under the father-right was polygamy, as, for example, we find it described in the Old Testament. Here we have a typical picture of the patriarchal order of family. The head of the house and of the family has a principal wife for the procreation of legitimate issue, but, in addition, numerous concubines. Among the Jews, the great stress laid upon father-right gave rise to the so-called “Leviratsehe”—that is to say, a widowed wife was compelled to marry the brother of her deceased husband, in order that the race of the dead man should be continued. Out of this patriarchal polygamy there gradually arose monogamic marriage, which down to the present time—let us insist on the matter once for all—has remained an ideal, never in reality attained, either by the Greeks or Romans or in the modern civilized world. For the modern civilized marriage is mainly a production of the father-right, and stands under the dominion of “man-made” morality, which, beside monogamy, legally established and assumed to be binding, tolerates “facultative polygamy”; hence there is here concealed an element of lying and hypocrisy which has rightly brought into discredit the modern patriarchal marriage as a conventional form among those who regard as the[197] true ideal of marriage in the future the enduring life in common of two free personalities endowed with equal rights.

Hegel, in his celebrated definition of marriage,[164] which he regards as the embodiment of the reality of the species and as the spiritual unity of the natural sexes brought about by self-conscious love, as legal-moral love, has not done justice to the recognition and development of the individuality of both parties. The “unity,” the “one body and one soul,” corresponds indeed to the patriarchal conception, according to which the woman is completely absorbed into the man; it does not correspond, however, to the modern idea of individual marriage, in which both man and woman are united as free personalities. This, as we shall see later, is the meaning of the struggle for “free-love,” which must not be confused, as, for example, it is confused by Ludwig Stein (“Beginnings of Civilization,” p. 110), with the free-love, the hetairism, of ancient times, or with the simple extra-conjugal intercourse of the present day.

Neither the mother-right alone, nor the father-right alone, is competent to satisfy the ideals of modern civilized human beings, in respect of the configuration of the social forms of the amatory life. This is only possible when both forms of right are united in a new form, by equal rights given to both sexes.[165]

Hence, in association with the endeavour for the free individual development of the feminine nature, we find also the tendency to reintroduce into public life, into true valuation and honour, the ancient conception of the mother-right.

“Slowly and gradually,” says Kohler, “has the reawakened idea of the mother-right been gnawing with a sharp tooth, now in one way, now in another, at the rigid fetters of this system, and has loosened them.... That in this manner woman will attain a worthier position is certain. But the unitary family-sense has long ceased among us to be the powerful incentive to action that it is among the purely agnate (patriarchal) peoples.... Our own conditions render it possible that the institutions of civilization will continue to thrive, even though the family tie is no longer tense and exclusive.”

The modern civilized man can quietly accustom himself to the idea that the old patriarchal family under the dominion of the father-right will gradually disappear; and that at the same time the patriarchal conventional marriage of ancient times, still to[198] all appearance so firmly established, will be replaced by other, freer forms. The idea of marriage, and its value as a form of social life, remains meanwhile unaffected. It is possible to be a critic of the old, outlived form of marriage, without therefore being exposed to the suspicion of wishing to dispense with the idea of “marriage” altogether. The one-sided, juristic, political, sacramental, and ecclesiastical conception of the past does justice neither to the social nor to the individual significance of marriage. He who, like Westermarck, regards monogamic marriage as something primitively ordained, as if it were a biological fact, and denies completely the development of that institution out of lower forms, denies also the possibility of any extensive transformation of the existing forms of marriage. The common mistake is, to place on the one hand monogamy in its most ideal form, that of life-long marriage, and on the other hand, the so-called “free love,” understanding by free love completely unregulated extra-conjugal sexual intercourse. It is not a matter for surprise that, in respect of both of these extreme forms of sexual relationship, a pessimistic view should easily gain ground. According to the point of view, one party will insist on the intolerable character, in relation to the need for individual freedom and as regards the development of personality, of a lifelong marriage of duty; whilst the other party will lay stress upon the equally great, if not greater, dangers of the unrestrained practice of extra-conjugal sexual intercourse.

With regard to recent views on the marriage problem, the reader will do well to consult the thoughtful pamphlet of Gabriele Reuter, “The Problem of Marriage” (Berlin, 1907). The author points out that there is a “deep-lying dissatisfaction with the existing marriage conditions, a yearning and restless need for improvement.” In marriage, she holds, the bodily and spiritual process of human development is completed in the most concentrated manner. As a cause of the numerous unhappy marriages of our time, she points to the divergencies, so widely manifest at the present day, between modes of thought and views of life among members of the same strata of society and among those of the same degree of education, more especially in religious matters, and she refers also to experiments made in respect of new modes of life, such as the woman’s movement. According to Gabriele Reuter, the child will become the regulator of all the changes in the married state which we have to expect in the future. As “marriage,” she defines that earnest union between man and woman which is formed for the purpose of a life in[199] common, and with the intention of procreating and bringing up children, and she regards it as altogether beside the question whether that union has been affected with or without civil or ecclesiastical sanction. In contrast with this idea of “marriage,” there would be other fugitive or more enduring unions, serving only for excitement and sensual enjoyment. It is interesting to note that the author recommends to the modern woman “good-humoured and motherly forbearance” in respect of marital infidelity. For a woman’s own good and for that of her children, it is more important that her husband should show her love, respect, and friendship, than that he should preserve unconditional physical faithfulness. But the author here ignores the possibility of venereal infection as a result of occasional unfaithfulness, which very seriously threatens the well-being of the wife and the children! Very wisely she advises a facilitation of divorce. This would not make husband and wife careless in their relations one to the other; on the contrary, it would make both more careful and thoughtful in the avoidance of anything causing pain to one another. The children should always remain with the mother up to the age of fourteen years. A detailed and valuable account of the problems of modern marriage will be found also in the work “Regarding Married Happiness: the Experiences, Reflections, and Advice of a Physician” (Wiesbaden, 1906).

Fortunately, by the legal introduction of civil marriage and of divorce the necessity has now been recognized by the State of leaving open for many persons a middle course—one which lies between lifelong marriage (whose sacramental character is thus abandoned) and free extra-conjugal sexual intercourse, and yet maintains the tendency towards the ideal of monogamic marriage.

The principle of divorce forms the most important foundation at once for a future reformation of marriage, and for a rational view, one doing equal justice to the interests of society and those of the individual, of the relations between man and wife. By the introduction of divorce, the State itself has recognized the purely personal character of conjugal relations, and has admitted that circumstances arise in which the marriage ceases to fulfil its aims and becomes injurious to both parties. Thus the State has proclaimed the rights of the individual personality in the married state.

In the marriage problem, the so-called “duplex sexual morality” also plays an important part—that is to say, the idea that man is by nature inclined to polygamy, but woman to monogamy. Herein, indeed, the thoroughly correct idea was[200] dominant that the cohabitation of one woman with several men—be it understood we refer to simultaneous cohabitation—is harmful to the offspring. From this, however, the only permissible inference is that for the purposes of the procreation of children and of racial hygiene “monogamy” can be demanded of woman on rationalistic grounds—that is to say, the intercourse of woman should be restricted to a single man during such a time and for such a purpose. But it is not legitimate from these considerations to deduce the necessity of permanent “monandry” for woman.

I will consider this question somewhat more exactly, and in doing so will refer to the interesting essay of Rudolph Eberstadt on “The Economic Importance of Sanitary Conditions” in relation to marriage, being the concluding chapter of “Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage and the Married State,” by Senator and Kaminer (Rebman, 1906), because here we find a very clear recognition of the confusion between monogamy and monandry.

According to Eberstadt, there are above all two things characteristic of modern civilized marriage—in the first place, the higher rank allotted to the husband in the married state, and, in the second place, the increased demand for prenuptial purity and for conjugal fidelity on the part of the wife. The husband demands from his wife, in addition to his own mastership in the married state, also sexual continence before marriage and unconditional fidelity during marriage. But the husband does not recognize that corresponding duties are imposed on himself.

This difference of judgment regarding extra-conjugal sexual intercourse on the part of husband and wife respectively, depends entirely upon the perfectly sound experience that simultaneous cohabitation on the part of a woman with several men obscures paternity, and therewith the foundations of the family, quite apart from a not uncommon physical injury to the child. This natural difference between man and woman, in respect of sexual intercourse and its consequences, will always endure. A man can simultaneously cohabit with two women without thereby interfering with the formation of a family; but a woman cannot with similar impunity cohabit with two men. It is possible that the demand for the virgin intactness of the wife at the time of marriage is based upon the old experience that by sexual intercourse, and still more by the first conception, certain far-reaching specific changes are induced in the feminine organism, so that the first man impregnates the feminine being for ever in his own sense, and even transmits his influence to children of a second[201] male progenitor. (Cf. in this connexion G. Lomer, “Love and Psychosis,” p. 37.)

“It is not the brutality of man,” says Eberstadt, “which has imposed a higher responsibility upon woman; Nature herself has done this. Nature has endowed man and woman differently in respect of the consequences of sexual intercourse. The fruit of intercourse is entrusted to the woman alone. Now, one who has special responsibilities has also special duties. Certain breaches of conjugal responsibility are more sternly condemned when committed by the man; certain others—especially such as concern care for the offspring—are more severely judged in the wife. The relative positions in respect of sexual intercourse are different in man and in woman, for reasons which are physical and inalterable. Seduction, ill-treatment, abandonment of a wife, and adultery, are punished in the husband by law and custom. The wife, on the other hand, loses her honour simply on account of promiscuous and unregulated intercourse, because Nature herself forbids this intercourse if the material and spiritual tie between mother, father, and child is to persist.”

In accordance with these considerations, Eberstadt holds fast to the demand for “monandry” on the part of the wife; he rejects on principle the idea of sexual equality between man and wife, and relegates the progressive development of marriage exclusively to the spiritual and moral provinces.

Although we recognize the general accuracy of this view, and admit that it is based upon conditions imposed once for all by Nature herself, still we are compelled to regard it as too narrow and one-sided, for it completely overlooks the fact that this demand for monandric love on the part of woman can be fulfilled in association with a freer moulding of woman’s amatory life. We need merely think of the often happy marriages of one woman to several men—nota bene in temporal succession—in which marriages perfectly healthy children have been born to different fathers, in order to see that for the woman of the future a freer moulding of the amatory life is also possible, though admittedly within narrower limits than in the case of man. Just as the mastership of the husband must give place to an equality of authority on the part of husband and wife, considered as two free personalities, so also must the “duplex morality” undergo a revision in the sense above indicated.

In passing, let us remark that all those who proscribe any kind of extra-conjugal intercourse on the part of woman, and who love to brand as an “outcast” any woman who indulges in it, should have their attention directed for a moment to the tremendous fact of politically tolerated, and even legalized, prostitution, which, like a haunting shadow, accompanies the[202] so-called conventional marriage—a shadow growing ever larger the more strictly, exclusively, and narrowly the idea of this “marriage” is conceived.[166]

The civilized ideal of marriage is the lifelong duration of the marriage between two free, independent, mature personalities, who share fully love and life, and by a common life-work further their own advantage and the well-being of their children. But this rarely attained ideal of civilization in no way excludes other forms of marriage, which have a more transient and temporary character, without thereby doing any harm either to the individual or to society.

More than forty years ago Lecky, the English historian of civilization, an investigator whom no one can blame, in respect of the tendency of his writings, for advancing lax ideas regarding sexual morality or for advising libertinage, expressed himself admirably on this subject. In his “History of European Morals” he wrote:

“In these considerations, we have ample grounds for maintaining that the lifelong union of one man and of one woman should be the normal or dominant type of intercourse between the sexes. We can prove that it is on the whole most conducive to the happiness, and also to the moral elevation, of all parties. But beyond this point it would, I conceive, be impossible to advance, except by the assistance of a special revelation! It by no means follows that because this should be the dominant type, it should be the only one, or that the interests of society demand that all connexions should be forced into the same die. Connexions, which were confessedly only for a few years, have always subsisted side by side with permanent marriages; and in periods when public opinion, acquiescing in their propriety, inflicts no excommunication on one or both of the parties, when these partners are not living the demoralizing and degrading life which accompanies the consciousness of guilt, and when proper provision is made for the children who are born, it would be, I believe, impossible to prove, by the light of simple and unassisted reason, that such connexions should be invariably condemned. It is extremely important, both for the happiness and for the moral well-being of men, that lifelong unions should not be effected simply under the imperious prompting of a blind appetite. There are always multitudes who, in the period of their lives when their passions are most strong, are incapable of supporting children in their own social rank, and who would therefore injure society by marrying in it, but are nevertheless perfectly capable of securing an honourable career for their illegitimate children[203] in the lower social sphere to which these would naturally belong (!). Under the conditions I have mentioned these connexions are not injurious, but beneficial, to the weaker partner; they soften the differences of rank, they stimulate social habits, and they do not produce upon character the degrading effect of promiscuous intercourse, or upon society the injurious effects of imprudent marriages, one or other of which will multiply in their absence. In the immense variety of circumstances and characters, cases will always appear in which, on utilitarian grounds, they might seem advisable.”

In ancient Rome these laxer unions were recognized by law as a form of marriage, and this legal recognition protected them, notwithstanding the unlimited freedom of divorce, from social contempt and stigmatization. “Concubinage” was such a second kind of marriage, which was thoroughly recognized and thoroughly honourable. The amica convictrix or uxor gratuita was neither a legitimate wife nor simply a mistress; she had rather the position of women in our own day who have contracted a “morganatic” marriage, a “left-handed marriage.” The only difference was that these ancient unions were more readily dissoluble.

It was the Christian dogma and the sacramental and lifelong character of marriage which first caused the stamp of infamy to be impressed upon all other varieties of sexual intercourse. The religious marriage was in its very nature indissoluble; indeed, by forbidding mixed marriages (marriages between Christian and pagan) individual freedom was entirely prohibited.

In contrast with this ancient religious view, the State, by the introduction of civil marriage, of mixed marriage (vide supra), and of divorce, has been compelled to make continually greater concessions to modern ideas, and has already recognized in principle that marriages limited in duration harmonize exceedingly well with the demands of civilization; that in general, as Lecky maintained, the recent changes in economic conditions have a much greater influence upon marriage and the forms of marriage than the ecclesiastical and mystical conception of the institution.

Anyone who wishes to gain an insight into this very difficult problem of modern marriage must first obtain clear views in respect of certain peculiarities of individual human love, regarding the intimate connexion of which with the whole process of mental evolution we have already dealt in earlier chapters.

Max Nordau has written a celebrated chapter on “The Lie of Marriage,”[167] and in the light of reality marriage is, in fact, often[204] such a lie as he describes, especially in view of the fact that not less than 75 per cent. of modern marriages are so-called “marriages of convenience,” and in no sense are properly love-marriages.[168]

But it is a well-known fact that these marriages of reason are often more enduring than love-marriages. This depends upon the nature of human love, which is by no means inalterable, but changes in accordance with the various developmental phases of the individual, needs new incitements and new individual relationships.

In No. 14,919 of the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna, March 6, 1906, there appeared among the advertisements a remarkable question, which was probably directed by a betrayed or deceived lover to his beloved:

Love also, personal love, is transitory, like man himself, like the isolated individual. It differs in the different ages of life; it differs, too, according to its object for the time being. Eduard von Hartmann calls love a thunderstorm, which does not discharge in a single flash of lightning, but gradually discharges the electrical energy in several successive flashes, and after the discharge “there comes the cool wind, the heaven of consciousness clears once more, and we look round astonished at the fertilizing rain falling on the ground, and at the clouds fleeing towards the distant horizon.”

All those who are well acquainted with humanity, all poets and psychologists, are in agreement respecting the fugitive character of youthful love. For this reason, they advise against marriage concluded during the passion of early youth. This poetry of love at first sight is, according to Gutzkow, the eternal game of chance of our young people, in which their health, their life, and their future go to wreck.

“Love has many mysteries, and this first love is also a mystery, if not the greatest. Most men in their ardent passion are as if insane; they become engaged or commit some other stupidity, and in a moment it is all over, and they know once more what it has cost them, what they have lost.”

“It is a folly of the same kind to trust the constancy of a young man of twenty years of age. At this age it is less a woman that one loves than women; one is intoxicated rather by sensual phenomena than by the individual, however lovable that individual may be.”

But to youth love is almost always no more than a beautiful memory, a vanishing paradise. There clings to it something imperishable, which has, however, no binding force.

And just as to every man the love of youth appears ideal in character, precisely because it is not subjected to the rude considerations of reality, so also in every subsequent love it is almost always the first beginnings only in which true beauty and deep perception are experienced.

“A thousand years of tears and pains,” Goethe makes his Stella say, “could not counterpoise the happiness of the first glance, the trembling, the stammering, the approach and the withdrawal, the self-forgetfulness, the first fugitive ardent kiss, and the first gently breathing embrace.”

The eternal duration of such feelings is contradicted by an anthropologico-biological phenomenon of human sexuality, which I have described as “the need for sexual variety.”[169] Human love, as a whole and in its individual manifestations, is dominated and influenced by the need for change and variety. Schopenhauer drew attention to this primordial and fundamental phenomenon of human love; he was wrong, however, in limiting it to the male sex.[170] As I have already insisted, this general human need for variety in sexual relationships is to be regarded rather as a general principle of explanation of admitted facts, than as a desirable ideal. On the contrary, in my opinion, faithfulness, constancy, and durability in love, bring under control and diminish this need for sexual variety, through the recognition of the eminent advances in civilization by means of which the human amatory life will be further developed and perfected in a higher sense. But the facts of daily observation are not to be shuffled out of existence by any kind of hypocrisy or prudery. They must be faced and dealt with.

First, it is an incontestable fact that the so-called “only” love is one of the greatest rarities; that, on the contrary, in the[206] life of the majority of men and women a frequent repetition and renewal of love-sentiments and love-relationships occurs. For the most part these loves occur at successive intervals. Stiedenroth, in his admirable “Psychology,” makes the following remarks regarding these successive outbursts of passion and the transitory character of the feeling of love:

“Since no two human beings are precisely alike, one will at one time love passionately one only; in succession, however, several can be loved, and the opinion that one person only can be loved in a lifetime originates in rare dreams regarding the ideal, of which a quite false representation is made. An object can indeed appear which transcends the ideal hitherto conceived; but passion does not need a fully developed ideal for its first foundation; it needs merely that which in the theory of the feelings has been found to be a necessary condition of love. That every love gladly thinks itself immortal, lies in the nature of the case, for on account of the overwhelming character of the sensations of love, it is impossible to understand how they can ever come to an end. Experience, however, teaches us the contrary, and insight enables us to recognize the reason.”[171]

Regarding the frequent occurrence of several love-passions on the part of the same person, there can be two opinions; but is it possible that anyone can simultaneously be in love with several individuals? I answer this question with an unconditional “Yes,” and I agree fully with Max Nordau when he explains that it is possible to love at the same time several individuals with almost identical tenderness, and that it is not necessarily lying when ardent passion for each of them is expressed.[172]

It is precisely the extraordinarily manifold spiritual differentiation of modern civilized humanity that gives rise to the possibility of such a simultaneous love for two individuals. Our spiritual nature exhibits the most varied colouring. It is difficult always to find the corresponding complements in one single individual.

I ask those who are well acquainted with modern society if they have not met men, and women also, who had advanced so far in the adaptation of their love-needs to the anatomical analysis of their psychical life, that for the romantic, realistical, æsthetic traits of their nature, for the lyrical or dramatic moods of their heart, they demanded correspondingly different lovers; and if these several lovers should encounter each other, and be angry with one another, the one who loved them both (or all)[207] would be inclined to cry out in naive astonishment, like the heroine in Gutzkow’s “Seraphine,” “Love one another! love one another! You are all one, one—in me!”

In the romance “Leonide,” by Emerentius Scävola, the heroine is at the same time the wife of two husbands. Reality also is familiar with double love of this kind—for example, in the relationship of the Princess Melanie Metternich to her husband, the celebrated statesman, and to her previous bridegroom, Baron Hügel.[173] Especially frequent is the gratification of higher ideal needs and of the simple natural impulse, by means of two different persons. A man can love at the same time a woman of genius and a simple child of Nature. In the novel “Double Love” (1901), Elisar von Kupffer describes the simultaneous love of a learned man for his extremely intelligent wife and for a buxom servant-girl. A well-known example is also the double love of Wieland—the ideal love for Sophie Laroche, the frankly sensual love for Christine Hagel. But not only do differences of culture, of position, of character, play a part in such multiple love; the simple difference also of bodily appearance may lead to such simultaneous attractions; for example, a man may love at the same time a brunette and a blonde, an elegant little sylph and a distinguished presence. This is, however, on the whole, much rarer than simultaneous attraction to two different spiritual varieties.

Such facts as these are not to be employed so much in advocacy of the multiplication of love-relationships as for the illustration of the enormous difficulty in obtaining complete harmony between human beings, between one man and one woman. There remains always a balance of yearning, which the other does not fulfil; always a balance of striving, which the other is unable to understand. This cannot, however, affect in the slightest degree the ideal of the single love; on the contrary, it makes it stand out all the more brilliantly before our spiritual vision. It is rare, like every ideal, and attainable only by few. This rarity of complete love between a man and a woman is dwelt on also by Henry Laube in his novel “Die Maske,” in which he describes love in all its manifoldness and modern distraction.

Schleiermacher described very strikingly the necessity that exists for the repetition and manifoldness of love-perceptions:

“Why,” says he, “should it be different with love from what it is in every other matter? Is it possible that that which is the highest in mankind should be brought at the first time, by the most elementary activity, to a perfect conclusion in a single deed? Should we expect it to be easier than the simple art of eating and drinking, which the child first attempts, and attempts again and again, with unsuitable objects and rude experimentation, and with results which, contrary to his deserts, are not always unfortunate? In love, also, there is need for preliminary experiments, leading to no permanent result, from which, however, every one carries away something, in order to make the feeling more definite and the prospect of love greater and grander.”[174]

Georg Hirth also shows that true mastery of love only becomes possible by means of repetition. There are ideal masculine and feminine Don Juan natures, which are always searching for the genuine, eternal, only love; as, for example, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, wandering perpetually from man to man; or a similar figure, the titular heroine of the romance “Faustine,” by the Countess Ida Hahn-Hahn. Many, most indeed, of such never learn to know true love, because they never find the proper object of love; and they die, as Rousseau, in his “Confessions,” says so strikingly, without ever having loved, eternally torn by the need for love, without ever having been able perfectly to satisfy that need. Happy indeed are those like Karoline, who in Schelling found at length the man whose powerful personality fully corresponded to her idea of love.

The need for such a great and true love remains fixed, notwithstanding all deceptions, bitternesses, and the sorrows of unsatisfied longing. Love is, in fact, the human being himself; like the human being, love has its development, its impulse towards higher things, towards that which is better. No painful experience can completely annihilate love, and the need for love. In a beautiful stanza a French poet of the eighteenth century, the Chevalier de Bonnard, has described this essential permanency of love:

True love is the product of the ripest development; it is therefore rare, and comes late. For this reason, as Nietzsche points out, the time for marriage comes much earlier than the time for love. It is by means of spiritual relationships that love first becomes enduring. Its prolongation is almost always effected only by an enlargement and variation of psychical relationships. Physical relationships alone soon lose through habituation the stimulus of novelty; whence we explain the fact that so many husbands, notwithstanding the physical beauty of their wives, become unfaithful to them, often in favour of much uglier women, of girls of the lower classes, or even of prostitutes. The de Goncourts remark in their “Diary” that the beauty which in a cocotte a man will reward with 100,000 francs, will not in his own wife seem worth 10,000 francs—in the wife whom he has married, and who, with her dowry, has brought him this magnificent beauty into the bargain. For this reason, a priest, when a wife complained to him that her husband had begun to get somewhat cold in his manner to her, gave the following by no means bad advice: “My dear child, the most honourable wife must have in her just a suspicion of the demi-mondaine.”

The greatest danger for love, a danger which therefore makes its appearance above all in married life, is the danger of habituation. This has a double effect. On the one hand, by the mere monotony of eternal repetition, love may become blunted.

“It is worth remarking,” says Goethe, “that custom is capable of completely replacing passionate love; it demands not so much a charming, as a comfortable object; given that, it is invincible.”

In the second place, however, custom contradicts the already mentioned need for variety, the eternal uniformity of daily companionship puts love to sleep, damps its ardour, and even gives rise to a sense of latent or open hatred between a married pair. This hatred is observed most frequently in love-matches,[175] precisely because here the ideal is all the more cruelly disturbed by the rude grasp of realities; especially if the intimate life in common enfolds a human, all-too-human, element, and tears away the last ideal veil. With justice the common bedroom of a married couple has been called “the slaughter of love.”

A further cause of unhappy marriages is to be found in unfavourable age-relations of the married couple. The most serious is the premature entrance upon marriage.

Before the introduction of the Civil Code, the age of nubility in the German Empire was attained, in the male sex, with the completion of the twentieth, in the female sex with the completion of the sixteenth year of life. In Prussia a Minister of Justice could give permission to marry at an even earlier age. According to the Civil Code, men could not marry until they were of full age (twenty-one), and women, as before, not until they were sixteen years of age. Women are able to obtain remission from this restriction, but not men. In special cases, however, a man is enabled to marry before the age of twenty-one years if the Court of Wardship (cf. the English Court of Chancery) declares him to be of full age, which the Court has power to do at any time after he is eighteen years of age.

Whilst, before the year 1900, on the average, there were not as many as 300 men under twenty years who annually contracted marriage with the permission of the Minister of Justice—already a matter for serious consideration—since the introduction of the new Code, by which the ordinary age of nubility for man is raised by one year, the number of persons prematurely contracting marriage has exhibited a notable increase. In the year 1900 there were 1,546, and in the year 1901 actually 1,848 young men married before the age of twenty-one years. These very early marriages were distributed among all professions, and almost all classes of the population.

This increase in premature marriages is, speaking generally, a symptom indicative of the premature awakening of sexuality in our own time, a phenomenon which we shall discuss more fully later. Such an occurrence as the elopement of a girl aged fourteen with a boy aged fifteen, the pair having already for some time been engaged in an intimate love-relationship, and having finally come to the conclusion that they could no longer live apart, is by no means a great rarity.[176] No detailed argument is needed to show that persons completely wanting mental and moral maturity are not suited for marriage, which can only be regarded as offering some security for endurance and life happiness, when it is the union of two fully-developed personalities. In this respect it seems to me that the regulations of the Civil Code are not at present sufficiently strict.

A second notable factor in the causation of unhappy marriages[211] is an excessive difference between the ages of husband and wife, and in this respect it is quite an old experience, that a marked excess of age on the part of the husband has a less unfavourable influence than a similar excess on the part of the wife. This observation harmonizes with the fact that men can preserve sexual potency up to the most advanced age—even in a centenarian active spermatozoa have been found [177]—that such old men can have complete sexual intercourse, and can procreate children; whereas in women, at the age of forty-five to fifty years, with the cessation of menstruation the procreative capacity is extinguished, though not, indeed, the capacity for sexual intercourse and for voluptuous sensation. Naturally, in this connexion we are not alluding to quite abnormal cases, such as a premature impotence in the husband, or other morbid conditions in either husband or wife. We are considering merely the normal physical difference in age. Metchnikoff lays great stress upon this physical disharmony between husband and wife. He insists upon the fact that in the man sexual excitability generally begins much earlier than in woman, and that at a time when the woman stands at the acme of her needs the sexual activity in the man has already begun to decline; but this is only the case when the husband was notably older than the wife when the marriage was contracted. A difference of five or ten years in this respect is a small matter; but a difference of ten or twenty years may be of serious significance. Generally speaking, in the case of marriages which are intended to be of lifelong duration, the difference of age should never exceed ten years.

With increasing civilization, the average age at marriage has continually advanced (in Western Europe the average age at marriage is for men twenty-eight to thirty-one years, and for women twenty-three to twenty-eight years), whilst the number of persons who do not marry until late in life, and of those who do not marry at all, is continually increasing. This is partly the result of spiritual differentiation and of the ever-increasing difficulty in finding a suitable life-partner, and partly it is the result of the increasing economic difficulty in providing for the support of a household.

Schmoller has calculated that under normal conditions about 50 per cent.—one-half, that is to say—of the population of the country must be either married or widowed. In Europe, however, a much smaller proportion is in this condition. Thus, taking only persons over fifty years of age, in Hungary[212] 3 per cent., in Germany 9 per cent., in England 10 per cent., in Austria 13 per cent., in Switzerland 17 per cent., were unmarried.

The number of married and widowed persons among those over fifty years of age varies in the different countries between 56 per cent. (in Belgium) and 76 per cent. (in Hungary). In England, in the years 1886 to 1890, the number was 60 per cent., in Germany 61 per cent., in the United States 62 per cent., in France 64 per cent. If we enumerate the married only, excluding the widowed, we find 8 or 10 per cent. fewer. When we compare the number of married with the entire population, we find, instead of the above-mentioned 50 per cent., no more than 37 to 39 per cent. And this percentage appears likely to undergo a continual further decline. We must, at any rate, in the future reckon with this fact, although, of course, isolated oscillations in the marriage frequency may continue to occur. In these oscillations economic and domestic factors play a great part.

It is, however, quite erroneous to regard our own time as one especially characterized by “mercenary marriages,” one in which the union between man and wife has become a simple affair of commerce. There are not wanting reformers who attribute to mammonism all the blame for the disordered love-life of the present day, and who describe very vividly and dramatically Amor’s dance round the golden calf.

The facts of the history of civilization and folk-lore completely contradict the view that this mammonistic character of marriage is a product of our modern civilization. It is, on the contrary, a vestige of early primitive civilization, in which economic factors always had a far greater importance for marriage than spiritual sympathies. Thus, Heinrich Schurtz proves that among the majority of savage races marriage is rather an affair of business than of inclination. And where are money marriages more frequent than they are among our sturdy German peasants, with whom everything conventional has the freest possible play?[178]

It is first the higher, refined spiritual civilization which brings with it a higher conception of marriage as the realization of the ideal, individual only-love. As Ludwig Stein justly remarks:

“It was not in our own time that marriage first began to degenerate to the level of an economic idea. The converse, indeed, is true; the economic background of marriage, as it so clearly manifests itself among savage races, first began to disappear in the course of the [213] development of our own system of civilization, and therewith began also the liberation of mankind from the burden of metallic shackles.”[179]

At the same time, it cannot be denied that even at the present day the economic factor plays a very extensive part in the determination of marriage, although certainly not to the degree maintained by Buckle, who held that there was a fixed and definite relationship between the number of marriages and the price of corn.[180] Beyond question, economic considerations have a great influence upon the frequency of marriage. Many marriages, even to-day, are purely mercenary marriages; but still at the present time the qualities of intellect and emotion, quite apart from physical characteristics, have at least an equal share in the production of marriage. Only among the classes who feel it their duty to keep up a particular kind of appearance, among the upper-middle classes, the aristocracy, and among officers in the army, is the economic question the main determining influence in marriage. Well known, also, is the predominance of mercenary marriages among the Jews.

One may be an enemy of mammonism, and still see the necessity for an economic regulation of conjugal relations in view of the expected offspring, of the altered conditions of life, of the increase in the household, and of the necessity for safeguarding personal independence and free development. Such economic considerations can harmonize perfectly with the demand for personal sympathy, and with the most intimate physical and spiritual harmony between husband and wife.

Schmoller rightly places the most important advance of the modern family in this, that it becomes more and more transformed from a productive and business institute into an institute of moral life in common; that by the limitation of its economic purposes the nobler ideal must become more predominant, and the family become a richer soil for the cultivation of sympathetic sentiments.[181]

More especially among the upper classes of modern European and American society is there apparent an increasing disinclination to marriage, or, to employ a phrase of the moral statistician Drobisch, there is a decline in the intensity of the marriage impulse. Although the often burning money question no doubt[214] plays its part, that part is, on the whole, much smaller than the part played by the ever-increasing difficulties of individual spiritual harmony, difficulties dependent on differences in age, character, education, views of life, and individual development during marriage. This disinclination to marry is nourished by certain tendencies of the time to be subsequently described, and by certain changes in the relations between the sexes.

To many also the idea of “conjugal rights,” as established by law, appears a horrible compulsion, an assignment to physical and spiritual prostitution. The modern consciousness of free personality, in fact, no longer harmonizes with that stoical conception of duty in marriage such as, for example, is described by B. Chateaubriand in his memoirs, although, of course, every one who enters on marriage ought to be aware that by doing so he assigns to the other party certain rights, the non-fulfilment of which actually destroys the character and the idea of marriage. Thus, the conduct of a schoolmistress of Berlin, who persistently refused physical surrender to her husband, on the ground that she had wished merely to contract an “ideal” marriage (of the same kind as the mystical “reformed marriage” of the American woman Alice Stockham), demands emphatic condemnation. But an abominable misuse of “conjugal rights” is unquestionably made by inconsiderate husbands, who demand from their wives unlimited, excessively frequent, gratification of their sexual desire, without any regard to the wife’s physical and spiritual condition at the time. That in this respect the idea of “conjugal rights” is greatly in need of revision has been convincingly proved by Dorothee Goebeler in an essay entitled “Conjugal Rights,” published in the Welt am Montag of August 6, 1906.

Too frequently, also, it happens that the husband simply transfers into his married life previous customs of extra-conjugal sexual intercourse, and makes use in marriage of the experience he has gained in intercourse with prostitutes or with priestesses of the love of the moment; he treats his wife as an object of sensual lust, without paying any regard to her individuality and to her more delicate erotic needs.

This physical dissonance is not even the worst. Too often it is simply boredom which kills love in married life. Like Nora in “A Dolls’ House,” one waits for the “wonderful,” and the wonderful does not happen. Instead of this the years pass by; sexual passion, greatly influenced as it is by the spiritual environment, gradually disappears, and with it disappears also the last possibility of spiritual sympathy. Thus, the character of most[215] marriages is solitude. They represent the tragedy of desolation, of the eternal self-seeking of husband and wife.

What disastrous consequences, finally, may result from the part played in marriage by disease, what tragic conflicts may here rise, can be studied in the great book “Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage and the Married State” (Rebman, 1906), an encyclopædic work edited by H. Senator and S. Kaminer, discussing in detail the relation between disorders of health and the married state.

The calamities of modern marriage are strikingly illuminated in the following psychologically interesting account given by the alienist Heinrich Laehr (“Concerning Insanity and Lunatic Asylums,” p. 44 et seq.; Halle, 1852):

“How, as a matter of fact, do marriages come about? In heaven certainly a very small number indeed, if by that phrase we understand marriages undertaken with the full understanding of the nature of the sacrifice involved, under the impulsion of an inner necessity, and based upon deep mutual inclination founded upon self-respect and respect for each other; in social circles, and not in heaven, on the other hand, the majority of marriages are made. The question upon which ultimately so many marriages depend is, what each will gain by it, whilst inner sensations and mutual liking are regarded as subordinate matters.... A man is fully informed about such matters in early years; a woman is full of dark perceptions, uncertain as to what she is to receive and what she is to give. She is naturally impelled by her sense of inward weakness to yield to anyone more powerful than herself, and, in the intoxication of sensual excitement, under conditions in which both, in order to please, tend to show the best side only to each other, she is far less able than man to weigh beforehand the significance of such a step. Later, indeed, when, in the trodden path of marriage, the current of love runs more slowly, her eyes are opened, naked reality takes the place of the pictures of imagination, which formerly caused self-deception, and what appeared to be love, but was not love, takes flight for ever. What has not been hidden under the name of love! It conceals the pretence of egoistic impulses, vanity it may be, the life of pleasure, avarice, indolence; and what a number of marriages are entered into on the part of the woman in order to escape from the oppression of repugnant domestic conditions, because the imagined future appears to them more pleasant in contrast with the actual present.

“There are in the course of marriage so many periods of misunderstood depression, sadness, trouble; and mankind so readily forgets the golden rule, that these periods have to be got through by means of mutual aid, and that in married life husband and wife should do all that is possible to help one another onwards, and not to thrust one another back—so easily is this forgotten, that only too readily the mirth and gladness with which married life was begun vanish away. The intense pain which attacks us with violence, but only at long intervals, has a far less depressing influence on our organism[216] than much less severe, but frequently repeated, emotional disturbances, especially such as arise out of the wretchedness of life. They give rise in us to irritability of the nervous system, by which sensitiveness is increased; and repeated misunderstandings in married life soon make both husband and wife feel that marriage is rather a burden than a joy.”

That women as well as men recognize the danger to love entailed by marriage is shown by Frieda von Bülow in “Einsame Frauen,” pp. 93, 94 (1897):

“During this period I have often considered the question of such continued life in common. Is it not inevitable that this unceasing, intimate association must always give rise to mutual hatred? Husband and wife learn to know one another through and through. The veil of white lies which plays so important a part in ordinary social intercourse is here impossible. The characters are seen naked in all their weakness, all their incapacity for love, all their vanity, all their egoism. In such circumstances, phrases intended to conceal appear simply untruths, and instead of producing illusion they repel. Just as in the first awakening of love, all the powers of the soul are directed towards the discovery of the excellences of the beloved one, so here the soul is for ever upon a voyage of discovery seeking for faults. In both cases alike, a sufficiency of that which one seeks is found.”

The poets also give us an insight into the depths of the eternal contradiction between love and marriage. Who does not know the saying of the idealistic and optimistic Schiller: “Mit dem Gürtel, mit dem Schleier reisst der schöne Wahn entzwei”—“With the girdle, with the veil (of marriage), the beautiful illusion is torn to pieces”? Consider, also, the horribly clear characterization of the pessimistic Byron (in “Don Juan,” canto iii., stanzas 5-8):

It is significant that those who most praise marriage are young people who do not know marriage from experience, but have failed to find true happiness in celibacy. We think of the words of Socrates, that it is a matter of indifference whether a man marries or does not marry, for in either case he will regret it.

Our own time is certainly characterized by hostility to marriage. It is the form of modern marriage which frightens most people; the compulsion which has actually been rendered more stringent by the new Civil Code of 1900. Modern individualism draws back from the undeniable loss of freedom which legal marriage entails. The shadow which, according to a saying of E. Dühring, indissoluble marriage has thrown upon love and upon the nobler aspects of the sexual life, is darker to-day than ever before.

Hence the growing disinclination to marry, which, significantly enough, is increasingly manifest upon the part of women; hence, above all, the extraordinary increase in divorce.

According to a statement in the Vossische Zeitung (No. 137, March 22, 1906), the number of divorces in Germany underwent a marked increase in the year 1904. In that year there were 10,882 divorces; in 1903, 9,932; in 1902, 9,074; thus in the year 1904 there was an increase of 590, or 9·6 per cent.

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, a marked increase in the number of divorces was already discernible. For instance, in the years 1894-1899 the number rose from[218] 7,502 to 9,433. It was at that time believed that the increase depended upon the fact that in most of the countries of the German Confederation the new Civil Code made divorce more difficult, and that for this reason as many people as possible were seeking divorce before the new Code came into action. It is true that the number of divorces diminished after the Civil Code passed into operation. In the year 1900 the divorces numbered 7,922, and in the year 1901, 7,892. Since then, however, there has once more been a marked increase, so that the figure for the year 1904 is 2,990 in excess of that for the year 1901, an increase of 38 per cent. This increase is principally to be referred to the fact that the so-called relative grounds for divorce, enumerated in § 1568 of the Civil Code,[182] appear to have justified a great number of demands for divorce. The marked extensibility of the sections of this paragraph leaves the judge very wide discretion in its application.

To what an extent the increase in the number of divorces influences the existing marriages is seen as soon as we compare the number of divorces with the number of marriages. It appears that in the years 1900 and 1901, for every 10,000 marriages, there were 8·1 divorces; in 1902, 9·3 divorces; in 1903, 10·1 divorces; and in 1904, 11·1 divorces. Thus in the year 1904, there were 3 more divorces per 10,000 marriages than in the year 1901.

I have already referred to the enormous importance of divorce in relation to the recognition on the part of the State of the temporary character of every marriage, whereby, in principle, free love, which is no more than a temporary marriage, receives a civil justification, and is legitimized. This fact stands out still more clearly when we recognize the legal possibility of repeated divorces on the part of one and the same person. Numerous actual examples of this can be given. Thus a well-known author was divorced no less than four times, and of his four wives one, on her side, had been divorced by other men. Two divorces on both sides are by no means rare. If we consider the matter openly and unemotionally, it must be admitted that this is nothing else than the much-opposed “free love,” the bugbear of all[219] honest Philistines, a free love which has already received the official sanction of the State.

When four or five divorces are possible to the same individual by official decree, when, that is to say, this procedure has received civil sanction, the number may for theoretical purposes be multiplied at discretion.

He who knows human nature, he who knows that the consciousness of freedom in mature human beings—and only such should enter upon marriage—strengthens and confirms the consciousness of duty—such a one need not fear the introduction of free marriage. On the contrary, it may be assumed that divorces would be far less common than they are in the case of coercive marriage.

According to the Civil Code, divorces are obtainable on the ground of adultery, hazard to life, malicious abandonment, ill-treatment, mental disorder, legally punishable offences, dishonourable and immoral conduct, serious disregard of conjugal duties. As we saw, the last clause empowered the judge in difficult cases, by a humane, reasonable interpretation of the idea “disregard of conjugal duties,” to pronounce a divorce. It is obvious that in every divorce the interests of the children of the marriage (if any) must be especially safeguarded.

Marriage in France, to which hitherto the clauses of the Code Napoléon, analogous to those of our Civil Code, have been applicable, is said to have recently undergone reform, both in respect of moral and of legal rights. In Paris there has been constituted a standing “Committee of Marriage Reform,” composed of well-known authors, jurists, and women, among the number being Pierre Louys, Marcel Prevost, Judge Magnaud, Octave Mirbeau, Maeterlinck, Henri Bataille, Henri Coulon, and Poincaré.

In an address to the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate by the President of this Committee, Henri Coulon, in which he gives the reasons for desiring a change in the present marriage laws,[183] he says:

“It would be childish to disguise the fact that the institution of marriage has entered upon a critical phase; philosophers and novelists lay odds on the complete disappearance of the institution. In this, perhaps, they go too far. But it is none the less true that it is a matter of profound interest and importance to reform the institution of marriage. Granted this, how shall we begin?

“The entrance into marriage must be made as easy as possible; in this way the number of marriages which are based upon love will rapidly increase. Then, the married pair must have equal rights,[220] equal duties, and equal responsibilities; in this way marriage will become more practical and less immoral than it is at present. Finally—and this is the most important of all—it is necessary to facilitate divorce. Divorce will then become the worthy separation of two thinking beings, and will no longer be the disgusting comedy that it is at the present day.

“For those determined to live apart, for those whose morals are loose, indissoluble marriage itself is no longer a bond. Absolute freedom is no hindrance to conjugal fidelity and constancy; on the contrary, freedom is the cause of constancy.

“Divorce is not happiness, but it is a help towards happiness. For two human beings who hate one another to continue to live together is a much greater evil than divorce. Certainly it would be preferable if husband and wife could continue to love one another as they did during the first days of their married life; that they should love their children and be honoured by them. But since humanity is not free from faults and vices, this does not always happen. Divorce, as we wish for it, makes marriage worthier and more profound. Such marriages will be better suited to the new social movements and to the modern spirit.

“The civil equality of the two sexes must be a fundamental principle of modern law. The French Civil Code already recognizes for both sexes equal rights in some respects; but the wife still loses a certain portion of her rights in the moment that she marries. She is in fact rendered incapable of business. The contrast between the incapacity for business of the married woman and the capacity for business of the unmarried is one of the characteristic traits of our legislation.

“Divorce, as it now exists, contradicts the indissolubility of the marriage bond demanded by the Church. Adultery should only be regarded as a ground for divorce, and should not exonerate the murderer who kills his adulterous wife or her accomplice.

“We demand the abolition of the punishment for adultery, because prosecutions of this character arise either from revengeful feelings or from litigiousness.”

Justice demands that with this facilitation of divorce, as advocated in the French scheme of marriage reform, there should be associated increased security for the care of the dependent wife and children after divorce. In this connexion, conjugal responsibility is merely a part of sexual responsibility in general. If two independent, free individuals have sexual relations one with the other, in or out of marriage, they thereby both undertake in respect of their own persons and of all possible offspring, the duty and the responsibility which are the outcome of a natural instinctive feeling, namely, “the sense of sexual responsibility.” This must dominate the entire sexual life of every human being, as a categorical imperative. In this is to be found the necessary ethical counterpoise to the activity of boundless sexual egoism.

For the love of the future and its social regulation, the three following conditions appear to me to be determinative; they form a part also of the French programme of marriage reform:

1. Equal rights, equal duties, equal responsibilities on the part of husband and wife.

3. Individual freedom to be regarded as preferable to coercion. Freedom best promotes constancy in love.[184]

If these principles were strictly carried out in practical life, without doubt, and as a matter of absolute certainty, the number of divorces would not increase, but would diminish, and we should sooner witness the realization of the ideal of true marriage, as the lifelong union of two free personalities, fully conscious of their duties and their rights.

The high ethical and social significance of family life will ever continue, even under the freest love, by which, as I must again and again insist, I do not understand unrestricted and continually changing extra-conjugal sexual intercourse. Against this the gravest considerations must be urged. What “free love” is, is already apparent from the preceding exposition, but in the next chapter the subject will be more thoroughly discussed.

APPENDIX
ONE HUNDRED TYPICAL MARRIAGES AND SOME CHARACTERISTIC PICTURES OF THE MARRIED STATE, AFTER GROSS-HOFFINGER

In a long-forgotten, but very interesting, book by Dr. Anton J. Gross-Hoffinger, entitled “The Fate of Women, and Prostitution in Relation to the Principle of the Indissolubility of Catholic Marriage, and especially in Relation to the Laws of Austria and the Philosophy of our Time,”[185] we find a collection, equally interesting to psychologists and to students of human character, to the physician, the jurist, and the sociologist, of a hundred typical marriages, and also a more detailed description of the course of a few marriages. These sketches deserve to be preserved[222] from oblivion, because they will serve equally well as an example of marriages of our time.

In the first place, the author discusses the principal difficulties of marriage. He then asks whether, in view of the smallness of the number of those comparatively happy persons who have found it possible to live a legal and at the same time a natural family life, the existing marriage laws, religious ideas, and social customs have attained their aim, whether they give rise, as a general rule, to happy and fruitful, honourable and blessed unions. The author hesitated long before presenting for the first time “to the Catholic world the picture of the actual state of marriages in that world, a picture based upon numerous experiences and observations.” He investigated one hundred marriages of persons belonging to the most diverse classes, without selection, as they came under his observation by chance; then, again, another hundred, and once again a third hundred. Always the results were equally sad; always the ratio between happy and unhappy marriages was the same. The result of his investigations was, he states:

“Although I have earnestly sought for happy marriages, my search has to this extent been vain, that I have never been able to satisfy myself that happy marriages are anything but extremely isolated exceptions to the general rule.”

In his view this is not the unhappy result of erroneous observation, but depends upon exact observation during a long series of years, and in conditions which brought him into intimate relationship with numbers of persons in all classes of society.

Thus, after a long, difficult, and careful investigation into a hundred marriages among persons of different classes, he obtained the following results, here briefly summarized:

Among these hundred marriages only one was happy owing to mutual faithfulness; all the other slightly happy marriages, if one may call them so, were so only because the wife did not disturb herself with regard to the question of her husband’s faithfulness.

3. The morality of the remaining smaller moiety is preserved only by avoiding questions regarding the husband’s faithfulness.

4. Fifteen per cent. of all marriages live on the earnings of professional unchastity and procurement.

5. The number of orthodox marriages which are entirely above every suspicion of marital infidelity (assuming the existence of complete sexual potency) is in the eyes of every reasonable man, who understands the demands which Nature makes, and the violence of those demands, equivalent to nil. Hence the ecclesiastical purpose of marriage is generally, fundamentally, and completely evaded.

“No compulsion,” thus concludes the author, “is more unnatural than that of the Catholic (Protestant, Jewish, Greek Orthodox) religion, by which is prescribed a compulsory continuance of marriage, with its fantastic code and ridiculous conjugal duties and rights.

“First of all, this compulsion—this sacrament of marriage—marriage which is nothing, can be nothing, according to nature should be nothing, but a free union and a civil arrangement—results in the avoidance of marriage.

“Secondly, it results that in marriage the purposes of marriage are not and cannot be completely fulfilled.

“Thirdly, that marriage has ceased to be the natural marriage which it should be, and has become merely a business, a speculation, or a hospital for invalids.”

In illustration of this proposition, Gross-Hoffinger finally describes from life twenty-four marriages, some of which, being especially interesting, we will here record.

Note.—That in Vienna the conjugal conditions so graphically described in the above extracts are still much the same as formerly, and that marriage needs and marriage lies are there exceptionally painful is shown by the foundation in Vienna of a “Society for Marriage Reform,” which sent to the Assembly of German Jurists, meeting at Kiel in the beginning of September, 1906, the telegraphic request that they would undertake a revision of Austrian marriage law, since hitherto no cure had been found for unhappy marriage in Austria, no divorce was possible, and those who had obtained a judicial separation could, according to Canon Law, sue one another on account of adultery (cf. Neue Freie Presse, No. 15108, September 13, 1906). It is hardly credible, but, according to a report in the Berlin Aerzte-Correspondenz, 1907, No. 8, it is true, that the Medical Court of Honour for the town of Berlin and the province of Brandenburg, in the year of our Lord 1906, punished physicians on the ground of adultery!

CHAPTER XI
FREE LOVE

“The transformation of coercive marriage into a free and equal marriage, one more closely approaching perfection, both naturally and morally, can only be effected in conjunction with social arrangements providing for the complete economic independence of woman, and giving security for her material means of subsistence. Unless this indispensable preliminary is fulfilled, the highest ideal of free morality will be debased to the level of a gross caricature.”—E. Dühring.[234]

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XI

Free love as a burning question of our time — Definition — Free love not equivalent to extra-conjugal sexual intercourse — Defamation of free love and sanction of extra-conjugal sexual intercourse by the coercive-marriage-morality — The immoral duplex morality for man and woman — Its momentous influence upon the sexual corruption of the present day — Free love as the only source of help — Actual realization of free love among the proletariat — Strengthening of the sense of responsibility in consequence of free love.

History of free love in the nineteenth century — William Godwin’s fight against coercive marriage — His free union with Mary Woolstonecraft — Shelley’s polemic against conventional sexual morality — John Ruskin on free love — Goethe’s marriage of conscience — His “Wahlverwandtschaften” (“Elective Affinities”) — The remarkable proposal for a temporary marriage in this romance — Perhaps based upon a Japanese custom — Malayan temporary marriage — Influence of Schlegel’s “Lucinde” — Karoline’s marriage wanderings — Free love in Jena and Berlin — Communistic-socialistic ideas regarding free love — Rétif de la Bretonne, Saint-Simon, Enfantin, and Fourier — George Sand’s “Jacques” — The “Es-geht-an-Idea” of the Swedish author Almquist — Schopenhauer’s fight against coercive marriage — His one-sided standpoint — His description of the disastrous effects of monogamic coercive marriage — His apology for concubinage — Criticism of his view of the rôle of women in marriage reform — His theory of tetragamy — First communication of a hitherto unpublished note of Schopenhauer’s on tetragamy — Criticism of this theory.

Free love based upon only-love, the watchword of the future — Bohemian love — Does not correspond to the ideal of free love — Importance of social and economic factors in the sexual relationships of the present day — Efforts for sexual reform — The literature of free love — Charles Albert’s communistic foundation of free love — Liberation of love from the dominion of the state and of capital — Ladislaus Gumplowicz — Bebel’s “Die Frau und der Sozialismus” (“Woman and Socialism”) — The psychologico-individual foundation of free love — Eugen Dühring — Edward Carpenter’s “Love’s Coming of Age” — His ideas regarding self-control and spiritual procreation — Ellen Key’s work, “Ueber Liebe und Ehe” (“Love and Marriage”) — Detailed analysis of this work — Her critique of nominal “monogamy” — Her idea of “spiritualized sensuality” — “Erotic monism” — The unity of marriage and love — Sexual dualism owing to coercive marriage and prostitution — General diffusion of erotic scepticism — Recognition of love as the spiritual force of life — Importance of relative asceticism — Love’s choice — Medical certificates of fitness for marriage — Immoral love — The right to motherhood — Preliminary conditions — Necessity for free divorce — Unfortunate marriages — Importance of divorce to children — New programme of the rights of children — Ellen Key’s new[235] marriage law — Endowment of motherhood — Authorities for the protection of children — Division of the property of husband and wife — Discontinuance of the coercion to live together — Secret marriages — Conditions under which marriage is to be contracted — Divorce — Council of Divorce — Jury for the care of children — Sexual responsibility — “Marriages of conscience” — Examples from Sweden — Public notification of “free” unions — Legal recognition of “free” unions in Sweden — Increase in the number of “marriage protestants” — Importance of free love to the vital advance of humanity — General characterization of Ellen Key’s book — Its importance in connexion with sexual reform in Germany — Formation of “The Association for the Protection of Mothers” — Directors and committee of this society — Preliminary appeal and programme of the association — The periodical Mutterschutz — The formation of local groups — The “Umwertungs-Gesellschaft” (Revaluation Society) of the United States — Its characterization of modern marriage — The Berlin “Union for Sexual Reform” — Helene Stöcker’s “Love and Woman” — Conception of the sexual problem in the sense of Nietzsche — No revolution, but evolution and reform — Deepening of woman’s soul by means of the older love — The affirmation of life of the new love — The economic and social grounds for the necessity of social reform — Friedrich Naumann, Lily Braun, and others, on this subject — Increase in enforced abstinence from marriage — The “maintenance question” a crying scandal of our time — A characteristic letter — The radical evil of conventional morality — Insurance of motherhood — Homes for pregnant women and for infants — The rights of the “illegitimate” child — Suggestions regarding a statistical inquiry relating to free love and illegitimate offspring in the upper classes — Examples of celebrated personalities.

CHAPTER XI

The problem of “free love” is the burning question of our time. Upon its proper solution depends the future of civilization, and our ultimate liberation from the ignominious conditions of the amatory life of the present day, dependent as these are upon coercive marriage. This is our firm conviction, our profound belief, one which we share with many, and those not the worst minds of our day.

Free love is neither, as malevolent opponents maintain, the abolition of marriage, nor is it the organization of extra-conjugal sexual intercourse. Free love and extra-conjugal sexual intercourse have nothing whatever to do one with the other. Indeed, I go so far as to maintain that true free love, as it must and will prevail, will limit casual and unregulated extra-conjugal sexual intercourse to a far greater extent than coercive marriage has ever succeeded in doing. Above all, free love will ennoble sexual intercourse.

For the longer, in existing economic conditions, we cling to the antiquated “coercive marriage,” which has so long been in need of reform, the smaller is the number of those who desire to marry, the more advanced becomes the age of marriage, the greater becomes the general sexual wretchedness, the deeper shall we sink into the mephitic slough of prostitution, towards which the increasing promiscuity of extra-conjugal sexual intercourse inevitably leads us.

For this is the peculiar, hypocritical, and absurd mode of argument of those who uphold conventional marriage; they despise and brand with infamy every sexual relationship of two adult independent persons based upon free love, and sanction quite openly casual transitory extra-conjugal sexual intercourse, devoid of all personal relationships, not only with prostitutes, but also with respectable women.

“Bachelorhood,” says Max Nordau, “is very far from being equivalent to sexual continence. The bachelor receives from society the tacit permission to indulge in the convenience of intercourse with woman, when and where he can; it calls his self-seeking pleasures ‘successes,’ and surrounds them with a kind of poetic glory; and the amiable vice of Don Juan arouses in society a feeling composed of envy, sympathy, and secret admiration.”[186]

On the other hand, this same conventional coercive marriage morality demands from the girl complete sexual continence and intactness until the time of her marriage!

But every reasonable and just man must ask the question, Where, then, are the unmarried men to gratify their sexual impulse if at the same time the unmarried girls are condemned to absolute chastity?

It is merely necessary to place these two facts side by side in order to expose the utter mendacity and shamelessness of the coercive marriage morality, and to display the true cancer of our sexual life, the sole cause of the increasing diffusion of prostitution, of wild sexual promiscuity, and of venereal diseases.

When hereafter, before the judgment-seat of history, the dreadful “j’accuse” is uttered against the sexual corruption of our time, then there will be a good defence for those of us who, under the device, “Away with prostitution! away with the brothels! away with all ‘wild’ love! away with venereal diseases!” were the first to indicate free love as the one and only means of rescue from these miseries.

We are always told that men are not yet ready for the free, independent management of their sexual life; mankind is not yet ripe for the necessary responsibility. Our opponents point especially to the danger of such an opinion and such reforms for the lower classes.

But human beings are better than the defenders of the obsolete conventional morality would have us believe, and above all, it is the members of the lower classes whom we may quietly allow to follow the dictates of their own hearts. They, indeed, give us the example that freedom is not equivalent to immorality and pleasure-seeking; that, on the contrary, it is freedom that awakens and keeps active the consciousness of duty and the sense of responsibility.

Alfred Blaschko rightly draws attention to the fact that among the proletariat for a long time already the idea of free love has been actually realized. In a large majority of cases men and women of these classes have sexual intercourse with one another, especially between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, without marrying.[187]

“Among the proletariat free love has never been regarded as sinful. Where there is no property which is capable of being left to a legitimate heir, where the appeal of the heart draws man and woman together, from the very earliest times people have troubled themselves little about the blessing of the priest; and had it not been that at the present day the civil form of marriage is so simple, whilst, on the other hand, there are so many difficulties placed in the path of unmarried mothers and illegitimate children, who can tell if the modern proletariat would not long ago, as far as they themselves are concerned, have abolished marriage?”[188]

Blaschko adduces proofs that in all places in which free love is not possible prostitution takes its place.

This fact affords a striking proof of the necessity of free love. For there can be no doubt as to the correct answer to the question which is better, prostitution or free love.

Max Marcus and other physicians have recently discussed the question whether the medical man is justified in recommending extra-conjugal sexual intercourse. I myself, as a physician, and as an ardent supporter of the efforts for the suppression of venereal diseases, in view of the enormous increase of professional prostitution (both public and private), and in view also of the extraordinarily wide diffusion of venereal diseases, feel compelled to answer this question, generally speaking, in the negative. Yet I look to the introduction of free love, and in association with free love of a new sexual morality, in accordance with which man and woman are regarded as two free personalities, with equal rights and also equal responsibilities, as the only[239] possible rescue from the misery of prostitution and of venereal disease.

Place the free woman beside the free man, inspire both with the profound sense of responsibility which will result from the activity of the love of two free personalities, and you will see that to them and to their children such love will bring true happiness.

Before going further into this problem of free love, I will give a brief account of the history of the question during the nineteenth century. We shall see that quite a number of leading spirits, morally lofty natures, were occupied with the question, because they were deeply impressed with the intolerable character of existing conditions in the sexual sphere, and were convinced that help was only to be found in a relaxation of those conditions in the sense of a freer conception of sexual relationships.

In addition to the romanticists (vide supra, pp. 169 and 175) in the beginning of the nineteenth century in England, William Godwin, the lover and husband of Mary Wollstonecraft (the celebrated advocate of woman’s rights), in his “Political Justice,” declared the conventional coercive marriage to be an obsolete institution, by which the freedom of the individual was seriously curtailed. Marriage is a question of property, and one person ought not to become the property of another. Godwin maintained that the abolition of marriage would have no evil consequences. The free love and subsequent marriage of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft deserves a short description. Godwin was of opinion that the members of a family should not see too much of one another. He also believed that they would interfere with one another’s work if they lived in the same house. For this reason he furnished some rooms for himself at a little distance from Mary Wollstonecraft’s dwelling, and often first appeared at her house at a late lunch; the intervening hours were spent by both in literary work. They exchanged letters also during the day.[189]

Doubtless under the influence of the views of Godwin, Shelley, in the notes to “Queen Mab,” writes a violent polemic against coercive marriage. He says:

“Love withers under constraint; its very essence is liberty; it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear; it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited, where its votaries live in confidence, equality, and unreserve. How long, then, ought the sexual connexion to last? What law ought to specify the extent of the grievances which should limit its duration? A husband and wife[240] ought to continue so long united as they love each other; any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny.”[190]

He then proceeds to attack the conventional morality so intimately associated with coercive marriage, and concludes with the words:

“Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half of the human race to misery, that some few may monopolize according to law. A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage. I conceive that from the abolition of marriage, the fit and natural arrangement of sexual connexion would result. I by no means assert that the intercourse would be promiscuous; on the contrary, it appears, from the relation of parent to child, that this union is generally of long duration, and marked above all others with generosity and self-devotion.”[191]

Here, also, we find the expression of the firm conviction that in the freedom of love is to be found an assured guarantee for its durability!

Later, also, the English Pre-Raphaelites, especially John Ruskin, advocated free love, and maintained that the sacredness of these natural bonds lay in their very essence. It is love which first makes marriage legal, not marriage which legalizes love (cf. Charlotte Broicher, “John Ruskin and his Work,” vol. i., pp. 104-106; Leipzig, 1902).

In Germany, at the commencement of the nineteenth century, a lively discussion of the problems of love and marriage ensued upon the publication of Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde” and Goethe’s “Wahlverwandtschaften”—“Elective Affinities” (1809).

Goethe, in his very rich amatory life, especially in his relationship to Charlotte von Stein and to Christiane Vulpius, with the latter of whom he lived for eighteen years in a free “marriage of conscience,”[192] and whose son, August, the offspring of this union, he adopted long before the marriage was legitimized, realized the ideal of free love more than once. Although in his book “Wahlverwandtschaften” (“Elective Affinities”) he at length gave the victory to the moral conception of monogamic marriage,[241] and propounded it as an illuminating ideal for civilization (which “ideal standpoint” we ourselves, as we have shown in the previous chapters, fully share), yet in this novel he has represented conjugal struggles, from which it appears how profoundly he was impressed by the importance of a transformation of amatory life in the direction of freedom. It is especially by the mouth of the Count in this work that he gives utterance to such ideas. The latter records the advice of one of his friends that every marriage should be contracted for the term of five years only.

“This number,” he said, “is a beautiful, sacred, odd number, and such a period of time would be sufficient for the married pair to learn to know one another, for them to bring a few children into the world, to separate, and, what would be most beautiful of all, to come together again.”

“How happily would the first portion of the time pass! Two or three years at least would pass very happily. Then very likely one member of the pair would wish that the union should be prolonged; and this desire would increase the more nearly the terminus of the marriage approached. An indifferent, even an unsatisfied, member of such a union would be pleased by such a demeanour on the part of the other. One is apt to forget how in good society the passing of time is unnoticed; one finds with agreeable surprise, when the allotted time has passed away, that it has been tacitly prolonged. It is precisely this voluntary, tacit prolongation of sexual relationship, freely undertaken by both parties without any extraneous compulsion, to which Goethe ascribes a profound moral significance.”

I should like to draw the attention of students of Goethe to the fact that this recommendation of a temporary marriage for the term of five years, with tacit prolongation of the term, is a very ancient Japanese custom, or, at any rate, was so thirty years ago.

Wernich, who for several years was Professor of Medicine at the Imperial University of Japan, remarks:

“Marriages were concluded for a term only: in the case of persons of standing for five years; among the lower classes for a shorter term. It was very rare, however, only in cases in which the marriage was manifestly unhappy, for a separation to take place when the term expired. If there were healthy living children such a separation hardly ever occurred—most of these temporary marriages were, in fact, extremely happy, and the same is true of Jewish marriages, in which divorce is easily effected by a very simple ceremonial, closely resembling that of the Japanese.”[193]

In view of the remarkable coincidence between the proposal in Goethe’s “Elective Affinities” and the Japanese custom, we are probably justified in assuming that Goethe was acquainted with the latter.

“Lucinde” gave expression to the feelings and moods of the time in respect of love and marriage on behalf of a circle far wider than that of the romanticists. At no time were the ideals of free love so deeply felt, so enthusiastically presented, as then; above all, by the beautiful Karoline, who, after long “marriage wanderings,” especially with A. W. Schegel, finally found the happiness of her life in a free marriage with Schelling, which subsequently became a legally recognized union.

“In her letters,” says Kuno Fischer, “she praises again and again the man of her choice and of her heart, in whose love she had really attained the goal which she had longed and sought in labyrinthine wanderings.... And that Schelling was the man who was able completely to master the heart of this woman and to make her his own, gives to his features also an expression which beautifies them.”[194]

Rahel, Dorothea Schlegel, and Henriette Herz, extolled, under the influence of “Lucinde,” the happiness of free love. For this period of genius in Jena and Berlin, as Rudolph von Gottschall calls it, the free-love relationship of Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia and Frau Pauline Wiesel was typical. This relationship is more intimately known to us from the letters exchanged between the two, published by Alexander Büchner in 1865. In these letters, to quote a saying of Ludmilla Assing, we find “the most passionate expression of all that it is possible to express in writing.”

In France the discussion of the question of free love was to an important extent associated with the communistic-socialistic ideas of Saint Simon, Enfantin, and Fourier. Before this, Rétif de la Bretonne, in his “Découverte Australe” (a work which exercised a great influence upon Charles Fourier),[195] demanded that the duration of marriage should be in the first instance two years, with which period the contract should spontaneously terminate. Saint Simon and Barrault proclaimed the “free wife,” Père[243] Enfantin proclaimed the “free union,” and Fourier proclaimed “free love” in the phalanstery.

A reflection of this idea is to be found in the novels of George Sand, especially “Lelia” and “Jacques,” these tragedies of marriage; in “Jacques,” for example, we find the following passage:

“I continue to believe that marriage is one of the most hateful of institutions. I have no doubt whatever that when the human race has advanced further towards rationality and the love of justice, marriage will be abolished. A human and not less sacred union would then replace it, and the existence of the children would be not less cared for and secured, without therefore binding in eternal fetters the freedom of the parents.”

We must mention Hortense Allart de Méritens (1801-1879) as a contemporary of the much-loving George Sand, and, like her, a theoretical and practical advocate of free love. She was cousin to the well-known authoress Delphine Gay, and herself wrote a roman à clef, published in 1872, “Les Enchantements de Prudence,” in which she records the history of her own life, devoted to free love. First the beloved of a nobleman, she ran away when she discovered she was pregnant, and then lived successively with the Italian statesman Gino Capponi (1826-1829); with the celebrated French author Chateaubriand (1829-1831); with the English novelist and poet Bulwer (1831-1836); the Italian Mazzini (1837-1840); the critic Sainte-Beuve (1840-1841); these being all free unions. From 1843 to 1846 she was the perfectly legitimate and extremely unhappy wife of an architect named Napoléon de Méritens, whereas with her earlier lovers she had lived most happily. Léon Séché, in the Revue de Paris of July 1, 1907, has recently described the life of this notable priestess of free love, to whose above-mentioned romance George Sand wrote a preface (cf. Literarisches Echo of August 1, 1907, pp. 1612, 1613).

In Sweden at about the same time the celebrated poet C. J. L. Almquist was a powerful advocate for free love. In the numbers for July and August, 1900, of the monthly review, Die Insel, Ellen Key has published a thoughtful essay, containing an analysis of Almquist’s views on this subject.

In the novel “Es Geht An” Almquist advocates the thesis that true love needs no consecration by a marriage ceremony. On the contrary, a ceremony of this kind belies the very nature of marriage, for it forms and cements false unions; and any relationship concluded on the lowest grounds, if it has only been[244] preceded by a marriage ceremony, is regarded as pure, whilst a union based upon true love without marriage is regarded as unchaste. In the sense of free love Lara Widbeck, in “Es Geht An,” arranges her own life and that of her husband Albert. Both are to be masters of their respective persons and of their respective property; they are to live for themselves, the work of each is to be pursued independently of the other, and in this way it will be possible to preserve a lifelong love, instead of seeing love transformed into lifelong indifference or hate.

Even at the present day in Sweden the idea of free love is known, after this romance of Almquist’s, as the “Es-geht-an idea” and also as “briar-rose morality.” It was, above all, Ellen Key who revived Almquist’s idea, and enlarged it to the extensive programme of marriage reform in the direction of free love, which we shall consider more fully below.

In his last writings Schopenhauer occupied himself at considerable length with the problems of love, but entirely from the standpoint of misogyny and of duplex sexual morality. Still, he recognized the great dangers and disasters which the traditional coercive marriage entails upon society, and rightly regarded this formal marriage as the principal source of sexual corruption.

In his essay “Concerning Women” (“Parerga and Paralipomena,” vol. xi., pp. 657-659), ed. Grisebach, he writes:

“Whereas among the polygamist nations every woman is cared for, among monogamic peoples the number of married women is limited, and there remains an enormous number of unsupported superfluous women.[196] Among the upper classes these vegetate as useless old maids; among the lower classes they are forced to earn their living by immeasurably severe toil, or else they become prostitutes. These latter lead a life equally devoid of pleasure and of honour; but in the circumstances they are indispensable for the gratification of the male sex, and hence they constitute a publicly recognized profession, the especial purpose of which is to safeguard against seduction those women more highly favoured by fortune, who have found husbands, or may reasonably hope to do so. In London alone there are 80,000 such women. What else are these women than human sacrifices on the altar of monogamy—sacrifices rendered inevitable by the very nature of the monogamic institution? All the women to whom we now allude—women in this miserable position—form the inevitable counterpoise to the ladies of Europe, with their pretension and their pride. For the female sex, regarded as a whole, polygamy is a real benefit. On the other hand, from the rationalistic point of view, it is impossible to see why a man whose wife is suffering from a chronic disease, or remains unfruitful, or has gradually become too old for[245] him, should not take a second wife. That which produces so many converts to Mormonism appears to be the rejection by the Mormons of the unnatural institution of monogamy. In addition, moreover, the allotment to the wife of unnatural rights has imposed upon her unnatural duties, whose neglect, nevertheless, makes her unhappy. To many a man considerations of position, of property, make marriage inadvisable, unless the conditions are exceptionally favourable. He would then wish to obtain a wife of his own choice, under conditions which would leave him free from obligations to her and her children. However economical, reasonable, and suitable these conditions may be, if she agrees to them, and does not insist upon the immoderate rights which marriage alone secures to her, she will, because marriage is the basis of every society, find herself compelled to lead an unhappy life, one which, to a certain degree, is dishonourable; because human nature involves this, that we assign a quite immeasurable value to the opinion of others. If, on the other hand, she does not comply, she runs the danger either of being compelled to belong as a wife to a man repulsive to her, or else of withering as an old maid, for the period in which she can realize her value is very short. In relation to this aspect of our monogamic arrangement, the profoundly learned treatise of Thomasius, De Concubinatu, is of the greatest possible value, for we learn from it that among all cultured people, and in all times, until the date of the Lutheran Reformation, concubinage was permitted, and even to a certain extent legally recognized, and was an institution not involving any dishonour. From this position it was degraded only by the Lutheran Reformation, for the degradation of concubinage was regarded as a means by which the marriage of priests could be justified; and, on the other hand, after the Lutheran denunciation of concubinage, the semi-official recognition of that institution by the Roman Catholic Church was no longer possible.

“Regarding polygamy there need be no dispute, for it is a universally existing fact, and the only question is regarding its regulation. Where are the true monogamists? We all live at least for a time, but most of us continually, in a state of polygamy. Since, consequently, every man makes use of many wives, nothing could be more just than to leave him free, and even to compel him, to provide for many wives.”

Just as are these views of Schopenhauer’s regarding the necessity of a freer conception and a freer configuration of sexual relations, and regarding the shamefulness of exposing to infamy the unmarried mother and the illegitimate child, so much the more dangerous is his view of the part to be played by women in this reform of marriage. Woman as an inferior being, without freedom, is once more to lose all her rights, instead of standing beside man as a free personality with equal rights and equal duties. The result of a rearrangement of amatory life on this basis would inevitably be a new and a worse sexual slavery.

As Julius Frauenstädt records, Schopenhauer, in a separate manuscript found amongst his papers, has described the evil conditions of monogamy, and has recommended, as a step to[246] reform, the practice of “tetragamy.” This peculiar and unquestionably very interesting essay has not found its way into the Royal Library of Berlin. With regard to the whereabouts of the manuscript we are uncertain; perhaps Frauenstädt destroyed it.

However, we find a brief, hitherto unpublished, extract from this essay in Schopenhauer’s manuscript book, “Die Brieftasche,” written in 1823, which is preserved in the Royal Library in Berlin.[197]

I publish here, for the first time, the summary account of tetragamy contained on pp. 70-77 of the aforesaid manuscript book:

SKETCH OF SCHOPENHAUER’S “TETRAGAMY”
(Hitherto Unpublished).

“Inasmuch as Nature makes the number of women nearly identical with that of men, whilst women retain only about half as long as men their capacity for procreation and their suitability for masculine gratification, the human sexual relationship is disordered at the very outset. By the equal numbers of the respective sexes, Nature appears to point to monogamy; on the other hand, a man has one wife for the satisfaction of his procreative capacity only for half the time for which that capacity endures; he must, then, take a second wife when the first begins to wither; but for each man only one woman is available. The tendency exhibited by woman in respect of the duration of her sexual capacity is compensated, on the other hand, by the quantity of that capacity: she is capable of gratifying two or three vigorous men simultaneously, without suffering in any way. In monogamy, woman employs only half of her sexual capacity, and satisfies only half of her desires.

“If, now, this relationship were arranged in accordance with purely physical considerations (and we are concerned here with a physical, extremely urgent need, the satisfaction of which is the aim of marriage, alike among the Jews and among the Christians), if matters were to be equalized as completely as possible, it would be necessary for two men always to have one wife in common: let them take her when they are both young. After she has become faded, let them take another young woman, who will then suffice for their needs until both the men are old. Both women are cared for, and each man is responsible for the care of one only.

“In the monogamic state, the man has for a single occasion too much, and for a permanency too little; with the woman it is the other way about.

“If the proposed institution were adopted in youth, a man, at the[247] time when his income is usually smallest, would have to provide only for half a wife, and for few children, and those young. Later, when he is richer, he would have to provide for one or two wives and for numerous children.

“Since this institution has not been adopted—for half their life men are whoremongers, and for the other half cuckolds; and women must be correspondingly classified as betrayed and betrayers—he who marries young is tied later to an elderly wife; he who marries late in youth acquires venereal disease, and in age has to wear the horns. Woman must either sacrifice the bloom of her youth to a man already withered; or else must discover that to a still vigorous man she is no longer an object of desire. The institution we propose would cure all these troubles; the human race would lead happier lives. The objections are the following:

“1. That a man would not know his own children. Answer: This could, as a rule, be determined by likeness and other considerations; in existing conditions it is not always a matter of certainty.
“2. Such a menage à trois would give rise to brawls and jealousy. Answer: Such things are already universal; people must learn to behave themselves.
“3. What is to be done as regards property? Answer: This will have to be otherwise arranged; absolute communio bonorum will not occur. As we have already said, Nature has arranged the affair badly. It will, therefore, be impossible to overcome all disadvantages.

“As matters are at present, Duty and Nature are continually in conflict. For the man it is impossible from the beginning to the end of his career to satisfy his sexual impulse in a legal manner. Imagine his condition if he is widowed quite young. For the woman, to be limited to a single man during the short period of her full bloom and sexual capacity, is an unnatural condition. She has to preserve for the use of one individual what he is unable to utilize, and what many others eagerly desire from her; and she herself, in thus refusing, must curb her own desires. Just think of it!

“More especially we have to remember that always the number of men competent for sexual intercourse is double the number of functionally capable women, for which reason every woman must continually repel advances; she prepares for defence immediately a man comes near her.”

When we consider this suggestion of tetragamy of Schopenhauer’s from our own standpoint, we find an accurate exposition of the evils arising from monogamic coercive marriage, and a clear-sighted presentation of the physiological disharmonies of the sexual life arising from the difference between man and woman, upon which recently Metchnikoff also has laid so much stress. In other respects Schopenhauer’s views are for us not open to discussion, for, as already pointed out, he regards woman from the first simply as a chattel, and denies to her any[248] individuality or soul; and, secondly, because he rejects the principle of the only-love—a principle so intimately associated with the idea of woman as individual. For the watchword of the future must be: Free love, based upon the only-love! and, indeed, the only-love manifesting itself reciprocally in the full struggle for existence.

For this reason, also, the characteristic free love of the Bohemians of Paris during the second half of the nineteenth century, and more especially during the period 1830 to 1860, can only be regarded as a truly poetic love-idyll, when compared with that grand and earnest love consecrated wholly to work, and to the inward spiritual development which presents itself to modern humanity as an ideal love, as the united conquest of existence. Grisette love, which Sebastian Mercier described with great force, and which found its classic representation in Henry Murger’s “Vie de Bohème,” was characterized by the enduring life-in-common of the loving couples, who belonged for the most part to the circle of artists and students. Thus it stood high as heaven above our modern “intimacy,” which, for the most part, has a quite transitory character; and yet the Bohemian free love corresponded in no way to the conception and ideal of free love as a community of spirit and of life.

The development of modern civilization, in association with the awakening of individualism, and with the economic revolution of our time, has created entirely new foundations for sexual relationships, and has made continually more apparent the injurious and destructive effects of our long outworn sexual morality. These changes have taught us to understand that in the so-called social question the sexual problem possesses as much importance as the economic problem—perhaps more. They have shown us the necessity for a new love of the future, for the reason that to cling to the old, outlived forms would be equivalent to a continuous increase in sexual corruption in the widest sense of the word, combined with a general disease contamination of civilized nations—as the threatening spread of prostitution, and more especially of secret prostitution, and the increased diffusion of venereal diseases, demonstrate before our eyes.

Almost at the same time, during recent years, among the various civilized nations of Europe there have originated efforts for a radical transformation of conventional sexual morality, and for a reform, adapted to modern conditions, of marriage and of the entire amatory life. In France, England, Sweden, and Germany, writers have appeared, producing books, many of[249] which have been important, full of matter, and comprehensive, entirely devoted to this object. Societies for marriage reform and sexual reform have been founded in North America, France, Austria, and Germany; parliamentary commissions for the investigation of these questions have been established. Several newspapers have been founded for the reform of sexual ethics. In short, a general interest has been aroused in this central question of life, and theoretical and practical activity have been directed towards its solution.

All at once, as if by general agreement, civilized humanity asked itself the earnest and solemn question, How was it possible that to hundreds and thousands the simple right to love was refused, so that they were condemned to a joyless existence, in which all the beautiful blossoms of life withered away; that hundreds of thousands of others were condemned to the hideous misery of prostitution; that, finally, the community at large was delivered up in ever-increasing degree to devastation by venereal diseases and their consequences?

How is it possible, asks Karl Federn, in the preface to his translation of Carpenter’s “Wenn die Menschen reif zur Liebe werden” (“Love’s Coming-of-Age”)—how is it possible that we sing love-songs, and yet have an amatory life like that which we lead to-day, and have a moral doctrine such as that which is dominant to-day?

All honour to the men and women who have dared to give an answer to these questions, who have opposed conventional lies with the truth of love, and who point out the new way along which mankind will go—will go, because it must.

It is impossible here to mention by name all the writings dealing with the reform of sexual relationships which have appeared within recent years. Their name is legion. We must content ourselves with an allusion to those books which most of all deserve the name of epoch-making, which have aroused the interest of the community, and which may probably be said to have first stimulated the discussion of the problem, and to have been principally effective in starting the flowing current of reform.

In France, Charles Albert has treated the problem of free love from the communistic standpoint.[198] In the first two chapters of his book, he describes the development of the primitive sexual[250] impulse, to become the most supreme individual love, and then gives an interesting account of the struggle of middle-class society against love, which to-day is endangered to an equal extent both by the state and by capital.

“Capitalistic society represents one fact, love another. It suffices to place them one beside the other in order to notice how sharp a contrast there is between them, an eternal state of war.”

It is only money that dominates the thought and feeling of modern humanity; for love and its idealism there is no longer any room; social economy recognizes only a sexual relationship, but not the higher feeling of love. Capital subjects the whole of the sexual life to its laws. In prostitution this great social crime finds its conclusion. The majority of marriages are nothing more than “sexual bargains.”

Free love is simply love liberated from the dominion of the state and of capital. It can, therefore, be realized only by an economic revolution, which will put an end to the economic struggle for existence. Free love means the independence of the sexual from the material life. Economic reform is the only way to the higher love. This is the author’s conviction. But he is not subject to any deceptive delusion that with this all will become beautiful and good; with this all problems will be solved, all incompleteness at an end.

“We do not,” Albert continues, “regard the province of the sexual life in the society of the future as an Eden, wherein those individuals best suited one to the other will come together with mathematical certainty, to lead a cloudless existence. Just as to-day, there will be unrequited love, uncertain search and endeavour, errors and deceptions, misunderstandings, satiety, aberrations, and sorrows. However great the material prosperity may be which mankind in the future will enjoy, the life of feeling will always remain the source of incalculable disturbances, and love will not be the rarest cause of such disturbances; but still a large proportion of the existing causes of pain can and must disappear.”

The indispensable preliminary to free love is the complete equality of man and woman. This, however, can only be attained by means of communism—that is to say, by that ordering of society in which property and wages cease to exist, in which not only the means of production, but also all the articles of consumption, are appropriated to the common use, and woman will no longer possess a commercial value, as she does at the present day.

Like Albert, Ladislaus Gumplowicz [199] also believes that free love can only be realized in a collectivist community.

However important it is to draw attention to the economic point of view, as was done before Albert and Gumplowicz by Bebel, in his celebrated “Woman and Socialism” (thirty-fourth edition, Stuttgart, 1903), still, it appears to me that the communistic solution is not the only possible solution, and that free love can very well be associated with the preservation of private property.[200]

While the progressive changes in the economic structure of society powerfully influence sexual relationships and lay down the rules for their existing forms, still, physiological individual factors play a great part also in the matter. The first to insist on this fact were the Englishman Carpenter and the Swedish writer Ellen Key.[201]

Edward Carpenter,[202] at one time a priest in the Anglican Church, in his study of the question of free love, without ignoring the economic factor, lays stress above all on the psychical factor, the inward spiritual relationship between man and wife.

“It is in the very nature of Love that as it realizes its own aim it should rivet always more and more towards a durable and distinct relationship, nor rest till the permanent mate and equal is found. As human beings progress, their relations to each other must become much more definite and distinct, instead of less so—and there is no likelihood of society in its onward march lapsing backwards, so to speak, to formlessness again.”

Above all, Carpenter has introduced into the discussion of free love an element which to me appears of great importance from[252] the medical standpoint: the question of relative asceticism, of self-control. He rightly considers that the duty of the love of the future does not subsist merely in the common physical union, but also in spiritual procreation. From the intimate spiritual contact between two differentiated personalities, the highest spiritual values proceed. Only self-control leads us to this highest love.

“It is a matter of common experience that the unrestrained outlet of merely physical desire leaves the nature drained of its higher love-forces.... Any one who has once realized how glorious a thing Love is in its essence, and how indestructible, will hardly need to call anything that leads to it a sacrifice” (op. cit., pp. 7, 8).

The indispensable prerequisites to the reform of love and marriage are, according to Carpenter, the following (op. cit., p. 100):

(1) The furtherance of the freedom and self-dependence of women. (2) The provision of some rational teaching, of heart and of head, for both sexes during the period of youth. (3) The recognition in marriage itself of a freer, more companionable, and less pettily exclusive relationship. (4) The abrogation or modification of the present odious law which binds people together for life, without scruple, and in the most artificial and ill-assorted unions.

Carpenter accepts Letourneau’s view, that, in a more or less distant future, the institution of marriage will undergo transformation into monogamic unions, freely entered on, and when necessary freely dissolved, by simple mutual consent, as is already done in several European countries—in Canton Geneva, in Belgium, in Roumania, as regards divorce; and in Italy as regards separation. State and society should take part in the matter only so far as the safety of the children demands, concerning whom more extensive duties should be expected from the parents. Carpenter also points out, as was shown seventy years ago by Gutzkow, that, as regards the development of the children, it is better, in unhappy marriages, that their parents should separate than that the children should grow up amid the miseries of such marriages.

“Love”—thus Carpenter concludes his dissertation on marriage in the future—“is doubtless the last and most difficult lesson that humanity has to learn; in a sense, it underlies all the others. Perhaps the time has come for the modern nations when, ceasing to be children, they may even try to learn it” (op. cit., p. 113).

A greater vogue even than Carpenter’s book had was obtained by the essays of the Swedish writer Ellen Key, “Love and Marriage,” which in 1894 appeared in a German translation,[203] and had an unusual success in the book-market. It is without exception the most interesting and pregnant work on the sexual question which has ever appeared. Written from the heart, and inspired by the observations of a free and lofty spirit, it avoids none of the numerous difficulties and by-paths in this department of thought; and the reproach of libertinism which has been cast at the author must be emphatically rejected. Ellen Key is the most outspoken realist of all the writers on the subject of free love. She takes her arguments from actual life; she associates her ideas of reform always with the real; she writes as an earnest evolutionist. Thus, in her book, her first aim is to establish “the course of the evolution of sexual morality” and the “evolution of love.”

Ellen Key starts from the fact that no one has ever offered any proof that monogamy is that form of the sexual life which is indispensable to the vital force and civilization of the nations. Even among the Christian nations it has never yet really existed, and its legalization as the only permissible form of sexual morality has hitherto been rather harmful than helpful to general morality.

The writer then develops the idea, no less beautiful than true, that the genuine character of love can be proved only by the lovers actually living together for a considerable time; only thus is it possible to demonstrate that it is moral for them to live together, and that their union will have an elevating influence on themselves and their generation. Consequently, of no conjugal relationship can we beforehand affirm or deny its success. Every new pair, whatever form they may have chosen for their common life, must first of all prove for themselves that they are morally justified in living together.

Ellen Key then proceeds to maintain a view, which I myself also regard as an integral constituent of the programme of the love of the future, and one which I have advanced in earlier writings: that love is not merely, as Schopenhauer thought, an affair of the species, but is, at least in equal degree, the concern of the loving individuals. This is the result and the meaning of civilization, which, as I have proved in earlier chapters, exhibits a progressive individualization and an increasing spiritual enrichment of love (the “spiritualized sensuality” of Ellen Key), and[254] thus gives to love a thoroughly independent importance for each individual.

“In view of the manner in which civilization has now developed personal love, this latter has become so composite, so comprehensive and far-reaching, that not only in and by itself—independently of the species—does it constitute a great life-value, but it also increases or diminishes all other values. In addition to its primitive importance, it has gained a new significance: to carry the flame of life from sex to sex. No one names that person immoral who, deceived in his love, abstains in his married life from procreating the species; that husband and wife also we shall not call immoral, who continue their married life rendered happy by love, although their marriage has proved childless. But in both cases these human beings follow their subjective feelings at the expense of the future generations, and treat their love as an independent aim. The right already recognized in these individual cases, as belonging to the individual at the expense of the species, will continue to undergo enlargement in proportion as the importance of love continues to increase. On the other hand, the new morality will demand from love an ever-increasing voluntary limitation of rights at those times when the growth of a new life renders it necessary. It will also demand a voluntary or enforced renunciation of the right to procreate new life under conditions which would make this new life deficient in value.”

Ellen Key terms this new, modern love “erotic monism,” because it comprehends the entire unitary personality, including the spiritual being, not merely the body. George Sand gave the first definition of this love as being of such a kind that “neither had the soul betrayed the senses, nor had the senses betrayed the soul.”

This erotic monism proclaims as its indestructible foundation the unity of marriage and love.

The idea of unity gives to the human being the right to arrange his sexual life according to his personal wishes, subject to the condition that he does not consciously injure the unity, and therewith, mediately or immediately, the right, of possible posterity.

Thus, according to Ellen Key, love “will continually become to a greater extent a private affair of human beings, whilst children, on the contrary, will become more and more a vital problem of society.” From this it follows that the two “most debased and socially sanctioned manifestations of sexual subdivision (of dualism), coercive marriage and prostitution, will gradually become impossible, because, after the victory of the idea of unity, they will cease to correspond to human needs.”

Ellen Key rightly insists that among the young men of the present day there is an increasing hostility to socially protected[255] immorality (both in the form of coercive marriage and in that of prostitution); whilst they increasingly exhibit a monistic yearning for love. The general diffusion, which we shall describe at length in a special chapter, of ascetic moods and of misogyny among men and of misandry among women, is partly connected with the feeling that the present social forms of the sexual relationship limit to an equal extent the worth and the freedom of mankind.

To-day the “purity fanatics and the frantic sensualists” meet in common mistrust of the developmental possibilities of love, because they do not believe in the possible ennoblement of the blind natural impulse. In contrast to these, Ellen Key reminds us of the fact of the “mystical yearning for perfection, which in the course of evolution has raised impulse to become passion, and passion to become love, and which is now striving to raise love to an ever greater love.”

We must recognize love as the spiritual force of life. Love, like the artist, like the man of science, has a right to the peculiar, original activity of its own poietic force, to the production of new spiritual values. The more perfect race that is to come must, in the fullest meaning of the words, be brought forth by love.

For this, however, the indispensable preliminary is the inward freedom of love; the free-love union is the watchword of the future. Ellen Key also shows that among the lower classes free love has long been customary, and that there the dangerous utilization of prostitution is far more limited than among the higher classes, with which view Blaschko’s statistical data regarding the far greater diffusion of venereal diseases among the higher classes of society are in substantial agreement.

No less indispensable to free love, however, is the full, mature development of the loving individual. For this reason, Ellen Key demands self-control and sexual continence at least until the age of twenty years. She regards the indiscriminate sexual intercourse which is to-day an established custom among all young men as the murder of love. But too early marriages are no less dangerous. She demands for the woman at least an age of twenty; for the man, an age of twenty-five years; and until these respective ages are attained, sexual continence should be observed as fully as possible by both sexes.

This self-command is good for the physical development, “steels the will, gives the joy of power to the personality; and these qualities are later of importance in all other spheres of activity.[256]”

With wonderful beauty, Ellen Key describes the happiness of the power of waiting in love, and quotes in this connexion the lovely phrases of the Swedish poet Karlfeldt:

On the other hand, it is a demand of true morality that healthy men and women between the ages of twenty and thirty years should enjoy the possibility of marriage—of free marriage. This possibility can, however, be secured only by economic reforms.

The author then considers the very important point of love’s choice, and demands above all the compulsory provision of a medical certificate of health before entering on marriage.

“It is absolutely beyond question that the healthy self-seeking which wishes to safeguard the personal ego, in conjunction with the increasing valuation of a healthy posterity, will hinder the contraction of many unsuitable marriages. In other cases, love might overcome these considerations, as far as husband and wife are themselves concerned; but they must then renounce parentage. In those cases, on the contrary, in which the law would distinctly forbid marriage, one could naturally not prevent the sick persons from procreating independently of marriage; but the same is true of all laws: the best do not need them, the worst do not obey them, but the majority are guided by them in the formation and development of their ideas of what is right.”

“Parentage without love.

“Irresponsible parentage.

“Parentage on the part of immature or degenerate human beings.

“Voluntary unfertility on the part of a married pair who are competent to reproduce their kind.

“All manifestations of the sexual life resulting from force or seduction, or from the disinclination or the incapacity for the proper fulfilment of sexual intercourse.”

It is interesting to note that Ellen Key prophesies as the result of the progressive improvement of the species by love’s selection, the attainment of a state wherein every man and every woman will be suited for the reproduction of the species. Then would the ideal of monogamy, one husband for one wife, one wife for one husband, be for the first time realized.

Very beautifully, and with a prudent insight into the actual relationships, Ellen Key discusses the question of the “right to motherhood,” where she finds occasion to describe the new and[257] very various types of women which the evolution of modern life has brought into being. She recognizes only with reservation the general right to motherhood, but she does not regard it as a desirable example to follow when a woman becomes a mother without love, either in marriage or out of it. It is not right to do what is generally done to-day by the man-haters—namely, to demand from the majority of unmarried women that they should produce a child without love. This should not even happen when love exists, but a permanent life-in-common with the father of the child is impossible. An unmarried woman who determines on motherhood should be fully mature, and already have behind her “the second springtime” of her life; she must “not only be pure as snow, pure as fire, but also must be possessed of the full conviction that with the child of her love she will produce a radiance in her own life and will endow humanity with new wealth.”

Such an unmarried woman really makes a present of her child to humanity, and is quite different from the unmarried woman who “has a child.”

Indeed, for the majority, the ideal always remains that of the ancient proverb, that man is only half a human being, woman only half; and only the father and the mother with their child become a whole one!

With regard to divorce, Ellen Key demands that it should be perfectly free, and should depend only upon the definite desire, held for a certain lapse of time, of either or both parties. The dissolution of marriage must be no less easy than the breaking off of an engagement.

“Whatever drawbacks,” she says, “free divorce may involve, they can hardly be worse than those which marriage has entailed, and still continues to entail. Marriage has been degraded to the coarsest sexual customs, the most shameless practices, the most distressing spiritual murders, the most cruel ill-treatment, and the grossest impairment of personal freedom, that any province of modern life has exhibited! One need not go back to the history of civilization; one need simply turn to the physician and magistrate, in order to learn for what purpose the ‘sacrament of marriage’ is employed, and frequently employed by the very same men and women who are professed enthusiasts as to its moral value!”

Just as little as the relations between friends, between parents and children, or between brothers and sisters, necessarily give rise to lasting sentiments of affection, is it possible to expect this of two lovers. The “marriage fetters,” described with such horrible truth by John Stuart Mill and Björnstjerne Björnsen,[258] are to-day felt to be intolerable. The love of the modern man flourishes only in freedom.

“The delicate erotic sentiment of the present day shrinks from becoming a fetter; it shuns the possibility of becoming a hindrance.”

Free divorce, in a case of unhappy marriage, is no less necessary when there are children to the marriage. The duties of the parents to the children remain in such cases unaltered, without, however, thus rendering it necessary that the parents should continue to live together. For the sorrows of such a union, and the harm done thereby to the children, are greater than those that would result from divorce.

Human love has its phases of development. It does not remain for ever the same, but it alters pari passu with the evolution of the individual. Lifelong love is an ideal, but it is not a duty. Such a demand would as inevitably destroy personality as would the demand for the unconditional belief in a doctrine, or for the unconditional pursuit of a profession.

Very interesting is Ellen Key’s description of the numerous disillusions of love, which become still more perceptible in a coercive marriage. There is a whole series of “typical unhappy fates” in marriage, often with no blame properly attaching to either party, dependent merely upon incompatibility of temperament, but also upon faults of one or both parties to the marriage.

Frequently a man or a woman of a thoroughly sympathetic temperament lives with a woman or a man of such faultless excellence that the home seems filled with icicles. One day the husband or the wife runs away because the air has become so thin as to be irrespirable. The general sentiment is one of commiseration for the—superlatively excellent man or woman!

In the case of earnest, mature human beings, free divorce will not increase the number of dissolutions of marriage. On the contrary, the obligations imposed by a free relationship are greater than those of legal coercive marriage. The fear also that with the granting of free divorce every one will enter upon numerous free marriages one after another is groundless. It is precisely those who are united in free love to whom such a separation, when it does become necessary, is so profoundly painful, that life itself forbids the frequent repetition of such unhappiness.

Very beautiful, and based upon lofty ethical conceptions, are the writer’s views regarding the necessity for divorce precisely in view of the existence of children. She says:

“Men and women of earlier times went on patching up for ever and ever. The psychologically developed generation of to-day is more inclined to let the broken remain broken. For, except in those cases in which objective misfortunes, or a retarded evolution, gave rise to a rupture, patched-up marriage, like patched-up engagements, seldom prove durable. Often it was owing to profound instincts that the rupture became inevitable; reconciliations fortify these instincts, and sooner or later they once more find free vent.

“Thus it happens that even an exceptional nature is strained by the burden it has to bear, and the children are not then witnesses of their parents living together, but of their dying together.

“Neither religion nor law, neither society nor a family, can determine what it is that marriage is killing in a man, or what he finds it possible to rescue in that state—he himself alone knows the one and suspects the other. He alone can delineate the boundaries, can decide whether he is satisfied to regard his own existence as closed, and to remain contented in the life of his children; whether he is able so to endure the sorrows of a continued married life with such fortitude as to make it increase his own powers and those of his children.”

The conviction of the rights of love, and the consciousness of the rights of the children, are to-day unmistakably on the increase. There is no danger that the latter right, the right of the children, will suffer in comparison with the rights of love. It is, on the contrary, characteristic, that out of the very same feeling by which the freer configuration of the amatory life is demanded, there has also arisen a new programme of the rights of children. This same Ellen Key who proclaims the inalienable rights of free love, speaks also of the “century of the child,” and devotes to this subject an admirable book.

The most important point with regard to free divorce, in respect to the children, is that the father and the mother must not separate from one another in hatred, but in friendship, and that, in the interest of the children, they should continue to meet one another from time to time. Ellen Key here rightly condemns the conduct of the good friends and relatives who simply lay down the law that the separated pair must hate one another, and must in every relationship torment and cheat one another. It is precisely such “enmity” of the parents after divorce that is so full of bad consequences in respect of the children.

We also have to consider this point of view, that sometimes the new husband or the new wife has a better influence over the children than their own parents, and that in this way divorce may have brought the children greater happiness, may have been for them a true blessing.

The closing chapter of her work is devoted by Ellen Key to the formulation of practical recommendations regarding the new[260] marriage laws. She indicates as a starting-point of her dissertation that the ideal form of marriage is the perfectly free union between a man and a woman. But this ideal can in the meanwhile only be attained through transitional forms. In this the opinion of society regarding the morality of the sexual relationship must find expression, and thus remain as the support for undeveloped personalities; but at the same time, these transitional forms must be sufficiently free to favour a progressive development of the higher erotic consciousness of the present day.

There always remains, therefore, the necessity for laws, to some extent limiting individual freedom; but these laws must admit of an advance towards perfection in respect of the freer gratification of individual needs. The sense of solidarity demands a new marriage law adapted to new modern erotic needs, since the majority are not yet prepared for complete freedom. But it is only the needs of modern civilized human beings, and not abstract theories concerning the idea of the family or the “historic origin” of marriage, that should be determinative in this matter.

In the marriage of the future, above all, the economic and legal subordination of woman must be abolished. Woman must supervise her own property and arrange her own work, and she must in the main care for herself in so far as this is compatible with her maternal duties. She must, however, have this assurance—that during the first years of the life of every child she shall be cared for by society, and this under the following conditions:

She must have performed her feminine “military service” by a one year’s course of instruction in the care of children, in the general care of health, and, whenever possible, in sick-nursing.

She must either care for her child herself or provide another thoroughly competent nurse.

She must bring proof that she does not possess sufficient personal property, or sufficient income from her work, in order to provide for her own support and half of her child’s support, or else that the care for her children compels her to discontinue her professional occupation.

Only in exceptional cases should this support of motherhood be provided for a longer time than during the three first and most important years of the life of the child.

The funds for this most necessary of all kinds of insurance must be provided in the form of a graduated income tax, graduated so as to make the wealthier classes pay the most, and the unmarried should pay just as much as the married.

In every community the central authorities of this insurance should consist of “boards for the care of children.” The members of these boards should be two-thirds women and one-third men; they should distribute the funds and supervise the care of the infants and older children; in cases in which the mother was not properly fulfilling her duties to the child, they could cut off supplies, or remove the child from the mother’s care.

The mother should receive yearly the same sum, but, in addition, she should receive for each child half of the cost of its support, as long as the number of children is not exceeded which the society has laid down as desirable. Children born in excess of this number would be a private concern of the parents. Every father must, from the time of birth until the child attains the age of eighteen years, provide one-half of the money needed for its support.

The existing immoral distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children is practically equivalent to freeing unmarried fathers from their natural responsibility, and drives unmarried mothers to death, prostitution, or infanticide.

All this would be done away with by a law ensuring from the State support for the mother during the first, most difficult years, and ensuring the child a right to support from both parents, a right also to the name of both, and to inheritance from both.

Legal expression is also demanded for the right of each member of a married couple to possess his or her property; those who wish to make any other arrangement can do so by special contract after a definite valuation of their property. And in respect of the right of inheritance, the domestic work of the wife (housekeeping and the care of the children) must receive due economic consideration—a matter hitherto ignored. Not only in respect of her property, but also in respect of all civil rights, and of the right of control over her own person, the married woman must be placed in the same position as the unmarried.

Ellen Key’s remarks on the removal of the coercion exercised at present on husband and wife in respect of living together are very interesting. She writes:

“There are persons who would have continued to love one another throughout the whole of their life had they not been compelled—day after day, year after year—to adapt their customs, their volitions, and their inclinations entirely according to one another’s tastes. So much unhappiness depends, indeed, upon matters of almost no importance, difficulties which two human beings endowed with moral courage and insight would easily have overcome, had it not been that the instinct towards happiness was overpowered by regard for ordinary[262] opinion. The more personal freedom a woman (or man) has had before marriage, the more does she (or he) suffer in a home in which she does not possess an hour or a corner for her own undisturbed use. And the more the modern human being gains an increase in his individual freedom of movement, the more he feels the need for privacy in other relations, the more also will man and wife need these things in the married state....

“But at present custom (and law) demand from the married pair that they should lead a life in common, which often ends in a permanent separation, merely because conventional considerations prevented them from living apart!

“Also for those otherwise constituted, the narrow dependence, the compulsory belonging each to the other, the daily adaptation, the unceasing mutual consideration, may become oppressive. In continually increasing numbers people are beginning quietly to transform conjugal customs, so that they may correspond to the new needs. For instance, each goes for a journey by himself, when he feels the need for privacy; one of the pair seeks alone pleasures which the other does not value; in former times both would have ‘enjoyed’ them together, against the will of one, or both would have renounced what one could have genuinely enjoyed. More and more married people have separate bedrooms, and after a generation, it is probable that separate dwelling-houses for husband and wife will be sufficiently common to arouse no particular attention.”

With regard to the question of personal freedom in marriage, Ellen Key takes into account the possibility of marriage being kept secret on urgent grounds; also the introduction of new forms of divorce, the present procedure giving rise to such detestable practices in the law-courts—for example, the detailed statement of the grounds for divorce, or an account of the refusal or the misuse of “conjugal rights,” or an account of the malicious desertion of one party by the other.

The author, therefore, makes proposals for a new marriage law and a new divorce law.

That neither should be closely related or connected with the other, as the present law already forbids. The new law must in this respect be modified in the sense either of greater severity or of relaxation, according as the scientific knowledge of the future may direct.

Finally, neither party should simultaneously enter upon another marriage. On both parties will be imposed the duty of providing a medical certificate regarding the state of their[263] health; a proposed marriage must be forbidden when either party is suffering from a disease transmissible to the children (also when suffering from a disease which would infect the other party?). With regard to other illnesses, the matter may be left to the free judgment of those wishing to be married.

Marriage will take place before the marriage assessor of the commune, and before four other witnesses, without any special ceremony; the contracting parties will enter their names in the register, and their signatures will be witnessed by those present. When for any reason the marriage is to be kept secret, the witnesses will, of course, be bound to secrecy.

This civil marriage is all that the law will direct; the religious ceremony will be a voluntary affair, and will have no legal force.

In marriage, husband and wife will retain all the personal rights which they had before marriage, over their bodies, their names, their property, their work, their wages, also the right to choose their own place of residence, and all other civil rights. For common expenses and debts they will have a common responsibility; whilst each will be personally responsible for personal expenditure and debts. In case of divorce, each will retain his or her property. In the event of death, the widower or widow will inherit half the property, the remainder going to the children.

For divorce, Ellen Key suggests there should be a “council of divorce,” consisting of four persons, men or women. The first aim of this council will be, somewhat like that of a court of honour before a duel, to attempt to reconcile the parties, to adjust any cause of quarrel. If this attempt fails, the matter must go before the marriage assessor of the commune; but this cannot take place until the expiration of six months from the time when it was brought before the council of divorce. The council of divorce must testify before the assessor that six months before each party was fully informed regarding the wish of the other that the marriage should be dissolved, and regarding the reasons for that wish. If there are no children, if a division of the property has been arranged, and if husband and wife have lived completely apart for one year, the divorce will be effected one year after the commencement of proceedings. When there are children to the marriage, there will be needed a special “jury for the care of children” to deal with the custody of the children. If either party is found by the jury and the judge to be unworthy for or incapable of the custody of the children, on the ground of his (or her) morals or character, he (or she) loses his (or her) rights. If either father or mother is deprived of the custody of[264] the children, a guardian must be appointed—a man to represent the father, a woman to represent the mother—and this guardian will supervise the education of the children in association with the remaining parent. If both parents are found to be unfitted for the custody of the children, the education of the latter must be supervised by a guardian only. If both parents are equally fitted and worthy for the custody of the children, the latter should remain with the mother until the age of fifteen, and would then have the right to choose between their parents.

Ellen Key demands severe laws against the seduction and abandonment of girls under age, on the part of unconscientious men; and she considers that the witting transmission of any infective disorder by means of sexual intercourse should be punished by imprisonment for a minimum term of six months. Speaking generally, the law should always come to the assistance of the weaker party, above all, to the assistance of the children, and in most cases to the assistance of the mother.

Although the new marriage law is to give to adult citizens complete freedom to arrange their erotic relationships at their own responsibility and risk, with or without marriage, it remains necessary that double marriages (bigamy), sexual relationships within forbidden degrees, or on the part of persons suffering from transmissible disease, which the law has declared to be a hindrance to marriage, and also intercourse with persons under eighteen years of age, should be regarded as punishable offences. The same is true of homosexual and other perverse manifestations. The trial in such cases will be conducted by a judge, with the assistance of a jury of physicians and crimino-psychologists.

The writer does not believe that marriage will be transformed by legal changes in the way outlined above, but she is of opinion that what will happen is that “men and women will refuse to submit themselves to the unworthy forms of marriage, which will remain established by law, and will form free unions, the so-called ‘marriage of conscience,’” such as those which the Belgian sociologist Mesnil has recommended in his work, “Le Libre Mariage.”

It is, in fact, in Sweden, Ellen Key’s fatherland, in which these free marriages of conscience appear to have first obtained adherents. She records the free union of the professor of national economics at Lund, Knut Wicksell. Additional reports of free marriages in Sweden are given by the Swedish physician Anton Nyström.[204] He mentions among those who have formed free[265] unions, without legal or ecclesiastical ceremony, but simply by public notification, in addition to the already mentioned university professor, also the editor of a leading newspaper, a physician and doctor of philosophy, and a candidate of philosophy. The latter is engaged in study with his wife at the high school at Göteborg. In February, 1904, they made a public announcement in the newspaper that they were entering on a “marriage of conscience,” since they had a conscientious objection to the ecclesiastical form of marriage. The principal of the college wrote an address to the young couple, stating that, although this union was not entered upon on immoral grounds, and therefore could not be regarded as a punishable offence, still, such a free union, unrecognized by the State, between man and woman, was not compatible with the good order of society, that it was injurious to the general ethical conception of the sacramental character of marriage, and also constituted a dangerous example, which others might be led to imitate. The principal therefore urged the young people most earnestly “to place their union as soon as possible on a legitimate footing.” This exhortation, however, led to no result.

Moreover, the University of Upsala was more free-thinking than that of Göteborg, for the above-mentioned professor and his wife were, for a long time after they had become united in free love, matriculated students at the University of Upsala, and the university authorities favoured them with no attention with regard to this matter.

In recent years, the public declaration of “free marriages” has also found observance in other European countries. Thus, not long ago the author who writes under the pseudonym of “Roda-Roda” announced in the newspapers his free union with the Baroness von Zeppelin; and in the Vossische Zeitung, No. 410, September 2, 1906, we find the following announcement:

“Dr. Alfred Rahmer
Wilhelmine Ruth Rahmer
geb. Prinz-Flohr
Frei-Vermählte”
(Free-Wedlock).

Similar public announcements are reported from Holland. Moreover, according to Nyström, it has since 1734 been legally established in Sweden, that in certain cases engagement is equivalent to marriage—namely, when the engaged woman becomes pregnant. “When a man impregnates his fiancée, the engagement becomes a marriage.... If the man refuse to go through the[266] ceremony of marriage, and wishes to break off the engagement, the woman is legally declared to be his wife, and enjoys full conjugal rights in his house.” So runs this law.

We can predict with certainty that the adherents of free marriage, the number of “marriage protestants,” as Ellen Key happily calls them, will continue to increase. To such will belong all those who have an equal antipathy to coercive marriage, to the debasing intercourse with prostitutes, and to the transient casual love, such as is experienced in ordinary extra-conjugal sexual intercourse, the true “wild” love.

“It is only a question of time”—thus Ellen Key concludes her remarks on marriage reform—“when the respect felt by society for the sexual union will not depend upon the form of the life in common, by which two human beings become parents, but only on the worth of the children which these two are producing as new links in the chain of the generations. Men and women will then devote to their spiritual and physical preparation for sexual intercourse the same religious earnestness that the Christians devote to the welfare of their souls. No longer will divine laws regarding the morality of sexual relationships be considered the mainstay of morality; in place of these the desire to elevate the human race and a sense of personal responsibility will be the safeguards of conduct. But the conviction on the part of the parents that the purpose of life is also their own proper life—that is, that they do not exist only for the sake of children—should free them from certain other duties of conscience which at present bind them in respect of children—above all, from the duty of maintaining a union in which they themselves are perishing. The home will perhaps become more than it is at present; something at unity with the mother, something which—far from excluding the father—carries within itself the germ of a new and higher ‘family right.’...

“A greater and healthier will-to-live in respect of erotic feelings and demands—this it is that our time needs! Here from the feminine side real dangers threaten; and one of several ways in which these dangers must be averted is by the construction of new forms of marriage.

“Human material of ever higher worth and capable of higher evolution—it is this which in the first place we have to create. If we preserve coercive forms of the sexual life, the possibility of doing this is a diminishing one; if we adopt free forms of the sexual life, the possibility of doing it will increase. Not only because the present time asks for more freedom are its demands full of promise, but because those demands approximate ever more closely to the central point of the problem—to the conviction that love is the principal condition upon which depends the vital advance of the individual and of humanity at large.”

I have given such a lengthy analysis of Ellen Key’s book because, in the first place, in no other work do we find so lucid[267] an exposition of all the points needed for the consideration of the question of free love—an exposition based upon the richest experience of life and a really astonishing psychical knowledge of mankind, combined with the finest understanding of the subtle activities and sentiments of the loving soul; and, in the second place, because as an actual fact—at any rate, in Germany—this book has formed the true starting-point of all endeavours towards the reform of sexual morality. Ellen Key’s “Ueber Liebe und Ehe” (“Love and Marriage”) is a demonstration of human rights in the matter of love; it is the evangel for those who have determined to harmonize love with all the changes and advances attendant on the evolution of civilization, and have resolved not to allow the forcible retardation of progress by conditions which were perhaps still tolerable one hundred or two hundred years ago, but to-day are unconditionally hostile to civilization.

In Germany these endeavours have been centralized in the Bund für Mutterschutz (the Association for the Protection of Mothers), founded in the beginning of 1906, whose purpose it is to protect unmarried mothers and their children from economic and moral dangers, to counteract the dominant condemnation of such mothers, and thereby also indirectly to bring about the reform of the existing views on sexual morality. Those who initiated this most important movement were indeed high-minded women. I mention, among many, only the names of Ruth Bré, Helene Stöcker, Maria Lischnewska, Adele Schreiber, Gabriele Reuter, and Henriette Fürth.

By the preparatory committee to which Maria Lischnewska, Dr. Borgius, Dr. Max Marcuse, Ruth Bré, and Dr. Helene Stöcker belonged, a committee meeting was called on January 5, 1905, and the Association for the Protection of Mothers was founded, its programme having already received the support of a number of leading personalities from all parts of the German Empire.

In addition to this committee, to which, besides the above-named members of the preparatory committee, there belonged Lily Braun, Georg Hirth, and Werner Sombart, a further committee was formed, the members of which were: Alfred Blaschko, Iwan Bloch, Hugo Böttger, Lily Braun, Gräfin Gertrud Bülow von Dennewitz, M. G. Conrad, A. Damaschke, Hedwig Dohm, Frieda Duensing, Chr. v. Ehrenfels, A. Erkelenz, W. Erb, A. Eulenburg, Max Flesch, Flechsig, A. Forel, E. Francke, Henriette Fürth, Agnes Hacker, Hegar, Willy Hellpach, Clara Hirschberg,[268] Georg Hirth, Graf Paul von Hoensbroech, Bianca Israel, Josef Kohler, Landmann, Hans Leuss, Maria Lischnewska, R. von Liszt, Lucas, Max Marcuse, Mensinga, Bruno Meyer, H. Meyer, Metta Meinken, Klara Muche, Moesta, A. Moll, Müller, Friedrich Naumann, A. Neisser, Franz Oppenheimer, Pelman, Alfred Ploetz, Heinrich Potthoff, Lydia Rabinowitsch, Gabriele Reuter, Karl Ries, Adele Schreiber, Heinrich Sohnrey, Werner Sombart, Helene Stöcker, Marie Stritt, Irma von Troll-Borostyani, Max Weber, Bruno Wille, L. Wilser, L. Woltmann.

In the programme which the newly founded Association for the Protection of Mothers speedily published, we are told:

One hundred and eighty thousand illegitimate children are born in Germany every year, approximately one-tenth of all births. This important source of our strength as a people, children who at the time of birth are usually endowed with powerful vitality (for their parents are commonly in the bloom of youth and health), we allow to go to ruin because a rigorous moral view bans unmarried mothers, undermines their economic existence, and compels them to entrust their children for payment to strange hands.

The momentous consequences of this state of affairs are shown by the fact that the average number of still-births, in the case of illegitimate children, amounts to 5 per cent., as compared with 3 per cent. of still-births among the total number of births; the mortality of illegitimate children during the first year of life is 28·5 per cent., as compared with 16·7 per cent. for the mortality of all children born. And whilst only a diminishing percentage of illegitimate children ever become fitted for military service, the world of criminals, prostitutes, and vagabonds, is recruited to an alarming extent from their ranks. Thus, by unfounded moral prejudices, we produce artificially an army of enemies to society. At the same time the birth-rate of Germany is relatively declining. In the year 1876 the number of births per 1,000 living was 41; in the year 1900 it was only 35¹⁄₂!

To put an end to this robbery of the strength of our people is the aim of the

Association for the Protection of Mothers.

The attempt has already been made by means of crèches, foundling institutions, and the like, to deal with this matter. But the protection of children without the protection of mothers is, and must remain, no more than patchwork; for the mother is the principal source of life for the child, and is indispensable to the child’s prosperity. Whatever ensures rest and care to the mother in her most difficult hours, whatever secures her economic existence for the future, and protects her from the contempt of her fellow-beings, by which her health is endangered and her life embittered, will serve to provide a secure foundation for the bodily and mental prosperity of the child, and will simultaneously give the mother herself a stronger moral hold. Therefore the Association for the Protection of Mothers will, above[269] all, make the mothers’ position safe, by assisting them to the attainment of

Economic Independence

—especially such as are prepared to bring up their own children—by the formation in country and in town of

Homes for Mothers,

in which, in addition, arrangements will be made for the necessary care and upbringing of the children, the granting of legal protection, and the provision of medical aid. Experience has shown that such provision also corresponds to the wish of many of the fathers, and assists in retaining their help and interest for mother and child.

The Association will, however, above all, close the sources from which the present poverty of unmarried mothers arises, and these are more especially the moral prejudices which at the present day defame them socially, and the legal regulations which burden them almost exclusively with the economic care and responsibility for the child, and which entail on the father not at all, or in a quite insufficient degree, his contribution to the burden.

The Moral Defamation

of unmarried mothers would, perhaps, be comprehensible if we lived in economic and social conditions rendering it possible for every one to marry soon after attaining sexual maturity, so that the involuntary celibacy of adult persons was an abnormal state. In such a time as ours, however, in which no less than 45 per cent. of all women competent to bear children are unmarried, and those who actually marry do so for the most part at a comparatively late age, we must regard as untenable the view which considers the unmarried woman giving birth to a child to be an outcast, thrusts her out of society like the basest criminal, and gives her up to despair. Equally untenable appears

The Present-Day Legal View,

which, when the actual father has not gone through the forms prescribed by the State for a marriage, does not regard him as father in the legal sense, ascribes to him no relationship with the child procreated by him, and imposes on him no responsibility for the child or its mother, although in the majority of cases the mother is economically the weaker, and he himself economically the stronger party. There must, therefore, be a legal reform in the direction of equalizing as far as possible the position of the illegitimate and the legitimate child in relation to the father.

Finally, however, motherhood—legitimate and illegitimate alike—is a factor of such profound importance to society, that it appears urgently desirable not to leave it exclusively to private care, with all the results that private care entails. In the interest of the community it is desirable that there should be

A General Insurance of Motherhood,

the cost of which should be defrayed by contributions from both sexes, as well as supplemented by grants from public sources. This[270] assurance must not only suffice to provide for every woman sufficient medical assistance and skilled care during pregnancy and delivery, but should also furnish a provision for the education of the child until it is of an age to earn its own living.

In order to propagate these views and endeavours methodically and upon the widest possible foundation, the active assistance and participation of every class in the population is indispensable. We therefore urge on all those who share our views the pressing demand

to join the Association for the Protection of Mothers,

and thus to assist in securing and accelerating the attainment of these ends.

As the official organ of the Association, was chosen the monthly magazine, edited by Dr. Phil. Helene Stöcker, Mutterschutz: Zeitschrift zur Reform der Sexuellen Ethik (The Protection of Mothers: a Journal for the Reform of Sexual Ethics)—hitherto published in the year 1905 twelve numbers, in the year 1906 twelve numbers, and in the year 1907 three numbers.

The foundation of the Association was followed on February 26, 1905, by the holding of its first public meeting, in the Architektenhaus, under the presidency of Helene Stöcker; and the meeting was extensively attended by the general population of Berlin. The aims and endeavours of the new union were explained, in longer and shorter speeches, by Ruth Bré, Max Marcuse, Maria Lischnewska, Justizrat Sello, Helene Stöcker, Ellen Key, Lily Braun, Adele Schreiber, Iwan Bloch, and Bruno Meyer; and from the standpoint of the advocates of woman’s rights, of jurists, of physicians, of sociologists, and of moralists, in equal degree, a radical transformation and reform of the present untenable conditions was demanded.[205]

Soon afterwards, the Association proceeded to form local groups. The first was formed in Munich, where on March 28, 1905, the first local meeting took place. Frau Schönfliess, Margarethe Joachimsen-Böhm, Alfred Scheel, and Friedrich Bauer belonged to this committee. Further local groups were founded in Berlin (May 20, 1905—members of this committee, as distinct from the committee of the general Association: Finkelstein, Galli, Agnes Hacker, Albert Kohn, Bruno Meyer, Adele Schreiber), and in Hamburg (president, Regina Ruben).[206]

The first general meeting (cf. Helene Stöcker, “Our First General Meeting,” published in Mutterschutz, 1907, No. 2) took place in Berlin, January 12 to 14. After speeches on the practical protection of mothers (Maria Lischnewska), the present-day form of marriage (Helene Stöcker), prostitution and illegitimacy (Max Flesch), limitation of marriages by economic conditions (Adele Schreiber), limitation of marriage by hygienic factors (Max Marcuse), the position of the illegitimate child (Böhmert and Ottmar Spann), the insurance of motherhood (Mayet), there followed animated discussions, and various important resolutions were passed, dealing with the equality of husband and wife in married life, the legal recognition of free marriages, and of the offspring of such marriages, the necessity for the provision of certificates of health before the conclusion of marriage, the means to be employed in the care of illegitimate children, and the insurance of motherhood. Especially noteworthy was the address of the leading medical statistician, Professor Mayet, regarding the introduction and management of the insurance of motherhood. At his suggestion, proposals followed regarding the enrolling of working-class members in the societies for insurance against illness and for the insurance of motherhood, the necessity for contributions on the part of the State, the inclusion of the agricultural and forest labourers, and of domestic servants of all kinds, in the schemes of insurance against illness and the insurance of motherhood, the possibility of a voluntary insurance of all women, what could be effected by the insurance of motherhood (free provision of midwives and medical assistance, free lodging in case of need, the provision of premiums for mothers suckling their own children, the institution of places where advice could be given to mothers, of homes for women during pregnancy and child-birth, and homes for women and infants), and the further development of factory legislation with regard to nursing mothers. The committee for 1907 was chosen: it consisted of Helene Stöcker, Maria Lischnewska, Adele Schreiber, Wilhelm Brandt, Iwan Bloch, Max Marcuse, Heinrich Finkelstein.

In the end of January, 1907, an Austrian Association for the Protection of Mothers was founded in Vienna, under the presidency of Dr. Hugo Klein. To the committee of this Society there belong, Siegmund Freud, Rosa Mayreder, Marie Eugenie[272] delle Grazie, Professor Schauta, and about forty other well-known persons, physicians, lawyers, schoolmasters, and many women. In the meeting at which the Association was founded, Dr. Ofner spoke regarding the legal rights of illegitimate mothers and children, and Dr. Friedjung regarding the protection of nursing infants.

In the United States also an Association for sexual reform has been founded, the so-called “Umwertungsgesellschaft” (Revaluation Society), the principal aim of which is the complete re-estimation of all values in the amatory life, and the introduction of a more ideal view of love. The President of this American Association is Emil F. Ruedebusch; the secretary, Mrs. Lina Janssen; the meeting-place of the society is Mayville, in the State of Wisconsin. Regular evenings of discussion are fixed, on which questions of especial interest are debated.

[In Holland also an Association for the Protection of Mothers has been founded; its name is “Vereeniging Onderlinge Vrouwenbescherming.”]

In the newspaper Mutterschutz (1905, No. 9, pp. 375, 376), we find a report of the meeting of the American Association held on October 8, 1905, when the topic of discussion was:

Is it the family (parental) relationship?—No; for a married couple may have no children, may not desire to have children, and can, none the less, be thoroughly married.

Is it the common home, domestic life?—No; for husband and wife may live their whole life in a hotel, and, none the less, be thoroughly married.

Is it the lifelong community of material interests?—No; for man and wife can keep their property separate, if they wish to do so.

Is it mutual assistance and a state of comradeship throughout life?—No. When a conjugal union is the exact opposite to this, we speak of a bad husband and a bad wife; they are, none the less, man and wife.

Does it signify a contract for a lifelong exclusive love?—Certainly not; if marriage signified that, all Christians would be opposed to this institution. And yet these are the things which, according to the common estimation, make up the nature of marriage, whenever the question is discussed in a manner which is regarded as “respectable” and “decent.”—As a matter of fact, there is nothing respectable or decent in this mystification.

What is it, then, in which the true nature of marriage is to be found?—It is the possession of a human being for lifelong exclusive sexual service.

Very various views have prevailed on the question how many[273] human beings it is legitimate for one human being to employ for his exclusive sexual gratification, and among different nations, and at various times, the most widely divergent rules and regulations have prevailed regarding the mode of sexual possession, and, on the other hand, regarding the duties towards this sexual property; but wherever marriage has existed, it has signified a right of property in respect of sexual utilization.

If we oppose marriage, we mean that we oppose that which actually constitutes marriage according to morality, and according to written law, that which even the most enthusiastic advocates of this institution regard as so debasing that they are ashamed to name it openly.

But, with the exception of the matters relating to sexual service, we hold fast to and defend everything which is publicly considered as marriage, and we expect that in this case we shall be “faithful,” “constant,” and “trustworthy” in all circumstances. For, according to our view, these most important imponderabilia, and these intimate associations of interest between husband and wife, are not the inevitable result of the longing for physical enjoyment in common, but are the much-to-be-desired result of a well-considered longing for any one or all of the relations entering into the question. According to our view, however, the duration of this union, and constancy while it lasted, would not be dependent upon the activity of sexual desires.

A special Association for Sexual Reform was founded in Berlin in the year 1906, at the instance of the editor of the Die Schönheit, Karl Vanselow. It is an Association of cultured men and women who also have in view the formation of local groups, and the delivery of artistic and scientific lectures in furtherance of their movement for reform.

In the above-mentioned monthly magazine, Mutterschutz, edited by Helene Stöcker, all the modern problems of love, marriage, friendship, parentage, prostitution, and all the associated problems of morality, and of the entire sexual life, are discussed from their philosophical, historical, legal, medical, social, and ethical aspects.

The editor herself, a talented disciple of Nietzsche, has since the year 1893 been chiefly occupied in the study of the psychological and ethical aspects of the problems of higher love, and has recently published her collected writings on this subject in a single volume.[207]

It is an interesting literary physiognomy which is offered to us in this book; we encounter here a lofty, free, and pure conception of the love of the future. After the first spiritual wanderings[274] and confusions, which no one in emotional pursuit of the ideal can escape, we see this courageous and undismayed advocate of the eternal, inalienable rights of love, ultimately insisting on the recognition of the lofty mission of love, in accordance with the saying of Nietzsche, which she lovingly quotes: “Ye shall not propagate onwards, but upwards!” (“Nicht fort sollt Ihr Euch pflanzen, sondern hinauf!”). She especially insists on the duty and responsibility of individual love. No one can take a more earnest view of love than is taken here. Helene Stöcker is throughout no radical revolutionist, but an evolutionist and reformer. She sees quite clearly that to-day there is no panacea, no unfailing solution of sexual problems. While she energetically contests the old sexual morality, and demands its replacement by a new freer conception of sexual relationships, she, none the less, recognizes throughout the significance and the value of self-command, of relative asceticism, the wonderful influence of which, in the deepening of emotional life, she has most rightly emphasized. Especially the soul of woman, she believes, has by the asceticism imposed on women by conventional morality, gained in a high degree, depth, fulness, and comprehensiveness. The inward development of woman will be greatly advantaged by the newer valuation of love. This will be characterized, neither by an arid renunciation and denial of life, nor by a coarse, egoistic search for pleasure, but by a joyful affirmation of life and all its healthy powers and impulses.

Whilst Helene Stocker has laid especial stress upon the psychological and ethical relationships of free love, its equal importance from economical and social points of view has been discussed by Friedrich Naumann,[208] W. Borgius,[209] Lily Braun,[210] Maria Lischnewska,[211] and Henriette Fürth.[212]

Naumann rightly draws attention to the fact that our purely monetary economic system is favourable to the production of sterility, for the reason that in this system motherhood is equivalent to loss of money, because the wife ceases to earn money in a degree proportionate to the extent to which she becomes a mother. The burden of the upbringing of children must be made[275] an affair of the community. At the present time, on the contrary, the producer of human beings is burdened upon all sides. He who has children has more rent to pay, and increased school expenses. Therefore, Naumann demands, as a first step to the recognition of the fact that it is a public duty to educate children, that school expenses shall no longer be demanded from the individual parent. Above all, however, it must be made easier to the wife to be a mother.

The wife as a personality demands her right to work, and her right to motherhood. The fact of the compulsory celibacy of an ever-increasing number of women competent to become mothers is the problem which here demands solution. According to the census of 1900, there were in Germany no less than 4,210,955 women between the ages of eighteen and forty years unmarried, the total number of women of corresponding age being 9,568,659—that is, 44 per cent. were unmarried. Among these there were 2,830,538 between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five years, the period most suitable to child-bearing, the total number of women of corresponding age being 3,593,644—that is, no less than 78 per cent. According to Lily Braun, there remain from 2,000,000 to 2,500,000 German women permanently unmarried; and we may expect the number of female celibates to increase. The economic conditions, the previously described unhealthy conditions of coercive marriage, and the efforts of women for emancipation, have a combined influence hostile to marriage. On the other hand, law and conventional morality co-operate in making life a martyrdom for the unmarried mother and for the illegitimate child.[213]

The woman who becomes a mother, when united only in the bonds of free love, is at the present day defamed, despised, a being without rights. The question of “maintenance” is a scandal of our time! It is the proof of the degree to which most men are devoid of conscience. An experienced lawyer has very forcibly described the intolerable conditions which at present obtain in this matter.[214] He published the following characteristic letter from a young master-butcher, which shows how meanly[276] even a simple-minded man may endeavour to escape the duty of maintenance. The letter runs:

“Dear Dora,

“I wanted to come round to-day, and wished to deal with the matter by word of mouth, but I can’t do it, and so I must write to tell you that we cannot marry, for, in fact, I have now less money even than when I was a journeyman. The few hundred marks that I had I have put into the business; and, in fact, I really cannot marry; if I did, I couldn’t exist at all. I should have to shut up the shop. What should we do then? I shouldn’t be able to show my face in H—— again; besides, at best, the business is not worth very much. So, my dear Dora, write to me now how we can settle matters; you mustn’t draw the string too tight, or ask too much; if you do, you see, you will have to find your own way out of the trouble. Of course, I shall be glad enough to do what’s right, because I am as much to blame as you are. If after a while I get on as well as my brothers have done, I can do more for you. But just now I can’t help you much. Let’s hope you may find some other man with whom you may live more happily than you have lived with me. Dear Dora, don’t make such a fuss about it: there are plenty more in the same case, up and down the world; you are not the only one. Now, write to me directly what you want to do; let’s get the matter settled quietly; that’ll be better for you. Your mother won’t leave you in the lurch, and you will find it will all come right.

“Best love.

“Fritz H.

“P.S.—Write soon.”

Let us imagine the state of mind of the young woman who receives this letter, characterized as it is by such crafty heartlessness! And yet this heartlessness is no greater than that of modern European society, which simultaneously makes fun of the “old maid” and condemns the unmarried mother to infamy. This double-faced, putrescent “morality” is profoundly immoral, it is radically evil. It is moral and good to contest it with all our energy, to enter the lists on behalf of the right to free love, to “unmarried” motherhood. Let us make a clearance of this medieval bugbear of coercive marriage morality, which is a disgrace in respect of our state of civilization and economical development. Two million women in a condition of compulsory celibacy and—coercive marriage morality. It is merely necessary to place these two facts side by side, in order to display before our eyes the complete ethical bankruptcy of our time in the province of sexual morality.

In addition to this necessity for a radical alteration in sexual morality, we must, in the second place, enunciate the demand for a general insurance of motherhood, for the foundation of homes for pregnant women, for women in child-birth, and for infants.[277] The fulfilment of these demands alone will bring us a great step forward in the restoration to health of our sexual life, and in the preparation of a more beautiful future.[215]

If it be true, as W. B. Stevenson reports,[216] that King Charles IV. decreed that all foundling children in Spanish America were to be regarded as of noble birth, in order that all professions might be open to them, we cannot but consider that this mode of thought and action, on the part of a ruler in the country of the Inquisition, was a shining example for our own time.

“Society,” says Eduard Reich, “as well as the Church, sins against the laws of morality, as long as it stands in the way of the advancement of illegitimate children, either by the maintenance of miserable prejudices against these poor beings, or by positive decrees. We shall never be able, even should the human race enter Paradise, to make it impossible for extra-conjugal procreation to occur: love-children will always exist. Since, then, it is not the fault of the latter that their parents have brought them into the world; and, further, since, even if all men were married, one could not impute it to a man as a moral transgression, if he, in the plenitude of his procreative powers, had intercourse with a beautiful girl, instead of with his wife (suffering, for example, from cancer, or some other serious disease); and since, on the other hand, a wife still in the full bloom of youth could not be blamed for unfaithfulness if, her elderly husband having been impotent for several years, she now has intercourse with a vigorous and healthy young man—for such reasons, let us throw the veil of forgetfulness over all well-intentioned human weaknesses, and no longer ask whether a citizen of the world has been engendered in the marriage-bed, or has sprung from the well-spring of love. To the reasonable being it is the man himself who is of value; and only blockheads, simpletons, and donkeys will inquire as to his origin.”[217]

And yet one more question I will address in conclusion to the adherents of coercive marriage morality. How many free-love relationships, how many illegitimate children have there not been at all times among the cultured classes, even among the pillars of the throne and the altar, precisely among those who, on account of their higher spiritual development, ought to possess a stronger ethical sensibility (nota bene, from the standpoint of coercive marriage morality). It would be an interesting task to collect statistics relating to such free unions, and the resulting “illegitimate” offspring, in the case of notable men and women! The marriage fanatics would be horrified! Quite apart from the innumerable secret relationships of this nature, and their consequences, a short observation and enumeration of the illegitimate loves and parentage of men and women of high standing, alike spiritual and moral, would alone suffice to illuminate the actual conditions, and would enable us to draw remarkable conclusions regarding coercive marriage. It is my intention, as soon as possible, to represent in a brief work the rôle of free love in the history of civilization, and to adduce proofs that free love is very well compatible with a moral life. Who would venture to reproach with immorality a Bürger, a Jean Paul, a Gutzkow, a Karoline Schlegel, a George Sand, or even a Goethe?[218]

It is a simple evolutionary necessity that free love, in association with progressive differentiation and with the reshaping of economic conditions, will find its moral justification also for those who at present judge and condemn it from the point of view of long outworn social conditions.

CHAPTER XII
SEDUCTION, THE SENSUAL LIFE (GENUSSLEBEN), AND WILD LOVE (WILDE LIEBE)

“In the sensual life, imponderabilia play a leading part, and many an effort towards improvement, many a reform, has been shattered against them, simply because the would-be reformer has overlooked the finer threads which connect the human soul with the institutions and customs of the material world.”—Willy Hellpach.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XII

Difference between free love and wild love — The danger of wild love — Forms the bridge to prostitution — Its connexion with the sensual life and with seduction — The peculiarities of modern epicureanism — Restless character of the sensual life — The life of “amusement” — The erotic aim of this life — Sexual excesses of the present day — Heedlessness of wild love — Influence of large towns on the sensual life — Nocturnal life — Character of the pleasures of large towns — Increase of sexual tension — Pursuit of pleasure among the common people — The increasing number of young embezzlers — Public seduction — Professional seduction — History of the art of love — Its gradual spiritualization — Seducer types — Don Juan and Casanova — British Don-Juanism — The domineering erotic, and the erotic genius — Kierkegaarde, “Diary of a Seducer” — Pseudo Don-Juanism — Printed guide-books to the sensual life for the modern man of pleasure — Influence of the mode of life upon the sexual life — Alcohol as the incorporation of evil in this respect — Analysis of its influence on the vita sexualis — Its peculiar duplex influence — Utilization of this influence by prostitutes and seducers — Alcoholism and venereal diseases — Absinthe in France — Share of alcohol in producing offences against morality — Encouragement of wild love by alcohol — Connexion of illegitimate births with alcoholic excess — Increase of wild love at the present day — “Intimacy” (“das Verhältnis”) — Its gradual degeneration — History of the origination of the “intimacy,” and psychological explanations thereof — Increasing similarity between the nature of the “intimacy” and the conditions of prostitution — Causes — Frequent changes of “intimates” — The diffusion of venereal diseases by means of wild love — Rôle of lies, mistrust, and hatred therein — Produces disbelief in love — Wild love and coercive marriage — Causes of sexual corruption — Need for the campaign against wild love and sexual libertinism — Hellmann’s book on sexual libertinism — Attitude of the medical man towards “extra-conjugal” sexual intercourse — Increasing aversion to wild love — The increase in free ideal love unions — Wild love as the transitional stage to prostitution.

CHAPTER XII

In the previous chapter we repeatedly drew attention to the fact that free love is not identical with the sexual promiscuity indulged in at the present day to such an alarming extent and with such disastrous consequences—sexual promiscuity in the form of extra-conjugal sexual intercourse, irregular in character, and dependent almost entirely upon chance.

I am an ardent advocate of “free love,” by which I understand sexual union based upon intimate love, personal harmony, and spiritual affinity, entered on by the free resolve of both parties, involving the assumption of all the duties entailed by such free unions, and with satisfactory mutual assurances regarding health. But with corresponding emphasis I must condemn, from the standpoint of the physician and from that of public hygiene, and also on ethical grounds, the now so widely diffused “extra-conjugal” sexual intercourse, for which, in order to distinguish it from the entirely different extra-conjugal “free” love, I suggest the term “wild love.”

This wild love is the true cancer of our society, for its chief characteristic is that it constitutes an enduring connexion and means of transition between hygienically and ethically unexceptionable sexual intercourse and prostitution, and thus involves the unceasing risk of transferring to the former all the dangers of the latter. In this sense, wild love can really be regarded as a kind of irradiation of the whole nature of prostitution into the entirety of sexual relations in general. Thus, it remains a powerful hindrance to all ennoblement and resanation of the amatory life, and it is an invincible source of the moral and physical degeneration and the infective contamination of the nation.

Wild love is intimately connected with the artificial sensual life of our time, and with the manifold varieties of seduction [219] arising from that life. Wild love, the sensual life, and seduction, form, as it were, a triad, each member of which is the principal predisposing condition of the others.

He who wishes to characterize in a few words the European civilization of the present day may say that its nature consists in epicureanism, mitigated by toil and the struggle for life; but this epicureanism is of a very peculiar kind. It is no longer the unqualified sensual life of the eighteenth century, in which sensual lusts and epicurean refinements were to many the whole object of life, nor is it the comfortable enjoyment of “the good old times”; it is a quite peculiar concentrated enjoyment of the moment, in the midst of the hard work of life. The carpe diem of Horace has to-day become carpe horam!

The forced labour which the fierce struggle for existence at present entails upon the majority of men leaves no more time for a simple undisturbed enjoyment of existence, for the inward deep experience of reality, and for a quiet joy therein. No, our sensual life of to-day bears in it the sting of pain, because the will to live, which, according to Schopenhauer, continually strives for an “increase of life,” has now degenerated into a convulsive search for the most violent sensations possible, into a wild hunt after the strongest possible and most frequent enjoyments, because the time is lacking for a peaceful, harmonious existence. Each man asks himself anxiously whether he may not have “missed” this or that possibility of objective pleasure; and forgets in doing so that the true happiness of life lies within himself, and that the greatest possible sum of outward enjoyments cannot procure him this happiness.

The signature of our time is “amuse oneself,” a phrase which conveys the idea of all our modern superficial pleasures, and of our sensual and spiritual sensations, which must chase one another in rapid succession in order to enable the modern civilized man to feel that he “lives.”

For the majority of those living in great towns, amusement is equivalent to a continued succession of superficial sensual pleasures, as preparatory stimuli for an equally fugitive and debasing sexual act.

The frequently heard and favourite phrases “to go through with it,” “to live one’s life,” “to sow one’s wild oats,” etc., have all the same significance, in the sense of preparation for sexual indulgence by means of such stimuli.

From beer-saloons and public-houses of all kinds, especially those at which the attendants are women, from the cabarets and variety theatres, the low-class music-halls and dancing-saloons, also, however, from better-class balls, soirées, and luxurious dinners, the road is open to the prostitute, or to the arms of a[283] girl excited by similar sensual stimuli to a similarly transitory sexual desire.

A great physician has said: “We eat three times too much.” I might add, in amplification of this saying, Not only do we eat three times too much, but we look for all other sensual pleasures in excess, and for this reason we love also three times too much, or rather, we indulge too often in sexual intercourse.

One of our most talented psychologists, Willy Hellpach, has described these relationships with great insight:

“To the enormous majority of our young men sexual indulgence is a matter of course, like their card-parties, their evenings at the club, their glass of beer; and of the few who live otherwise, a considerable proportion do so simply from timidity, or from poverty of spirit (they would like to, but they cannot screw their courage up). Another portion is honourably continent, but does not dare to make any display of this adhesion to principle, and rather pretends not to be distinguished in any way from the majority; and the very few young men who openly set their faces against the custom may be counted on the fingers of one hand. It is obvious that in this way the extra-conjugal sexual act loses the distinction of the unaccustomed; it is effected continually in a more heedless, light-hearted, frivolous manner—until, finally, the very idea of danger connected with indiscriminate sexual indulgence is forgotten; the preventive is thrown aside with an easy “Nothing has ever happened to me.” Indeed, many a man goes to his fate in the shape of infection with his eyes open, and with the most light-hearted confidence: if he is infected, there will be plenty of time before his marriage to be thoroughly cured.

“This factor comes the more readily into play in proportion to the degree in which the whole arrangement of the sensual life culminates in the stimulation of erotic activities. Such a tendency is inevitably associated with the development of the modern large town; and there ensues an imitation of the sensual life of large towns in smaller towns, and even in country villages.[220]

“Every large town provides the means for a much more extensive stimulation of the senses than country life; and the alternate stimulation and deadening of the senses, characteristic of town life, has in the very large towns of our time reached an unheard-of degree of intensity. The town is the typical habitat of that sensual and nervous condition of irritability which historically characterizes our own generation; the townsman is the typical representative of “nervousness” in its modern form. The verbal connexion between “senses” and “sensuality” represents an actual transition; and in ordinary parlance, by the “sensual” we understand the “erotic.” Where the senses are more strongly stimulated, there erotic desire grows, there it loses its periodical course in favour of a continuous wakefulness, or, at any rate, in favour of a light slumber, which the slightest[284] stimulus will disturb. And the townsman is more easily impelled to the sexual act, not merely because the town offers him prostitutes, “intimates,” etc., in much greater numbers, but also because his over-stimulated nervous system impels him much more powerfully to search for these objects, and makes it much more difficult for him to safeguard himself against their allurements.

“And town life is nocturnal life! The more so, the larger the town; and we see the extreme form of this in the great capitals of Europe. The consequences in regard to the opportunities for and incitations to sexual enjoyment are not lacking. First of all, nocturnal life gives rise to a summation of stimuli, to an incredible variety of nervous titillation, and this induces an increasing sensuality; and once the sensual life has become habitually nocturnal, now, by a vicious circle, all enjoyment is unavoidably fettered to the town. Natural recuperation has become a secondary consideration, and in place of the relief of tension, we have apparent restoration by means of variety. All, all, tends in favour of a sharpening of sensual stimuli, of arousing the wish for erotic pleasures. And the town is untiring, inexhaustible, in its discovery of means for the gratification of these instincts. Variety theatres, gin-palaces, low music-halls, and all the amusements of similar kind, are simply unthinkable without the sensual note; and even where they maintain themselves to be free from that note, it will be unconsciously sought by the audience, will be easily found, and if it were absent, its absence would be angrily resented. The same is true, more or less, of entertainments of a higher æsthetic rank. With very few exceptions, our theatres are compelled to take into consideration the instincts of the public, and the instincts of the population of our large towns are chiefly concerned with eroticism. Even where sexual questions are elevated into the sphere of the highest art, and by the artist himself the common is detested, the audience will, after their kind, merely extract erotic stimulation; and that the opera and the stage are sought by many merely on account of these accessory influences, is too well known to need proof—not to say a word regarding the pantomime and the ballet.

“Perhaps the worst of all is yet to come. In his public dinners, his parties, his clubs, his balls, etc., the man of the upper classes, and also the man of the middle classes, does not find the much-to-be-desired ethical counterpoise to this characteristic sensual life of our young men; but rather finds the prolongation of it in a somewhat more masked and artificial form. From the outset, the relationship between the sexes is of so suggestive, so purposive a character, that this exercises a gentle, stimulating influence upon desire; and a man is thrown into a state of tension for which he often finds only one outlet, sexual gratification—which he must either buy or obtain by cunning—and thus he passes straightway from the influences of the public sensual life, to become the customer of the prostitute, the partner in the “intimacy,” the seducer in the nocturnal life of the great town. He then either runs the danger of infection with venereal diseases, or he occupies himself with their dissemination; for the man suffering from venereal disease is not merely a victim: he is commonly also a focus of infection, one who finds new victims in the shape of girls hitherto uninfected.

“To this evil a remarkable trait in the sensual life of the simpler[285] woman extends ready assistance—I mean that servility, that erotic obsequiousness which finds expression already in the gossip, and in the favourite reading of the lower classes, and which makes them feel to some extent flattered if they are treated as means of enjoyment by a man of good position. It is well known that the prostitute in her talk gladly makes her lover a baron; but, unfortunately, a similar tendency characterizes the feminine half of the lower classes throughout, and to our regret, this is more especially true of the German people. Our commercial-traveller nature, to which, according to Sombart, we owe a portion of our ascendancy in the markets of the world, finds its most regrettable and disastrous seamy side in the readiness with which the masses forget their pride and self-respect, when it is a question of snatching a pleasure. This characteristic has, in recent lustra, unfortunately become not better, but rather worse; the desire to look well at any cost, with which the simple girl so often makes herself laughable, inspires also her longing to ‘walk out’ with a distinguished admirer.”[221]

But not only does the simple girl of the people sacrifice her life and health in this pursuit of pleasure; the young men also are not behindhand in the pursuit, which they regard as “gentlemanlike,” of enjoyment and of women. It is astonishing what an increase in recent times there has been in the number of youthful embezzlers, learners and clerks in merchants’ offices, whose offences have been committed simply in order to provide funds for the gratification of their pothouse pleasures. Among them one meets lads between the ages of fourteen and eighteen years, a symptom of the earlier sexual maturity of the present day. When, as usually happens, they are arrested after a few days, it comes out in evidence that the embezzled money was squandered in the society of prostitutes, but we learn that the tendency to such excess had existed in the embezzler long before he actually committed a crime. If the heads of businesses were to keep themselves better informed regarding the mode of life of their employees, many a disillusion and many a loss would be spared them.

Sexual seduction is at the present time effected less by individuals than by the environment. The sensual life as such, the entire stimulating sensual atmosphere of that life, plays to-day a rôle which at an earlier time, when our social life and pleasures were less fully developed, fell to the “seducer,” the galant homme and Don Juan of earlier days. Our young people are subjected rather to the general influences of the pursuit of amusement, which fascinates all circles, than to the allurements[286] of the habitual seducer. To-day, the victims of public seduction, by means of the sensual life characteristic of our time, are far more numerous than those seduced by isolated individuals, though such there have been, and will be, at all times.

Before I pass to the consideration of the individual influences of the modern sensual life, those by which wild love is especially favoured, and before I describe the general seduction of the present day, I propose to touch upon the interesting question of “professional seduction,” to consider Don-Juanism and the practice of the “ars amandi.”

It is remarkable how strongly the history of the art of seduction reflects the general tendency of the evolution of love from purely physical impulses to spiritual love. This we learn simply from the study of the numerous text-books of the art of love, the so-called “ars amandi.”

Whereas in the earlier text-books of this subject, from Ovid’s “Ars Amandi,”[222] widely celebrated in antiquity, to the “Practica Artis Amandi,”[223] the “Morale Galante, ou l’Art de Bien Aimer,”[224] of the seventeenth century, and Gentil Bernard’s “L’Art d’Aimer,”[225] of the eighteenth century, the principal stress was laid upon all the possible sensual stimuli, and upon the superficial gallantry associated with this; in the modern text-books, in that of Manso [226] (still belonging to the eighteenth century), but especially in the more recent works by Stendhal,[227] Paul Bourget,[228] A. Silvestre,[229] Catulle Mendés,[230] Robert Hessen,[231] and Hjalmar Kjölenson,[232] we find much more stress laid on all the spiritual influences of the art of love. In this way it is possible to follow in these works the whole course of the enrichment of the spiritual and emotional life in love.[233]

The same process of development can be recognized also in the[287] figure of Don Juan. His type has undergone gradual alteration, always becoming more and more intellectual. The purely sensual Don Juan, as Lord Chesterfield, for example, characterizes and embodies him, is to-day quite out of date even among sensual men of the ordinary type; whereas though Kierkegaard’s “Diary of a Seducer” describes an extreme type, that of the purely reflective libertine, yet in this extreme, the author has very rightly recognized the general tendency of evolution.

Recently, Oscar A. H. Schmitz has published an extremely original and thoughtful study of “Don Juan, Casanova, and other Erotic Characters” (Stuttgart, 1906), in which he distinguishes very sharply the seducer type of a Casanova from the seducer-type of a Don Juan. Don Juan is a deceitful, cunning seducer, to whom the sense of possession associated with the attainment of his aim, the danger, the activity of his desires for power and dominance, are the principal matters, but who is in himself unerotic; whereas Casanova is pre-eminently the erotic, also crafty and deceitful, not, however, for the gratification of his need for power, but rather for the agreeable satisfaction of his need for sensual love. Don Juan knows only “women”; for Casanova each one is “the woman.” Don Juan is demoniacal, devilish he goes on to the complete destruction of the women seduced by him, deliberately he ensures their unhappiness; Casanova is human, cares always for the happiness of the women he loves, and devotes to them a tender reflection. Don Juan despises women, he is of the type of the misogynist, of the satanic woman-hater; Casanova is the typical feminist, he possesses a profound understanding of woman’s soul, is not disappointed by love, and needs for his life’s happiness continuous contact with feminine natures. Don Juan seduces by means of his own elemental nature, by the attractive power of brutal wild force; Casanova does so by means of the sensual atmosphere which surrounds him.

“It seems as if the love of one, or, where possible, of several, women inoculates the man, as it were, with a vital fluid, and gives his glance a fire which at times makes him irresistible. Men of pleasure declare that after the most fortunate nights, when, exhausted, they were returning home to sleep, on the way the most eager and meaning glances were cast upon them by the women whom they passed.”

This distinction between the two types of seducer, which Schmitz makes in his original book, containing excellent observations on the psychology of love, is indeed not new. Stendhal, in[288] the chapter “Werther and Don Juan” of his book, “Ueber die Liebe,” pp. 241-251 (German edition, Leipzig, 1903), points out the same types. “The genuine Don Juans,” he says, “ultimately come to regard women as their enemies, and find actual pleasure in their manifold unhappiness”; whereas Werther, the equivalent of Casanova, regards all women as entrancing beings, towards whom we are far too unjust. The love of Don Juan is “a similar feeling to the love of the chase”; Werther’s love is gentle, idealizes the reality, is full of tender and romantic impressions. Don Juan is the conqueror; Werther is the erotic.

I myself also, in my work on “Sexual Life in England,” vol. ii., p. 159 (Berlin, 1903), have, earlier than Schmitz, clearly distinguished from one another these two seducer types, in a passage in which I depict the British Don Juan, in contrast to the French and Italian Don Juan.

“The principal characteristic of the British Don Juans, who are completely distinct from the libertines of the Latin and of the other Teutonic countries, is the cold, brazen quietude with which they indulge in the sensual pleasures of life; love is much less to them an affair of passion than one of pride and of the gratification of their consciousness of power. The French, the Italian Don Juan is driven by ardent sensuality from conquest to conquest. This is the principal motive of their actions and of their mode of life. The English Don Juan seduces on principle, for the sake of experiment; he pursues love as a sport. Sensuality plays a part only in the second degree, and in the midst of his sensual enjoyment the coldness of his heart is still painfully apparent.

“This is the rake, the type of Lovelace, which Richardson, in his ‘Clarissa Harlowe,’ has described with incomparable mastery.”

Taine, also, in his “History of English Literature,” has described this British Don-Juanism, which hates rather than loves.

Finally, we find these types also in Rosa Mayreder’s book, “Zur Kritik der Weiblicheit” (“Critique of Femininity,” Leipzig, 1905), especially in the chapter, “A Few Words on the Powerful Faust” (pp. 210-243). Her type of the “masterful erotic” closely resembles the Don Juan type of Schmitz, and my own British seducer type.

“Erotic excitement,” says Rosa Mayreder, “gives rise in these men to the lust of dominion; to them the relationship with women signifies a grasping possession, an enjoyment of power, and they are unable to think of women except as subject and dependent. Only in so far as woman adapts herself to them as a means do they know her; as a personality, with individual aims, she does not exist for them.”

This masterful eroticism exists among men of quite low social position, just as much as among men of high position.[234] Their diametrical opposite is the love-perception of delicately sensitive, erotical, highly differentiated men, whose highest type constitutes the “erotic genius.” Rosa Mayreder characterizes this latter type in the following terms:

“The increasing differentiation of erotic perception brings with it a new faculty, which extinguishes the consciousness of superiority and transforms the need for contrast into the need for community, for reciprocity—the capacity for devotion. Thus comes to pass the most remarkable phenomenon in the masculine psyche, the great miracle, which effects a complete transformation of the primitive mode of perception, a transformation of the teleological sexual nature.

“The erotic genius grasps the nature of the opposite sex with intuitive understanding, and is capable of assimilating it completely. The other sex is to him the primevally akin and primevally allied; his love-relationships are accompanied by ideas of enlargement, fulfilment, liberation of his own essential nature, or even by the idea of a mystical union. To him sexuality does not denote an annulment or limitation of personality, but rather an enlargement and enrichment by means of the individuals with which, in this way, his personality is associated.”

As an erotic genius of such a kind, Rosa Mayreder points to Richard Wagner, as he manifests himself in his letters to Mathilde Wesendonk.

The sensibility and refinement of the modern woman, her emergence as a personality, must continually repel the masterful type of erotic—although doubtless that type will never be entirely eliminated. I do not believe in a complete transformation of the teleological sexual nature of man, which has always assigned to him the active aggressive rôle. But it is true that the possibilities of existence for the masterful erotic, the Don Juan type, have become limited. He must, as Schmitz rightly insists, intellectualize himself if he wishes to continue to exist. This psychological satanism of the modern Don Juan is wonderfully described by Kierkegaard, in his “Diary of a Seducer.”[235]

The hero of this book learns best from the girls themselves how they can be betrayed; he develops in them “spiritual eroticism,” in order then suddenly to abandon them, but they themselves must loosen the tie. Woman and love are not to him in themselves the principal need; what is important to him is, as he says[290] at the conclusion, that he has been able to enrich himself with numerous erotic perceptions. The modern Don Juan is, therefore, nothing more than a cold psychological experimenter. It is in this way that, with prophetic insight, Choderlos de Laclos has described him in the Vicomte de Valmont, the hero of his “Liaisons Dangereuses.”

Yet another interesting Don Juan type of our time has to be considered, one which indeed is not a genuine Don Juan, but a pseudo Don Juan, or rather a pseudo Casanova; and this type makes its appearance also in the female sex.

Like Rétif de la Bretonne, it is the man or woman seeking eternally for the ideal, for true love; a type which only, in consequence of the ever-repeated disillusions and errors, assumes a Don Juanesque character. At the present day, we meet this type very often. It is only the expression of the increasing difficulty of the proper love choice, owing to the progressive differentiation of our time; and it is not originated by the desire for sensual lust, but rather by the eternally disillusioned yearning for genuine individual love.

But we must return after this excursion to the consideration of the commonest type of public seduction by means of the sensual life of our time. It is significant that this also possesses its literary guides and course of instruction, in the form of the numerous printed handbooks for the world of pleasure. Among these we may mention, “Guides du Viveur,” “Guides de Plaisir,” “Führer durch das Nächtliche Berlin” (“Guide to Berlin by Night”), “New London Guide to the Night Houses,” “Die Geheimnisse der Berliner Passage” (“Secrets of the ‘Passage’ of Berlin”), “Paris by Night,” “The Swell’s Night Guide through the Metropolis,” “Bruxelles la Nuit, Physiologie des Établissements Nocturnes de Bruxelles” (for Englishmen of pleasure, published under the title of “Brussels by Gas-light”), “Paris and Brussels after Dark,” “The Gentleman’s Night Guide,” “Hamburgs galante Häuser bei Nacht und Nebel” (“Hamburg’s Fast Houses by Night and Cloud”), “Das Galante Berlin,” “Naturgeschichte der galanten Frauen in Berlin” (“Natural History of the Fast Women of Berlin”), “Paris Intime et Mystérieux,” “Guide des Plaisirs Mondains et des Plaisirs Secrets à Paris.” All these have appeared during the last thirty years, some of them in several editions. For Vienna, Buda-Pesth, St. Petersburg, Rome, Milan, Barcelona, Madrid, Marseilles, Rotterdam, and New York, there also exist such guides to all open and secret enjoyments.

In order to give an idea of the contents of such a guide to the sensual life, I need merely enumerate the chapter headings of a book published in 1905, and, as the Paris bookseller from whom I obtained it informed me, immediately confiscated, but none the less still openly sold in the bookshops of the Boulevards and the Rue de Rivoli. It bears the title, “Pour s’Amuser. Guide du Viveur à Paris, par Victor Leca” (Paris, 1905). In his versified dedication, the compiler writes:

And he states in the preface that all the various pleasures of Paris, for the eye, the ear, and the sense of taste, lead ultimately to—woman, in complete agreement with the definition which I gave above of the sensual life of our time. All these pleasures concur in leading to sexual indulgence—that is the end, the climax of every “amusement,” the true punctum saliens of the life of pleasure of our large towns. Thus Leca, in his comprehensive and elaborate guide for men of pleasure, lays the principal stress on announcements regarding eroticism and on opportunities for erotic adventures in the individual places of pleasure. He enumerates these in series: the theatre, especially the “théâtres très légers,” the “cafés-concerts,” the dancing-saloons, the hippodromes, and circuses, the cabarets of Montmartre, the Quartier Latin, the women’s cafés, the boulevards, the halls of the central market, the brothels (with an exact indication of the streets, and with the numbers of the houses!!), the houses of accommodation (maisons de rendezvous), the likenesses of a few “ladies of pleasure,” the arcades, the parks and public gardens, the popular festivals, the races, drives, public bathing establishments, cemeteries, museums, and exhibitions—all, always, in relation to the feminine element.

These handbooks of the art of enjoyment are existing proofs, from the point of view of the history of civilization, of the fact that the sexual impulse is, in every possible way, influenced, increased, elaborated, and complicated, by the civilization of the present day. Especially the life of great towns, where the essence of modern civilization is found in its most concentrated[292] form, is a sexual stimulant in the highest degree, with its haste and hunting, its “nocturnal life,”[236] with its multiplicity of enjoyments for all the senses, with its gastronomic and alcoholic excesses—in short, with its new device that after work comes pleasure, and not repose.

In my “Sexual Life in England” (vol. ii., p. 261 et seq.) I have described the momentous influence of the mode of life upon sexuality, and have proved how both in the old England and in the new the excessive consumption of meat and of alcoholic beverages has unnaturally stimulated the sexual impulse, and has conducted it into devious paths.

But of Germany also we may say that, apart from the times of “meat famine,” we eat too much meat and drink too much alcohol, the former especially among the higher classes, the latter among all classes of society.

The sexually stimulating influence of luxurious feeding, which, for example, Gabriele d’Annunzio describes in the early part of his romance “Lust,” and which Tolstoi, in the “Kreutzer Sonata,” describes as the principal cause of incitation to lasciviousness, is indeed a well-known fact of experience; and the later in the day these heavy meals are consumed, the more dangerous are they in respect of their influence on the sexual impulse. I am fully convinced that the good old German custom of taking the principal meal of the day at noon is greatly preferable to the so-called “English dinner,” when the principal meal is deferred to four or six o’clock. Luxurious suppers, or even midnight dinners, such as at the present day are quite customary, must be definitely regarded as aphrodisiac.

A far more momentous rôle is played by alcohol in the modern sensual life. A writer who is not himself a strict teetotaller may yet feel it his duty to lay all possible stress on this fact. Indeed, from the standpoint of medical experience and observation, I am prepared to term alcohol the evil genius of the modern sexual life, because in a malicious and underhand manner it delivers its victim to sexual misleading and corruption, to venereal infection, and to all the consequences of casual sexual intercourse.[237]

This is not the place for a detailed discussion of the drink question, or for stating the reasons for my own opinion, that complete abstinence is a Utopian idea, and that the moderate[293] and careful use of alcohol, in quantities suited to the particular individuality, and at suitable times, does no harm worth mentioning. Though this be so, I cannot fail to recognize the deeply tragic rôle which the customary abuse of alcohol plays in the sexual corruption of our time. As to the connexion between alcohol and the sexual life, I must therefore speak at greater length.[238]

The influence of alcohol upon the sexual life and upon the psyche is a very peculiar one. Beer or wine, taken in very moderate quantities, unquestionably give rise, in addition to their general psychical stimulating influence, to sexual excitement of greater or less degree. This sexual excitement, if more alcohol is now taken, endures longer than the psychical excitement, which soon gives place to psychical paralysis, to a discontinuance of the inhibitory influences proceeding from the brain. It is in this unequal influence exercised upon the purely sensual-sexual and upon the psychical processes, that the peculiar danger of alcoholic excesses appears to me to depend. The sexual stimulation produced by the first draught of alcohol continues at a time when the man has already lost all control over reason and will, and thus he becomes an easy prey to sexual seduction.

It is only in this way that we can explain the momentous influence of alcohol, for we know, generally speaking, it is not a means for the increase of sexual power. On the contrary, it increases voluptuousness and sexual desire, but almost always hinders erection and delays the sexual orgasm.

Thus, a man under the influence of alcohol requires a longer time for the completion of the act of sexual intercourse than a sober man, and in this way the danger of venereal infection is notably increased, for the contact with the infecting person is considerably longer. I have inquired of many patients who were infected during intercourse with prostitutes after alcoholic excess, and was almost always informed that the act of intercourse, owing to the well-known relative impotence produced by alcohol, was exceptionally long in duration, and this naturally gave more[294] opportunity for excessive contact, for mechanical injuries dependent upon increased friction, etc., and thus brought about infection.

In medical literature, numerous cases are reported in which two men have completed intercourse with an infected prostitute, shortly after one another, and, remarkable to relate, one only became infected, whilst the other remained healthy. More exact inquiry would show without doubt in many such cases that the uninfected man was sober, in comparison with the infected man, who must have been under the influence of alcohol.

In the case of women, with regard to whom there can be no question of any specific effect upon sexual “potency,” the influence of alcohol in exciting libido, in association with its withdrawal of all psychical inhibitions, makes itself all the more manifest. Thus, to woman, who, speaking generally, is far more intolerant of the drug than man, very moderate enjoyment of alcohol entails dangers.[239]

The seducer, the procuress, and the prostitute are all familiar with the above-described peculiar influence of alcohol upon the libido sexualis and upon the psyche, and it is precisely this discriminative duplex influence which is utilized by them. Not only in the so-called “Animierkneipen”—that is, the drinking-saloons with women attendants—and in the brothels does alcohol subserve this purpose, but the street-walkers also await their victims by preference outside the doors of the great restaurants, or after festival dinners, and keep an eye especially on drunken men, because in the case of these, in whom all self-command has been lost, they have, in every respect, an easy prey.[240]

A man under the influence of alcohol is as easily led and as devoid of will-power as a child. He is not particular in his choice: he generally fails to notice whether the prostitute who accosts him is young or old, pretty or ugly, clean or dirty; he follows her blindly, and in most cases with results disastrous to his pocket and to his health. The following case illustrates very clearly this loss of will produced in a man by indulgence in alcohol:

An officer of high rank, a married man, in general a man of solid repute, left the officers’ casino after a banquet late at night, very tipsy, to seek his house. Suddenly he felt an arm thrust into his; it was a prostitute who had noticed his condition, and she had turned it to her own advantage. Without reflection and without exercise of will, he allowed her to lead him to her dwelling, and there, still in a quite apathetic condition, had intercourse with her, without taking any precautions whatever. It was not until afterwards that he saw, being then somewhat sobered, that he was in the company of an elderly prostitute of the lowest class. His dread of venereal infection was justified a few days later by the appearance of a urethral discharge. In great alarm he consulted me. Microscopic examination of the urethral secretion, and the cure which ensued in a few days, showed me that he was suffering from a simple urethral catarrh, and not from gonorrhœa.

Such cases as this, however, do not always end so fortunately. It is notorious, and has been proved by the researches of leading physicians and medical statisticians, that the majority of venereal infections take place under the influence of alcohol.

For this reason, the continued increase in the consumption of alcohol leads to a further diffusion of venereal diseases. While our ancestors consumed alcoholic beverages to excess only on Sundays and festival days, at the present time spirits are freely consumed on weekdays—above all, during the evenings. Brandy and beer have become everyday beverages, especially beer, whose consumption increases year by year, so that in the year 1898 the beer drunk in Germany was valued at £100,000,000! Strümpell showed that labourers earning three marks a day are accustomed to spend eighty pfennige—that is, more than one-third of their income—on beer; these are by no means notorious drinkers, but steady fellows who only follow the general “custom.” The part played by beer in Germany is played by absinthe in France; the well-known “apéritif” to which prostitutes of Paris so often invite their male clients is in most cases absinthe. Wine, as the[296] experienced Fiaux says, is merely an “ideal drink” in the dreams of the ordinary Parisian prostitute.

We shall return in subsequent chapters of this work to the consideration of alcohol in its relations to the sexual life in general, and to abnormal sexual manifestations in particular. We shall also have occasion to speak of the momentous rôle played by alcohol in the causation of offences against morality. Baer goes so far as to assert that alcohol is the cause in 77 per cent. of such offences.

Here we shall only once more insist upon the high degree to which the excessive enjoyment of alcohol assists in seduction and favours wild love—that is, sexual intercourse free from all choice and all regulation. This is to be seen with especial clearness at popular festivals and other occasions giving rise to alcoholic excesses; and the effects are later shown by the resulting increase in the number of illegitimate births.

Magnus Hirschfeld relates that when he was a student he spent one Christmas Eve in the company of a professor of medicine in Breslau. Among the guests were two of the maternity assistants, and first one, then the other, was called away to attend confinements. An old physician who was present thereupon remarked: “Yes, yes; these are the children of the Emperor’s birthday.” Hirschfeld, who asked for an explanation of this incomprehensible phrase, was told that on Christmas Night the lying in hospitals were overcrowded, because then the illegitimate children were born which had been procreated nine months earlier, on March 22, the birthday of the old Emperor, celebrated as a popular holiday.

The increase in wild love, in sexual intercourse dependent upon the inclination of the moment and upon chance, with a rapid succession of different individuals—this increase, which is associated in the way above described with the sensual life, is a characteristic of our own time.

In addition to prostitution, which we shall treat in a separate chapter, the so-called “intimacy” constitutes the true nucleus of wild love. When those who support coercive marriage speak of free love, they do not mean the free love, the higher individual love, which we have described in the previous chapter, but they always refer to the latter-day “intimacy,” which, in fact, does involve the most serious dangers, alike from the physical and from the moral point of view; for, on the one hand, the “intimacy” forms the principal intermediate agent in the wider diffusion of venereal diseases, and, on the other hand, this new[297] form of sexual relationship has above all introduced the element of hypocrisy, lying, and mistrust, which poisons love to-day, separates the sexes continually more each from the other, and gives rise to that tragic sexual hate, enmity of men on the part of women, and misogyny on the part of men, which is also peculiarly characteristic of our own time.

The gradual differentiation of the originally ideal intimacy, to the wild love of the present day, has been admirably described and psychologically elucidated by Hellpach in his short work on “Love and Amatory Life in the Nineteenth Century.”

In this admirable characterization of the “intimacy,” the fact is first established, that it is above all and through and through a product of great towns, and consequently that it is closely connected with the capitalistic evolution which compels thousands of young girls to earn their own living, so that from them are especially recruited the great human class of shop-girls, and all the allied varieties, so typical of large towns. This is the soil in which the “intimacy” naturally develops. [Hellpach writes first of conditions of a generation ago, and then passes on thirty years to our own day.]

“By day these girls were occupied. When the evening came, bringing with it the greatly desired closing of the shop, the prospect opened to them of going home to poor surroundings, often enough of taking part in painful family scenes, then going to bed, and the next morning early returning to business. This was their life, day in, day out. Here was no very pleasant calendar, especially when the way from the places of business to their home led through streets crowded with brilliantly lighted beer saloons, cafes, theatres, and concert-halls. And all this during the years of sexual blossoming, when the ardent sensual desire for the first time ran through all the nerves! Who can wonder that the longing became absolutely fiery, after all the work of the day, to enjoy a little share of all the glories of the great town which lay extended before their gaze? After the confinement of the shop, not to return straightway to the confinement of the family, but to learn to know a little about the freedom of pleasure—and this under the most entrancing form of a little love affair?

“And the social conditions were such as to make it possible for this yearning to be fulfilled. Were there not thousands of young shopmen, hundreds of students, clerks, non-commissioned officers, who would rather walk about in the evening with a girl on their arm than alone? Prostitutes would be little suited for such companionship. Besides, it would not be always the young man’s intention to proceed to an extremity, to have a night of love following the evening of amusement; the young man simply was in the mood to walk about with the girl, to gossip, perhaps to embrace and kiss her a little.

“Here was the beginning. The young man accosted a shop-girl, accompanied her a little way, made an appointment for the following evening; then he went a little further; he saw how pleased the little[298] one was; the tutoyer and the kiss followed. So it went on for a few evenings, and the young man felt that the happy girl was quite as eager as he himself was to take the last step; and when this was done, there was the “intimacy” complete. And in all respects it appeared preferable to prostitution; it was inexpensive, unassuming, very pleasant, and—involved no risk to health. Moreover, to both this amatory life did not seem a ‘necessary evil’ on the contrary, it was a glorious pleasure, and there were only two little shadows in the bright picture: the fear of having a child, and the thought of separation. Moreover, this cloud troubled the man only; girls then, as to-day, thought very little about matters so remote.

“In the development of the ‘intimacy’ during the last thirty years, many details have undergone change, but the picture as a whole has been but little affected. The young shop-girl of to-day does not need a long courting; she enters her business already fully aware that she will soon be ‘intimate’ with some one. At first she will always prefer to choose a man of whom it is possible to assume that he may marry her. A young shopman, a non-commissioned officer, will, therefore, be most in demand. It is not till later, when resignation comes, and the only remaining wish is for amusement, that University students have the preference; they are jollier, more entertaining, and the girl is vain about their position. That has all remained just as it used to be; only thirty years ago there were many shop-girls who, notwithstanding all their desire, remained untouched. For the girl brought up in the atmosphere of the lower middle classes there was a certain ill-odour about free sexual intercourse. This has completely passed away. The girls of this stratum, who, with open eyes, withstand all allurements, might be counted on the fingers. At the present day, these ‘intimacies’ extend deeply into the middle classes of society.

“As regards the men, there has certainly been one marked change. The illusion that sexual intercourse with an ‘intimate’ offered any guarantee against the danger of venereal disease has now long been dispelled. We are to-day confronted with the fact that the intimacy is the focus of venereal infection to a far greater extent [241] than is actual prostitution. In order to understand this, we must glance at the dissolution of the intimacy.

“We have already pointed out that in the German ‘intimacy’ there has never occurred a thorough development of a life like that of the Parisian ‘grisette’; and there will be no change in this respect within a time which we can at present foresee. Even in Berlin there are not many dwellings in which the landlord would tolerate the visits of ladies of doubtful reputation on any account whatever. But even those who let quarters on easy terms, or, as the student calls them, ‘storm-free’ rooms, would never allow their lodger to entertain a woman day after day, and could not do so without running the risk of being suspected by the police of procurement. Thus, the only thing that unites the two parties in the intimacy is in almost all cases sexual intercourse. The characteristic of grisette-love, the prose of the life in common, day after day, is hardly ever experienced in the ‘intimacy.[299]’ In consequence of this, on the man’s side satiety very readily ensues. New impressions enchain and stimulate him. He breaks off the intimacy, and this is not usually done with tenderness. The possibilities are numerous, but the only decent way, the open verbal communication of the fact, is probably the rarest. He breaks off the intimacy without a word, and as far as he is concerned the matter is at an end; he is richer by an agreeable experience, and after a while begins to look round once more.

“The girl also. But for her, this dissolution of the intimacy is very often the first step upon a very steep downward path. At first there perhaps ensues a short period of bitterness, but the sexual impulse makes light of all other activities; a new intimacy begins. And now, gradually, the idea gains ground in her mind that a change in love is, after all, not such a bad thing. The second breach is borne with equanimity; and very soon it is by no means rare for the girl to limit her love associations to a few days, and ultimately, as a matter of daily custom, to seek fresh gratification with a new associate. It is not yet professional prostitution; psychologically also there is still a difference. There is still sensual perception at the root of her actions, and of such a strength, increasing owing to excess in sexual intercourse, that the personality of the partner in the sexual act becomes almost a matter of indifference. But now an economic difficulty commonly intervenes: discharge from her position, expulsion from her parents’ house, either or both being due to her dissipated life, with its heedlessness and the resulting dislike to hard work—and then the avalanche falls. Hunger drives her to do that for payment which hitherto she has done only for the gratification of her own desires. Prostitution has one victim the more.

“But the whole period between the beginning of the second intimacy and her enrolment in the list of prostitutes by the police offers to all her lovers the greatest possible danger of venereal infection. For the majority of girls actually become infected in their very first intimacy. The explanation of this goes back to the time in which the intimacy first began to become fashionable, and in which the control of prostitutes with regard to their condition of health was even more defective, and the safeguarding against the danger of venereal infection was even less understood than at the present day. In the majority of cases the young men of the large towns were infected in their very first experience of love; for it was with prostitutes that they always sought their first sexual gratification, as is still customary at the present day. For the inexperienced youth this course is easier, making, as it does, fewer demands on his adroitness, and none at all on his seductive skill; whereas in the formation of an ‘intimacy’ these qualities are somewhat in demand. Later, when he had had enough of prostitution, he sought an ‘intimate,’ and since at that time the treatment of gonorrhœa was still extremely defective, he promptly infected his partner in the intimacy. In this manner the girls engaged in intimacies, since they first became fashionable, have been systematically infected.”

Next to prostitution, the intimacy is the great focus of sexual infection; and wild love, from the psychological and ethical[300] points of view, involves the same danger as prostitution. The frequent changes, the multiplicity of sexual intercourse in intimacies, allows no deeper spiritual relationships to be formed; thus, the girls are debased to become the simple objects of physical sensuality, and they are forced more and more to depend on the financially stronger men; thus, they rapidly become partial or complete prostitutes. To them now the sensual life, the pursuit of pleasure, is the principal thing, not love. Venereal infection is soon superadded, to deprave them more thoroughly. Still worse is the corruption of the world of men, who transfer to the intimacy the practices they have learned in their association with prostitutes; but, above all, they come finally to seek and to desire the rude sexual act solely for its own sake, without feeling the need for any deeper spiritual association. Hence results the fugitive character of these sexual relationships, the frequent changes on both sides, and the end—lies, mistrust, hatred.

Belief in and hope for true love disappear for ever; there remains only the cold, desolate, unspeakably embittered disillusionment, the distrust of the other sex which is so characteristic of our time. Never before were there so many woman-haters and man-haters on principle. In the intercourse between the sexes, neither believes the other any longer; and on both sides the “intimacy” is entered on without any illusions, the sole aim of both parties being to satisfy in the intensest possible way their desire for enjoyment and their sensual lusts.

Prostitution can destroy no illusions, for its true character is manifest at the first glance; but the modern intimacy has become the grave of love, and has given rise to a new corruption of the sexual life, which appears almost more dangerous than the old corruption dependent on prostitution. It has, moreover, become a second, and not less dangerous, focus of venereal infection, to the diffusion of which it is extraordinarily favourable.

He, therefore, who wishes to take part in the fight against the moral degeneration of our amatory life, and to assist in the campaign against venereal diseases, must attack and endeavour to suppress the modern development of the life of “intimacy” just as energetically as he attacks prostitution.

The wild love of the present day, “extra-conjugal” sexual intercourse (which, as I cannot too often repeat, has nothing whatever to do with “free love”), and coercive marriage, are the true causes of sexual corruption. They are intimately associated one with the other. The social, economic, and spiritual[301] civilization of the present day demands free love, with which neither coercive marriage nor wild love is compatible.

Neither for prostitution, nor for the wild extra-conjugal sexual intercourse of our time, can any justification be found from the point of view of medicine, racial hygiene, or sociology. In their nature both lead to the same end: the death and destruction of all individual love, of all the finer activities of love, by which the spiritual nature of man is so greatly enriched; and they both give rise to a continuous increase and rapid diffusion of venereal diseases.

The salvation of our people is not to be found in the “recommendation” of extra-conjugal sexual intercourse for all those who are not in a position to marry—and the number of these grows from day to day—but it is to be found in the reform of marriage, in a freer configuration of the amatory life, in connexion with which we can confidently trust Ibsen’s saying in the “Lady from the Sea”:

“We can’t get away from this—that a voluntary promise is to the full as binding as a marriage.”

There shall not and must not be “sexual freedom,”[242] but there must be “freedom of love.”

When anyone asks me whether I should advise him to indulge in “extra-conjugal sexual intercourse,” as a physician and a man of science I am compelled to answer with a bald “No,” because I cannot undertake the responsibility of the consequences of such advice.

Fortunately, alike in the world of women and in the world of men, there manifests itself an increasing disapproval of wild love as it exhibits itself in the modern “intimacies.” There are already numerous intimacies which closely resemble free love, and in which all the conditions of free love are fulfilled, in respect of duration, of a profound spiritual relationship, a sense of sexual[302] responsibility alike physical and moral, and in the joyful acceptance of the consequences in respect of offspring.

We must, however, continually keep up the fight against wild love as the enduring associate of prostitution, to which it constitutes the bridge or stage of transition. Therein lies its greatest danger. This we shall recognize more clearly in the ensuing chapter, in which we turn to consider the subject of prostitution.

CHAPTER XIII
PROSTITUTION

“On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame. She remains, while creeds and civilizations arise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people.”—Lecky.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XIII

Prostitution and venereal disease the central problem of the sexual question — My belief in the possibility of the suppression of both — Only in recent years has the scientific attack on both begun — The plaie sociale — Internal and local treatment — The scientific literature of prostitution — Rosenbaum’s work on prostitution in antiquity — Aretino, Delgado, and Veniero on the prostitution of the renascence — Franckenaus’s first medical polemic against brothels — The commencement of the scientific study of prostitution and venereal diseases in the eighteenth century — Rétif de la Bretonne and his “Pornographe” — “Moral Control” — Parent-Duchatelet’s fundamental work — Analysis of this book — Contemporary works on prostitution in Paris, London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Lisbon, Lyons, and Algiers — First employment of the term “male prostitution” — A peculiar species of souteneur — Prostitution in Hamburg — Dr. Lippert’s book — “Memoirs of a Prostitute,” the predecessor of the “Diary of a Lost Woman” — Gross-Hoffinger’s book on “Prostitution in Austria” — Demonstration of the connexion between prostitution and coercive marriage — Celebrated chapter on “Maidservants and Prostitution” — Schrank on prostitution in Vienna — Prostitution in Leipzig — In New York — General works on prostitution — Jeannel, Acton and Hügel — Books on secret prostitution, on prostitution of girls under age, on regulation and on brothels, and on the social importance of prostitution — Blaschko’s recent critical investigation on the subject of prostitution — Results of this investigation — Lombroso’s anthropological theory — The works of Tarnowsky and Ströhmberg, of Fiaux and von Düring.

Conception and definition of prostitution — Genuine and pseudo-prostitutes — Prostitution among primitive peoples — Religious prostitution as the germinal form of modern prostitution — This latter the product of the growth of large towns — Medieval conditions — Diminution in the number of brothels since that time — The demand for prostitutes — Relation between the number of prostitutes and the male population — The supply greater than the demand — Causes of the male demand for prostitutes — Prostitution as a product of civilization — Repression of primitive sexual instincts by civilization — The sexual supra- and sub-consciousness — Transient elemental activities of the sub-consciousness — Reports of J. P. Jakobsen and other writers on this subject — Gratification of these instincts by means of prostitution — This in part the product of the physiological masochism of men.

The numerous causes of prostitution — The anthropological theory and the doctrine of the congenital prostitute — Criticism of this view — Proof that many of the physical and mental peculiarities of prostitutes are acquired — The obliteration of the secondary and tertiary sexual characters in prostitutes — The nucleus of Lombroso’s theory — The economic factors of prostitution — Actual and relative poverty as a cause — Poverty a cause of prostitution in the mass — Women’s and children’s work — Prostitution as an accessory occupation — Insufficient wages — The inquiries of 1887 and 1903 on this[305] subject — Examples — The large proportion of maidservants who become prostitutes — Explanation of this — Relative poverty of maidservants — Psychological factors of maidservant prostitution — Overcrowded dwellings — Families living in single rooms, and taking in lodgers for the night — Alcoholism — The traffic in girls — Sources of this — National and international preventive measures — Work done by the Jewish Committee to prevent the traffic in girls in Galatia — Measures taken in Buenos Ayres — The central police organization in Berlin for the suppression of the traffic in girls.

The localities of prostitution — Public prostitution — Street prostitution — Character and dangers of street prostitution — Still greater dangers of brothels — Brothels as centres of sexual corruption and perversity, and as foci of venereal infection — The high school of psychopathia sexualis — The brothel jargon — “Animierkneipen” — Dancing saloons, variety theatres, low music-halls, cabarets, and “Rummel” — “Pensions” and houses of accommodation — Massage institutes — Cafés with female attendants.

Appendix: The Half-World. — Origin of the name — The “Demi-Monde” of the younger Alexandre Dumas — Change undergone by the conception at the present day — Analogy with the Greek hetairæ — Connexion of the half-world with high life — Origin — The social influence of the “grandes cocottes” — The half-world in Germany — The international prostitute.

CHAPTER XIII

Prostitution, and the venereal diseases so intimately connected with it, constitute, properly speaking, the nucleus, the central problem, of the sexual question. The abolition of prostitution and the suppression of venereal diseases would be almost tantamount to the solution of the entire sexual problem. Imagine the extension and the intension of the idea: No prostitution, no more venereal disease!

There is, in fact, no more gratifying notion, no more illuminating ideal, than that of moral and physical purity in the relations between the sexes. At a time in which, especially in social spheres, such abundant activity and such far-seeing ideas of reform are apparent, this notion of a campaign against prostitution and venereal diseases, in the hope of eradicating both evils, should stand in the forefront of all the demands of civilization, in order that finally the tragical influence, the poisonous sting, should be removed from the disordered, unhappy, amatory life of the present day, and herewith, unquestionably, a proper foundation should be laid for a more beautiful future for that life. This idea is unique; it is the greatest of all that man, at length become self-conscious,[243] has ever grasped; and to this idea belongs the future!

The French term prostitution and venereal diseases une plaie sociale, a rodent ulcer in the body of society. I take this apt comparison, and carry it a stage further, to show a clear picture of the way along which we must go in order to eradicate prostitution; for in this respect I am a confirmed optimist. I believe in the possibility of the eradication of venereal diseases, and of the abolition of prostitution within the civilized world by national and international measures. I do not join in the chorus of those who say, “because prostitution has always existed, it must always exist in the future; because venereal diseases have always [244] existed, they are unavoidable accompaniments of civilization.”

How long is it, then, since any attempt has been made to oppose prostitution and venereal diseases? As regards the latter, it is only within the last few years that we have begun, in the battle against them, to make systematic use of the results of scientific research; and the study of prostitution, and the measures based on that study for its control and prevention, do not date further back than the second half of the eighteenth century. In fact, for practical purposes, they date from the appearance of the classical and epoch-making work of Parent-Duchatelet (1836).

We are, indeed, in the very first stages of the campaign against prostitution and venereal diseases. All that has hitherto been done has been to make inadequate, isolated attempts to introduce unsuitable and half-considered regulations, based upon successive misconceptions, which have only made matters worse. To-day medicine, social science, pedagogy, jurisprudence, and ethics have combined in a common campaign; and this is not national merely, but unites all civilized nations in a common cause.

Here we find an actual prospect, a credible hope, of a radical cure of the plaie sociale. But such an ulcer can only be radically cured when we are not content merely with the local treatment of the existing sore; we must simultaneously attack the internal causes of this chronic disease, and in the case with which we have to do the internal causes are even more important than the external—that is to say, ethics, pedagogy, and social science are even more important and indispensable in the campaign against prostitution than medicine and hygiene. We shall never attain our goal by considering and fighting prostitution and venereal diseases, the consequences of prostitution, purely from the medical and hygienic standpoint. In this case, one-sidedness will prove tantamount to failure. The problem of prostitution must be approached from many sides, because the causes that have to be considered are manifold, alike anthropological, economic, social, and psychological, in their nature. There are many varieties of prostitution; in the same way there are numerous and various types of prostitutes. It is, therefore, impossible for one who is acquainted with actual life to hold fast in a one-sided manner to a single theory. Thus, in one and the same case the most various points of view have to be considered.

The history of prostitution is an extremely interesting chapter of the general history of civilization, which has not hitherto been written in a manner satisfying scientific and critical demands; but the literature of prostitution is already alarmingly comprehensive. Here, also, critical grasp and mode of presentation are[308] still entirely wanting. It is impossible, in this place, in which we speak only of the present-day conditions, to enter at any length into the historical and literary aspects of the question of prostitution. This I must leave for a later, comprehensive work, for which I have for several years been collecting the materials. Here I shall only briefly refer, for the sake of the reader interested in the matter, to the most important writings on the subject of prostitution which have any scientific and historical importance.

Prostitution in antiquity is treated in a masterly manner by Julius Rosenbaum in his celebrated “History of Syphilis in Antiquity” (Halle, 1839); this is, down to the present day, the chief source of our knowledge of the conditions in antiquity. It is true that he starts from the false assumption that syphilis already existed in ancient times, a view which in the second volume of my book on the “Origin of Syphilis” (now in course of preparation) I show to be incorrect; this work will also contain a thorough study of prostitution among the ancients, based upon the more recent researches published since the year 1839, when Rosenbaum’s book appeared.

The first truly classical descriptions of the nature of modern prostitution dated from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; these are not scientific, belonging rather to the province of belles-lettres; but they are of great value in respect of the accuracy of their observations, and of their psychological insight into the nature of prostitution. I refer above all to the celebrated “Ragionamenti” of Pietro Aretino;[245] next, to the not less important work, published earlier, in 1528, “Lozana Andaluza,” by Francisco Delgado (Francesco Delicado).[246] Both these books, and also the celebrated “Zafetta” of Lorenzo Veniero (circa 1535), describe the conditions of prostitution at the time of the Italian renascence; these display a most astonishing similarity to the conditions of the present day, and the books mentioned have therefore still an instructive value.[247]

From the seventeenth century we have as important documents of civilization the description of prostitution in Holland in the interesting work “Le Putanisme d’Amsterdam” (Brussels,[309] 1883; the original Dutch edition, Amsterdam, 1681), and also in the work published in the same year, 1681, “Disputatio Medica qua Lupanaria ex Principiis quoque Medicis Improbantur,” by Georg Franck von Franckenau,[248] noteworthy as being the first medical polemic against brothels.

Down to the middle of the nineteenth century the study of prostitution was most active in France.[249] In the second half of the eighteenth century, according to the expression of the de Goncourts, “pornognomonie” was a scientific problem. Various attempts at reform were made; as early as 1763 “moral control” was recommended; and in 1769 there appeared the celebrated “Pornographe” of Rétif de la Bretonne,[250] the first extensive work on the state regulation of prostitution, the great historical importance of which was recognized by Mireur, the well-known syphilologist of Marseilles, by the publication of a new edition (Brussels, 1879).

But it was with the publication of the immortal and most admirable work of Parent-Duchatelet,[251] on prostitution in Paris, that in the year 1836 the modern scientific literature of prostitution really began. It is the first work in which full justice is done to the importance of prostitution in all its relations, and it is based upon exact medical observations and psychological and social studies. Even to-day it remains unique in its kind, and a standing example of critical research and of French learned zeal.

A very short account of the contents of this epoch-making book of Parent-Duchatelet will best teach us its importance, and will give us an insight into all the problems connected with prostitution, and considered by the French author.

In the introduction, Parent-Duchatelet explains the reasons which led him to undertake the work, and the literary sources he has consulted. The first chapter then proceeds to the consideration of certain general problems, gives a definition of the term prostitute, an estimate of the number of prostitutes in Paris, their origin in respect of native country, position, culture, profession, their age, and the first cause of their adoption of this profession. The second chapter discusses the manners and customs of prostitutes, the opinion they have of themselves, their religious ideas, their sense of shame, their spiritual qualities,[310] tattooing, occupation, uncleanliness, speech, defects and good qualities, the various classes of prostitutes, and, finally, the souteneurs. The third chapter contains physiological observations concerning prostitutes—namely, concerning their obesity, the changes in their voice, peculiarities in the colour of the hair and the eyes, the stature, the condition of the genital organs, and fertility. In the fourth chapter he deals with the influence of professional prostitution on the health of the girls, and describes the various morbid conditions which may result from their occupation. The fifth chapter treats of the public houses of prostitution (brothels), their advantages and disadvantages, the question of brothel streets, and the localization of prostitution in definite quarters of the town. In the sixth chapter the inscription of prostitutes in police lists is discussed; in the seventh procurement and the owners of brothels. Chapters eight, nine, and ten deal with secret prostitution in houses of accommodation, drinking-saloons, coffee-houses, tobacconists’ shops, etc.; chapter eleven discusses street prostitution; chapter twelve, the diffusion of prostitution in the various parts of Paris; chapter thirteen, the relation of prostitution to military life; chapter fourteen, prostitution in the environs of Paris. The fifteenth chapter describes the ultimate destiny of prostitutes; the sixteenth deals with their medical treatment—above all, the methods of examination to ascertain their state of health are accurately described. Chapters seventeen and eighteen deal with hospitals and prisons for prostitutes; chapter nineteen, with the former taxation of prostitutes; chapter twenty considers questions relating to administration, and the special branch of police dealing with the institution—for example, the suggestion (recently revived) is discussed of the medical examination of the male clients of prostitutes; prurient pictures and books are also considered, and thefts in brothels. The twenty-first chapter is devoted to the question which still attracts attention at the present day, viz., the peculiar relationship between the owner of a house and the prostitutes living there, and deals also with the legal aspect of the punishments decreed against prostitutes. Chapter twenty-two is occupied with a general discussion of the legal questions connected with prostitution. At the conclusion, in chapters twenty-three and twenty-four, the author discusses the question whether prostitutes are necessary, and this question (nota bene, from the standpoint of coercive marriage morality) he answers in the affirmative; he asks also whether the police should be entrusted with the application of measures for the prevention of venereal diseases, and this[311] he agrees to conditionally only, for he considers that the public recommendation of protective measures should be forbidden by police ordinance. Finally, in the last chapter, the twenty-fifth, he speaks of the institutions for the rescue of fallen women, and he concludes his comprehensive work, in which he has dealt so thoroughly with all the subdivisions of his general topic, with the words:

“My work is at an end. When I commenced it, I pointed out what reasons I had for undertaking it, what aim I wished to attain. Had I not been firmly convinced that the investigations begun by me regarding the nature of prostitutes might favour health and morality, I should not have published them. I have exposed to the public gaze great infirmities of mankind; thoughtful men, for whom I have written, will thank me for doing so. He who loves his fellow-men will without anxiety follow me into the department of knowledge I have described, and will not turn away his glance from the pictures I have drawn. He who wishes to know the good that remains to be done, and who wishes to learn how to pursue with good results the way by which something better is to be attained, must first know what actually exists; he must know the truth.

“The profession of prostitution is an evil of all times, all countries, and appears to be innate in the social structure of mankind. It will perhaps never be entirely eradicated; still, all the more we must strive to limit its extent and its dangers. With prostitution itself it is as with vice, crime, and disease; the teacher of morals endeavours to prevent the vices, the lawgiver to prevent the crimes, the physician to cure the diseases. All alike know that they will never fully attain their goal; but they pursue their work none the less in the conviction that he who does only a little good yet does a great service to the weak man. I follow their example. A friend whose loss I shall always mourn drew my attention to the fate of the prostitute. I studied them, I wished to learn the causes of their degradation, and wherever possible to discover the means by which their number could be limited. What experience has taught me on this subject I have openly stated, and I am convinced that the lawgiver, the man whom the State has empowered with authority to care for public health and morality, will find in my book useful information.”

Parent-Duchatelet’s book, no less admirable in its execution than in its design, still remains the foundation for the scientific study of prostitution. It is the exemplar for all contemporary and subsequent works.

The powerful influence exercised by this book was shown above all in this—that works on prostitution appeared in rapid succession in the various capitals of the civilized world. These were all based to a greater or less extent upon the work of Parent-Duchatelet, and thus they constitute extremely valuable scientific monographs regarding the conditions of prostitution in particular towns,[312] such as since that date have not been issued. Here there still lies hidden a wealth of material, a large part of which has not yet been utilized.

As an enlargement and continuation of the work of Parent-Duchatelet, there appeared three years later, in the year 1839, the work of the Commissary of Police Béraud [252] on the prostitutes of Paris and on the Parisian police des mœurs. The book is more especially distinguished by an elaborate history of prostitution, and by the wealth of psychological observations it contains; also by its exact information regarding secret prostitution.

In the same year a well-known London physician, Dr. Michael Ryan,[253] published his important book on Prostitution in London,[254] with a comparison of the conditions in Paris and New York. Ryan first dealt with the general social and economic causes of prostitution, with critical acumen, as we could not but expect from an Englishman. His book also contained an interesting account of the extraordinary diffusion in England at that time of pornographic books and pictures,[255] and concerning their publication and sale by pedlars, and the measures undertaken to repress this traffic. Valuable also are the detailed reports given in this book, on pp. 212-252, regarding prostitution in the United States, and especially in New York.

The example of Ryan was followed by his countrymen, Dr. William Tait and the Rev. Ralph Wardlaw. The former treated in a comprehensive work the subject of prostitution in Edinburgh;[256] the latter, in a shorter book, described prostitution in Glasgow.[257]

Very interesting is the book, of which a few copies only ever reached Germany (one of which is in my own possession), and which even in Portugal is extremely rare, of Dr. Francisco Ignacio dos Santos Cruz regarding prostitution in Lisbon,[258] in which the whole subject of Portuguese prostitution is admirably described, with special reference to the capital city. Santos Cruz gives[313] most careful attention to the legislative aspect of the question. He was the first to advocate a measure which has recently been proposed also by Lesser (doubtless in ignorance of the work of his predecessor)—viz., the formation of polyclinics for the gratuitous treatment of prostitutes.[259]

Regarding prostitution in the town of Lyons, renowned for its immorality, Dr. Potton wrote a celebrated book, which received a prize from the Medical Society of Lyons in the year 1841. This work was based on official sources, and had especial reference to the relationships of prostitution to the hygienic and economic conditions of the population.[260]

A valuable book, also, is the work on prostitution in Algiers by E. A. Duchesne.[261] It contains an elaborate account of “male prostitution”—that is, prostitution of men for men—an expansion of the idea of prostitution which is, as far as my knowledge goes, found here for the first time. Naturally, in earlier works we find allusions to men who practise pederasty for money, but the idea “prostitution” had hitherto been strictly limited to the class of purchasable women.

We see this, for example, in the anonymous book “Prostitution in Berlin, and its Victims,”[262] published in Berlin seven years before the appearance of the work of Duchesne. The author definitely states that “the admirable book of Parent-Duchatelet on prostitution in the town of Paris, and its remarkable success, have chiefly given occasion to the publication of my own work.” The book is, however, quite independent in character, and treats of the individual relationships of prostitution in Berlin, on the basis of official sources and experience, in historical, moral, medical, and political relations, and also from the point of view of police administration. It contains an appendix on “prostituted men” (p. 207), who, however, are not homosexual prostitutes, but, according to the writer’s own definition, “men who make it their profession to serve for payment voluptuous women by the gratification of the latter’s unnatural passions.” This species still exists at the present day, but there is no particular name for the type. (In the seventies, in Vienna, men who could be hired to perform coitus were known locally as “stallions”—Ger. Hengste.) We must include them in the great army of[314] souteneurs, although the term is not strictly applicable. Later we shall return to the consideration of this peculiar variety of male prostitution.

As an enlargement of the work just mentioned, we can regard the book published in the same year, 1846, by the Criminal Commissary, Dr. Carl Röhrmann, on Prostitution in Berlin.[263]

This book is especially remarkable from the fact that it contains “complete and candid biographies of the best-known prostitutes in Berlin,” an idea which has recently been revived, for example, in W. Hammer’s “The Life-History of Ten Public Prostitutes in Berlin” (Berlin and Leipzig, 1905).

Very valuable official material is, finally, to be found in a third work on prostitution in Berlin, written by the celebrated syphilologist F. J. Behrend.[264] It begins with a careful history of the police regulations regarding prostitution in Berlin, then discusses the consequences of the abolition of the Berlin brothels in the year 1845, and proceeds to demand new measures and regulations for the control of prostitution and for the prevention of syphilis in Berlin. As a collection of material, the book is of considerable value.

Little known, but thoroughly original, is the work of the Hamburg physician, Dr. Lippert, on prostitution in Hamburg.[265] Blaschko even fails to mention it in the bibliography at the end of his own work, presently to be described. Lippert adduces numerous and interesting new contributions to our knowledge of “the many-headed hydra, the colour-changing chameleon,” of prostitution. After an introductory sketch regarding the historical development of prostitution in Hamburg, he gives a “characterization of the present moral condition of Hamburg,” embodying important information regarding the number of brothel prostitutes and street-walkers, the topographical distribution of prostitution and of brothels, the secret houses of accommodation, the remarkable decline in the number of marriages, the relationship between legitimate and illegitimate births, and the number of drinking-saloons and dancing-halls; and he goes on to describe with more detail these individual factors of prostitution,[315] and especially the opportunities for prostitution. The third chapter contains an extremely interesting physiological and pathological description of the Hamburg prostitutes. According to Lippert, the principal motives of prostitution are “idleness, frivolity, and, above all, the love of finery.” He rightly lays especial stress upon the last-named cause, which, in the more recent scientific investigations regarding the causes of prostitution, has, unfortunately, been too much neglected. Then follow data regarding the age, nationality, class, and occupation of prostitutes. We learn that as early as the date of this book of Lippert’s the greatest number of public prostitutes had originally been maidservants (p. 79), not girls of the labouring classes. Thus the fact that prostitutes recruit their ranks chiefly from the servant class is not, as recent writers assert, exclusively the consequence of the increasing mental culture of the modern proletariat, but is most probably rather connected with the freer configuration of the amatory life among the labouring classes, where the nobler form of “free love” has long been dominant. From the very nature of the case, this must lead to a limitation of the supply of prostitutes from this class. The chapter closes with an elaborate description of the physical and mental peculiarities of the Hamburg prostitutes, and of the diseases observed in them. In the fourth chapter the various classes of prostitutes are considered more closely—the brothel prostitutes (with an exact description of the celebrated brothel streets of Hamburg), the prostitutes living alone, the street-walkers, the “kept women,” the large group of secret prostitutes. There follow in an appendix interesting accounts of the public places which are related to prostitution; of prostitution in the Hamburger Berg and in the suburb of St. Pauli; and of the rescue work of Hamburg.

A very good account of prostitution in Hamburg is also found in a book contemporary with that of Lippert, entitled “Memoirs of a Prostitute, or Prostitution in Hamburg” (St. Pauli, 1847). This work, which is now extraordinarily rare, resembles the book which recently gained such celebrity, the “Tagebuch einer Verlorenen” (“Diary of a Lost Woman”), by Margaret Böhme, in that it was edited by a Dr. J. Zeisig, professedly after the “original manuscript.” As usual, it has all happened before!

In the preface to his book, Lippert remarks that, since prostitution in Berlin and in Hamburg has now been adequately described, it was desirable that an analogous book should be compiled regarding Vienna, in order that we might have the necessary[316] comparative statistics of “the three principal towns and principal factors of German prostitution.”

The actual account of prostitution in Vienna did not, however, appear till forty years later, in the year 1886. Still, as early as 1847 the book of Dr. Anton J. Gross-Hoffinger was published, describing exclusively the conditions of prostitution in Austria, and naturally chiefly concerned with conditions in Vienna.[266] In my opinion, this book has an epoch-making significance, because therein we find asserted for the first time, with all possible emphasis, that the institution of coercive marriage is the ultimate cause of prostitution, to which all the other causes are subsidiary. In no other book do we find so painful a description, drawn with such astonishing clearness, of the horrible conditions resulting from the artificial preservation of the official and ecclesiastical coercive marriage, which was really based upon economic conditions peculiar to the remote past. The two first sections, “Woman the Slave of Civilization” and “Woman in her Degradation,” are the most frightful accusations of conventional marriage. On pp. 190 and 191 the author formulates in fifteen paragraphs a law of marriage reform, which has a very close resemblance to the previously described ideas of Ellen Key. A perfect classic is the chapter on servant-girls (pp. 226-284), unique in its thoroughness, and affording an admirable description of the legal, moral, and economic relationships of domestic service.

“The great army of domestic servants,” he writes, “constitute the ever-ready reserve force of prostitution. Daily from this reserve are drawn new recruits for the regular service, and daily the vacant places in the reserve are once more filled.”

Gross-Hoffinger, in 1847, came also to the conclusion that in “free love” or “free marriage” was to be found the only salvation from the misery of prostitution.

The comprehensive work of Schrank upon prostitution in Vienna [267] is distinguished by an abundance of interesting isolated observations, and these are especially to be found in the earlier historical portion. The second part is occupied with the administration and hygiene of prostitution in Vienna. The work gives an exhaustive account of Viennese prostitution down to the year 1885.

Prostitution in Leipzig was described in three chapters of a general work on prostitution, published in the year 1854.[268] The titles of these three chapters are: “Moral Corruption in Leipzig”; “Tolerated Prostitutes and Tolerated Houses in Leipzig”; “Tolerated Prostitutes in Leipzig: their Morals, their Customs, their Hygienic Condition, their End.” Very interesting is the statement of the author that of the 3,000 maidservants in Leipzig, one-third were engaged in secret prostitution.

The prostitution in the largest town of the new world, in New York, also found an admirable description in the sixth decade of the nineteenth century in the great historical work of the New York physician, William M. Sanger.[269] Of the 685 large octavo pages which the book contains, pages 450 to 676 are devoted to the description of the conditions of prostitution in New York. The historical portion of the book is also extremely valuable, being based upon the best historical authorities.

With the year 1860, or thereabouts, this first period of the scientific literature of prostitution, characterized by monographs dealing with individual towns, in pursuance of the example of Parent-Duchatelet, came to a close. Just as Parent-Duchatelet had inaugurated this kind of description, so the French now undertook the introduction of the further researches into prostitution. First of all, Dr. J. Jeannel summarized the results of the books we have already mentioned in a general work on prostitution,[270] which contained a comparative view of the conditions in various countries and towns. An Englishman, W. Acton, also wrote a similar general work on prostitution;[271] whilst yet another general work on the subject was written by the German Hügel.[272]

The extremely important question of secret prostitution has been elucidated especially by the writings of Martineau [273] and Commenge;[274] the not less important question of prostitution practised by girls under full age is treated by Augagneur;[275] the[318] problems of regulation and of brothels have been studied by Fiaux, whose work is comprehensive and based upon carefully compiled statistics, and the author attempts the solution of these problems;[276] the sometime French Minister Yves Guyot has discussed the problem of prostitution from the higher philosophical and social point of view;[277] in short, the French physicians illuminated this obscure province of thought from every side, and laid the foundations for the scientific and critical study of prostitution, which began with the last decade of the nineteenth century.

To Alfred Blaschko unquestionably belongs the credit of having broken entirely new ground in connexion with the problem of prostitution, by means of the debate instituted by him in the year 1892 in the Medical Society of Berlin, and by several works distinguished by a sharp-sighted, critical faculty.[278] Upon his exhaustive scientific studies, and upon the most careful practical considerations, Blaschko bases the demands:

At the same time, Blaschko is a convinced advocate of the economic theory of prostitution.

Almost at the same time, Cesare Lombroso, the celebrated alienist and criminal anthropologist of Turin, propounded his anthropological theory of prostitution, and enunciated the doctrine, which attracted so much attention, of the “Donna delinquinte e prostituta,” of the “congenital prostitute.”[279] This doctrine found an unconditional supporter in the St. Petersburg syphilologist Tarnowsky; whilst the latter strongly opposed the efforts made by the International Federation, founded in 1875 by Mrs. Josephine Butler, for the abolition of the regulation of prostitution.[280] Ströhmberg, in an interesting work on prostitution,[281] takes the same standpoint as Lombroso and Tarnowsky.

It is, however, noteworthy that quite recently the French observers also, and, above all, the experienced Fiaux, are inclining to the views of Blaschko, of the accuracy of which I myself am now fully convinced, notwithstanding the fact that in my work on prostitution in England,[282] which appeared eight years ago (October, 1900), I still advocated regulation. E. von Düring also, who, as professor of medicine in Constantinople for many years, has made elaborate study of the conditions of prostitution in that town, adheres, in an essay well worth reading, without qualification to the opinion of Blaschko regarding the uselessness of regulation and of brothels.[283]

After this brief enumeration of the most important descriptive and scientific studies of prostitution, we shall now proceed to a short account of the conditions that obtain at the present day.

The idea of “prostitution” is in no respect clearly and sharply limited. Parent-Duchatelet considered that prostitution only occurred

“when a woman was known to have accepted money for this purpose on several successive occasions, when she was openly recognized as being engaged in this occupation, when an arrest had occurred and the offence had thus been definitely discovered, or when in any other way it was proved to the satisfaction of the police” (vol. i., p. 11).

But in this way he entirely excluded the so-called “secret” prostitution—that is to say, he excluded by far the largest category of prostitution.

As soon as we take this latter into consideration, we find it necessary to have a wider conception of the term “prostitution.” This is recognized by the French physician Rey in his little book on “Public and Secret Prostitution” (German edition, p. 1; Leipzig, 1851). He regards as prostitution the act “by which a woman allows the use of her body by any man, without distinction, and for a payment made or expected.”

In this admirable definition we see the two most important characteristics of prostitution: complete indifference with regard to the person of the man demanding the use of her body, and the fact that the act is done for reward. The only point omitted from consideration is the condition mentioned by Parent-Duchatelet—namely, the frequent repetition of the act of prostitution with different men.

Schrank combines all these characteristics of prostitution in a[320] much briefer phrase, by defining them as “professional acts of fornication performed with the human body,” by which, in the first place, we include male and female homosexual prostitution, which are not covered by the definitions previously quoted, and, in the second place, Schrank’s definition lays stress on the fact that in genuine prostitution the monetary reward is the aim of the act of prostitution much more than any kind of enjoyment. Where enjoyment plays a prominent part, in addition to the earning of money, we are no longer concerned with genuine prostitution. Even a prostitute, who in other respects is typically a woman of that class, ceases at that moment and for that time to be a prostitute, when her earnings become a secondary consideration, and the man to whom she gives herself the principal consideration.

For this reason, strictly speaking, a large proportion of secret prostitutes and numerous members of the half-world cannot be reckoned as prostitutes in the proper sense of the term—at any rate, not always; not when, for instance, the man who supports and pays them is at the same time their “lover”;[284] they then belong for the time being to the not less dangerous province of “wild love.” But in practice this distinction cannot be strictly maintained, for the same woman will very frequently undertake a genuine act of prostitution.

It is only the “sale of the sweet name of love,” as the celebrated politician Louis Blanc expresses it, which constitutes prostitution—the complete lack of all spiritual and all personal relationships on the one side, and the ignominious predominance of the mercantile character of the sexual union on the other. Hence there may be prostitution in marriage, although this always remains widely different from the sale of the body to numerous and frequently changing individuals.

The “prostitution” of primeval times, in which social relationships were so utterly different from ours, unquestionably resembled rather the wild love of the present day than our own prostitution. It was sexual promiscuity, not professional fornication. According to Heinrich Schurtz, prostitution is indeed not an exclusive product of higher civilization, but occurs also among primitive peoples, and appears everywhere where the unrestricted sexual intercourse of youth—wild love—is prevented, without early marriage taking its place. But what he describes as prostitution—for example, the living of several unmarried girls in the houses[321] of men—is still no more than a peculiar form of wild love. Still, according to the reports of numerous travellers, there are among primitive peoples also purchasable women, and this must be explained, just as in our own case, from the combined influence of individual, social, and economic conditions.

To my mind there is no doubt that the so-called “religious” prostitution is to be regarded as at least a germinal form and predecessor of the prostitution of the present day. In this case also we had to do with professional fornication; only, although the temple-girls, just like our modern prostitutes, gave themselves indifferently to any man that offered the money paid for this service, that money did not, in the case of religious prostitution, go to the girl herself, but to the deity, or to the crafty priests who represented him; thus the priests really played the part of our modern brothel-keepers. It is absolutely unquestionable that in this religious prostitution a more ideal element also played a part. This subject was discussed at considerable length above (pp. 100-112).

Prostitution is everywhere a product of the growth of large towns; its peculiar characteristics are developed only in large towns. To the country it was always foreign until those beautiful times of the middle ages, in which prostitution was regarded as a necessary of life, like eating and drinking, and was organized in guilds, so that everywhere “women-houses” were instituted for the public, unconstrained use of all classes, for peasant and prince. At that time quite small towns also had their brothels. The appearance of syphilis, and the awakening of modern individualism, brought these conditions to an end; the brothels disappeared everywhere; and this tendency to a continuous decrease of barrack prostitution, to a progressive diminution in the number of brothels, has continually strengthened. On the whole, the rural districts to-day do not know prostitution; there we have only free love and wild love. The existence of prostitution is confined to the large towns, because in these all the necessary conditions are fulfilled, and, above all, because in large towns the possibilities for the gratification of the sexual impulse by marriage or by free love are in the case of men much more limited than they are in the country. In the town there is even a demand for prostitutes, but not in the country. It is true that the demand on the part of men does not correspond to the extension which modern prostitution has assumed in the large towns; this demand corresponds, as it were, to a portion only of prostitution. In his admirable work on the campaign against prostitution[322] (Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, vol. ii., pp. 311-313) F. Schiller proves that prostitution has not increased merely in proportion to the increase in the male population, but that in reality, in recent decades, it has increased, on the whole, in a much greater proportion than the population, and that different towns exhibit the most remarkable contrasts in the respective ratios of prostitutes to male population.

For example, in Berlin prostitution has increased to an extent almost double that of the increase in male population. A similar relationship is to be observed in other large towns. Everywhere the supply of prostitutes exceeds the demand; and we cannot doubt that by this great supply the need for prostitutes is to a large extent at first aroused. Street-walkers and brothels allure many men to sexual intercourse who otherwise would not have felt any need for it.

But, on the other hand, the existence of a voluntary demand for prostitutes on the part of men is a fact which cannot be denied. In this sense prostitution has been described as mainly a “man’s question.”

Here we touch upon an extremely difficult problem, and one which, as far as I can see, no one before myself has definitely stated, perhaps because no one has ventured to do it—and yet, for our knowledge of prostitution, the question is one of great importance.

What precisely is the “need of man for prostitution” of which Blaschko speaks? Is it merely the sexual impulse? Or is there any other factor in operation?

Certainly the sexual impulse, simple sensuality, plays a large part in this male demand for prostitutes; but this does not explain the fact why married men, and so many men who, if not married, have yet opportunities for other sexual intercourse, have recourse to prostitutes; it does not explain the fact, by which I am myself continually and anew astonished, of the peculiar attractive force which prostitutes exercise upon cultured men with delicate æsthetic and ethical perceptions. Is there any deeper physiological relationship here involved?

It is not by chance that prostitution is mainly a product of civilization, that it finds in civilization its proper vital conditions, whereas in primitive states it cannot properly thrive.

In primitive times, unrestrained by the (just) demands of a higher civilization, and by the social morality intimately associated therewith, men could, without fear or regret, satisfy[323] their wild impulses, no less in the sexual sphere than in others; they could give free play to those peculiar biological instincts of a sexual nature which lie hidden in every man. Their sexual “supra- and sub-consciousness,” to use the happy phrase which Chr. von Ehrenfels invented to denote the dualism of modern sexuality, were still monistic. To-day, however, the primitive instincts are repressed by the necessities of civilized life, and by the coercive force of conventional morality; but these instincts still slumber in every one. Each one of us has also his sexual sub-consciousness. Sometimes it awakens, demands activity, free from all restraint, from all coercion, from all convention. In such moments it seems as if the man were an entirely different being. Here the “two souls” in our breast become a reality. Is this still the celebrated man of learning, the refined idealist, the sensitive æsthetic, the artist who has enriched us with the most magnificent and the purest works of poetry or of plastic art? We recognize him no longer, because in such moments something quite different has awakened to life; another nature stirs within him and urges him with an elemental force to do things from which his “supra-consciousness,” the consciousness of the civilized man, would draw back in horror.

Such a delicate sensitive nature, open to the finest spiritual activities, as that of the Danish poet J. P. Jakobsen, must feel this contrast in an especially painful manner; it is precisely such natures—those in which the extremes we have described appear most sharply and most clearly—which afford us proof of the existence of a double consciousness. The primitive instinct breaks out, like a monomania—of which old psychiatric doctrine of “monomania” we are involuntarily reminded when we see how even men of light and leading, men who in other respects live only in the highest regions of the spirit, are subjected to the domination of this purely instinctive sexualism, so that they lead a “secret” inner life, of whose existence the world has no suspicion.

In “Niels Lyhne” J. P. Jakobsen has admirably characterized this double life.

“But when,” he writes, “he had served God truly for eleven days, it often happened that other powers gained the upper hand in him; by an overwhelming force he was driven to the coarse lust of coarse enjoyments; he yielded, overcome by the human passion for self-annihilation, which, while the blood burns as blood only can burn, demands degradation, perversity, dirt, and foulness, with no less force than the force which inspires the equally human passion for becoming greater than one is, and purer.”

These human instincts can be satisfied only by prostitution. By the purchasable prostitute this desire, described so aptly and with so much insight by Jakobsen, can be fully satisfied. To the origin of the desire we shall return in another connexion. The common, the rough, the brutal animal in the nature of prostitution, exercises a formal magical attractive force on large numbers of men.

Ludwig Pietsch, in his “Recollections of Sixty Years,” vol. ii., p. 337 (Berlin, 1894), tells of the celebrated cocotte of the Second French Empire, Cora Pearl, whom he saw in Baden-Baden:

“I have never been able to understand how it was that she exercised so powerful an attraction. In her appearance, her tumid, painted ‘pug-face,’ the secret was certainly not to be found. Perhaps the influence which she exercised on so many men rested principally in the quality which the royal friend of the Danish Countess Danner described to the latter, when explaining to her the reason of the power, to others quite incomprehensible, which Cora Pearl had exercised on his own heart. He said: ‘She is so gloriously vulgar.’”

This word speaks volumes, and illuminates the peculiar influence of prostitutes and prostitution upon man in an apt and powerful way.[285]

Admirably, also, has Stefan Grimmen, in his novelette “Die Landpartie” (published in Die Welt am Montag, No. 22, May 28, 1906), described this influence, which in this case was exercised by two demi-mondaines lying in the grass, upon the masculine members of a picnic-party, who were so enthralled as completely to forget the ladies of their company. The de Goncourts were also aware of the specific allurement exercised by prostitutes, for in one place in their diary they recommend a wife to adopt certain customs of prostitutes, in order to bind her husband to her for a long time.

In this respect, we cannot fail to recognize a certain masochistic trait in the sensibility of men, which appears especially remarkable when we call to mind the contrast between the nature of the above described spiritually lofty persons and the nature of a prostitute. In this way we should be led to the view that prostitution is in part a product of the physiological male masochism—that is to say, of the impulse from time to time to plunge into the depths of coarse, brutal, sexual lust and of self-mortification[325] and self-abasement, by surrender to a comparatively worthless creature. This attraction towards prostitutes is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the psyche of the modern civilized man; it is the curse of the evolution of civilization.

“The most ideal man also is unable to free himself from his body,” says Heinrich Schurtz; “refinement leads ultimately to an unnatural over-nicety, which must necessarily be permeated from time to time by a breath of fresh unrefinement and coarse naturalism, if it is not to perish from its own inward contradiction.”

In a certain sense the same need finds expression also in Gutzkow’s remark in the “Neue Serapionsbrüder,” vol. i., p. 198 (Breslau, 1877), that man sometimes has a need for “woman-in-herself,” not woman with the thousand and one tricks and whimsies of wives, mothers, and daughters.

Without question, this need is much more characteristic of man than of woman. Still, I am not prepared altogether to deny its existence in the latter. In another connexion I shall return to this extremely important question.

Naturally in this we see no more than a favouring factor of the appearance of prostitution in the mass; we do not speak of it as the definite cause of the production of any individual prostitute.

Speaking generally, I consider the dispute regarding the causes of prostitution as superfluous; a number of causes are in operation, and in each individual case it is always an unfortunate concatenation of circumstances, of subjective and objective influences, which have driven the girl to prostitution. The various theories regarding the causes of prostitution have therefore only a relative value. Not one of them explains it wholly; each explanation demands the assistance of others.

This is, above all, true of the celebrated theory of Lombroso, regarding the “born prostitute,” a theory which states, to put the matter shortly and clearly, that the girl is born with all the rudimentary characteristics of a prostitute, and that these rudimentary characteristics have also a physical foundation, in the form of demonstrable stigmata of degeneration.

Lombroso’s “born prostitute” is, above all, distinguished by a complete lack of the moral sense, by typical “moral insanity,” which is the true “root” of the prostitute life, for he regards that life as very little dependent upon the sexual. Prostitution, therefore, according to Lombroso, “is only a special case of the early tendency to all evil, of the desire which characterizes the morally idiotic human being from childhood upwards, to do that[326] which is forbidden.”[286] The individual cause of prostitution, according to this view, is to be found, not in the sexual, but in the ethical province. With the ethical defects are associated greediness, the love of finery, a tendency to drink, vanity, dislike of work, mendacity, and an inclination towards criminality. To this moral degeneration there corresponds the presence of stigmata of degeneration, such as anomalies of the teeth, cleft palate, abnormal distribution of the hair, prominent ears, asymmetry of the face, etc.

The above-described type of degenerate woman does, as a fact, exist. But, in the first place, such women constitute only a small fraction of prostitutes, and such women are found following other occupations. Thus, the expression “born prostitute” is a false one; it should run, “born degenerate,” for not all born degenerates become prostitutes.

In the second place, not all degenerate prostitutes are born degenerates. In many cases the degeneration is a result of the professional unchastity.

“No one,” says Friedrich Hammer, “who has not personally investigated the matter can conceive how rapidly and completely the process of transformation from an honourable girl into a prostitute proceeds—the transformation into a street-walker. A few weeks before she was clean-looking and trim, perhaps with a somewhat frivolous appearance, but still able to understand the position in which she found herself; now, however, she seems to have completely ‘gone to pieces’; she is dirty and verminous, and on her face is an expression of absolute wretchedness, not, as you perhaps might imagine, of unbridled sensuality—no, rather one of indifference, of complete helplessness and loss of will, of unresponsiveness alike to punishment and to benefit.”[287]

The earlier investigators of prostitution, including the first of all, Parent-Duchatelet, did not fail to recognize that the mental and physical abnormalities of the prostitute were changes due to her mode of life. In many prostitutes we can observe a typical obliteration of the secondary and tertiary sexual characters after a prolonged practice of their profession. Virey remarked, very justly, that “in consequence of the frequent embraces of men, prostitutes gain a more or less masculine appearance”: their neck is thicker, their voice harsher and more masculine (J. J. Virey, “Woman,” pp. 157, 158; Leipzig, 1827).

Most prostitutes have done more or less injury to the functions of the human body, have completely disordered their sexual life,[327] and are sterile. It is not to be wondered at that this sometimes manifests itself in their outward appearance—as, for example, in the slight development of the breasts, which often amounts to a simple atrophy. The “unmistakable development” of the tertiary characters of the male in individual prostitutes, which has led Kurella to propound the interesting hypothesis that prostitutes are a sub-variety of the homosexual,[288] rests for the most part upon their assumption of a masculine mode of life and masculine habits, which in the long-run cannot fail to influence also the bodily development—as, for example, smoking and the excessive use of alcohol, pot-house life, gluttony, and other masculine habits. The “deep masculine voice” of many prostitutes is unquestionably in most cases the result of the excessive use of tobacco and alcohol. To this striking gradual change in the voice Parent-Duchatelet devoted considerable attention (vol. i., pp. 86-88, of the German edition); it also attracted Lippert’s notice. Parent-Duchatelet refers the common development in prostitutes of the masculine voice to their excessive indulgence in alcoholic beverages, and to their exposure to frequent changes of weather (catching cold, etc.). Smoking also certainly plays a part.

Lippert draws attention to other changes (“Prostitution in Hamburg,” pp. 80 and 90):

“By the daily practice of their profession for many years their eyes acquire a piercing, rolling expression; they are somewhat unduly prominent in consequence of the continued tension of the ocular muscles, since the eyes are principally employed to spy out and attract clients. In many the organs of mastication are strongly developed; the mouth, in continuous activity either in eating or in kissing, is conspicuous; the forehead is often flat; the occipital region is at times extremely prominent; the hair of the head is often scanty—in fact, a good many become actually bald. For this reasons are not lacking: above all, the restless mode of life; the continued running about in all weathers in the open street, sometimes with the head bare; the often long-lasting fluor albus from which they suffer;[289] the incessant brushing, manipulation, frizzling, and pomading of the hair; and, among the lower classes of prostitutes, the use of brandy.

“The rough voice is the physiological characteristic of the woman who has lost her proper functions—those of the mother.”

However, the majority of youthful prostitutes exhibit purely feminine characteristics; it is only late in life that the above-described[328] type becomes predominant, and this shows us that the masculine characteristics are the result of objective influences. From five to ten years bring about a notable difference. In the year 1898 I treated a maidservant for syphilis. At that time she was of an elegant, genuinely feminine appearance. Seven years later, in the year 1905, I saw her once more. What a change! Her face was bloated and widened; her eyes, once so bright and clear, had become cloudy and expressionless; her voice was rough; all the specific feminine forms and characters had been obliterated by extreme corpulence. It was no longer a woman, it was a “prostitute,” a special type of humanity, but one which had been gradually produced, and as a result of no more than six years of the practice of professional prostitution.

These facts do not by any means exclude the existence of genuine degenerates among prostitutes in a greater percentage than among non-prostitutes;[290] nor do they exclude the existence of genuine homosexuals among prostitutes. To this extent Lombroso’s theory contains a nucleus of truth; but it concerns only a fraction of the entire world of prostitutes. Lombroso has himself been repeatedly compelled to recognize the frequency with which he has encountered among prostitutes women of normal appearance, and even beautiful women.[291]

Finally, the doctrine of the “born prostitute” is contradicted by the fact that the same types of degenerate which are described by Lombroso among prostitutes are found also among women who are not prostitutes.[292] In fact, Lombroso has been led to this view by the recognition of an “equivalent of prostitutes among the upper classes”; but in this way he has only proved that the same moral degeneration that is encountered in a certain proportion of prostitutes is also seen in misconducted women of other and higher classes. There are, in fact, prostitute natures among the “upper ten thousand.”

The best limitation of the general value of the doctrine of the “born prostitute” is the concluding chapter of Lombroso’s book[329] upon “Occasional Prostitutes.” He begins with the pertinent remark:

“Not all prostitutes are ethically indifferent—that is to say, they are not all born prostitutes; in this province opportunity also plays its part.”

Lombroso proceeds to develop this thesis, thus markedly limiting the application of his own theory, and recognizing that, in addition to natural predisposition, quite other causes and influences come into play in the production of prostitution.

Above all, the economic factors are of greater importance in the genesis and growth of prostitution, even though their influence is not an exclusive one.

I distinguish here between real, genuine poverty (lack of food, proper housing accommodation, etc.) and merely relative poverty. Hitherto, in considering the economic causes of prostitution, these two elements have not been distinguished with sufficient clearness.

The fact that real, absolute poverty and lack of the necessaries of life drives many girls to a life of prostitution can, in view of recent statistical data, no longer be disputed. More exact material dealing with this subject is to be found in the above mentioned writings of Blaschko, one of the principal advocates of the economic theory of prostitution; also in the works of Georg Keben,[293] Oda Olberg,[294] Anna Pappritz,[295] Pfeiffer,[296] Paul Kampffmeyer,[297] E. von Düring,[298] and many others. Here we have a superabundant material, a quantity of distressing and tragical individual data and proofs of Gutzkow’s thesis, that the material evils of society always and everywhere undergo transformation into immorality. Here unquestionably must we first apply the lever for the removal of this economic predisposing condition of prostitution. Hic Rhodus, hic salta! I am myself firmly convinced[330] of this fact, although I do not consider that the causes of prostitution are to be found exclusively in economic conditions—an opinion which Anna Pappritz, for example, maintains in the most extreme form. It is quite true, however, that our entire sexual life at the present day is so intimately connected with the social question that the reform of the sexual life demands as an unconditional preliminary a reform of economic conditions. Prostitution on the large scale, as it manifests itself in modern days, and its continuous increase to an extent quite unparalleled in former times, is only explicable by the rapid transformation of economic conditions—as, for example, by the concentration of population in large towns, by the industrial revolution, and by the development of great aggregations of capital, by the consequent greatly increased severity of the struggle for existence, the postponement of marriage, and the ever-increasing number of individuals who are not economically and professionally independent. The increase in child-labour (naturally we refer especially to children of the female sex) has also to be considered as a remarkable phenomenon of modern industrial life; but, above all, we must take into account the fact that woman’s work is on the average regarded at a very low valuation, and is paid accordingly.

The insufficiency of their earnings is the immediate cause of the fact that so many women and girls seek accessory earnings in the form of prostitution. It is well known that employers reckon on this fact in drawing up their pay-lists, and frequently are so brutally cynical as to point out to their female employees the possibility of increasing their earnings in this manner—one very convenient to the employer!

The Reichsarbeitsblatt, No. 2, of the year 1903, publishes a very remarkable account of the conditions of work and life of the unmarried female factory employees in Berlin. It is based upon the reports of the professional factory inspectors in Berlin, who have access to material affording them accurate information regarding the mode of life of factory women. The reports concern 939 unmarried factory hands, and include all occupations in which in Berlin a considerable number of women were employed. The average age of the women who came under observation was 22¹⁄₂ years; the oldest was 54 years; 53·5 % of the whole number were over 21 years of age; 42 % were between 16 and 21 years of age; 4·5 % were below 16 years of age. The average number of hours of daily work was 9¹⁄₂; 3·2 % of all the women worked from 7¹⁄₂ to 8 hours; 37·2 %, 8 to 9 hours; 47·7 %, 9 to 10 hours;[331] and 11·9 %, 10 to 11 hours. The weekly wage amounted on the average to 11·36 marks (shillings); individually, the wages were very variable; 4·3 % of the women were paid less than 6 marks (shillings); 1·1 % were paid from 20 to 30 marks (shillings). In a very large majority of instances the wages varied between 8 and 15 marks. Supplies from a source independent of their wages, in the form of money, clothing, and means of subsistence, were received, according to their own statement, by 88 of the women; among these, 41 were assisted by parents, 4 by other relatives, 3 in other ways; 542 of those examined lived with their parents, 57 with other relatives—that is, altogether 64·2 of the total number—21·5 % lived in common lodging-houses, 14 % in their own rooms. The worst-paid workwomen lived chiefly with their parents; as soon as the wage sufficed to support them away from home a great many left their parents’ houses. The housing accommodation was ascertained in 846 instances; in 758 of these a single room constituted the dwelling, in 82 cases a kitchen, in 2 cases an attic, in 3 some other room. In isolated cases quite unsuitable places were used to sleep in. Speaking generally, the conditions were worse than appears from the above figures. Of 832 workwomen, only 169 had a room to themselves; 193 slept in a room with one other person, and 470—that is, 56·6 %—with several persons. With regard to the cost of their dwellings, there were 464 reports; the average payment was 1·79 marks (shillings) per week. The cost of the food (dinner and lesser meals) amounted on the average, in the case of 568, to 6·77 marks (shillings); of these, 205 paid less than 6 marks (shillings), 109 more than 8 marks (shillings) per week. The total cost for lodging and food amounted in the case of 867 workwomen on the average to 7·62 marks; 44·7 % had their principal meal at midday; 55·3 % in the evening; 79·4 % took it at home; 9·4 % in the factory; 11·2 % in a public kitchen, a cooking-school, or an eating-house. With regard to the expenditure for clothing, etc., very scanty details were obtained—too scanty to be worth recording. Of the 939 workwomen of whom inquiry was made on the point, 197, or 21 %, contributed money to the education or support of relatives or children; about 10 % paid (direct) taxes, with a mean expenditure of 8 pfennige (one penny) per week. For amusement, 233 women recorded an average weekly expenditure of 1 mark (shilling). To a considerable number of those examined it was possible to put a little money by; in most cases the amount averaged from half to one mark (sixpence to one shilling) per week; in many cases, however,[332] the money saved was spent at some other time during the year, in consequence of diminished earnings or illness. The figures obtained, although in many cases they require further examination, elaboration, and illustration, still suffice to show that much remains to be done for the improvement of the conditions of life of female factory employees.

That these wages are quite insufficient is shown by the following table of the daily expenditure of a sempstress for food and lodging (based on the reports of von Stülpnagel):

	Mk.	Pf.
Bedroom and coffee	0	20
Second breakfast	0	15
Dinner (midday)	0	30
Afternoon tea	0	15
Supper	0	20
Two bottles of beer	0	20
Total	1	20

That amounts per week to 8 marks 40 pfennige (eight shillings and fivepence) for board-lodging. For the rest, clothing, washing, and a little amusement, have to be provided for, and this is only possible in the case of the highest wages, varying from 12 to 15 marks; but this higher wage often enough suffices, as Anna Pappritz herself admits. In many cases the weekly wage is only 5 to 8 marks. In the majority of occupations connected with the manufacture of ready-made clothing, trade is only brisk for four to six months in each year. Thus, there is necessarily a great deal of unemployment.

According to the Statistical Annual for the town of Berlin for the year 1907, the annual wages amounted:

According to the report of the Statistical Bureau, the average yearly income of women factory employees throughout the German Empire was only 322 marks!

It is, therefore, no matter for surprise that the industrial councillors of Frankfurt-on-the-Main and of Wiesbaden, in their published reports on the wages of female factory employees for the year 1887, state:

“In Frankfurt, at the end of last month, among 226 persons under the observation of the police des mœurs (that is, not reckoning secret prostitution), 98 were female factory employees. Since for their necessary bare support (food and sleeping accommodation only), the minimum daily sum needed is 1·25 marks, it appears that the wages which can be earned by female employees of 1·50 to 1·80 marks can hardly suffice to provide for all their needs. It would seem, therefore, that the lowness of their earnings must play some part in the matter under discussion.”

The reports of the industrial councillors of Düsseldorf, Posen, Stettin, Neuss, Barmen, Elberfeld, Gladbach, Erfurt, etc., have a similar signification.

Important in relation to the incontrovertible connexion between material poverty and prostitution is the fact that in the majority of cases the prostitution of female factory employees is only occasional, and not professional prostitution—that is to say, such women have recourse to prostitution only when compelled thereto by deficient means.

As regards genuine professional prostitution, female factory employees, who live in a state of comparative freedom, contribute a smaller contingent of recruits than maidservants, whose position is always a more dependent one, and who are much less experienced in the struggle for existence, although, generally speaking, they live in better conditions. From a computation based upon figures for the years 1855, 1873, and 1898 (those for 1855 and 1898 relating to far too small a number of cases), Blaschko derives the opinion that formerly female factory employees provided a greater number of recruits to prostitution than they do at present; but that, on the contrary, the contribution of maidservants to the ranks of professional prostitution has enormously increased. This assertion cannot pass without contradiction. Gross-Hoffinger, in the work previously mentioned, pointed out that the class of maidservants was the true nucleus of prostitution, and devoted to this fact a long and illuminating chapter of his book. And at about the same time (1848) Lippert also wrote (op. cit., p. 79): “The principal sources of prostitution are maidservants, sempstresses, flower-girls, tailoresses, hairdressers, shop-girls, and barmaids.” (Gross-Hoffinger himself emphasizes the word “maidservants.”)

We see, therefore, that the preponderance of ex-maidservants in the ranks of professional prostitution is by no means a new phenomenon, although, possibly, that preponderance is even greater now than it was in former times. And though in isolated instances it may happen that simple poverty forces a maidservant[334] to become a prostitute, this explanation does not suffice for the generality of cases. The same reservation must be made in respect of seduction and illegitimate motherhood as causes of prostitution. And in so far as poverty is a cause, we must speak rather of relative poverty, poverty which has more of a subjective than an objective character.

Schiller rightly remarks, in his admirable essay on the “Prevention of Prostitution,” that in respect of prostitutes who have been maidservants, in the majority of cases there can be no question of insufficient wages and actual poverty (if we except the badly paid servants in public-houses, laundry-maids, and a few others), since the maidservant receives, in addition to her wages, free board and lodging, and therefore is in a much better position than the majority of female factory employees and of women engaged in home industries. Notwithstanding this, maidservants supply the largest proportion of prostitutes.

The majority of maidservants come from the country, where lax views prevail regarding sexual relationships. In addition, girls usually come to town when still very young. The want of education and experience of life is, in their case, very striking; and this is increased by their permanently dependent position, in contrast with the early independence of the town factory-women, who are speedily initiated into all the possible evils of town life. In addition, there comes into the question an influence which hitherto has been underestimated: the love of finery. Among maidservants this is especially powerful, since, in this respect, they are continually exposed to suggestive influences, arising from the clothing of their mistresses. This love of dress, in association with a far greater unscrupulousness in sexual matters than exists among workwomen, drives many servant-girls, even without real poverty, to prostitution. After they have lost their place, after they have acquired a distaste for work, have given birth to an illegitimate child, or have been infected with venereal disease, they very readily enter the ranks of professional prostitution.

This subjective psychological factor plays nearly as great a rôle as the economic factor. Blaschko himself draws attention to the fact that, in proportion to the hundreds of thousands of women who are compelled to earn their bread by hard, badly paid toil, the number of those who ultimately become prostitutes is really almost infinitesimally small; and that, therefore, we must regard as accessory causes of prostitution, defective will-power, want of industry, of perseverance, and of moral instincts, and, finally, also—and here Lombroso is justified—congenital deficiency. Hellpach[335] is right when, in his most readable essay on “Prostitution and Prostitutes” (Berlin, 1905), he lays the principal stress on this “social-psychological” explanation of prostitution, and regards the purely economic factor as “the ultimate turning-point” in the fatal road that leads to prostitution. (Earlier than Hellpach, Anton Baumgarten attempted to give a social-psychological explanation of prostitution. See his essays, containing much valuable material, “Police and Prostitution,” and “The Relations of Prostitution to Crime,” published in the eighth and eleventh volumes respectively of the “Archives of Criminal Anthropology.”)

We must, therefore, hold firmly to the fact that the most diverse and heterogeneous vital conditions may ultimately lead to prostitution. Among these, lack of education, premature habituation to sexual depravation by casual observation and by deliberate seduction, play an important rôle. And these causes are themselves to a large extent secondary to the miserable housing conditions in great towns, recently so dramatically described by von Pfeiffer and Kampffmeyer.

“It is easier,” says Pfeiffer, “to thunder against immorality from the top of a lofty tower, than it is to resist every allurement in dull, narrow dwellings, in the midst of poverty and deprivation.... The lodger flirts with the wife; the married or free-loving pair, also living in the house, do not wait to begin their caresses until the children are out of the way. The children are witnesses of many scenes which are little adapted to the preservation of pure morals; they see things which they later come to regard as matters of course, and when they have the opportunity they act in the same way themselves, for they have not learned otherwise, and they think that every one does the same....

“The servant-girl becomes pregnant; no one knows what has become of her child’s father. Driven out of her place, she remembers that she has a married sister, and after long search she finds her in a damp basement dwelling. This dwelling consists of a single room and a dark kitchen; three shivering, dirty children are playing on the floor; the husband is out of employment; but still they can find room for this sister-in-law and her illegitimate child. Then perhaps there are better days for a time. But within the narrow limits of the one-roomed dwelling the association is too intimate, and the sister-in-law again becomes pregnant, and ultimately in the same week both the sisters are delivered as the result of impregnation by the same man. When we think how all this has taken place in the only available room, we can understand that the children must have seen a great deal little suited to childish eyes.”

The housing statistics of Berlin for the year 1900 give horrible reports regarding this, and even much worse conditions—conditions[336] which are sufficiently explained when we consider how often families living in a single room take in a male or a female lodger for the night. One-roomed dwellings in which from four to seven sleep every night are common; those in which eight to ten sleep are by no means rare!

After what has been said above, no elaborate demonstration is needed to show that alcoholism everywhere, in the most diverse conditions, prepares the soil for prostitution. Kräpelin and O. Rosenthal have thoroughly exposed this intimate connexion between prostitution and alcoholism.

An even more important source of prostitution is to be found in procurement and in the traffic in girls—this grave social evil of our time. How often are children initiated into the practice of prostitution, for the sake of pecuniary gain, by their own parents, or by some other individual devoid of all moral feeling, and taught to serve as mere instruments of earning money by lust! Paris offers more examples of this traffic than any other European city, but London is not far behind, as was proved by the Pall Mall Gazette scandals of 1883, to which we shall return in another connexion. In Berlin itself in recent years the number of half-grown, and even childish, prostitutes has enormously increased. Prostitutes from thirteen to fourteen years of age are no longer rare.

An even sadder phenomenon is the modern traffic in girls, a characteristic product of the age of commerce, although earlier times were, indeed, familiar with it, especially France in the eighteenth century,[299] witness more especially the accounts of the celebrated Parc-aux-Cerfs.

The modern traffic in girls [300] is intimately connected with the[337] brothel question. We can, in fact, assert that if there were no brothels there would be no traffic in girls. This is proved also by the growing dislike to brothels felt by prostitutes, who prefer a free life. For this reason, it becomes more and more difficult for the keepers of brothels to obtain inmates, and the international traffic in girls attempts to fill the continually increasing deficiency in the number of girls entering brothels.

The traffic in girls is to-day almost exclusively recruited from Eastern Europe. As regards its original sources, we find that Galicia—i.e., Austrian Poland—supplies 40 %, Russia 15 %, Italy 11 %, Austria-Hungary 10 %, Germany 8 %, of the “White Slave Trade.” Most of the girls are transported to the Argentine, where we find them in the brothels.[301]

The traders in girls, or “kaften” as they are called in Brazil, are, for the most part, Polish Jews. Rosenack shows, in his report on the campaign against the traffic in girls (a campaign actively taken up by the Western European Jewish Unions, and especially by the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women), that five out of six of the Galician Jews engaged in this traffic are what are called “Luftmenschen” (men of air)—that is, men without any definite or secure means of livelihood—and that only an improvement in their social conditions can put an end to the traffic in girls. As regards that part of the world, he considers that the measures resolved upon by the National and International Conference for the Suppression of the Traffic in Girls (Berlin, 1903; Frankfurt-on-the-Main, 1905) are not adapted to offer any important hindrances to the traffic. More effective has been the work of the Jewish Branch Committee in Germany for the suppression of the Galician traffic in girls. Dr. Rosenack, Berta Pappenheim, and Dr. Sera Rabinowitsch, in furtherance of the work of the committee, studied the local conditions; the population was instructed verbally and by leaflets and pamphlets. Endeavours have been made to improve the economic condition of the workwomen of Galicia. For this purpose, instructed female assistants are sent from Germany to Galicia. It has been possible to awaken in Galicia general[338] interest in the work of the suppression of traffic in girls. In a Conference held at Lemberg, the Galician clubs and Jewish committees made representations to German and other societies, in order to formulate a plan, and to devise measures for the improvement of Galician conditions.

In Buenos Ayres, the principal town of entry for Galician girls, a committee has been formed to oppose the traffic in girls, the members of this committee being of all religions and nationalities. This has had one good effect—that the traders in girls have become alarmed; they no longer practise their profession so openly as before. The Argentine police are also taking an active part in the fight with the traffic. Not more than two of the judges at Buenos Ayres were found to make common cause with the “traders,” and to discharge them on receipt of large bribes. A law has been drafted for the punishment of those engaged in this traffic, by imprisonment for six years and confiscation of their property.

The traders in girls constitute an international ring, and the centre of their organization is in Buenos Ayres.

In Berlin, since 1904, there has existed a central police organization for the suppression of the international traffic in girls, the activity of which extends throughout the Empire. Every case of this traffic which comes to the notice of the police in Germany is reported to the central police organization. This draws up a list of all the traders in girls whose names are definitely known. It has started an album containing photographs of traders who have been punished, and it exchanges experiences with the police of other countries. It is to be hoped that in comparison with the other countries of Europe the number of German girls exported to brothels abroad will continually grow smaller, and that the local measures undertaken in Galicia and the Argentine will have a good effect in limiting, and ultimately suppressing, this traffic.

Henne am Rhyn has shown that to and from other countries—for example, from England to Belgium and Germany (Hamburg), from Galicia to Turkey, from Italy to North America, etc.—individual girls are transported. According to Felix Baumann, the number of traders in girls in New York approaches 20,000. They have close relations to the police, and they employ young handsome men, called “cadets,” to attract the girls. The abolition of brothels would here also be the best means of abolishing the traffic in girls.

Having now learned the sources of prostitution, we must proceed to give a brief account of the places in which it is carried on.[339] Here we have first of all to distinguish public from secret prostitution.

As regards public prostitution, there are only two principal varieties to consider: street prostitution, where the women seek their victims in the streets, in order to carry them off either to their own dwellings or to houses of accommodation; and brothel prostitution. At the present day in most countries public street prostitution is far the most general form, and this is especially true as regards Germany, where in a few towns only brothels continue to exist. In many places this street prostitution—for example, in the Friedrichstrasse of Berlin, and also on the boulevards of Paris—gives rise to conditions which recall the worst days of imperial Rome. The contact between public life and professional prostitution is unquestionably a great evil. The activity of prostitutes in the open streets, the shameless and lascivious display of their sexual charms, their bold solicitation coram publico, the stimulating character of professional unchastity—all these poison our public life, obliterate the boundary between cleanliness and contamination, and display daily a picture of sexual corruption—alike before the eyes of the pure, blameless girl, those of the honourable wife, and those of the immature boy. Aptly has this street prostitution been termed the cloaca of our social life, which empties into the open street, whereas at least brothel prostitution only represented a hidden cloaca, whose offensive odour need not annoy all the world, as inevitably happens in the case of street prostitution. In addition, we have to consider the serious dangers involved in the practice of professional fornication in private dwellings and houses of accommodation, as they involve the decent families living in such houses. What do the children living in such houses see and hear? Frequently prostitutes are admitted to confidential family intercourse, and they seduce the daughters of poor people to join them in the practice of prostitution, and the sons to a vicious life or to become souteneurs. That the danger of contamination of the lower classes of the population by means of prostitution is by no means imaginary, is clearly shown by numerous examples from actual life. I subscribe to all that the advocates of brothels say in this respect.

And yet brothels are a still greater evil! They constitute an incomparably more dangerous centre of sexual corruption, a worse breeding-ground of sexual aberrations of every kind, and last, not least, the greatest focus of sexual infection. With reference to the last point, the matter will be discussed more fully in[340] the chapter dealing with the question of regulation in connexion with the suppression of venereal diseases.

The brothel is the high-school of refined sexual lust and perversity. The detailed proof of this I must leave to the descriptions of the two writers most experienced in the life of brothels, Léo Taxil [302] and Louis Fiaux.[303]

It is a fact well known to all that many young men learn in brothels for the first time the manifold and artificial ways in which natural sexual intercourse can be replaced by perverse methods of sexual activity. Here, in the brothel, psychopathia sexualis is systematically taught. And what the old debauchee demands from the prostitute and pays her for, perverse intercourse, is spontaneously offered to the youthful initiate, because competition between the prostitutes, and the hope of a higher payment, lead them to do so. The opinion of the French authors just mentioned is perfectly credible—that there are young men who in this way have learned about perverse sexuality before they were fully acquainted with natural sexuality, and who thus have permanently acquired more inclination for these mysteries of Venus than for a natural and normal sexual intercourse.

“Brothel-jargon,” or “brothel-slang,” contains a number of words almost peculiar to this dialect, by which the contra-natural, abnormal methods of sexual intercourse are denoted in a more or less cynical manner; for example, faire feuille de rose = anilinctus; sfogliar la rosa (to pluck the leaves from the rose) = pædicare; faire tête-bêche = reciprocal cunnilinctus of two tribades; punta di penna = masturbatio labialis; pulci lavoratrici (learned fleas!) = tribades, etc.

A learned investigator like Fiaux is led by his observations of many years to the conclusion that brothels constitute not only the most dangerous form of public prostitution, but the most dangerous kind of prostitution that exists at all, and that it is urgently necessary that they should be abolished in all countries as soon as possible.

In addition to the two varieties and localities of “public” prostitution—that is, prostitution carried on under the observation of the police—there is a much more extensive secret prostitution, in connexion with which, however, the word “secret” must always be accepted with reserve, since in its case also it comes more or less under the eye of the public. This secret prostitution[341] is, for example, accessible at numerous places, and these are very different one from another. Secret prostitution also has its types, its peculiarities—in short, its definite local colouring, according to the place in which it is practised. Let us give a brief account of the various localities of secret prostitution.

1. Public-houses with Women Attendants, the so-called “Animierkneipen.”—The waitress (barmaid) is the true exemplar of the secret prostitute, and further, in consequence of the perpetual association with alcoholism, is the most dangerous variety;[304] for the barmaid allures the guest even more to the excessive consumption of alcohol than to sexual indulgence. For this purpose barmaids receive a percentage of the receipts from the sale of liquor, and this sum, in addition to free board, is their only wage.

The “animierkneipen”[305] and the restaurants with women attendants can be plainly distinguished from a considerable distance by their curtained windows, and by the red, green, or blue glass panes over the doors of entry. These coloured panes are so characteristic of these places of lust and gluttony that at the last year’s District Synod of the Friedrichswerder section of the town of Berlin the attempt was made (cf. Vossische Zeitung, No. 248, May 30, 1906) to forbid the use of such illuminated panes for the advertisement of the houses of entertainment in Berlin with female attendants. To this proposal the reasonable objection was made that if this distinguishing mark were abolished, there would be no means of recognizing such places, and therefore no warning signal for blameless individuals.

Many “animierkneipen”—the French similarly term the girls in such places “les inviteuses”[306]—by their mysterious-looking interior; by the heavy curtains, which produce semi-obscurity; by small very discreet chambres séparées, lighted by little coloured lanterns and with erotic pictures on the walls; by their Spanish walls and their enormous couches—obtain the appearance of small lupanars. To these the richer customers and the initiates are brought, whilst the ordinary habitual guests commonly assemble in the larger bars, where also music—it must be admitted very[342] bad music—in the form of a piano- or a zither-player, is not wanting.

The whole shameless activity of these “animierkneipen,” in which alcohol and indecency play the principal rôle, has recently been described by Hermann Seyffert in a manner no less perspicuous than true to life.[307] The clients of such places are, for the most part, immature lads, who squander here the money of their parents or their employers; but we find there also the habitual guests, usually elderly married men, who find in this atmosphere a welcome variety in comparison with the monotony of their homes. The quantities of alcohol which are consumed in the “animierkneipen,” both by the guests and by the attendants, are enormous. The barmaids must always drink at the cost of the guests, in order that the sales of liquor may be larger. O. Rosenthal [308] speaks of barmaids who consume twenty to thirty glasses of beer a day, and more, without mentioning brandy and liqueurs!

2. Ball-Rooms and Dancing-Saloons.[309]—Properly speaking, these are only a sub-variety of the places described in Section 1; they are enlarged “animierkneipen,” with the addition of (better) music and of dancing. But the beautiful days of the Bal Mabille and the Closerie des Lilas, or of Cremorne Gardens, the Portland Rooms, the Argyll Rooms, and the Orpheum have long passed away. The majority of the ball-rooms of Berlin and Paris (in London they disappeared long ago) have sunk to a lower level. Prostitution is now dominant. The “intimacy,” which in the earlier more idyllic ball-rooms felt so much at home, is now no longer to be found there. It is only necessary to visit the celebrated ball-rooms of Berlin—the Ballhaus in the Joachimstrasse, the “Blumensäle,” etc., not to speak of the seats of baser prostitution, as, for example, Lestmann’s Dancing-Saloon—in order to be aware of this fact. Here also the principal thing is drinking, and always more drinking! In Paris, in the dancing-rooms of Montmartre, we can see the “inviteuses” in full cry; some of the French dancing-rooms, however, appear more attractive from the æsthetic point of view than the haunts of Terpsichore in Berlin. A dancing-saloon that was not exclusively[343] concerned with prostitution was that of Emberg in the Schumannstrasse, but in the year 1906 this was closed for ever. Now, similar great ball-rooms exist, properly speaking, only in the suburbs—in Halensee, Grünau, Nieder-Schönhausen, etc. Here also, however, the dance is not the principal thing—procurement and prostitution are widely diffused, as was pointed out fifty years ago by Thomas Bade in his essay, in this respect most convincing, “Ueber Gelegenheitsmacherei und Öffentliches Tanzvergnügen”—“Procurement in Relation to Public Ball-Rooms” (Berlin, 1858).

3. Variety Theatres, Low Music-Halls, and Cabarets.—The principal object of these places, so characteristic of our time, is “to kill time” in as amusing a manner as possible, “amusement” being what the “average sensual man” of to-day, dull and empty-headed, demands. What he wants is the satisfaction of his desire for sensations by the appearance of more or less décolleté singers, dancers, acrobats, male and female, by the representation of tableaux vivants in which the parts are played by beautiful women, by the kinematograph, or by pantomime, by spicy songs, by the performance of clever jugglers, by wrestling and boxing matches between men and women, by juggling, and all kinds of spectacles, etc. In short, the most diverse “varieties”—hence the name—of amusement are offered here, and it is significant that these places of pleasure first appeared in the great seaports of Liverpool, London, Hamburg, and Marseilles, where the sailors, after the weary monotony of long sea voyages, found satisfaction in the variegated display of enjoyment offered to them in such places. Now the monotony, the emptiness of their life, drives innumerable crowds of townsmen to the variety theatres, which, even though as little as the drinking-saloons can they be called true “places” of prostitution, still serve as localities in which prostitutes meet their clients; and in this way evening after evening a large number use them as the field of their activities.

The lowest class of variety theatre, the “Tingel-Tangel” (low music-hall), also euphemistically called “Academy of Music,” is, in fact, nothing more than a brothel, the only difference being that the actual sexual intercourse does not take place in the house itself, as so often occurs in the similar “animierkneipen.” The singers appearing in these “tingel-tangel” are all low-class prostitutes. In most cases, whilst one of their number is practising the “art of song” (sit venia verbo), the others, sitting about the hall in shameless décolleté, display their charms, and incite[344] (“animieren”) the visitors to drink. Clerks and students form the indulgent audience; in seaport towns the audience consists generally of sailors. Who is not familiar with the most celebrated tingel-tangel streets in the world, the Spielbudenplatz and the Reeperbahn, in St. Pauli, near the docks of Hamburg? In these streets we see one variety theatre after another, and all are crowded by a smoking, drinking audience, taking part in the choruses of the songs. A peculiar kind of these places of pleasure is constituted by the so-called “Rummel,” a speciality of Berlin. Wherever, within or without the town limits, by the demolition of old houses or in any other way, a large area remains free from building for a considerable time, these tingel-tangel proprietors invade the place, erect merry-go-rounds and cake-stalls, and there develops in the place a manifold activity, in which the lower classes of the population exclusively share. Here the very lowest types of prostitute seek their prey, and find it.

4. “Boarding-Houses” (“Pensionate”) and Maisons de Passe (Houses of Accommodation).—Anyone walking through the streets of Berlin will not fail to notice boards at the doors of certain houses, bearing the inscription, “Here rooms can be hired by the month, week, or day.” I do not assert that this announcement always represents an invitation to fornication, or the provision of an opportunity therefor; but in many cases these announcements serve as indications of the “intercourse” obtainable in such dwellings. Often several stories, or even the entire house, is devoted to this purpose. It professes to be a “Private Hotel” or Furnished Lodgings; but in reality it is a masked brothel, a “house of accommodation” for prostitutes and their clients, a place in which the landlord—in most cases the landlord is of the female sex—has for principal occupation the practice of procurement. Other dwellings, without these sufficiently well-known and suspicious boards attached to the door-posts, passing under the less striking name of a “pension,” are adapted rather for the exquisite and artificial enjoyment of the richer classes, and are employed for sexual orgies of a more extensive character, for the procurement and seduction of young girls, and for the assignations of the higher classes of the demi-monde and their clientèle.

5. “Massage Institutes.”—To these distinctly modern establishments, which mainly subserve the purposes of masochistic prostitution, we shall return in the chapter on masochism. Many prostitutes have some knowledge of massage, and masquerade as “masseuses”; their supplementary profession is ordinary prostitution,[345] and for this reason we are justified in alluding to them in this section.

6. The Weibercafés.—These are found in all the large towns, especially in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and Buda-Pesth, and they serve as the principal places in which prostitution is carried on by day. Prostitutes sit here in great numbers hour after hour, and wait for their clients, who, of course, must pay for drinks which are consumed. Certain cafés in Berlin—as, for example, the “Café National,” the Café Keck in the Leipziger Strasse, etc.—are typical nocturnal cafes, in which from the onset of darkness until early in the morning prostitutes await their clients.

Naturally, the above classification does not include all varieties of modern prostitution, which exhibits many other modes of activity. Most of these others, however, have some sort of relationship to the varieties already described, and it is, therefore, unnecessary to deal with them all at length. Prostitution can, of course, be practised anywhere; and its allurements are found in all places in which great numbers of human beings come together.

APPENDIX
THE HALF-WORLD

To prostitution in the wider sense of the term belongs also the “half-world” (“demi-monde”), under which name, first used by the younger Dumas, we include the various categories of “mistresses,” femmes soutenues (kept women), lorettes, cocottes, and fast women.

Alexandre Dumas, in the celebrated passage of his play “Demi-Monde” (Act II., Scene 9), gives by the mouth of Olivier de Jalin the following definition of the half-world:

“All these women have made a false step in their past; they have a small black spot upon their name, and they go in company as much as possible, so that the spot may be less conspicuous. They have the same origin, the same appearance, the same prejudices as good society; but they no longer belong to it, and they form that which we call the half-world (demi-monde), which floats like an island upon the ocean of Paris, and draws towards itself, assumes, and recognizes, everything which falls from the firm land, or which wanders out or runs away from the firm land, without counting the foreign shipwrecked individuals who come no man knows whence.

“Since the married men, under the protection of the legal code, have[346] had the right to banish from the bosom of the family a woman who has forgotten her duty, the morals of married life have undergone a revolution which has created a new world—for what becomes of all these expelled, compromised women? The first of them who found herself shown the door, bewailed her fault, and hid her shame in retirement; but—the second? She sought the first one out, and as soon as there were two of them, they called the fault a misfortune, the crime a mistake, and began to make excuses for one another mutually. Having become three, they asked one another to dinner; having become four—they danced a quadrille. Now round these women there grouped themselves young girls also who had begun their life with a false step; false widows; women who bore the name of the lovers with whom they lived; some of those rapid ‘marriages’ which had lasted as liaisons of many years’ duration; finally, all the women who wished people to believe that they were something else than they really were, and did not wish to appear in their true colours. At the present day this irregular world is in full bloom, and its bastard society is greatly loved by young men. For here love is less difficult than in circles above—and not so expensive as in circles below.”

From the last sentence we see that the original idea of the “half-world” was not so wide as that of the present day; above all, the former notion did not, as it does at present, include the idea of prostitution. The ladies of the half-world of Dumas were “not so expensive” as ordinary prostitutes. Our modern demi-mondaines are characterized by the fact that their price is high. They are prostitutes for the upper ten thousand. And yet they have this in common with the other demi-monde—that they do not, like prostitutes properly speaking, give themselves indifferently to anyone able to pay the price, but they lay stress on the social position of their lover for the time being, and upon his character as a “gentleman.” They can even exhibit something of the nature of love. The modern half-world can most aptly be compared with the Greek hetairism. It forms a characteristic constituent of modern “high life.” Whether this especially manifests itself on the racecourse, at first nights at the theatre, in great charitable bazaars, at masked balls, at fashionable seaside resorts, at Monte Carlo, at floral festivals, and the like, there also we encounter the half-world; and its members, in respect of beauty, toilet, distinguished appearance, cultivation, and conversation, are in no way to be distinguished from the ladies of high society. Certain types of the demi-monde realize, in fact, the ideal of the Greek hetairæ; but even more than these, the modern demi-mondaine represents elaborated enjoyment. These women are thoroughly cultivated, the true law-givers of fashion, the arbiters in every question of taste. Mondaines and demi-mondaines are in outward appearance hardly to be distinguished[347] one from the other; at least, this is the case in Paris, where a witty writer defined the distinction between them in this way—that the former received their lovers only in the daytime, the latter also by night.[310] It is only the connoisseur who is able to detect the “half-world aroma,” that indefinable quality which gives the demi-mondaine such an exceptional value in the eyes of the jeunesse dorée.

From what circles do the recruits of the half-world come? The ladies of the theatre, the stars of the variety stage and of the ballet, send their contingent; the aristocracy is also represented in their ranks; but many a distinguished lorette or “fille de marbre” is of low origin, and yet understands admirably how to adapt herself rapidly to all the demands of high life, to drive her dog-cart as smartly as the most genuine Countess, and in Longchamps, Karlshorst, Ostend, or Trouville, to play the part of the fine lady.

The one distinction between them—and it is the distinction of half a world—is the fact that this fashionable life of the demi-monde is not provided out of their own means, but out of the pockets of one, or more often of several, rich galants.

The type of the “grande cocotte” is encountered in its genuine and unadulterated form only in Paris. Here the demi-mondaine plays a great part in public life. The time of the earlier mistresses of princes, with their political intrigues and their far-reaching spheres of influence, is indeed over—a Lola Montez, an Aurora Königsmark is to-day no longer possible; and yet the Parisian demi-mondaine maintains influential relationships with the new great power of our time—the power of the press. The journalists who are in the service of the demi-monde are by George Dahlen termed the “Press-Fridoline,” because “their pens are paid, not with ducats, but with more or less enviable hours of love in distinguished boudoirs”;[311] and Victor Joze also describes the advertisements—paid for by a night of love, or perhaps only by a smile—which the writers of Paris give in the newspapers to the distinguished cocottes of the Quartier Marbœuf or of the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, in order to attract the attention of Indian nabobs, Russian Grand Dukes, or American millionaires, to this or that fashionable beauty. This is characteristic of Paris. In other great capitals marketable gallantry does not seek publicity in this way, but pursues a more hidden course.

For what the German, and especially what the Berliners, term[348] the “half-world” is very different from the type we have just described of the true Parisian demi-mondaine. Our half-world (the half-world of Berlin) is recruited for the most part from intelligent prostitutes, who are to be found chiefly in the public gardens, in the Zoological Gardens, in the Lehrter Ausstellungspark, and in the leading restaurants. Here every evening they seek new prey, every evening they sell their charms to a new lover for a definite sum of money; whereas the true lady of the half-world never has at any time more than one or two admirers, who provide for all the expenses of her life, and she never—at any rate in public—practises professional prostitution, as do the women just described.

Finally, there is yet another type, which must not be confused with the demi-monde. This is the international prostitute, who journeys from one place to another, has indeed often the appearance of a distinguished lorette, but leads a much more insecure, unstable life than the true demi-mondaine, and often combines with prostitution the profession of an adventuress. Now she is in Paris, now in London, now at Biarritz, now at Monte Carlo (the principal field of her activity), now in Constantinople, Smyrna, St. Petersburg, or Berlin. Sometimes she undertakes a voyage of discovery to the New World. Germany provides a not insignificant percentage of these international cocottes. Such wanderers are especially well known in the circles of officers and of speculators on the Bourse; by these they are not seldom “recommended,” after the manner in which a traveller is given letters of introduction. They may even be “raffled for,” as recently happened in an officers’ mess in Munich, and so pass to the share of the fortunate (generally much to be commiserated) winner. Abroad they prefer to adopt French or exotic names.

[243] Here, in the phrase “man at length become self-conscious,” we have the animating idea of this work, as it is of all fruitful efforts at the amelioration of the human lot. See the admirable development of this idea in E. Ray Lankester’s Romanes lecture, “Nature and Man”; and also in H. G. Wells’s later writings, more especially “A Modern Utopia” and “New Worlds for Old.”—Translator.

[244] That this opinion is false, I have proved incontestably as regards syphilis in my book, “The Origin of Syphilis” (Jena, 1901). For the European and Asiatic world, syphilis is a specifically modern disease, not more than 400 years old.

[245] Venice, 1534.

[246] “La Lozana Andaluza” (“The Gentle Andalusian”), by Francesco Delicado. Traduit pour la première fois, texte Espagnol en regard par Alcide Bonneau, 2 vols., Paris, 1888. Regarding this work, see my book “The Origin of Syphilis,” vol. i., pp. 36-43.

[247] Cf. also the interesting work of Salvatore di Giacomo, “Prostitution in Naples in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries, based on Unpublished Documents,” revised in accordance with the German translation, and provided with an introduction by Dr. Iwan Bloch (Dresden, 1904).

[248] Reprinted in his “Satyræ Medicæ XX.,” pp. 528-549 (Leipzig, 1722).

[249] Cf. my work on “Rétif de la Bretonne,” p. 504 et seq. (Berlin, 1906).

[250] The contents of this work are enumerated in my above-mentioned book, pp. 505-512.

[251] A. J. B. Parent-Duchatelet, “De la Prostitution dans la Ville de Paris,” third edition, 1857 (Paris, 1836).

[252] F. F. A. Béraud, “Les Filles Publiques de Paris” (Brussels, 1839, 2 vols.).

[253] Dr. Michael Ryan was an acquaintance of Arthur Schopenhauer, who in June, 1829, sent Ryan a copy of his book “Theoria Colorum.” Cf. Eduard Grisebach, “Schopenhauer: the History of His Life,” p. 168 (Berlin, 1897).

[254] M. Ryan, “Prostitution in London, with a Comparative View of that of Paris and New York” (London, 1839).

[255] Cf. in this connexion also the report from other sources given in my “Sexual Life in England,” vol. iii., pp. 315-319, 440-447 (Berlin, 1903).

[256] W. Tait, “Magdalenism: An Inquiry into the Extent, Causes, and Consequences of Prostitution in Edinburgh,” second edition (Edinburgh, 1842).

[257] R. Wardlaw, “Lectures on Female Prostitution; its Nature, Extent, Effects, Guilt, Causes, and Remedy,” third edition (Glasgow, 1843).

[258] F. I. dos Santos Cruz, “Da Prostituiçao na Cidade de Lisboa” (Lisbon, 1841).

[259] “Estabelecimentos de Beneficencia para as Consultas Gratuitas,” pp. 203-206.

[260] A. Potton, “De la Prostitution et de ses Conséquences dans les Grandes Villes, dans la Ville de Lyon en Particulier” (Paris and Lyons, 1842).

[261] E. A. Duchesne, “De la Prostitution dans la Ville d’Alger depuis la Conquête” (Paris, 1853).

[262] “Die Prostitution in Berlin und ihre Opfer” (Berlin, 1846).

[263] C. Röhrmann, “Der sittliche Zustand von Berlin nach Aufhebung der geduldeten Prostitution des weiblichen Geschlechts”—“The Moral Condition of Berlin after the Abolition of Tolerated Prostitution of the Female Sex” (Leipzig, 1846).

[264] F. J. Behrend, “Prostitution in Berlin, and the Measures it is Desirable to Adopt against Prostitution and against Syphilis,” etc. A work based on official sources, and dedicated to His Excellency the Minister von Ladenberg (Erlangen, 1850).

[265] H. Lippert, “Prostitution in Hamburg” (Hamburg, 1848).

[266] A. J. Gross-Hoffinger, “The Fate of Women and Prostitution, in Relation to the Principle of the Indissolubility of Catholic Marriage, and especially in Relation to the Laws of Austria and the Philosophy of our Time” (Leipzig, 1847).

[267] Josef Schrank, “Prostitution in Vienna in Historical, Administrative, and Hygienic Relations” (Vienna, 1886, 2 vols).

[268] “The Moral Corruption of Our Time and its Victims in their Relationship to the State, to the family, and to Morality, with especial Reference to the Conditions of Prostitution in Leipzig” (Leipzig, 1854).

[269] W. M. Sanger, “The History of Prostitution” (New York, 1859).

[270] J. Jeannel, “Prostitution in Large Towns in the Nineteenth Century, and the Abolition of Venereal Diseases.”

[271] W. Acton, “Prostitution in its Various Aspects,” second edition (London. 1874).

[272] Hügel, “The History, Statistics, and Regulation of Prostitution” (Vienna. 1865).

[273] L. Martineau, “La Prostitution Clandestine” (Paris, 1885).

[274] O. Commenge, “La Prostitution Clandestine à Paris” (Paris, 1897).

[275] V. Augagneur, “La Prostitution des Filles Mineures” (Paris, 1888).

[276] L. Fiaux, “La Police des Mœurs en France et dans les Principales Villes de l’Europe” (Paris, 1888); “Les Maisons de Tolérance, leur Fermeture,” 3me édition (Paris, 1862); “La Prostitution ‘Cloitrée’” (Brussels, 1902).

[277] Yves Guyot, “La Prostitution: Étude de Physiologie Sociale” (Paris, 1882).

[278] A. Blaschko, “The Problem of Prostitution,” published in the Berliner Klin. Wochenschrift, pp. 430-435 (1892); “Syphilis and Prostitution from the Hygienic Standpoint” (Berlin, 1893); “Hygiene of Prostitution and of Venereal Diseases” (Jena, 1900); “Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century” (Berlin, 1902); “The Dangers to Health resulting from Prostitution, and the Contest with these Dangers” (Berlin, 1904).

[279] C. Lombroso and G. Ferrero, “Woman as Criminal and Prostitute.”

[280] B. Tarnowsky, “Prostitution and Abolitionism” (Hamburg, 1890).

[281] C. Ströhmberg, “Prostitution: a Socio-Medical Study” (Stuttgart, 1899).

[282] E. Dühren (Iwan Bloch), “The Sexual Life in England,” vol. i., pp. 201-445 (Charlottenburg, 1901).

[283] E. von Düring, “Prostitution and Venereal Diseases” (Leipzig, 1905).

[284] Goethe, in the poem “Der Gott und die Bajadere,” has very beautifully described the ennoblement of gross love by means of ideal love.

[285] Henry Murger, in his “Vie de Bohème,” also alludes to the “incomprehensible” fact that “persons of standing who sometimes possess spirit, a name, and a coat cut according to the fashion, out of their love for the common will go so far as to raise to the level of an object of fashion a creature whom their very servant would not have chosen as a mistress.”

[286] C. Lombroso, “Woman as Criminal and Prostitute,” p. 550.

[287] Friedrich Hammer, “The Regulation of Prostitution,” published in The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, vol. iii., No. 10, p. 380 (Leipzig, 1905).

[288] H. Kurella, “A Contribution to the Biological Comprehension of Physical and Psychical Bisexuality,” published in the Zentralblatt für Nervenheilkunde, 1896, vol. xix., p. 239.

[289] Syphilis is not to be forgotten.

[290] This modified Lombrosism is advocated by B. A. H. Hübner in his interesting work concerning prostitutes and their legal relations (Monatsschrift für Kriminalpsychologie, 1907, pp. 1-11). He found that among sixty-four insane prostitutes, under observation in the Hertzberg Asylum in Berlin, not less than 59·45 % were already intellectually defective at the time they had come under police control as prostitutes.

[291] C. Lombroso, “Recent Advances in the Study of Criminals.”

[292] Schrank observes (“Prostitution in Vienna,” vol. ii., p. 216) that striking physical peculiarities do not appear to be either more or less frequent among prostitutes than they are among the generality of the population.

[293] G. Keben, “Prostitution in its Relation to Modern Realistic Literature” (Zurich, 1892).

[294] Oda Olberg, “Poverty in the Domestic Industry of Making Ready-made Clothing” (Leipzig, 1896).

[295] Anna Pappritz, “The Economic Causes of Prostitution” (Berlin, 1903).

[296] Pfeiffer, “Poverty and Overcrowding in Great Towns and in Relation to Prostitution and to Venereal Diseases,” published in The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1903, vol. i., pp. 135-144.

[297] P. Kampffmeyer, “Poverty and Overcrowding in Great Towns,” etc., published in The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1903, vol. i., pp. 145-160; “Bad Housing Accommodation in Relation to Prostitution and ‘Night-Lodgers’; the Necessary Legal Reforms,” op. cit., 1905, vol. iii., pp. 165-229.

[298] E. v. Düring, “Prostitution and Venereal Diseases.” p. 11.

[299] Cf. the description of the astonishing development of the French procurement of that day which is given in my “New Researches concerning the Marquis de Sade,” pp. 88-98 (Berlin, 1904). The Marquis de Sade, in his novel “The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom,” has very fully described the traffic in girls of his time. Incredible revelations of this traffic, of the almost absolute power of the procuresses, and of their relations to the police, led in October, 1906, to an action against the procuress Regine Riehl, who, under the mask of a dressmaker’s shop, had for years conducted a brothel, in which the girls were entirely robbed of their freedom, were subjected to corporal punishment, and never received payment for their “work.” Cf. A. Blaschko, The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1906, vol. v., pp. 427-433; also Karl Kraus, “The Riehl Trial” (Vienna, 1906).

[300] The literature of the “White Slave Trade” is extensive. I shall mention a few works only: Alfred S. Dyer, “The Trade in English Girls” (Berlin, 1881); the celebrated work of Alexis Splingard, “Clarissa, from the Dark Houses of Belgium,” with an introduction by Otto Henne am Rhyn, fourth edition (Leipzig, 1897); Otto Henne am Rhyn, “Prostitution and the Traffic in Girls” (Leipzig, 1903); Julius Kemény, “Hungara—Hungarian Girls in the Market: Revelations regarding the International Traffic in Girls” (Buda-Pesth, 1903). Cf. also the extensive references in The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1904, vol. ii., pp. 207-212 (Report of the Jewish Commission for the Suppression of the Traffic in Girls). Regarding the traffic in girls in Holland, cf. J. Rutgers, “Sketches from Holland,” ibid., 1906, vol. v., pp. 531-355.

[301] Cf. regarding the conditions in South America, the report of Major D. Wagner, Secretary of the German National Committee for the Suppression of the Traffic in Girls, published in The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1900, vol. v., pp. 378-382.

[302] Léo Taxil, “La Corruption Fin-de-Siècle,” p. 169 et seq. (Paris, 1894).

[303] Louis Fiaux, “Les Maisons de Tolérance: leur Fermeture,” troisième édition, pp. 169 et seq., 248, 250, 251 (Paris, 1892).

[304] According to recent statistical data, from 80 to 90 % of barmaids (in Germany) are infected with venereal diseases, so that they perhaps represent the most dangerous class of prostitutes.

[305, 306] “Animierkneipen.”—Kneipe signifies a drinking-saloon or pothouse, equivalent to the French cabaret. The Animierkneipe is a beer-saloon at which the attendants are women (Kellnerinnen), who are engaged on the terms described in the text, and whose function, therefore, is to attract the male customers of the place, to incite them (animieren) to drink freely, and to play the part of prostitutes when required. Thus they correspond to les inviteuses of the similar drinking-saloons in Paris.—Translator.

[307] H. Seyffert, “Die Animierkneipen und ihre Geheimnisse” (“Animierkneipen and their Secrets”), published in Freie Meinung, 1906, Nos. 26 and 27. See also “Impropriety at Inns with Female Attendants in Prussia, with especial Reference to the Conditions in Cologne” (1891).

[308] O. Rosenthal, “Alcoholism and Prostitution,” p. 46 (1905).

[309] Cf. the elaborate descriptions by Hans Ostwald, “Berliner Tanzlokale” (Berlin and Leipzig); regarding the earlier dancing-rooms of London, see my “Sexual Life in England,” vol. i., pp. 324-334.

[310] Victor Joze, “Paris-Gomorrhe. Mœurs du Jour,” p. 173 (Paris, 1898).

[311] Georg Dahlen, “Sketches of European Society,” p. 126 (Berlin, 1885).

CHAPTER XIV
VENEREAL DISEASES

“In co-operation with alcoholic intoxication and with tuberculosis, syphilis plays in our day the part which in the middle ages was played by bubonic plague.”—Alfred Fournier.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XIV

Prostitution the focus, not the cause, of venereal diseases — Philosophy of venereal diseases — Their age — Time and place of their first appearance — The origin of syphilis — Practical importance of the proof of the recent character of syphilis — The theologico-animistic theory of venereal diseases — Refutation of this theory — Blameless infection (syphilis innocentium) — The notion of specific infective disease — Scientific campaign against venereal diseases — Syphilis as a specific disease of modern times — Description of its symptoms, its course, and its termination — Consequences of syphilis to the family, to the offspring, and to the race — Congenital syphilis of the first and second generations — Racial degeneration in consequence of syphilis — The age at which infection with syphilis occurs in man and in woman — The soft chancre (chancroid) — Gonorrhœa — Change in our views regarding the dangers of gonorrhœa — Urethral gonorrhœa in the male — Acute and chronic stages — Complications — Gonorrhœa in women — The “diseases of women” — Blindness due to gonorrhœa.

CHAPTER XIV

The central problem of the sexual question is, as I pointed out at the commencement of the previous chapter, the suppression of prostitution and of venereal diseases, the former evil being the principal focus of the latter. I say the principal “focus,” not the “cause.” For, if all prostitutes were healthy, we could leave prostitution quietly alone—leaving out of consideration the moral depravity to which it gives rise—and venereal diseases would spontaneously disappear.

This opinion I advance at the beginning of the chapter on venereal diseases because, even at the present day, there is a remarkable species of philosophy, or rather theology, of venereal diseases, which propounds the most extraordinary hypothesis regarding their origin.

For example, the Alsatian writer Alexander Weill, in his confused work “The Laws and Mysteries of Love,” writes:

“Why should we bother our heads about the cure of syphilis? If anyone wishes to get rid of any evil, he must first of all ascertain its causes in order to remove these. If the cause of it is removed, the evil disappears spontaneously. If the snake has been killed, its poison no longer does any harm. But how can we put an end to the causes of syphilis, when this disease is spontaneously renewed and increased day by day by means of neglected prostitution, and by our social laws which combine to oppose the monogamy of youth and the increase of population? If to-day we could cure all patients suffering from syphilis, to-morrow the same disease would return in a new form, for it would be recreated by the same irregularities that first led to its production (!) It is absolutely useless to employ iodide of potassium and mercury, for every new infringement of natural laws would again bring into being new incurable diseases, which can only be avoided by those who have firmly resolved to observe these laws strictly.”

Weill, indeed, goes so far as to maintain that every man who simultaneously, or rather in brief succession, has intercourse with two healthy women, acquires syphilis, even although both these women remain faithful to him, because “any kind of libertinism in sexual intercourse suffices by itself to give rise to this disease!”

According to this view, which is shared by many members of the laity, venereal diseases, and, above all, the worst of them, syphilis, would be as old as sexual licentiousness itself—that is, as old as the human race, and an inalienable associate of that race.

In my book on “The Origin of Syphilis” I have disproved[352] this view. I have answered the question, so important alike on general philosophical and on social-hygienic grounds, regarding the true nature of syphilis, and have proved that syphilis (and also the other venereal diseases) had a definite local and temporal origin; that syphilis has not existed since the beginning of time; and that some day, when certain definite conditions are fulfilled, the disease will disappear.

The history of syphilis is a matter of profound practical importance. From that history we learn with certainty that the most dangerous and most dreaded of the venereal diseases has, for the European world, and for the “old world” in general, the character of a pure chance comer; and we learn that retrospectively—regarded from the point of view of our present experience—at the time when the disease first began to flourish, it might perhaps have been nipped in the bud.

It is hardly possible to overestimate the practical importance of the recognition of this fact—that for the old civilized world syphilis represents a historical phenomenon, that it has a history, a beginning, or, as Voltaire half-ironically remarks, a genealogy.

Is there not a deliverance, a redemption, in the idea that for the old world there was a time in which syphilis did not exist; that this time, in comparison with the time which has elapsed since syphilis first appeared, was almost infinitely long; and that for this reason, when we look out into the future, the history of the lues venerea assumes the character of a simple episode in the history of European civilized humanity?

At the same time, the definite acceptance of this view would be an urgent warning to all those obscurantists of both sexes who imagine that the problem of the diffusion of venereal diseases can be solved exclusively by religious and moral considerations, and who thus confuse the simplest and clearest relationships, place everything upon an insecure foundation, and exclude every possibility of a successful campaign against syphilis.

Even to-day it unfortunately happens that many continue, as of old, to believe that sexual intercourse is a sin for which a punishment has been provided, and that this punishment is a venereal disease—for example, syphilis. Tylor, the celebrated English anthropologist, has proved that this idea has developed out of the animism extending back into prehistoric times, which regarded all illnesses as the work of demons. We are still influenced by this doctrine, this gloomy, demoniacal conception in respect of everything sexual. I need hardly remind the reader of the ideas of Tolstoi, and of his disciple, the unhappy Dr.[353] Weininger, a disciple exceeding even his master in respect of fanatical condemnation of sexual intercourse. Until recently the laws regulating our German system of workmen’s insurance against illness continued to exhibit definite traces of our legislators’ adhesion to this view. The majority of physicians and historians who said that syphilis was as old as sexual intercourse itself, who employed the phrase ubi Venus ibi syphilis, were unconsciously influenced by this idea, that venereal diseases are to be regarded as a mark of the Divine wrath.

This theological theory, as we may call it, of the origin of syphilis is opposed by certain incontrovertible facts, which suffice to show its utter nullity and untenability.

The mere fact that there exists a blameless infection with syphilis (syphilis innocentium), that, for example, in certain districts of Russia as many as 90 % of the cases of this disease are acquired quite independently of sexual intercourse, by simple contact, shows the absurdity of this superstitious idea.

In the second place, it is a widely known fact that quite frequently persons who are still entirely uncontaminated, blameless initiates, become infected with syphilis on the very first occasion in which they have sexual intercourse, whilst greater experience and more exact knowledge of the threatening dangers induce notorious debauchees to adopt effective measures of protection (which, however, would be useless if syphilis were really a divinely decreed punishment for licentiousness of this kind!).

In the third place, the occurrence of syphilis in little children—partly owing to inheritance, partly, however, acquired in the way already mentioned by casual contact—affords a striking refutation of the above idea, which, unfortunately, still dominates and fascinates a large circle of people.

We could adduce further arguments against this view, but what we have said should suffice to show clearly the untenability of such a superstition. The syphilis of one individual is not the consequence of sexual intercourse, but the consequence of another case of syphilis in another individual—that is to say, syphilis is a specific infective disease, transmissible only by means of its peculiar specific virus, and this transmission can be effected without any sexual intercourse, by means of contacts of other kinds. Syphilis arises only from syphilis.

We have, therefore, to attack this disease precisely in the same manner as the other venereal diseases. As a Portuguese physician has most aptly remarked, to the tyranny of syphilis we must oppose the tyranny of human reason. The principal aim of a[354] campaign against venereal diseases will be the organization of the means offered to us by reason and experience to cope with the disease. The knowledge of these means must be diffused in ever-wider circles of humanity, and care must be taken that every individual is fully and clearly informed regarding the importance and the dangers of syphilis and the other venereal diseases.

Here also history is our teacher, our lamp of truth, and promises us complete success as the result of our campaign against venereal diseases.

The results of my investigations regarding the origin of syphilis all point to a single extremely important fact—namely, that in the case of syphilis, and as regards the “old world,” we have to do with a specific disease of modern times, which made its first appearance at the end of the fifteenth century, and of the previous existence of which, even in the most distant prehistoric times, not the minutest trace remains. This view was held by very eminent physicians, even before the publication of my own critical work, based upon entirely new sources of study. Among these authorities I may mention Jean Astruc and Christoph Girtanner, in the eighteenth century; in the nineteenth century, the Spanish army surgeon Montejo, and of German physicians, above all, Rudolf Virchow, A. Geigel, von Liebermeister, C. Binz, and P. G. Unna. The great philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer held the same view.[312]

Ricord, the celebrated French syphilologist, spoke once of a romance of syphilis which still remained to be written. I should rather compare it with a drama, the separate acts of which are centuries. Of this drama, four acts have already been played. At the present moment we find ourselves at the beginning of the fifth act. Thus, we have an entire century before us, in which, with all the powers placed at our disposal by scientific medical research, by practical therapeutics, and by hygiene in association with social measures, we must work to this end, that this fifth act shall also be the last, as it is in the case of a proper drama.

The history of syphilis has remained so long obscure, because, until the time of Philipp Ricord—that is to say, until the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century—the three venereal diseases, syphilis, or lues, the so-called soft chancre (venereal ulcer or chancroid), and gonorrhœa, were regarded as essentially one disease; whereas we know to-day that syphilis is a specific infective[355] disease of a constitutional character, which permeates the whole body, and must be absolutely distinguished from the other venereal diseases, these latter being purely local in character. This earlier belief in the identity of all venereal infections, an error held even by so great an authority as John Hunter, who was misled by falsely interpreted experiments, renders it necessary that the historical side of the question should be considered also from this point of view.

If gonorrhœa and chancroid were of a syphilitic nature, then certainly syphilis must have existed from very early times. It would not be difficult to refer to syphilis some descriptions and accounts of diseases of the genital organs given by the ancient and medieval writers. It was the progressive enlightenment regarding the essential differences between the three venereal diseases which first proved the untenability of such opinions; we were further assisted by the knowledge of pseudo-venereal and pseudo-syphilitic diseases which we have obtained from modern dermatology. Moreover, in the old world syphilitic bones belonging to ancient or medieval times have never been discovered.[313] The first syphilitic bones date from after the time of the discovery of America. They appear, above all, after the outbreak of the great epidemic of syphilis which followed the Italian campaign of King Charles VIII. of France, in the years 1494 and 1495; it was then that syphilis first became diffused in the old world.

In my work on “The Origin of Syphilis” (Jena, 1901),[314] I have adduced proof, basing my views upon the criticism of older opinions, and assisted by the utilization of very abundant new sources of material, that syphilis was first introduced into Spain in the years 1493 and 1494 by the crew of Columbus, who brought it from Central America, and more especially from the island of Hayti; from Spain it was carried by the army of Charles VIII. to Italy, where it assumed an epidemic form; and after the army was disbanded the disease was transported by the soldiers to the other countries of Europe, and also was soon taken by the Portuguese to the Far East, to India, China, and Japan. At the time of its first appearance in the old world, syphilis was extraordinarily[356] virulent. All the morbid phenomena produced by the disease had a more rapid and violent course than at the present day; the mortality was much higher; the consequences, even when a cure was effected, were much more severe. This virulence of syphilis at the time of its first introduction can only be explained, in accordance with our modern views of the nature and mode of appearances of the disease, by the fact that the nations of the old world (who, nota bene, were all attacked with equal intensity) had, until that time, been completely free from syphilis. All classes of the people and all nations were visited by syphilis to an equal extent and with the same violence.

Even to-day we observe everywhere, when syphilis is introduced into regions which have hitherto been free from the disease, that it has the same acute course, the same violence of morbid manifestations, that characterized its first appearance in Europe. In the four centuries that have elapsed since its introduction into Europe there has occurred a gradual mitigation of the syphilitic virus, or rather a certain degree of immunization of European humanity against the disease. Speaking generally, syphilis has to-day—in comparison with that earlier time—a relatively mild course. To this point we shall return later.[315]

The two other venereal diseases, gonorrhœa and chancroid, unquestionably existed in Europe in the days of antiquity. But they also are specific infective diseases, and are only produced by the virus peculiar to each, just as syphilis has its own peculiar virus.

Ricord (1800-1889), in the years 1830 to 1850, proved the complete diversity of syphilis and gonorrhœa, established the doctrine of the three stages of syphilis—primary, secondary, and tertiary—and, finally, taught us to distinguish the soft, non-syphilitic chancre (chancroid) from the hard, syphilitic chancre. Virchow, in his celebrated essay on “The Nature of Constitutional Syphilitic Affections” (Virchow’s Archiv, 1858, vol. xv., p. 217 et seq.), then threw a clear light on the peculiar course of constitutional syphilis and on the causes of the occasional disappearance and sudden reappearance of the morbid phenomena. Hitherto, however, our knowledge of venereal diseases had rested on an extremely[357] insecure foundation; and the truly scientific study of the subject may be said to have begun in the year 1879, with Albert Neisser’s epoch-making discovery of the gonococcus as the specific exciting cause of gonorrhœa. In the years 1889 to 1892 there followed the discovery of the bacillus of chancroid by Ducrey and Unna, by means of which discovery the complete distinction between the soft and the hard chancre was definitely proved; and, finally, the three years 1903 to 1906 were characterized by remarkable discoveries, the full importance of which is not as yet fully realized, regarding the nature of the syphilitic virus. In the year 1903 Eli Metchnikoff succeeded in transmitting syphilis from human beings to apes, and thus laid the foundation for progressive research regarding syphilis by means of experiments on animals; this was carried further by Lassar, by the inoculation of the syphilitic virus from one ape to another, and also by A. Neisser in his experimental researches in Java;[316] and in March, 1905, the Berlin protozoologist Fritz Schaudinn, since prematurely lost to the world of science, published his first studies on the probable exciting cause of syphilis, the so-called “spirochæte pallida.” Numerous subsequent investigations have established the connexion between this spirilla-form, belonging to the order of protozoa, and syphilitic disease. In this way we have been brought notably nearer to the discovery of the certain cure of syphilis and to the discovery of means of immunization against the disease. In this direction quite new views are opening before our eyes.[317] Numerous ideas suggested by recent discoveries in the province of syphilitic research are described in the admirable essay by J. Jadassohn, “Contributions to Syphilology,” published in the German “Archives for Dermatology and Syphilis,” 1907. Cf. also the account of the recent doctrines regarding syphilis by P. G. Unna and Iwan Bloch, “Die Praxis der Hautkrankheiten,” pp. 548-592 (Vienna and Berlin, 1908).

When some day humanity has been freed from the “sexual plague,” from the hydra of venereal diseases, and when a monument is erected to the liberators, four names will there be commemorated: Ricord, Neisser, Metchnikoff, and Schaudinn!

After these preliminary remarks on the nature of venereal diseases, I proceed to a short description of them, and I[358] begin with the most dangerous of all the venereal diseases, syphilis.[318]

The first manifestations of syphilis make their appearance about three or four weeks after infection, at the place at which infection has occurred, and this is not in every case the genital organs. It is true that syphilis is most commonly transmitted by means of sexual intercourse, but frequently also by contacts of other kinds—for example, by kissing; by gynecological or surgical examinations and operations; by drinking from a glass which has previously been used by some one suffering from syphilis; by the use of uncleansed pocket-handkerchiefs, towels, and bedding, which have been used by a syphilitic patient; by the use of tobacco-pipes, wind-instruments, tooth-brushes, tooth-picks, a glass-blower’s mouthpiece, etc., belonging to strangers; by an uncleansed razor; by the nasty habit of licking the point of a pencil; by moistening postage-stamps with the tongue; by sucking the wound in circumcision; by the suckling of the infant at the breast of a syphilitic wet-nurse, etc.[319] In England the custom, when taking a judicial oath, of kissing the Bible has repeatedly sufficed to transmit syphilitic infection.

In certain districts in which the level of civilization is a low one—as, for example, in some parts of Russia and of Turkey—as many as 50 to 60 % of all infections occur independently of sexual intercourse.

All the discharges from syphilitic lesions in all three stages of the disease are infective. The infective character of the tertiary stage of syphilis was formerly doubted, but has recently been proved beyond dispute. Blood also, although more rarely, can prove infective. On the other hand, the pure secretions—that is, the physiological secretions, not contaminated by morbid products—such as the saliva, tears, and milk, are not infective. Syphilis is, however, very frequently transmitted by means of the semen.

Infection occurs in places in which there is a solution of continuity of the skin or mucous membrane, such as a scratch or a superficial wound, through which the virus can enter. In this way an apparently healthy syphilitic patient—when, for example, he gets a small abrasion on the penis (or, in the case of a woman, in the vagina)—can transmit syphilis if the other individual also has a similar abrasion through which infection can occur.

As we have said, it is not till the lapse of two to four weeks after infection has occurred that the first manifestations of syphilis appear, in the form of a small vesicle or nodule in the infected area; less often merely an abraded area of a peculiar red colour. Gradually this nodule or area enlarges, and becomes continually harder at the base, whilst the surface often undergoes ulceration, and secretes extremely infective pus (the so-called “hard chancre” or “primary lesion”[320]).

This induration is in most cases a certain sign that the syphilitic virus has already entered the body; at least, it has only been possible in a few very rare cases, by excision or cauterization of the hard chancre, to prevent syphilis from entering the blood. Almost always, notwithstanding such endeavours, the manifestations of general infection of the body soon appear.

From the place of infection—that is, from the place at which the hard chancre forms—the syphilitic virus next passes by way of the lymph-stream into the inguinal glands, so that these, in the third or fourth week after the appearance of the hard chancre, begin to swell and to become hard. This swelling of the inguinal glands is painless (the so-called “indolent bubo”), in contrast to the painful swelling which accompanies the soft chancre. From this region the poison now proceeds by way of the bloodvessels and lymph paths on its wanderings all over the body, the individual stages of which can be detected by swellings of the lymph-glands of the axilla, the elbow, the neck, etc. Sometimes other symptoms of general infection are noticeable; above all, the appearance of fever (never earlier than forty days after infection), pains in the muscles, joints, nerves, also severe headaches, a general feeling of lassitude, pallor, and a falling-off in the nutritive condition.

These are the forerunners of the so-called secondary stage of syphilis, which now manifests itself by the appearance of a multiform skin eruption, rendering the diagnosis of syphilis absolutely[360] certain. For this reason, in doubtful cases of ulceration of the genital organs the patient should inspect his skin very carefully every day for several weeks or months, and keep watch for the appearance of red spots or nodules. This syphilitic eruption on the skin is also in the later periods one of the most certain and most characteristic insignia of the disease.

The eruption commonly appears first on the trunk, in the form of rose-coloured spots (the so-called “roseola syphilitica”), spreads thence over the whole body, and in many cases, simultaneously with or shortly after the spotted eruption, nodules appear on the skin, and marked thickenings form on the mucous membranes, especially at the anus, in the mouth, and on the tongue (the so-called “plaques muqueuses,” or “condylomata”). The patient’s attention is spontaneously directed to these lesions by painful sensations in the mouth or by itching of the anus. Often it is these painful sensations, associated with a violent inflammation of the tonsils and pharynx (the so-called “angina syphilitica”), which first lead the patient to consult a doctor, after all the earlier symptoms have passed by unnoticed! As characteristic forms of the secondary syphilitic changes in the skin must, therefore, be mentioned the so-called “corona Veneris,” by which distinguished name is denoted an eruption on the forehead, especially along the margin of the hair, which by members of the laity is easily confused with other affections of the skin common in this locality; the so-called “collier de Venus,” or leukoderma syphiliticum, a peculiar pigmentation of the skin on the throat and the back of the neck in the form of brown patches with white intervening areas. This symptom, which occurs almost exclusively in women, is an absolutely certain sign of syphilis. Equally characteristic is the so-called “syphilitic psoriasis,” the appearance of peculiar patches and thickenings on the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet; characteristic also is the syphilitic loss of hair, by its sudden onset and by the patchy way in which it occurs. Not rarely do we see purulent eruptions on the skin in this secondary stage of syphilis.

The syphilitic eruption of the skin is only an external manifestation of a disease affecting the entire body, for the internal organs also suffer. The affection of the liver manifests itself by jaundice; that of the brain and the meninges by headaches and by weakness of memory, which is often well marked at this stage; that of the spleen by swelling; that of the kidneys by the appearance of albumin in the urine; that of the bones by very painful inflammatory swellings; that of the eyes specially by the well-known[361] syphilitic iritis (60 % of all inflammations of the iris are syphilitic in nature!).

If the disease remains untreated, the appearances just described become more general and continually more severe; and after some time, quite new morbid symptoms are superadded (often as early as the third year, on the average five to ten years after infection, but also later), resulting from the transformation of the syphilitic morbid process into the tertiary stage. To these new manifestations belong the appearance of large nodules in the skin and other organs, which sooner or later undergo ulceration, the so-called “syphilitic gummata”; their ulcerative destruction may entail the greatest disfigurement or danger to life—for example, perforation of the hard palate; sinking of the bridge of the nose (the syphilitic “saddle-nose”); ulcerative destruction of large portions of the bones of the skull, of the intestine, of the liver, the lungs, the testicles, the bloodvessels (especially dangerous are gummous diseases of the bloodvessels of the brain), the brain, and the spinal cord. Apoplectic strokes occurring in comparatively young persons and nervous paralysis of the most various kinds, as well as sudden deafness and blindness, are in most cases referable to syphilitic disease. Many chronic diseases of the liver, kidneys, and nervous system, are consequences of previous syphilis; also calcification of the arteries, the very dangerous dilatation of the great bloodvessels, especially of the aorta (aneurism of the aorta), are very often of syphilitic origin.

By the researches of Alfred Fournier and Wilhelm Erb, we know to-day that two severe diseases of the central nervous system—tabes dorsalis or locomotor ataxy, and general paralysis of the insane (paralytic dementia)—are almost always (in about 95 % of the cases) referable to earlier syphilis. Among 5,749 cases of syphilis encountered in his own private practice, Fournier observed no less than 758 cases of brain syphilis, 631 cases of tabes, and 83 cases of softening of the brain. Tabes and general paralysis of the insane are all the more dangerous because they are no longer, properly speaking, “syphilitic” diseases, and therefore they cannot be cured by antisyphilitic treatment; they are severe degenerative changes of the central nervous system, which has been, as it were, prepared for their occurrence by the previous syphilis. These belong to the class of the so-called “parasyphilitic” diseases in which antisyphilitic treatment has little or no good effect.

Even more tragic are the consequences of syphilis to the family, the offspring, and the race. Syphilis in married life, congenital[362] syphilis, and the degeneration of the race by syphilis—these are the tragic manifestations which come under consideration in this connexion.

In his admirable work on “Syphilis and Marriage,” Alfred Fournier, the greatest living authority on syphilis in all its manifestations and relationships, has described the momentous influence exercised by syphilis in conjugal life; and in his recently published work, “Syphilis a Social Danger,” he has dealt also with congenital syphilis and racial degeneration. He found that, on the average, among 100 women suffering from syphilis, 20 had been infected by their husbands, either at the very commencement of married life, or in its later course, or finally through the offspring after conception. Divorce on the ground of syphilitic infection by the husband is at the present day of frequent occurrence.

The transmission of syphilis to the child by inheritance may be effected either by the father or the mother; when both the father and the mother are syphilitic, it occurs with absolute certainty. The various possibilities of transmission, and the contingent immunity of mother or child, as they are expressed in Colles’s law (Baumès’s law), and in Profeta’s law, cannot here be further dealt with. If the mother has herself been infected with syphilis, or if she was previously syphilitic, either the child is not carried until term, abortion or miscarriage ensuing, or, finally, it is born with symptoms of congenital syphilis.[321]

The frequent occurrence of premature births and still-births in any family suggests strong suspicions that they are due to syphilis. The general mortality of the children in a family is regarded by Fournier as an important sign to the physician of congenital syphilis. Syphilitic infection of the father gives rise to a mortality in the children of 28 %; syphilis in the mother causes a mortality in the children of 60 %; when the disease affects both parents, the mortality among the children amounts to 68 %. Absolutely astounding is the mortality of the children of syphilitic prostitutes; it amounts to from 84 to 86 %.

Children born alive, suffering from congenital syphilis, are generally weakly,[322] of deficient body-weight; have often a flaccid,[363] wrinkled skin, covered with typical syphilitic eruptions, and frequently with great purulent vesicles, especially on the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet (“pemphigus syphiliticus”); the internal organs also, the spleen, the liver, and the bones, exhibit morbid changes. Characteristic is the syphilitic affection of the upper air-passages, especially the syphilitic “cold in the head” (syphilitic rhinitis—“snuffles”), of new-born congenitally syphilitic children. Congenital syphilis further gives rise to severe disturbances of development and to phenomena to which Fournier has given the name of “late syphilis” (“syphilis hereditaria tarda”), because they first make their appearance in the later years of life.[323] Permanent debility, arrest of development, stigmata of degeneration, in the form of various malformations—as, for example, notching of the edge of the upper central incisor permanent teeth (a symptom first described by Jonathan Hutchinson), malformations of the nose, the ears, and the palate, dwarfing, deaf-mutism, malformations of the external and internal reproductive organs, rickets,[324] epilepsy, and mental weakness—are the consequences of congenital syphilis. Tarnowsky, Fournier, and Barthélémy have traced the consequences of congenital syphilis into the second and third generation, and so have discovered an important cause of racial degeneration. Syphilis in the grandfather can still exercise its disastrous influence in the grandson, and give rise to the above-mentioned stigmata of degeneration.[325] Indeed, congenital syphilis of the second generation often appears with the same severity as that of the first generation; and, like acquired syphilis, congenital syphilis in women can cause a predisposition to miscarriages and still-births.

According to statistics obtained by Edmond Fournier, relating to 11,000 cases of syphilis (10,000 men, 1,000 women) from the[364] private practice of his father, Alfred Fournier, regarding the age at which infection occurs, it appears that in men it most commonly occurs between the ages of twenty and twenty-six years (the maximum number of infections during the twenty-third year); in women, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one; 8 % of syphilitic males and 20 % of syphilitic females were infected before the age of twenty years. Syphilis is to a considerable extent at the present day a disease of inexperienced youth. This fact is important in relation to the problem of prevention and the problem of enlightenment.[326]

Of much less importance than syphilis is the purely local soft chancre, or chancroid, which never results in general infection. Chancroid is produced by a specific exciting cause, a chain-forming bacillus (streptobacillus), Bacillus ulceris cancrosi, which is found in the pus secreted by the ulcer. One or two days after infection, a small pustule forms at the site of inoculation, generally on the external genital organs. This pustule soon bursts, and a deeply hollowed ulcer makes its appearance, which usually undergoes rapid increase, and frequently, owing to the infective character of the pus, gives rise to new chancres in the neighbourhood of the original one, so that the soft chancre is commonly multiple. When suitably treated with antiseptic powders and cauterization, chancroid usually heals quickly; there are, however, very dangerous varieties of chancroid—for instance, the serpiginous chancre, which continues to creep irresistibly forward; and the phagedænic or gangrenous chancre, which puts the skill of the physician to the utmost test. A less dangerous but extremely disagreeable complication of chancroid is inflammation of the inguinal glands, most commonly only on one side; this painful “bubo” (painful in contrast with the painless syphilitic bubo) has a well-marked tendency to suppuration. If this occurs, and the pus finds its way to the surface, fistulas and new chancrous ulcers are liable to occur at the place where it opens. By rest in bed, the inunction of iodide ointment, the application of cold compresses, the injection into the bubo of a solution of nitrate of silver, and the internal use of iodide of potassium, this unfortunate course may be prevented.

A remarkable change of views has, in the course of the last[365] thirty years, taken place in respect of the nature and importance of gonorrhœa.[327] Whereas formerly this was regarded as a comparatively harmless disease, we know to-day that gonorrhœa in the male, and still more in the female, gives rise to tedious dangers and painful morbid phenomena, and is the source of unspeakable sorrows, and of the miserable ill-health of numerous women, and that it is the chief cause of sterility in both sexes.

Gonorrhœa is principally a disease of the mucous membrane, and is, in this way, distinguished from syphilis, which is a general disorder, diffusing itself by way of the bloodvessels. In rare cases, indeed, gonorrhœa can exhibit general morbid manifestations, the so-called gonorrhœal rheumatism, gonorrhœal affections of the spinal cord and of the heart, and gonorrhœal nervous troubles, all of which are so rare, that for practical purposes they can be left out of consideration.

The typical seat of gonorrhœa is the mucous membrane of the urinary and the genital organs of the male and the female; in the male affecting chiefly the urinary organs, and in the female affecting chiefly the genital organs. The cause of genuine gonorrhœa is always infection, the transmission from one human being to another of the purulent inflammation produced by the gonococcus discovered by Neisser in 1879. Simple urethral inflammations with a purulent discharge also occur in which no gonococci are found. These arise also from infection, but their actual exciting cause has not yet been discovered. Not less obscure is the relationship of many of the irritants giving rise to simple urethral catarrh—for example, that which is active during menstruation—to the supposed exciting cause. In any case, these simple catarrhs have a very mild course, and undergo a cure after a few days or weeks, spontaneously or as a result of treatment with mild injections.

Quite otherwise is it with genuine gonorrhœa. In the male it begins from two to six days after the infective intercourse, with a burning sensation on passing water, itching at the urethral orifice, which very easily becomes reddened, and this is soon followed by the discharge, either spontaneously or as a result of pressure on the urethra, of a thick fluid, at first mucous, later purulent, and then of a yellow or a greenish colour. Inflammation, discharge, and pain, the latter especially in association with urination, increase during the subsequent weeks; in addition, in a good many cases there are slight fever, lassitude, and mental[366] depression, and the patient is tormented, especially during the night, by violent, painful erections. In exceptional cases there are hæmorrhages from the urethra (the so-called “Russian clap”). In some cases the disease terminates favourably; this is especially observed after the first attack of gonorrhœa. As early as the third week the above symptoms become less severe, and in the fourth or sixth week after infection the whole morbid process may come to an end, the discharge ceases, the urine becomes clear once more, and, in fact, definite cure of the gonorrhœa ensues.

But the number of those who are so fortunate is comparatively small. In the majority of cases, there are other morbid phenomena and complications; the gonorrhœa becomes “subacute,” and later “chronic.” Ricord wrote many years ago: “When anyone has once acquired gonorrhœa, God only knows when he will get well again!” Happily, this pessimism is no longer fully justified at the present day; but it is a fact that in the majority of cases even to-day gonorrhœa is a very obstinate, wearisome illness, a long-continued burden, not only for the patient, but also for the doctor. The gonococci proliferate in the deeper layers of the mucous membrane, and pass upwards into the posterior part of the urethra, this latter migration being manifested especially by frequent and painful strangury; further, the bladder, the prostate gland, and the epididymis may be attacked. Bilateral epididymitis has often serious consequences as regards the procreative capacity. In about 50 % of the cases incapacity for fertilization (impotentia generandi) has resulted.

If the gonorrhœa becomes chronic, thickenings occur in isolated portions of the urethral mucous membrane; the urine remains turbid for a long time; the discharge, it is true, becomes scantier, but shows itself with the most annoying persistency every morning as soon as the patient leaves his bed, in the form of the so-called “bon jour” drops in the meatus; there are also troubles connected with the prostate (painful sensations, especially during defæcation), and symptoms of stricture of the urethra may occur. Very often, also, relative impotence and severe sexual neurasthenia are observed, as consequences of chronic gonorrhœa. Worst of all is the long duration of the infectivity. There is always the danger that somewhere or other some gonococci may remain hidden, and, given an opportunity, may start the process all over again, or may transmit the infection to another person. Zweifel reports a case in which a man actually infected a woman thirteen years after he had first acquired gonorrhœa!

The infection of a woman with gonorrhœa, as we know to-day, is a disaster. It is the immortal service of the German-American physician Noeggerath that, in the year 1872, he proved that the majority of the stubborn “diseases of women” were nothing more than the consequences of gonorrhœal infection. Gonorrhœa selects by preference the internal reproductive organs of woman; upon the extensive mucous membranes of these organs the gonococci find the most favourable conditions for their persistent life; they find a thousand out-of-the-way comers and hiding-places, where they can elude the therapeutic activity of the physician.

“They grow luxuriantly, like a weed which it has not been possible to uproot, over the entire surface of the genital mucous membrane, attacking with the same vigour the mucous membrane of the uterus and that of the Fallopian tubes. In women, as in men, they induce ulceration, they cause adhesions, and they give rise to sterility. But in the case of women, something further must be added—that, namely, this disease has upon them a miserably depressing effect, and that, in contradistinction from men, they are likely to suffer for many years from intense pains. Whenever they execute certain bodily movements, it may be during ten years in succession, they experience pains, often horribly severe, and in most cases they are condemned to a life of deprivation and misery—not usually for any fault of their own, since most women are infected by their husbands” (Zweifel).

Gonorrhœa in women, attacking successively the vagina, the uterus, the Fallopian tubes, the ovaries, and the peritoneum, is a true martyrdom, a hell upon earth. Sick in body and in mind, these unhappy women drag out a miserable existence; and to them so often the last consolation, that of motherhood, is denied, for gonorrhœa is the most frequent cause of sterility in woman.

Patients infected with gonorrhœa further run the danger of blindness, by transference of the gonorrhœal virus to the eye. This is one of the most distressing of the possible results of the disease. New-born children whose mothers are infected with gonorrhœa are during birth exposed to the same danger of eye infection, as they pass down the genital passage. In earlier days a very large proportion of the blind were persons who had lost their sight in this way very shortly after birth. Since Crédé advocated the admirable method of introducing nitrate of silver solution into the conjunctival sacs of new-born children, gonorrhœal inflammation of the eye has become one of the greatest rarities.

APPENDIX
VENEREAL DISEASES IN THE HOMOSEXUAL

It is an old belief, shared by the homosexual themselves, that venereal infections are extremely rare among them. If male homosexual persons had sexual intercourse only with one another, this assumption would be in some degree plausible. For the principal focus of venereal infection is feminine prostitution, by which venereal diseases are transmitted to heterosexual men. But since these homosexual men often undertake sexual acts with heterosexual men—apart from occasional sexual intercourse with women—a priori there is a possibility of infection in their case, and such infection is, in fact, observed. Above all, many male prostitutes also indulge in intercourse with women, and thus diffuse venereal troubles among homosexual men.

It is obvious that syphilis can be diffused among the homosexual as easily as among the heterosexual, for syphilis is transmitted by many varieties of contact—by kisses, other caresses, etc. But how is it as regards gonorrhœa?

In the case of heterosexual men and women gonorrhœa is almost exclusively transmitted by the sexual act, by the introduction of the male penis into the female vagina. The analogous act between men—that is to say, pæderasty, immissio penis in anum—is unquestionably far rarer than the ordinary sexual act between men and women; it is commonly replaced by mutual onanism, by kisses and other caresses, and quite frequently by coitus in os. This last is much commoner than genuine pædication. Of gonorrhœa of the rectum produced by pædication when the active man is suffering from gonorrhœa, we very rarely hear. But is there, in the case of homosexual men, any possibility of gonorrhœal infection due to coitus in os?

There can be no doubt that typical gonorrhœa of the mouth occurs. The observations of Kuttler, Atkinson, Rosinski, Dohrn, and Kast, have proved it.[328] Horand and Cazenave have even observed gonorrhœal infection of the urethra as a result of oral coitus![329] A homosexual patient told me that some years before, after coitus in os with a man, he had for several weeks had a discharge from the urethra, which spontaneously ceased, and therefore cannot have been genuine gonorrhœa, but only urethritis[369] resulting from infection by contagious angina. In the case in question, the urethral catarrh was certainly due to the coitus in os, since any other sources of infection could be excluded.

On the other hand, in a second case an apparently gonorrhœal infection of the oral cavity was transmitted from the urethra.

A homosexual man, forty-five years of age, one day allowed a heterosexual man to perform coitus in os on him. Some days afterwards he experienced difficulty in swallowing, was feverish, and saw in the looking-glass that the uvula was swollen. A specialist for throat troubles diagnosed merely a catarrhal infection. The illness became worse, and a second throat specialist detected the presence of a purulent angina of both tonsils, ordered painting with argentamin, also vapour baths, and an astringent gargle, whereupon the affection gradually subsided. Six weeks later the patient had swelling and pain in the joints of the right knee and foot; under cold compresses these swellings subsided after a fortnight. Of the whole trouble nothing now remains.

This description, on the part of a patient who is thoroughly trustworthy, aroused strong suspicion of a gonorrhœal angina, with a consecutive gonorrhœal arthritis. Unfortunately, the purulent discharge from the tonsils was not examined for gonococci by either of the physicians in attendance. The case remains, anyhow, very remarkable.

In the case of homosexual women, it is obvious that syphilis, and also gonorrhœa, can be transmitted, the latter by mutual friction of the genital organs. I do not know what actually occurs in practice.

CHAPTER XV
PROPHYLAXIS, TREATMENT, AND SUPPRESSION (BEKÄMPFUNG) OF VENEREAL DISEASES

“The friend of humanity may with some confidence anticipate a gradual diminution in the prevalence of venereal diseases, and may hope for their complete extinction in a not too distant future. All that is requisite for the attainment of this end is that those engaged in the study and practice of general hygiene, and those concerned in the safeguarding of public morality, should not weary in their efforts; and that scientific research should pursue its aims firmly and clearly, uninfluenced by the tyranny of custom, and independent of prejudice.”—K. F. Marx.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XV

The suppression of venereal diseases — Organization of the campaign against them — International Conference in Brussels — Foundation of the German Society for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases — Three methods of carrying on the campaign against venereal diseases.

Personal Prophylaxis against Venereal Diseases: Rôle of cleanliness — The preputial secretion and balanitis — Importance of circumcision — Technique of the cleansing of the genital organs before and after sexual intercourse — Examination for disease — Dangers of repeated coitus — Special protective measures — The condom — Varieties and technique of its use — The instillation of solutions of silver salts — Their relative value — The inunction of fat — Metchnikoff’s ointment for the prevention of syphilis — Antiseptic washings — The public advertisement of protective measures — Legal protection against venereal infection — Opinions of legal authorities on this subject (von Liszt, von Bar, Schmölder).

The Suppression of Venereal Diseases by Medical Treatment: Favourable conditions as regards syphilis — Mitigation of the syphilitic virus — Mercury and its importance — A “triumph of medicine” — Methods of employing mercury in the treatment of syphilis — Mode of action of the mercury cure — Means for the after-treatment of syphilis — Curability of syphilis — Treatment of gonorrhœa — Necessity for microscopical examination and the scientific methods to be employed — The different modes of treatment — The determination of the cure of gonorrhœa — Facilitation of the treatment of venereal diseases for the great mass of the public — “Krankenkassen”[330] and venereal diseases.

State Action and Public Action in the Campaign against Venereal Diseases: Statistics of venereal troubles — Blaschko’s researches — Frequency of venereal diseases in Denmark — Among various classes in Germany — Prussian statistics of April 30, 1900 — Conclusions deducible from these statistics — The different sources of infection — Prostitution the principal source of infection — Danger of youthful prostitutes — Measures to be taken by the State against the diffusion of diseases by prostitution — Regulation — Criticism of this measure — Its illegality — Its uselessness and its dangers — Favourable results of the withdrawal of “moral control” — Prostitution and crime — Soutenage — Criticism of Lombroso’s theory of the relations between prostitution and criminality — The brothel question — Diminution in the number of brothels — Dangers of brothels — Brothel streets and the limitation of prostitution to definite quarters — Proposals for the examination of the male clientèle — Criticism of these proposals — The true way towards the suppression of prostitution.

CHAPTER XV

The motto which I have placed at the head of this chapter on the campaign against venereal diseases and on the attempt to suppress them is taken from an interesting academic essay by the former professor of medicine at Göttingen, K. F. H. Marx, who is well known to have been the physician of Heinrich Heine during the latter’s student life in Göttingen. The title of this essay is “The Diminution of Diseases in Consequence of Advancing Civilization,” p. 35 (Göttingen, 1844).

The hopeful view which is here expressed by the university professor regarding the ultimate eradication of venereal diseases was shared at that time by the eminently practical physician Parent-Duchatelet. He appeals, unfortunately, not to medical men and students of social hygiene, but to the police:

“Pursue without cessation the diseases which are diffused by means of prostitutes; take it as your goal to cause them to disappear from the list of human troubles; do not doubt that your labours will ultimately be crowned with success, although the task may be one that will occupy several generations.”[331]

Two complete generations had, however, to pass away before the campaign against venereal diseases and the attempt to suppress them became a burning question of the time, became a question of public health and social hygiene, like those which concern the fight with tuberculosis, with infant mortality, and with alcoholism. Once again I must repeat that the organized systematic campaign against venereal diseases is still in its very earliest stages. Strictly speaking, it dates only from seven years ago, when the first international congress for the prophylaxis of syphilis and other venereal diseases was held in Brussels, from September 4 to 8, 1899. Almost all the civilized countries, European and other, took part in this congress, and not only physicians and dermatologists, but also lawyers, clergymen, attachés of embassies, authors, and philanthropists, explained their views, and thereby showed that the question of the suppression of venereal diseases was one of equal interest to all classes of society, and one which must exercise the activity of the community at large. At the[374] conclusion of this first international conference in 1899, there was founded the International Society for the Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis of Syphilis and other Venereal Diseases, which has its seat in Brussels, and meets at periodical intervals for international conferences.

Especially in Germany has this organization aroused active interest, and it was soon decided to found a national German Society for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, whose first meeting was held on October 19, 1903, in the hall of the Berlin Rathaus. The meeting was opened by a speech from Albert Neisser, after which Alfred Blaschko spoke on “The Diffusion of Venereal Diseases,” Edmund Lesser on “The Dangers of Venereal Diseases,” Martin Kirchner on “The Social Importance of Venereal Diseases,” and Albert Neisser on “The Aims of the German Society for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases.” The committee of the Society consists of Messrs. A. Neisser, president; E. Lesser, vice-president and treasurer; and A. Blaschko, general secretary. The organ of the Society is issued six times yearly, under the title, Reports of the German Society for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, and has been published for the last four years; it is supplied gratis to members; to non-members the yearly subscription is only three marks. In the spring of the year 1903 there was founded a larger Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, of which five volumes have hitherto appeared; this serves for the publication of more comprehensive critical studies.

Still in the same year, 1902, there were formed the first branches and local groups of the German Society for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases in Hanover, Wiesbaden, Breslau, and Berlin. Subsequently other branches were formed in Mannheim, Munich, Cologne, Beuthen, Danzig, Stettin, Posen, Dortmund, Elberfeld, Frankfurt-on-the-Main, Görlitz, Hamburg, Königsberg, Nürnberg, Stuttgart, and Heidelberg.

During the last four years, by means of lectures, the circulation of pamphlets and leaflets, and by public discussions, information regarding the dangers of venereal diseases has been diffused among the widest circles of the population. Of the other activities and measures of the Society we shall have to speak later.

We pass on to the consideration of the principal elements of the modern campaign against venereal diseases. In view of the limits of this work our discussion of this question must necessarily be a brief one. The eradication of venereal diseases must be effected in a threefold manner:

3. By measures belonging to the province of public hygiene, to that of state action, and to that of education.

The personal prophylaxis of venereal diseases [332] has made great progress with the increasing scientific knowledge of the causes and modes of infection of these diseases. We know now precisely where and how we can lay down personal rules which give us at least a fairly secure guarantee that in an individual case venereal infection will not occur. Various points of view must then be taken into consideration, the combined influence of which will alone promise a successful result. No one single measure will suffice to gain this end.

Above all, in this department of the prophylaxis of venereal diseases, experienced physicians, alike of earlier and more recent times, will unanimously agree in this proposition, that the principal preliminary means for the avoidance of venereal infection, means which it is absolutely essential to employ in every instance, consist of perfect cleanliness on both sides. He who insists on the most scrupulous cleanliness of body, clothing, and underclothing, will be sure to get rid immediately of any uncleanliness acquired in sexual intercourse. Cleanliness and health are often (not always) identical. In any case, the greatest mistrust should be felt as regards a person evidently unclean, with a neglected exterior, for this is always a sign that such a person is not particular as regards choice in matters of sexual intercourse. “Germany, get into your bath!” Heinrich Laube once exclaimed. This would be a good device to adopt in the campaign against venereal diseases. Every uncleanliness is an irritant; it impairs the intactness of the skin; and especially is this true of any uncleanliness of the genital organs, and above all of the male genital organs,[376] where, under the foreskin, the “smegma” (the sebaceous secretion of the preputial glands) often undergoes decomposition, and gives rise to an inflammation, the so-called balanitis, which greatly favours the probability of infection.[333]

If the foreskin has been removed by circumcision, this secretion entirely ceases, and the mucous membrane covering the glans penis is transformed into a thick skin, which is much less readily affected by the causes of infection. There is no doubt that circumcision is to a certain extent a protective measure against syphilitic infection, whilst it does not in any way protect against gonorrhœa. Neustätter has recently collected some very remarkable facts relating to this question.[334]

Breitenstein has contrasted 15,000 indigenous circumcised soldiers with 18,000 uncircumcised European soldiers of the army of the Dutch Indies, living under similar local and hygienic conditions. Thus, in the year 1895 there were infected with venereal diseases, of the circumcised 16 %, of the uncircumcised 41 %. As regards infections with syphilis, of the circumcised 0·8 % were infected; of the uncircumcised, on the other hand, 4·1 %—that is, five times as many. Similar observations were made by the celebrated English syphilologist Jonathan Hutchinson, one of the most ardent advocates of the general introduction of circumcision as a protective measure against venereal, and above all against syphilitic, infection. Moreover, with regard to the observations made in Java, the difference did not depend upon race, because similar differences have been observed as regards comparative immunity from infection in respect of circumcised Christians, circumcised on account of phimosis and other troubles, whose number is by no means insignificant.

Since, however, it is unlikely that circumcision will come into general use in Europe as a prophylactic measure, it only remains to recommend that, as a fundamental procedure, the greatest possible care should be employed in the daily and delicate cleansing of the preputial sac. By this means inflammation and laceration of these parts will be most effectually prevented, and even without circumcision a certain resisting power will be induced. For washing this region, lukewarm water which has been boiled and cooled may best be employed; then dry the part carefully,[377] so as not to rub off the skin. In the case of women, frequent washings of the external genital organs, and vaginal douches, are also of great importance in regard to the prevention of venereal infection. Before and after the sexual act, these measures are of especial value, because often by simple mechanical means, infective material already deposited may be carried away. The same purpose is subserved by urination, a procedure certainly adapted for washing out gonorrhœal pus which has found its way into the urethra, before the gonococci have had time to establish themselves in the mucous membrane. I know a number of patients who use no other means of protection in sexual intercourse beyond the observation of extreme cleanliness, by washing and douching, in both sexes, before and after sexual intercourse, and by passing water immediately after intercourse, and thus have remained free from infection; but who promptly became infected as soon as they discontinued these simple measures.

For this reason, these measures, where possible with the assistance of soap, which certainly exercises some antiseptic influence, cannot be too warmly recommended, although they naturally do not offer any absolute security. They have, however, the advantage that, in the first place, they can always be employed, even when the true protective measures of which we speak below are not available, and that, in the second place, they can always be used in addition to these. It sounds, perhaps, somewhat absurd, and yet it is true, to say that washing and urination are the first and most important protective measures against sexual infection.

The second point, which must also be considered important in this connexion, is the exercise of self-command before and during the sexual act, as far as this is possible in view of the nature of sexual excitement, which always lessens the personal responsibility, and overcomes reason and understanding. Yet no one should have sexual intercourse when in a state of alcoholic intoxication, in which self-control is completely lost; as we have shown in an earlier passage (pp. 292-296), there are several reasons why intercourse is apt to be disastrous to a drunken man. Moreover, love prefers the dark, but precaution prefers the sunlight. Before having intercourse with a woman previously unknown to him, a man should inspect her in clear daylight, with a view to her state of health. Suspicious spots on the skin, especially on the forehead and on the trunk; white areas on the lips, the tongue, the throat, and the back of the neck; visible glandular swellings; a marked discharge from the genital organs; ulcerated[378] areas in this region, etc., are of an extremely suspicious nature, and should cause abstinence from intercourse. French physicians go so far as to recommend examination of the inguinal and cervical glands under the harmless form of pretended caresses; but persons without medical education would seldom be sufficiently skilled to be able to detect glandular swellings unless these were unusually well developed. Especially enlargement of the cervical glands—this “pulse of syphilis,” as Alfred Fournier terms it—is a comparatively certain indication of syphilis.

It is dangerous also in many cases to repeat the sexual act several times in brief succession, because old experience has taught us that infective material may first make its appearance at the second or third act of coitus, and thus infect then only. This affords an explanation also of a fact often observed—that in intercourse with an infected woman on the part of two healthy men, with but a brief interval between the acts, the one who had intercourse first often remains healthy, whilst the second is infected.

I pass on to consider the special protective measures which have long been recommended for the prophylaxis of venereal infection.

1. The Condom.—This is the oldest and even to-day beyond question the best and most trustworthy artificial protective measure. Employed long ago in the days of antiquity, it was in the sixteenth century once more recommended by the Italian physician Fallopius, and therefore is not the invention of a physician “Conton,” after whom it is said to have been named (perhaps the name is connected with that of the French town “Condom”). Hans Ferdy (A. Meyerhof) suggests that the word is derived from “condus”—that is, one who preserves or protects—and that the article should properly be called “condus” instead of “condom.”[335]

The condom is a protective membrane, with which the penis is covered before intercourse. We distinguish as “rubber condoms” those made of rubber, gutta-percha, or caoutchouc; and as “cæcal condoms” those made out of the cæcal mucous membrane of the goat or sheep (incorrectly termed also “isinglass condoms”). The cæcal condom is thinner and more delicate, and blunts sensation less, than the rubber condom. The rubber condom, however, is more trustworthy, in respect of durability and its slighter liability to laceration, if the little precaution is not[379] neglected to keep it in a cool place, and to protect it from the long-continued influence of warmth. The habit of carrying about a rubber condom in the pocket for a long time favours its rapidly becoming untrustworthy and easily torn. Cæcal condoms, on the other hand, very readily become fragile and pervious, although the contrary is the common opinion, and they are preferred to rubber condoms in the belief that the dearer article must be the better. Advertisement is exceedingly active in this direction, and every kind of speciality is widely recommended. In England condoms are sometimes sold bearing the portrait of some celebrated person!

The condom is a “general protective measure”—that is, it protects against both gonorrhœa and syphilis, in so far as the latter disease, as is usually the case, is transmitted from the genital organs. All the leading physicians engaged more especially in the treatment of venereal diseases are agreed that the condom, when of good quality, when properly applied, and when removed with care (for in the removal material adhering to the outer surface may very readily give rise to infection), constitutes the very best and most certain of all the protective measures hitherto advocated. It is true that it can be used by men only, but when used by the man it simultaneously protects the woman from gonorrhœal infection, and not rarely also from syphilitic infection.

2. The Instillation of Solutions of Silver Salts.[336]—These serve exclusively for the prophylaxis of gonorrhœa, and are not, therefore, general protective measures. We owe their introduction to Blokusewski, who recommended the use of a two % solution of nitrate of silver. More recently, the albuminates of silver have been preferred, such as protargol in a 10 to 20 % solution, albargin in a 4 to 10 % solution, or a solution of 20 % protargol-gelatine. These solutions can be carried about in small drop-bottles—for example, as the “Sanitas” (silver nitrate) of Blokusewski, the “Viro” or the “Phallokos” apparatus (these are trade names for proprietary preparations—solutions of protargol). All solutions of silver salts must be kept in the dark, and after the lapse of any considerable time, some freshly prepared solution must be introduced, for time and the influence of light destroy their efficacy. Immediately after intercourse and urination, one or two[380] drops of the solution are instilled into the urethra, and a drop or two also allowed to run over the frænum præputii.[337]

The views regarding the value of these protective measures are conflicting. Beyond question, they are less trustworthy than the condom. Infection has been observed in spite of the use of instillations. Above all, however, the continued use of these methods gives rise to disagreeable irritative manifestations in the urethra and may even cause catarrhal inflammation, and thus artificially increase the liability to infection. Hence, these instillations should be reserved for occasional use; habitually, only the condom should be employed.

3. Inunction.—Whereas the instillation of chemical solutions serves to protect against gonorrhœa only, the practice recommended for a much longer time of anointing the penis with a simple fatty material, or with an antiseptic ointment, before or after sexual intercourse, protects against syphilis only. It is obvious that a layer of fatty material covering the penis exercises the purely mechanical function of preventing the passage of infective matters to the skin. It is, however, equally obvious that by the to-and-fro friction during sexual intercourse, especially when this occupies a considerable time, this fatty covering will be rubbed away, so that the virus can find a means of entrance. The protection is thus extremely relative. Still, such authors as Neisser, Max Joseph, Loeb, and Campagnolle, report favourable experiences regarding the prevention of syphilis by the inunction of the penis, for which purpose simple vaseline, or Schleich’s wax-soap cream, which is sold with the “Viro” apparatus, may be employed. In any case, this method is better than nothing at all. He who has no other protective measure available should remember that in every house there is always some fat or ointment obtainable which can be used for this purpose.

In order, whilst using this method, to protect simultaneously against gonorrhœa, it has been recommended that antiseptic ointment should be inserted into the urethra before intercourse, but this is a very unsatisfactory and untrustworthy method.

Well worth attention is the inunction recently recommended by Metchnikoff [338] of a specific mercurial ointment, after intercourse,[381] for the destruction of any syphilitic virus which may have been deposited.[339] He used for this purpose, not the strongly irritant blue ointment, but the white precipitate ointment, an ointment of the salicyl-arseniate of mercury (enesol), and, above all, a 30 % calomel ointment. After any suspicious coitus, this ointment should be rubbed for four or five minutes into the area of possible infection; this should be done without delay; but even after the lapse of eighteen to twenty-four hours an effect has been traced. The experiments on apes inoculated with syphilis gave positive results; also in the case of a student of medicine who voluntarily offered himself for inoculation with the syphilitic virus, the inunction of calomel ointment appears to have prevented the outbreak of the disease.

In any case, these new methods for the prophylaxis of syphilis demand the most careful attention. Further experience is needed to determine whether they deserve general application.

4. Antiseptic Washes.—Washing of the penis and douching of the vagina with antiseptic lotions (sublimate, lysol, permanganate of potassium) after intercourse are among the most uncertain of protective measures, because the sublimate solution, or whatever may be used, does not find its way into any possible lacerations; and because, in consequence of the profuse secretion of the sebaceous glands of the male and female genital organs, these organs are covered with a layer of fatty material, which prevents the contact of watery fluids, but does not in the same degree prevent the entrance of the syphilitic poison. Antiseptic washes after the sexual act have as little value as the same used before the sexual act.

The knowledge of these protective measures—above all, of those named under the first, second, and third headings—ought to be very much more general than it is. Unfortunately, however, in public life such measures are still viewed largely from the standpoint of the moralist as “indecent” or “improper”; and the criminal law classifies them thus, so that their public recommendation and diffusion is still exposed to great hindrances.

At the second congress of the Society for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, held in Munich in March, 1905, the question of the public recommendation of protective measures was opened to discussion, and was dealt with in two admirable addresses by[382] O. Neustätter [340] and Georg Bernhard.[341] Bernhard proposed that to Section 184, paragraph 3, of the Criminal Code, which declares it to be a punishable offence to “expose for sale articles intended for an indecent use, or to recommend or sell such articles to the public,” should be added a legal definition in the following sense: articles which are used either to prevent venereal diseases or to prevent conception are not regarded as “intended for an indecent use”; and Neustätter pleaded for an alteration of the existing state of the law, in the sense that the public recommendation of means for the prevention and cure of venereal diseases should be legally permissible, being restricted merely by certain regulations against quackery, extortion, and other misuse. The regulation of the recommendation could best be associated with the necessary control of the recommendation of therapeutic and preventive measures in general. A supreme sanitary authority should be constituted, part of whose duties should be to examine the form and contents of recommendations of this character.

Another juristic relationship of the prophylaxis of venereal diseases concerns legal protection against venereal infection. Franz von Liszt,[342] von Bar,[343] and Schmölder,[344] opened the discussion on the biological and criminal aspects of the prophylaxis of venereal diseases at the first congress of the Society for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, held at Frankfurt-on-the-Main in the year 1903.

Hitherto the heedless or deliberate transmission of venereal disease was punishable only as personal injury, since in the Criminal Code there was no paragraph directly relating to this matter. Only in the Criminal Code of Oldenburg of 1884 was such punishment expressly provided for (Article 387), and by this provision the intercourse of an infected person with a healthy one was punishable, without regard to the subsequent infection. In the legal regulations of other countries than Germany, we find several instances in which the witting transmission of venereal infection by means of sexual intercourse is punishable. In Germany[383] a measure proposing this was rejected by the Reichstag in 1900. Von Liszt advocated the introduction of the following paragraph into the Criminal Code:

“One who, being aware that he is suffering from a contagious venereal disorder, performs coitus, or in any other way exposes another human being to the danger of infection, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term of two to three years, and in addition shall be deprived of civil rights.”

Schmölder enlarged this clause by an amendment relating to the punishment of prostitutes disseminating venereal diseases.

On the other hand, von Bar drew attention to the inconveniences and dangers which a punishment of this nature would involve, especially to the dangers of blackmail, and to the duty it would impose on physicians of breaking their obligations of professional secrecy. Moreover, a proof of the knowledge of venereal infection is difficult to obtain; the proof that infection is derived from a definite person is also far from easy. Von Bar opposed the addition of such a clause on this and other grounds. In the discussion upon the motion, this view was shared by C. Fränkel, Ries, Oppenheimer, and others; Neisser was in favour of a punishment of this kind, because then, at any rate, there would be a public recognition of the fact that such an action was open to severe punishment, and was a disgraceful one; thus, by the mere existence of the paragraph an educative influence would be exerted.

In any case, such a punishment would be a two-edged weapon, and as far as present necessity goes, we have sufficient powers in the application to such offences of the paragraphs of the Criminal Code relating to bodily injury.

The second great means for the limitation and entire suppression of venereal diseases is to deal with them by medical treatment, to cure as speedily as possible persons suffering from syphilis of gonorrhœa, and thus to prevent these persons from becoming sources of fresh infection. Systematic, methodical treatment on a large scale—that is the goal at which we have to aim. To the poor man or woman suffering from venereal infection the same advantages should be opened as to the wealthy voluptuary. The provision of means of treatment of venereal diseases cannot be too free. In public hospitals, private clinics, ambulatoria, and sanatoria, in convalescent homes, and polyclinics for prostitutes, everywhere must be provided means for an intelligent treatment of venereal diseases. Just as tuberculosis is now attacked systematically and vigorously, so must it be with venereal diseases.

Since syphilis constitutes only about 25 %—only one-fourth part, that is to say—of venereal diseases in general, since also during the last four centuries the disease has shown a natural tendency to decline in virulence, since a mitigation in the intensity of the virus is clearly recognizable, it is in the case of this disease that the hope of radical success is especially great.

Our forefathers carried out for us a great part of the campaign against syphilis. The comparatively mild course of syphilis in the majority of uncomplicated cases leads us to infer that there has been a relative immunization against syphilitic poison.

Albert Reibmayr remarks that “during the last 400 years, every human being now living in Europe has had about 4,000 ancestors; of these, however disagreeable the fact may seem, a considerable number must have had to contend with syphilis.”[345]

But this undoubted fact, that all of us have been to a certain extent “syphilized,”[346] plays its part to our advantage in the campaign against syphilis—that campaign which our own time has taken up with joyful hope of success.

Above all, let honour be paid to the ever youthful and fresh master and Nestor of European research into the subject of syphilis, Alfred Fournier, the evening of whose life is devoted to the campaign against syphilis as a “social danger.” To the great scientific works of his life he has now added the small, but not less valuable, explanatory writings, which are being sold at a low price all over France, and in part also have already been translated into German and English.[347] Their aim is to get the people on our side in the campaign against syphilis.

When, in April, 1906, I paid the master a visit, he gave me the[385] last of these popular campaign writings. Its title was in the form of a question:

And the answer given on p. 4 runs: “Yes, it is curable, for of all diseases syphilis is the one which can best, most easily, and most certainly be cured.” And why? Because we have a wonderful specific against this disease, which, when given at the proper time and in the proper manner, works a miracle. This remedy is

I put this name clearly and visibly before the eyes of the reader, a name which for every physician to whose lot it falls to treat cases of syphilis has a truly miraculous sound, a name against which the unconscientious ignoramuses, the evil-disposed enemies of the human race have spoken their anathema, one which a great thinker and honourable man like Schopenhauer regarded as a “triumph of medicine,” a fact which he experienced personally in his own body. All honourable, critical, and scientific physicians agree in this opinion. In my work on “The Origin of Syphilis,” vol. i., p. 127, I have expressed the matter in the following words:

“Mercury is and remains—notwithstanding the ignorant and ill-considered hostility of quacks and their kindred—the divine means for the treatment of syphilis; mercury is to syphilis what water is to fire, in the hands of that physician who knows how to use the drug rightly, how to apply it at the right time and in the right form, who watches closely the course of the disease in his patient, and who supports the mercury cure (always of primary importance) by other therapeutic measures as indicated.”

Only the physician, the scientifically trained medical man, can cure syphilis; the quack certainly cannot; in his hands mercury is truly enough a dangerous “poison.” But he has no right to say, and he speaks deliberate untruths when he says, that we physicians “poison” the “unfortunate” syphilitics with mercury. To such preposterous accusations we can give a brief and incisive answer.

Therefore, during my lecturing journey, undertaken recently [348] under the auspices of the German Society for the Suppression of[386] Venereal Diseases, I prepared the following brief account of the therapeutic employment of mercury in syphilis, which in my opinion suffices to throw the proper light upon the value and importance of the mercurial treatment of the disease; it is a sufficient answer to the “Nature-Healers,” who are opposed to the use of this “poison”:

1. In innumerable instances it has been observed by the most experienced and scientific physicians, that cases of syphilis treated without mercury run a very severe course, accompanied by the most dangerous symptoms, such as extensive destructive lesions of the skin, lesions of the internal organs, brain syphilis, eating away of the bones, loss of the nose, etc.

2. In cases which previously have been treated without mercury, the administration of the latter drug immediately arrests the destructive processes, and saves the patient from death, or from very severe illness, and from physical disfigurement.

3. No less an authority than Virchow, in his celebrated treatise “On the Nature of Constitutional Syphilitic Affections,” pp. 7-14 (Berlin, 1859), has shown that the hypothesis of Hermann [349] is entirely devoid of foundation in fact.

4. I should feel conscientiously compelled to denounce myself for the commission of grievous bodily harm if I ventured to-day, after the accumulated experience of four centuries, to treat a case of syphilis without mercury.

What use is it to continue to fight against the disbelief and superstition which clings to mercury? Why should we for ever be occupied in contradicting the false accusations brought against this drug? For four centuries the divine mercury has withstood all attacks, and will continue to withstand them, until a greatly desired and even better measure is discovered—prophylactic immunization against syphilitic infection.[350]

How mercury is to be given, whether in the form of the long-prized “schmierkur” (cure by inunction), or by hypodermic injection, or by ordinary internal use, must be left in individual cases to the decision of the medical man, for numerous considerations, which can only be properly weighed by the physician, have to be taken into account. A mercury cure is a serious matter, but always also one which repays all the trouble that we take. In “En Guérit-on?” Fournier has most admirably described the[387] wonderful results of a critically considered and carefully conducted mercury cure. I do not, indeed, belong to the “doctors who build for themselves a house of pure quicksilver,” when they enter the field against the “French” (= syphilis), as the phrase runs in Schiller’s work “The Robbers.” I hold by a reasonable, measured use of mercury in the course of the treatment of syphilis, and I advise a good “after-treatment” in addition to the treatment with mercury.[351] Mercury, when given in moderate but sufficient doses, not only destroys the syphilitic virus, but also has a very favourable influence on the general condition, and sometimes even gives rise to an increase in the number of the red blood-corpuscles. Thus, mercury is not only not a poison: it is a most valuable restorative and vitalizing means. This is well illustrated by the following case, which came under my own observation, and which I recommend to the Nature-Healers, in the hope that it may lead them to revise their views regarding the action of mercury:

The case was that of an official, thirty years of age, who had been under my care several times before since the year 1898 for other troubles (gonorrhœa, etc.), and who was always pale and with hollow cheeks, in no way giving the impression of possessing a constitution with strong powers of resistance. Late in the summer he was infected with syphilis; the attack proved a severe one, running a serious course, complicated by an extremely painful suppurative inflammation of the lymphatic vessels of the penis, and accompanied by fever, lassitude, and a sense of exhaustion. An energetic inunction cure was immediately begun. Under this not only did the morbid symptoms rapidly disappear, but there occurred a remarkable change in the general condition, in the sense of an increase of strength, such as had not existed before the illness. Notwithstanding slight stomatitis, the patient during and after the cure felt stronger and more fit for work than he ever had before, and even now this favourable state continues unaltered, as is manifested above all by the increase in the body-weight, by the good appearance, etc. The patient, who now, one and a half years after the cure, has had no relapse, informed me repeatedly and spontaneously that this delightful improvement in his health could only be attributed to his syphilis (!) or to the mercury!

A single mercury cure will suffice, in some cases, to cure syphilis for ever! Regarding this, we have numerous trustworthy observations. In most cases, indeed, during the early years relapses occur, and then we need to use the indispensable mercury cure once more with care, and to employ all the other measures which make up the above-mentioned “after-treatment,” the supplementary means being, above all, iodide of potassium, sulphur (in the long-celebrated[388] sulphur-baths of Aix, Nenndorf, etc.) and arsenic (first recommended by me); also the water cure, brine-baths, and iodide-baths, and a visit to the seaside or to the mountains, and massage, are good accessory means to the cure. Above all, however, the State of nutrition of the patient [352] must always be kept under consideration, and assisted where necessary, for which purpose preparations of iron, nutritive preparations like sanatogen, and milk cures, are of value. Strict abstinence from alcohol is always necessary in the treatment of syphilis. Alcohol has a very unfavourable influence on the syphilitic process, and is often the only cause of continually recurring relapses of this disease.

The thorough treatment of syphilis is a matter of several years, during which the patient must repeatedly present himself to the physician for examination, and should any relapse occur, he must be subjected to renewed treatment. Such thoroughness will invariably be rewarded. Attention to detail will always bear fruit. Syphilis is curable. It is purely fanciful to say that syphilis is never cured, that it pursues its victims up to the end of life, that it knows no pardon. That is not true. Treat your syphilitic patients, treat them properly and thoroughly, if necessary for years in succession, and they will be freed from the disease. “Syphilis,” says Fournier, “is a misfortune, but it is a misfortune from which complete recovery is possible.” From the day when the patient becomes aware that he is suffering from syphilis, he must face the situation “in a calm and manly fashion,” and must say to himself:

“Now there is to be a fight between syphilis and me. To work, therefore, and courage! Courage, because science assures me that with the aid of mercury, of hygiene, and of time, an end will come to the syphilis, and because science gives me an absolute assurance that some day I shall be as healthy as I was before, and that I shall again have the right to a family, that I shall attain the freedom and the happiness of being a father!”[353]

With these admirable words of the greatest living authority on syphilis, I close my account of the suppression of syphilis by medical treatment, and turn to the not less important question of the management of gonorrhœa.

Recent scientific researches, especially those of A. Neisser and E. Finger, have shown that the infective urethritis of the male[389] produced by gonococci is by no means the “trifling and childish complaint” which it was formerly supposed to be, but, on the contrary, is a very serious and obstinate trouble, often resisting the very best means of treatment, so that it may persist for years, and remain for years infective. Still worse is it as regards gonorrhœa of the female genital organs, the cure of which is even more difficult, and the consequences of which are even more disastrous than in the case of the male. If the physician is needed for the cure of syphilis, still more is this the case as regards gonorrhœa. He only can command the scientific methods, and the very complicated technique of the treatment of gonorrhœa. He only can undertake the indispensable control of the treatment by means of microscopic and other methods of investigation. Every cobbler thinks he can cure gonorrhœa, and yet it is this disease which, even more than syphilis, demands the most precise knowledge of the local anatomical and pathological conditions. Blaschko rightly says:

“While no one gives a damaged watch to a baker to mend, or a torn coat to a tinsmith, every one seems to believe that in order to restore the most valuable gift of humanity, health, it is unnecessary to possess the profoundest knowledge of the human body, and to understand the nature and the causes of the disease. Anyone who has come to grief in his ordinary profession, but who understands how with a brazen voice to denounce the so-called ‘medicine of the schools,’ and to praise with sufficient confidence his own successes, is supposed to possess the wonderful power, without any exact knowledge at all, of charming all the illnesses of mankind out of the world.”

Gonorrhœa is also a curable disease, though curable often with great difficulty. We see this from the fact that, notwithstanding the extraordinarily wide diffusion of gonorrhœa (for a far greater number of infections with gonorrhœa occur than of infections with syphilis), still ultimately the majority of the men, and a large proportion of the women, infected with gonorrhœa are completely cured of their trouble.

The treatment of gonorrhœa is a complicated affair. Within the first two days, by the injection of powerful caustic agents, we are sometimes able to cut the matter short and to put an end completely to the gonococci. In every case the patient, as soon as he perceives a discharge, though not yet purulent, from the urethra, should immediately consult a physician, in order to determine the nature of his disease, which, in the majority of cases, will be found to be true gonorrhœa. If it is not possible to abort the gonorrhœa, then the disease will have to run its course. The[390] best measure, whenever possible, is rest in bed for a week or two, in association with a mild, unstimulating diet, and the absolute prohibition of all alcoholic beverages—the last is indispensable throughout the duration of the gonorrhœa—the drinking of uva ursi tea, and, if the inflammatory symptoms are severe, the application of cold compresses to the penis. Only when the first more severe symptoms have passed away, by which time, owing to the reaction of the urethral mucous membrane, a large proportion of the exciters of the disease will already have been expelled, is it time to begin injections or irrigations of the urethra, containing medicaments the nature of which must be left to the decision of the experienced physician, who will regard each individual case on its own merits. If rest in bed is not possible, the patient must wear a so-called “suspensory” bandage, in order to give as much rest as possible to the testicles and the epididymis, which are gravely endangered in every attack of gonorrhœa. If, as often happens, gonorrhœa ascends to the posterior part of the urethra, or to the bladder, or to the prostate, or if, finally, it becomes chronic, then special methods of treatment, with internal medicines, with local cauterization, massage, distension, medicated bougies, baths, etc., are needful. The cure will ensue very gradually; relapses are frequent; even cessation of the discharge is no certain sign of cure, as the presence in the still turbid urine of “threads” containing gonococci sufficiently proves. Only when the urine has become perfectly clear, and any threads which it may contain are shown by repeated search to contain no more gonococci; when also the prostate, a favourite seat of the last remnants of gonorrhœa, is free from inflammation, can the cure be regarded as complete. Even more difficult is the determination of a cure in women. But persistency in the treatment, and frequently repeated examinations, will lead also in women to the desired goal, or, at any rate, will overcome the capacity for spreading the infection.

In the campaign against venereal diseases by the methods of medical treatment, the facilitation of treatment for the great masses of impecunious persons, for the proletariat, is of great value. For them, above all, the provision of Krankenkassen[354] is needed, and it is very satisfactory to note that during recent years the Krankenkassen[391] have especially directed their attention to venereal diseases, since A. Blaschko,[355] A. Neisser,[356] R. Ledermann,[357] and Albert Kohn [358] drew attention to the duties of Krankenkassen in this relationship in a number of admirable works. Krankenkassen are in a position to obtain exact statistics regarding venereal diseases; to diffuse information, verbally and in writing, to the widest extent among their members; to facilitate hospital treatment, and treatment by specialists; to give medical aid as required to infected relatives of the insured; to carry out regularly every year, once or twice, a medical examination of all members, and to distribute among all these writings on the prophylaxis of venereal diseases. The question also of payment on the part of the patient requires new regulations as regards venereal diseases.[359]

Finally, it has been recommended that, in association with the Krankenkassen there should be founded “daily sanatoria” (Neisser), “work sanatoria” (Saalfeld), “ambulatory places for treatment” (Ledermann), and “convalescent homes” (Stern), for members of Krankenkassen suffering from venereal disease, and for insured persons similarly affected. All these institutions would, moreover, be valuable to the community at large.

What admirable results are obtainable by such a systematic treatment of as far as possible all the venereal patients throughout an entire country has been shown by the astonishing decline in the number of cases of venereal diseases in Sweden and Norway, and in Bosnia, where a gratuitous treatment of all such patients at the cost of the state has been introduced. Thus the organized[392] campaign against venereal diseases, which during recent years has been initiated in all the civilized countries of Europe, has led more particularly to efforts in the direction of the sufficient treatment and speedy cure of recent syphilis and recent gonorrhœa.

We pass now to the consideration of the third factor in the campaign against venereal disease, which comprises the duty of the state, the task of social hygiene, and the task of public pedagogy.

The foundation for the suppression of venereal diseases by state effort consists in a knowledge of the extent of the diffusion of these diseases; we need, that is to say, accurate statistics regarding venereal diseases.

It is once more the great service of Blaschko to have been the first in Germany to work on these lines.[360]

Dismissing from consideration the distribution of venereal diseases in countries outside of Europe, regarding which he gives interesting reports, we find that the European conditions are of such a nature that the large towns, the centres of industry and manufacture, garrison towns, and university towns, are most severely affected; that the smaller provincial towns suffer less; that the agricultural population is comparatively free from this disease, with the exception of the uncultivated country districts of Russia and of the Balkan States, where the country people suffer from syphilis to a terrible extent. No exact statistical data are at present available regarding the diffusion of venereal diseases in the individual countries of Europe. The best measure of the prevalence of these diseases is afforded by the figures for the different armies. From these we learn that Denmark, Germany, German Austria, and Switzerland, show the most favourable conditions; next come Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, North and Middle Italy. Worst of all are the conditions in Southern Italy, Greece, Turkey, Russia, and—England. These army statistics are, however, insufficient, for, as a matter of fact, England is most favourably placed in respect of the diffusion of venereal diseases. The most exact reports come from the Scandinavian countries, from Norway and Denmark, in which for several years all physicians have kept a list of all the infective diseases treated by them, as they are compelled every week to make a return to the Board of Public Health. According to these reports, it appears that venereal diseases in Copenhagen constitute the greater part of such diseases in the entire country; but in the[393] period between 1876 and 1895 these diseases have notably declined in frequency in Copenhagen, and all venereal diseases have shared in this decline; gonorrhœa constitutes 70 % of all cases of venereal disease. With regard to the diffusion of infection, it appears from the Copenhagen statistics that one woman with venereal disease serves to transmit it to four men; on the other hand, of four men with venereal disease, one only will transmit that disease to a woman. On the average, there are infected with venereal disease every year 16 to 20 % of all young men between the ages of twenty and thirty years; with gonorrhœa 1 in 8 are infected; with syphilis 1 in 55 are infected. In these last ten years, for every 100 young men living, there have been 119 infections during ten years; that is to say, on the average every one has been infected once, and a great many have been infected more than once; in the same period of ten years, for every 100 young men, there have been 18 infected with syphilis—that is to say, 1 for every 5·5.

Especially valuable also are the figures which Blaschko obtained in 1898 from the carefully kept books of a large mercantile Krankenkasse whose operations were diffused throughout Germany; these figures also give the result of an inquiry regarding venereal diseases amongst workmen, waiting-maids, secret prostitutes, and students. The result of these statistics, as regards Berlin, are given briefly in the following table:

According to these statistics, the diffusion of venereal diseases among shop employees, students, and secret prostitutes (chiefly barmaids and waitresses), is the greatest; it is much less among[394] workmen and soldiers. It further appears, from Blaschko’s inquiry, that of the men who entered on marriage for the first time when above the age of thirty years, each one had, on the average, had gonorrhœa twice, and about one in four or five had been infected with syphilis. Wilhelm Erb, in Heidelberg, obtained similar results.

Still more remarkable were the results of the statistical investigation which was carried out for the entire Kingdom of Prussia by the Prussian Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs and Public Instruction on April 30, 1900.[361]

According to this investigation, it appeared that on this day, in Prussia, there were 41,000 persons suffering from venereal disease, among whom 11,000 were infected with recent syphilis; in Berlin, on the same day, there were 11,600 cases of venereal disease, among whom 3,000 were infected with recent syphilis. The general relations are shown in the following table:

Thus, for every 10,000 adult men there were on this day persons suffering from venereal diseases to the following numbers: in Berlin, 142; in the remaining large towns, 100; in the smaller towns, 50; and in the whole of Prussia, on the average, 28. Naturally the figures should in reality be larger, for of the physicians to whom inquiries were sent, only 63 % returned an[395] answer. Moreover, the annual figure of cases is a very much larger one. Kirchner [362] assumes that every day in Prussia more than 100,000 individuals—that is to say, about 3 per mille—are suffering from a transmissible venereal disease, and he estimates the damage to the national property by typhoid fever as about 8 million marks annually, but that from venereal diseases as not less than ninety million marks annually. In these reports of April 30, 1900, the ratio of men to women suffering from recent syphilis was as 3 : 1.

In order to obtain more exact information regarding the diffusion of venereal diseases, and the actual number of those affected by them, it is of very great importance that there should be a revision of the duty of medical men in respect of the notification of diseases, and also in respect of the duty of professional secrecy.[363]

This latter question is also of importance in respect of the prevention of venereal infection in married life. (The question of syphilitic infection of married women by their husbands has recently been considered by Alfred Fournier: “Syphilis in Honourable Women.”)

In addition to the question of the diffusion and frequency of venereal diseases, the greatest interest attaches to the sources of dangerous infections—that is to say, the question where men and women most frequently contract venereal disease.

Of 487 syphilitic men, the disease was acquired by 395 (81·1 %) from professional prostitutes (officially inscribed or secret); 23 (4·7 %) from waitresses and barmaids; 23 (4·9 %) from their “intimate”; 45 (9·2 %) from casual acquaintances, shop-girls, or workwomen.

According to this report, it appears that prostitution, public[396] and secret (under which heading the waitresses and “casual acquaintances” must be numbered), forms the principal focus of venereal infection.

And that wild sexual intercourse is here almost exclusively to blame is shown by the following statistics, given by Blaschko:

Of 67 syphilitic wives, almost all the wives of workmen, 64 were infected by their husbands; whereas, on the contrary, of 106 husbands, 7 only acquired the disease from their wives; the remaining 99 acquired it by extra-conjugal sexual intercourse, either before or after marriage.

Another very valuable set of statistics dealing with the sources of infection has been published by Heinrich Loeb.[364]

These relate to the conditions in Mannheim. It appears that the sources of infection were as follows:

Here, as we see, the chief types of secret prostitution, the waitresses and barmaids, play the principal part; next, but a long way after, come maidservants and shop-girls. This, however, does not amount to saying that public prostitution is less dangerous. We know that a prostitute who has never been infected with venereal disease is something very rarely seen; that prostitutes under regulation are almost all, especially when still quite young, in an infective state, and that they serve just as much as secret prostitutes for the diffusion of venereal disease. It is a well-known fact that youthful prostitutes are more dangerous than women who have long practised prostitution, because the former are all suffering from more or less recent infection, and both[397] gonorrhœa and syphilis are present in them in the stages in which they are still strongly infective. H. Berger bases upon statistical investigations [365] his belief that red-haired girls have the most delicate epithelium, fall sick most rapidly and in the greatest numbers; dark haired women at first suffer less. After they have been prostitutes for some time, there is no important difference between blonde, brown, and black-haired women; but black-haired prostitutes are, in fact, more inclined to infection later in their career, because they are more in request.

Now that we have learned that at the present day prostitution remains the principal source of venereal infection, the following question immediately demands an answer: What can the state do in order to remove these sources of infection? and have the measures which the state has hitherto put into operation been of any use in this direction? To put it shortly, what part has been played by the state regulation of prostitution, as hitherto practised, in the campaign against venereal diseases?

With Schmölder,[366] we understand by “regulation” the following practice, which is what obtains in the majority of civilized countries: The police keep a list in which the girls and women regarded by them as prostitutes have their names entered. The “inscribed” (inscrites) receive a “licentia stupri”—that is to say, the permission to practise professional fornication under continual observation on the part of the police (the renowned “moral control”[367]), which is associated with a number of commands, prohibitions, and regulations—above all, with the necessity of submitting to medical examination at definitely stated intervals, and, where necessary, to compulsory medical treatment. At the same time, public prostitution on the part of those who are not inscribed is suppressed as much as possible. Berger has admirably described (“Prostitution in Hanover,” pp. 1-19) the methods of regulation and their consequences. Above all, however, have Blaschko, Schmölder, and Neisser considered the modes of regulation customary at the present day from the moral, legal, and medical points of view, and have in part entirely condemned them (Blaschko and Schmölder), in part declared them to be gravely in need of reform (Neisser).[368]

Among those who have recently discussed the question of the regulation of prostitution, we may mention Anna Pappritz,[369] who condemns the practice; Clausmann, who is in favour of it;[370] Friedrich Hammer, also in favour of it;[371] and, finally, S. Bettmann, who leaves the question open.[372]

In our consideration of the coercive system of regulation, we take a single standpoint—namely, that of its possible value for the suppression of venereal diseases. Some demand the abolition of regulation on ethical and humanitarian grounds, and we do not wish in any way to make light of these grounds. But they could not be decisive, if, as an actual fact, regulation had an effect either in diminishing the prevalence of venereal diseases or in checking prostitution; but, in truth, the reverse is the case!

Schmölder [373] has shown beyond dispute that the compulsory inscription of prostitutes, introduced from France, is in our country an utterly illegal measure, arbitrarily enforced by the police. It has been amply proved that this illegal compulsory inscription has actually made prostitutes of many girls who had no inclination to permanent professional prostitution; that this method produces artificial prostitutes. What errors of judgment, what abuses of power, occur on the part of the police, in connexion with this compulsory inscription! How often does the inscription result from a denunciation made on grounds of private spite! The “Committee of Fifteen,” constituted for the study of prostitution in New York, declares in its report:

“Men with political insight are of opinion that every limitation of the freedom of the individual is in itself an evil, and that such a limitation can only be justified in cases in which the good derived from the infringement can really be estimated at a very high valuation. A system which permits the police, simply on grounds of suspicion, to arrest a citizen, to submit him to an injurious examination, only with the aim of discovering a disease he is suspected to have, and then to[399] put him into prison, on the suspicion that he might have indulged in immoral intercourse if he had been left at liberty, cannot possibly be regarded as harmonizing with the principles of personal freedom.”[374]

Blaschko and Fiaux have proved that regulation concerns only a small fraction of prostitutes, usually the older ones; whereas the beginners, who are precisely those most dangerous in respect of venereal infection, and, further, the army of secret prostitutes, half prostitutes, occasional prostitutes, and the half-world, remain free from regulation—are probably left free deliberately—and anyhow could not possibly be supervised, on account of the enormous cost of supervision. In Berlin, speaking generally, only one-fifth part of the girls arrested are subjected to regulation, four-fifths are simply “warned and discharged”; and even of this fifth part, in reality a large percentage does not come under control because “escape from the lists” renders permanent observation impossible. Fiaux proves that more than 50 % of the medical examinations which ought to have been made on the 4,000 women under regulation in Berlin during the years 1888 to 1901, were in fact neglected.[375]

It is certain that regulated prostitution is more dangerous from the point of view of public health than free prostitution. The prostitute remaining under surveillance is in constant fear of compulsory treatment in the lock hospital, and therefore endeavours to conceal her illness as long as possible, or temporarily to avoid medical examination altogether. The free prostitute has a personal interest in becoming well again as soon as possible, and generally goes voluntarily and at once to seek treatment from a physician. Thus it happens that, among the regulated prostitutes, the number of those infected appears surprisingly small. In addition, we have to consider the inadequacy of the medical examination, because the number of the physicians and the time assigned to them are too small. And whilst it appears to be a fact that every third prostitute is infected with gonorrhœa, in Berlin, during the year 1889, as the result of official examination under regulation, only one prostitute in 200 was declared infected, and in 1884 only 1 in 1,873. Moreover, very many infected prostitutes under compulsory[400] medical treatment are, as Blaschko proves, allowed to resume their professional occupation in an uncured state, and to diffuse their illness freely once more. The figures given by Blaschko speak very clearly on this point:

Place.	Date.	Annual Percentage of Prostitutes attacked by Syphilis.
Regulated.	Free.
Paris	1878-1887	12·2	7·0
Brussels	1887-1889	25·0	9·0
St. Petersburg	1890	33·5	12·0
Antwerp	1882-1884	51·3	7·7

From this it is clear that the abolition of the regulation of prostitutes will not have an unfavourable, but, on the contrary, will have a thoroughly favourable, influence in respect of the frequency of venereal diseases. The conditions in England and Norway show this very clearly. In Christiania, after the abolition of regulation in the year 1888, syphilis declined in frequency—in the first place, because the number of girls who applied for treatment increased, whilst prior to the abolition of regulation they had concealed their illness in order to avoid falling into the hands of the police; and in the second place, because now the fear of venereal infection kept many young men from having intercourse with prostitutes, whereas previously they had erroneously believed that the “control” would free them from the danger of venereal infection. The same was the case in London, where there is no regulation; the frequency of venereal disease has decreased because young men now avoid intercourse with prostitutes as much as possible. In France, the country in which regulation was first introduced, the commission formed for the study of prostitution came to the conclusion that “regulation of prostitutes should be abolished.” The principal reason for which the police continue to advocate the preservation of the system of regulation—namely, that they have an interest in the matter on account of the intimate connexion between many prostitutes and criminality—will not bear examination. It is true enough that soutenage[376] is inseparable from prostitution. Moreover,[401] the world of criminals is very near to prostitution, in the first place, because the prostitute also has need of a man on whom she can lean, who can be something to her from the personal point of view, to whom she is not simply a chattel;[377] and, in the second place, because the prostitute is, like the criminal, despised and defamed—she shares with the criminal the pariah nature. Lombroso’s doctrine that prostitution is throughout equivalent to criminality is certainly not justified. It is only by the outward circumstances of their life that the bulk of prostitutes are driven into intimate relations with criminality. And among these outward circumstances, regulation, and the expulsion of prostitutes from honourable society (which is a necessary part of regulation) play the principal rôle! For this reason, if for this reason alone, regulation must be abolished, because then a strong supplement to criminality from the circles of prostitution would be cut off.

Even before investigators had become convinced of the uselessness and danger of regulation the cry arose: “Away with the brothels!” We have already alluded to the continuous decline in the number of brothels in all large towns. In 1841 there were in Paris still 235 brothels (to 1,200,000 inhabitants); in 1900 there were only 48 brothels (to 3,600,000 inhabitants); and for St. Petersburg and other large towns a similar decline in the number of brothels can be established, notwithstanding the fact that everywhere the population has markedly increased. This proves that the brothels no longer correspond to any real need.[378] At the present day, owing to the great development of intercourse in modern times, brothels are a public calamity; they bring the quarter of the town in which they exist into disrepute, and deprive the neighbourhood of its proper monetary value. Moreover, the time is past for slave-holding on the part of the brothel-owner. The existence of brothels favours the traffic in girls (the “White Slave Trade”), encourages sexual perversities, and increases the diffusion of venereal diseases. The prostitute living in a brothel is sometimes compelled to have intercourse with ten or twelve men in a single day, and is thus pre-eminently exposed to venereal infection, all the more because she must admit the embraces of every man who pays the brothel-keeper money; whilst the prostitute living freely can at least refuse to have anything to do with a man who appears to her to be ill. According to[402] Lecour, Mireur, Diday, and Sperk, prostitutes in brothels suffer from syphilis about three times as often as free prostitutes.[379]

Other modifications of brothel life, such as the so-called “controlled streets,”[380] the best known of which are in Bremen [381]—that is to say, streets closed to ordinary traffic, the houses of which are inhabited only by prostitutes under control, but the girls being in other respects free and not living under the domination of a brothel-keeper; also the “Kasernierung”[382] of prostitutes, their confinement to particular streets, or special “quarters” of the town (“Dirnenquartiere”)[383]—are all to be rejected on the same grounds.

The whole nature of brothel life, and the very serious dangers it involves, have been discussed in excellent works by E. von Düring,[384] Henriette Fürth,[385] Karl Nötzel,[386] and Martin Bruck.[387] They illumine the whole question, and provide sufficient grounds for the condemnation of brothels.

A few authors, however, continue to advocate the preservation of brothels, and some of these wish to enforce medical examination, not only of prostitutes, but also of their masculine clients. This proposition is made, for example, by Ernst Kromayer in his work, which, notwithstanding many Utopian ideas, is nevertheless very stimulating, “The Eradication of Syphilis,” pp. 67, 68 (Berlin, 1898). Von Düring, in his criticism of these ideas, rightly points out that this recommendation would be quite useless in practice, because, in the first place, only a small proportion of men visit brothels at all. In the second place, in the hurry in these resorts no proper examination could be undertaken. In the third place, the doctors who were to be appointed as a kind of medical porters to brothels, would not easily be found[403] to accept such situations. Lassar, who answers this last criticism, is of opinion that the brothel-master, or anybody with a little experience, could easily undertake this examination in the case of men.[388]

But these men would probably also decline the office; and even if they were willing, it is very doubtful if they would be in a position to make the suggested examinations, which, after all, require real medical skill; and, finally, the only result would be—to increase the number of quacks. Therefore, this idea of the examination of the male visitors to brothels is Utopian.

No, the true hope lies in absolute freedom; in relieving prostitution from the oppression of the police; in its gradual separation from criminality; in—I am not afraid of the word—in an “ennoblement” of prostitution.[389] The “prostitute” (German Dirne = drab) must disappear, and the “human being” must reawaken. The prostituted woman must be readmitted into the social community. No more coercion! Free and voluntary treatment, in polyclinics [390] and hospitals; the “rescue” of youthful prostitutes,[391] not in the prison-like “Magdalen Homes,” but by means of ethically instructive influence from human being to human being, of the value of which the “Letters to Prostitutes” of the noble philanthropist Frau Eggers-Smidt,[392] and also the experiences of the Salvation Army,[393] give such admirable evidence.

Very aptly, also, Kromayer has shown to what an extent a change in our present attitude towards sexual intercourse outside the conditions of coercive marriage, the removal of the stamp of infamy from such intercourse, would limit prostitution, and therewith also limit venereal diseases.[394] This is as clear as daylight. But, unfortunately, those very persons who declare the existing conditions in respect of prostitution to be absolutely intolerable will not admit its truth.

The misery of the life of these unhappy creatures must be relieved,[404] but we must do it ourselves, and soon; for they are not in a position to do so. The last, the highest goal of the campaign against venereal disease is the humanization of the prostitute.[395]

Supplementary Note.—In the essay on “The Woman’s Question” in the sociological section of his work, “The Ethic of Free-Thought,” Karl Pearson discusses the question of Prostitution in relation to the Woman’s Question at large. His remarks have especial interest in view of what is said above about “the ennoblement of prostitution” and “the humanization of the prostitute,” and it seems expedient to quote the passage at length (op. cit., 1888, pp. 379-382).—Translator.

“The emancipation of woman, while placing her in a position of social responsibility, will make it her duty to investigate many matters of which she is at present frequently assumed to be ignorant. It may be doubted whether the identification of purity and ignorance has had wholly good effects in the past; indeed, it has frequently been the false cry with which men have sought to hide their own anti-social conduct. It is certain, however, that it cannot last in the future, and man will have to face the fact that woman’s views and social action with regard to many sex-problems may widely differ from his own. It is of the utmost importance that woman, not only on account of the part she already plays in the education of the young, but also because of the social responsibilities her emancipation must bring, should have a full knowledge of the laws of sex. Every attempt hitherto to grapple with prostitution has been a failure. What will women do when they thoroughly grasp the problem, and have a voice in the attitude the state should assume in regard to it? At present hundreds do not know of its existence; thousands only know of it to despise those who earn their living by it; one in ten thousand has examined the causes which lead to it, has felt that degradation, if there be any, lies not in the prostitute, but in the society where it exists; not in the women of the streets, but in the thousands of women in society, who are ignorant of the problem, ignore it, or fear to face it. What will be the result of woman’s action in the matter? Can it possibly be effectual, or will it merely tend to embitter the relations of men and women? Possibly an expression of woman’s opinion on this point in society and the press would do much, but then it must be an educated opinion,[405] one which recognizes facts and knows the difficulties of the problem. An appeal to chivalry, to a Christian dogma, to a Biblical text, will hardly avail. The description we have of Calvin’s Geneva shows that puritanic suppression is wholly idle. What form will be taken by the reasoned action of women, cognizant of historical and sexualogical fact?

“Perhaps it may be that women, when they fully grasp the problem, will despair, as many men do, of its solution. They may remark that prostitution has existed in nearly all historic times, and among nearly all races of men. It has existed as an institution as long as monogamic marriage has existed; it may be itself the outcome of that marriage. I do not know whether any trace of a like promiscuity has been found in the animals nearest allied to man—I believe not. The periodic instinct has probably preserved them from it. How mankind came to lose the periodic instinct, and how that loss may possibly be related to the solely human institution of marriage, are problems not without interest. On the one hand, it has been asserted that prostitution is a logical outcome of our present social relations, while, on the other hand, it is held to be a survival of matriarchal licence, and not a sine qua non of all forms of human society. There is very considerable evidence to show that a large percentage of women are driven to prostitution by absolute want, or by the extremities to which a seduced woman is forced by the society which casts her out. This point is important. It may, perhaps, be that our social system, quite as much as man’s supposed needs, keeps prostitution alive. The frequency with which prostitutes, for the sake of their own living, seduce comparative boys, may be as much a cause of the evil as male passion itself. The socialists hold the sale of a woman’s person to be directly associated with the monopoly of surplus labour. Is the emancipated woman likely to adopt this view? and if so shall we not have a wide-reaching social reconstruction forced upon us? That emancipated woman would strive for a vast economic reorganization, as the only means of preserving the self-respect and independence of her sex, is a possibility with the gravest and most wide-reaching consequences. We cannot emancipate woman without placing her in a position of political and social influence equal to man’s. It may well be that she will regard economic and sexual problems from a very different standpoint, and the result will infallibly lead to the formation of a woman’s party, and to a more or less conscious struggle between the sexes. Would this end in an increased social stability or another subjection of sex?

“Woman may, however, conclude that the alternative is true—that prostitution is not the outcome of our present social organisation, but a feature of all forms of human society. She must, then, treat it as a necessary evil or as a necessary good. In the former case she will at least insist on an equal social stigma attaching to both sexes if she does not demand, as in the instance of any other form of anti-social conduct, so far as practicable its legal repression. In the latter case—that is, if its existence really tends in some way to the welfare or stability of society—women will have to admit that prostitution is an honourable profession; they cannot shirk that conclusion, bitter as it may appear to some. The ‘social outcast’ would then have to be recognized as filling a social function, and the problem would reduce to the amelioration of her life, and to her elevation in the social scale. Either there is a[406] means of abolishing prostitution, or all participators must be treated alike as anti-social, or the prostitute is an honourable woman—no other possibility suggests itself. Society has hitherto failed to find a remedy, perhaps because only man has sought for one; woman, when she for the time fully grasps the problem, must be prepared for one, or must recognize the alternatives. There cannot be a doubt, however, that in a matter so closely concerning her personal dignity she will take action, and that, if only in this one matter, her freedom will raise questions, which many would prefer to ignore, and which, when raised, will undoubtedly touch principles apparently fundamental to our existing social organization.”

[330] See note to p. 390.

[331] Parent-Duchatelet, “The Moral Corruption of the Female Sex in Paris,” vol. ii., p. 234 (Leipzig, 1837). Similarly, Julius Donarth remarks (“The Beginnings of the Human Spirit,” p. 19; Stuttgart, 1898): “Syphilis and alcoholism can by social arrangement and carefully adapted measures be suppressed just as much as plague and cholera.”

[332] The literature of this subject is very extensive. In addition to a comprehensive work dealing with the older literature, by J. K. Proksch, “The Prevention of Venereal Diseases” (Vienna, 1872), I must mention the following: E. Lang, “The Prevention of Venereal Diseases” (Vienna, 1894); M. Joseph, “Prophylaxis of Cutaneous and Venereal Diseases” (Munich, 1900); Neuberger, “The Prophylaxis of Venereal Diseases,” pp. 35-37 (Munich and Berlin, 1904); Felix Block, “How shall We protect Ourselves against Venereal Diseases and their Evil Consequences?” second edition (Leipzig, 1905); E. Boureau, “Conseils Pratiques à la Jeunesse pour Éviter les Avaries” (Paris, 1905); Suarez de Mendoza, “Conseils de Prophylaxie Sanitaire et Morale” (Paris, 1906); same author, “ABC à l’Usage des Mères de Famille pour la Défense de Leurs Foyers contre les Grands Fléaux du XXe Siècle: Tuberculose, Avariose [= Syphilis], Neissérose [= Gonorrhœa], Alcoolisme, Mortalité Infantile” (Paris, 1905); same author, “Avariose des Innocents” (Paris, 1905).

[333] Cf. also the valuable remarks of Robert Hessen, “Cleanliness or Morality?” published in Die Zukunft, June 9, 1906, pp. 367-377 (also separately printed in Munich, 1906).

[334] Otto Neustätter, “The Public Recommendation of Protective Measures,” published in The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, vol. v., No. 3, pp. 225-227 (Leipzig, 1905).

[335] H. Ferdy, “The History of the Cæcal Condom,” published in The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1905, vol. iii., No. 4, pp. 144-147.

[336] Cf. in this connexion the admirable essay, distinguished by a critical spirit, of R. de Campagnolle, “The Value of the Modern Prophylaxis of Gonorrhœa by Means of Instillations,” published in The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1904, vol. iii., Nos. 1-4, pp. 1-31, 51-115, 148 (with a complete bibliography).

[337] In place of these solutions, Cronquist (“Contributions to the Personal Prophylaxis against Gonorrhœa,” published in Medizinische Klinik, No. 10, 1906) recommends the use of little rods or bougies containing 2 per cent. of albargin, which melt from the body-heat when introduced into the urethra (these are sold under the trade name of “antigon-rods”); they are used, like the solutions, immediately after coitus. The advantage they possess is their greater durability.

[338] The same idea had already been advanced in Germany by Eduard Richter and S. Behrmann.

[339] E. Metchnikoff, “The Prophylaxis of Syphilis,” published in Medizinische Klinik, 1906, No. 15, pp. 372, 373. Cf. also Paul Maisonneuve, “Experimentation sur la Prophylaxie de la Syphilis” (Paris, 1906); and A. Neisser. “Experimental Research regarding Syphilis,” pp. 81-83 (Berlin, 1906).

[340] O. Neustätter, “The Public Recommendation of Protective Measures,” published in The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1905, vol. iv., pp. 203-252.

[341] G. Bernhard, “The Criminal Law and Protective Measures against Venereal Diseases,” ibid., pp. 253-273.

[342] F. von Liszt, “Legal Protection against Dangers to Health from Venereal Diseases,” published in The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1903, vol. i., pp. 1-25.

[343] Von Bar, “The Need for a Special Law against Blameworthy Venereal Infection,” ibid., pp. 64-72.

[344] R. Schmölder, “Criminal and Civil Juridicial Significance of Venereal Diseases,” ibid., pp. 73-106.

[345] Albert Reibmayr, “The Immunization of Families by Inheritable Diseases (Tuberculosis, Lues, Mental Disorders),” p. 17 (Leipzig and Vienna, 1899).

[346] This conception of “partial syphilization” of our race appears somewhat vague. If we take care to think clearly, and in terms of exact biological knowledge, we shall see that—apart from a spontaneous loss of intensity on the part of the syphilitic virus (of which we have no precise knowledge whatever)—the only known way of accounting for syphilis having become milder is by natural selection, by the death of those who suffered most severely from the disease. Now, in 400 years, ten or twelve human generations, there has hardly been time for the development of immunity to a disease to which at most a small fraction only of the population has ever been exposed. It appears to me, however, that we may reasonably doubt the alleged decline in the severity of syphilis. It must be remembered that the entire absence of mercurial treatment at first, and the misuse of that specific for many years after its value had been proved, will account for much in respect of the apparent greater virulence of medieval as compared with modern syphilis. (See also p. 356, and footnote to that page referring to the writings of Archdall Reid).—Translator.

[347] Alfred Fournier, “The Treatment and Prophylaxis of Syphilis.” One vol. Rebman, London.

[348] Cf. Iwan Bloch, “Personal Reminiscences of my Lecturing Journey this Year,” published in Medizinische Klinik, 1906, No. 10.

[349] Hermann is a fanatical medical opponent of mercury. There are, in fact, such oddities. They are very rare birds in the medical world.

[350] Recently R. Kaufmann has collected in a small readable essay the scientific views of the present day, “The Therapeutic Use of Mercury” (Leipzig, 1906). I warmly recommend this book to all who are interested in the question.

[351] Cf. Iwan Bloch, “The After-Treatment of Syphilis,” published in Medizinische Klinik, 1905, No. 4, pp. 88-91.

[352] Cf. Iwan Bloch, “Nutritive Therapeutics in Cases of Syphilis,” published in Medizinische Klinik, 1905, No. 18, pp. 442-446.

[353] Alfred Fournier, “En Guérit-on?” pp. 95, 96 (Paris, 1906).

[354] “Krankenkassen.”—I have to employ the German term, since in England we do not possess the institution, nor even the name. In Germany there is a general system of insurance against illness, to which workmen have to contribute a proportion of their wages, the fund being supplemented by contributions from the employers of labour. When ill the workman applies to the Krankenkasse for the necessary medical advice and treatment.—Translator.

[355] A. Blaschko, “The Treatment of Venereal Diseases in Krankenkassen” (Berlin, 1890).

[356] A. Neisser, “Krankenkassen and the Campaign against Venereal Diseases,” published in The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1904, vol. ii., pp. 161-169, 181-194, 221-247.

[357] R. Ledermann, “Do the Provisions of the Law for Insurance against Sickness Provide for the Cure of Venereal Disease?” ibid., 1905, vol. iii., pp. 449-463.

[358] Albert Kohn, “Should Krankenkassen send Delegates to Hygienic Congresses?” ibid., 1906, vol. v., pp. 121-130.

[359] Rudolf Lennhoff, in an address on February 8, 1907, to the local group of Berlin of the German Society for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases on “Venereal Diseases and Social Legislation,” drew especial attention to the necessity of enrolling in the scheme of insurance against illness wider circles of the impecunious population, especially the class of domestic servants. Servants suffering from venereal disease, since at the present day they usually preserve secrecy as to their trouble, in order that they may not lose their place, constitute a dangerous source of infection for their employers and the latters’ children. Therefore, a particularly thorough and speedy treatment of servants suffering from venereal diseases is necessary. It is further necessary to insist that all the employees of the Krankenkassen should observe the duty of professional secrecy. Recently the Landesversicherungsanstalt (an insurance institution) of Berlin started a dispensary of its own in Lichtenberg for patients suffering from venereal disease, in which every year more than 400 patients undergo treatment.

[360] A. Blaschko, “The Diffusion of Venereal Diseases,” published in The Hygiene of Prostitution and of Venereal Diseases, pp. 19-36 (Jena, 1900).

[361] “Diffusion of Venereal Diseases in Prussia, as well as the Measures Necessary in the Campaign against these Diseases,” edited by A. Guttstadt; Berlin, 1901 (Journal of the Royal Prussian Statistical Bureau).

[362] M. Kirchner, “The Social Importance of Venereal Diseases.”

[363] Cf. Chotzen and Simonson, “The Duty of Notification and the Obligation of Professional Secrecy on the Part of Physicians in the Case of Venereal Diseases,” published in The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1904, vol. ii., pp. 433-474; A. Neisser, “Amendment of § 300 of the Criminal Code, and the Medical Duty of Notification, in Relation to the Suppression of Venereal Diseases,” op. cit., 1905, vol. iv., pp. 1-28; Bernstein, “Medical Professional Secrecy and Venereal Diseases,” ibid., pp. 29-31; M. Flesch, “Medical Professional Secrecy and the Suppression of Venereal Diseases,” ibid., pp. 32-51; Magnus Möller, “The Duty of Professional Secrecy on the Part of Physicians, the Notification of Diseases, and the Ascertainment of the Sources of Infection in the Case of Venereal Diseases,” ibid., 1906, vol. vi., pp. 241-258, 283-301; Ludwig Bendix, “Professional Secrecy on the Part of Physicians,” ibid., 1906, pp. 372-376.

[364] H. Loeb, “Statistics Relating to Venereal Diseases in Mannheim,” published in The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, vol. ii., pp. 97, 98 (1904).

[365] H. Berger, “Prostitution in Hanover,” pp. 37, 38 (Berlin, 1902).

[366] Schmölder, “The State and Prostitution,” p. 1 (Berlin, 1900).

[367] Cf. J. Fabry, “The Question of Inscription under Police Surveillance, with especial Regard to the Conditions in Dortmund,” published in The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1906, vol. v., pp. 325-342.

[368] A. Neisser, “In what Direction can the Regulation of Prostitution be Reformed?” published in The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1903, vol. i., pp. 163-356.

[369] Anna Pappritz, “Is the Present Method of the Regulation of Prostitution Capable of Reform, and in What Manner?” published in The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1903, vol. i., pp. 367-372.

[370] Clausmann, “Prostitution, Police, and Justice,” op. cit., 1906, vol. v., pp. 219-225.

[371] Friedrich Hammer, “The Regulation of Prostitution,” published in The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1904, 1905, vol. iii., pp. 373-385, 426-435.

[372] S. Bettmann, “The Medical Treatment of Prostitutes” (Jena, 1905)—a thorough study of all the available material.

[373] Schmölder, “Professional Fornication and Compulsory Inscription on the List of Prostitutes” (Berlin, 1894).

[374] “The Social Evil, with Especial Reference to Conditions existing in the City of New York. A Report prepared under the Direction of the ‘Committee of Fifteen,’” pp. 91, 92 (New York and London, 1902).

[375] A severe criticism of regulation and its consequences is to be found in the excellent dissertation of Paul Emile Morhardt, “Les Maladies Vénériennes et la Réglementation de la Prostitution au Point de Vue de l’Hygiène Sociale” (Paris, 1906).

[376] Cf. the admirable description of soutenage given by Hans Ostwald, “Soutenage in Berlin” (Berlin and Leipzig, 1905).

[377] “The human being awakens in the prostitute. That is the whole secret and the cause of soutenage.”—H. Ostwald.

[378] The dislike to the brothels of Paris is confirmed by Lassar (“Prostitution in Paris,” Berliner klinische Wochenschrift, 1892, No. 5).

[379] J. Rutgers (“Sketches from Holland,” published in The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1906, vol. v., p. 345) has admirably expressed this fact in the following words: “The danger of infection is directly proportionable to centralization.”

[380] Anna Pappritz, “What Protection can Brothel Streets Offer?” published in The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1904, 1905, vol. iii., pp. 417-424.

[381] Stachow, “The Controlled Streets of Bremen,” ibid., 1905, vol. iv., pp. 77-87.

[382] Fabry, “Brothels and Brothel Streets,” ibid., 1905, pp. 167-169 (in favour of “Kasernierung”); Wolff, “The Question of Kasernierung,” ibid., 1905, vol. iv., pp. 73-76 (in favour of “Kasernierung”); F. Block, “The Kasernierung of Prostitution in Hanover” (Hanover, 1907).

[383] F. Zinsser, “The Conditions of Prostitution in the Town of Cologne,” ibid., 1906, vol. v., pp. 201-218.

[384] E. von Düring, “The Brothel Question,” ibid., 1905, pp. 111-128.

[385] H. Fürth, “The Suppression of Venereal Diseases and the Brothel Question,” ibid., pp. 129-156.

[386] K. Nötzel, “Brothels in Russia,” ibid., 1906, pp. 41-66, 81-106.

[387] M. Bruck, “Good Morals and the Brothel Trade,” ibid., pp. 57-62.

[388] O. Lassar, “Prostitution and Venereal Diseases,” published in Hygienische Rundschau, 1891, No. 23.

[389] See note at end of chapter.

[390] B. Marcuse, “Treatment of Prostitutes,” published in The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1906, pp. 1-8.

[391] F. Schiller, “Rescue-Work and the Suppression of Prostitution,” ibid., 1903, 1904, vol. ii., pp. 294-313, 341-349.

[392] Ibid., 1906, vol. iii., pp. 336-350.

[393] P. Kampffmeyer, “Educational Work in Connexion with Prostitutes,” ibid., pp. 351, 352.

[394] E. Kromayer, “The Physician and the Protection of Motherhood,” published in Mutterschutz, 1905, vol. iii., pp. 351-352.

[395] Quite recently—October, 1906—the first step in this direction has been taken. The Chief Commissioner of the Berlin Police addressed to the medical specialists in venereal diseases an inquiry whether they were prepared to treat gratuitously impecunious prostitutes who were not under police control. The girls would then be given a register of these doctors. If they presented themselves for treatment, no particulars about them would be demanded from the physician. The presentation by the patients to the police of a certificate from a medical man would suffice to exempt them from police control, and from compulsory examination and treatment at the police department of the section of the town to which they belonged. Further details will be arranged later in co-operation with the Committee of the Society for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases.

In his valuable study, “The Future of Prostitution,” published in the monthly magazine Mutterschutz, July, 1907, pp. 274-288, Havelook Ellis also takes an extremely optimistic view regarding the gradual and inevitable diminution of prostitution by indirect means—that is to say, in this way we are elevating ourselves socially and economically to a higher stage of humanity.

CHAPTER XVI
STATES OF SEXUAL IRRITABILITY AND SEXUAL WEAKNESS
(Auto-erotism, Masturbation, Sexual Hyperæsthesia and Sexual Anæsthesia, Seminal Emissions, Impotence, and Sexual Neurasthenia).

“The conditions of modern civilization render auto-erotism a phenomenon of increasing social importance.”—Havelock Ellis.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XVI

Wide diffusion of auto-erotic phenomena — Their significance in relation to civilization — Physiological and pathological relations — Their diffusion among animals and among primitive peoples — The auto-erotic instrumentarium — Causes of auto-erotism and of masturbation — New views regarding the masturbation of sucklings — The sexual tension of puberty — Sexual toxins — Mechanical stimuli in sexual tension — Sedative and anodyne effects of masturbation — Seduction as the cause of masturbation — Group-masturbation in schools, etc. — Diseases as causes of masturbation — Inheritance of the tendency to masturbation — Masturbation in the female sex — Its frequency — Psychical onanism — Sexual day-dreams — Erotic correspondence — Consequences of masturbation — Exaggerated views of former times — Analysis of the harmfulness of masturbation — Changes of the psyche and of the will — Explanation of certain phenomena of our time as due to masturbation — Physical consequences of masturbation — Local changes in the genital organs — Abnormalities in the libido sexualis — Treatment and cure of masturbation — Clothing — Trousers and masturbation — Doctor Bernhard Faust’s book — Various medical methods employed in the treatment of masturbation.

Sexual neurasthenia — Its connexion with masturbation — Relative independence of its symptoms — Abnormal increase of the sexual impulse (sexual hyperæsthesia) — Causes — Peculiar form of nocturnal increase of the sexual impulse — Satyriasis and priapism — Nymphomania — Causes of Nymphomania — Examples — Treatment of sexual hyperæsthesia — Abnormal diminution of the sexual impulse (sexual anæsthesia) — Causes — Frequency of sexual frigidity in women — Causes — Vaginismus — Treatment of frigidity in women — Frigidity and prostitution — Frigidity and marriage — Erotomania — Seminal emissions — Lallemand’s distinction between normal and abnormal pollutions — Morbid pollutions — Diurnal pollutions — Abnormalities of the genital organs and of the sensation during pollutions — Spermatorrhœa and prostatorrhœa — Pollutions in women — Older and more recent observations — Medical treatment of pollutions.

Impotence — Its principal forms — Malformations of the genital organs — Castration — Gonorrhœal diseases — Azoospermia — Smallness and injuries of the penis — Incomplete erections — Central and peripheral causes of erection — Functional impotence — General disorders — Deleterious influence of alcohol and tobacco — Nervous impotence — The psychical impotence of the wedding night — Examples — Mental work and potency — The effect of sudden mental impressions — Reflective impotence — Rousseau’s Venetian adventure — Neurasthenic impotence — Its forms and symptoms — Impotence due to abstinence — Senile impotence — Treatment of impotence.

Other phenomena of sexual neurasthenia (gastric disorders, etc.) — Sexual hypochondria — The treatment of sexual neurasthenia.

CHAPTER XVI

Almost as widely diffused as venereal diseases are the abnormal sexual manifestations to be considered in this chapter under the general title of “States of Sexual Irritability and Sexual Weakness.” They arise in part out of the very nature of mankind; in part they are the external manifestations of a natural impulse, of an instinctive excitement, in which form we see them also in other animals; in part they are connected with man’s spiritual nature, with civilization. We may, indeed, say that the duplex nature of man, his bodily-spiritual dualism, is most clearly reflected in this phenomenon of his sexuality. In this respect he is wholly human.

It is a great service performed by Havelock Ellis [396] that he was the first to direct attention to the “involuntary” manifestations of the sexual impulse peculiar to mankind, occurring without relation to the other sex. He gives them the distinctive name of “auto-erotism,” by which he means “the phenomenon of spontaneous sexual excitement manifesting itself without any stimulus, direct or indirect, supplied by any other person.” For the most part, therefore, the normal manifestations of art and poetry belong also to the province of auto-erotism, in so far as they are the result of erotic perception; and the same is true of all those manifestations which I have termed “sexual equivalents,” all transformations of sexual energy, such as religio-sexual phenomena, the transformation of individual love into the general love of mankind, the stimuli of fashion, and every powerful activity by means of which sexual tension finds a mode of discharge, even though this sexual relationship is usually of an unconscious nature, as in the dance, in society games, and other enjoyments.

In my essay on “The Perverse,” pp. 14, 15 (Berlin, 1905), I have shown that there is no doubt that these sexual equivalents, taken in their entirety, have played an extremely important part in the course of the evolution of mankind; that they represent the natural outlets for feelings of tension and excessive forces of sexual origin; and that they should not be unnecessarily suppressed, unless we wish to evoke much worse and far more dangerous variations of their activity—as, for example, in the political sphere.

Appositely, I find in Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Posthumous[410] Works” (vol. xii. of the “Collected Works,” p. 149; Leipzig, 1901) an interesting remark bearing on the question:

“Many of our impulses find an outlet in a mechanically powerful activity, which can be directed by intelligent purpose; unless this is done, these manifestations are destructive and harmful. Hate, anger, the sexual impulse, etc., can be set to the machine and taught to do useful work—for example, to chop wood, to carry letters, or to drive the plough. Our impulses must be worked out. The life of the learned man more especially demands something of the kind.”

What a wise and apt remark! Our whole civilization is permeated with sexual equivalents of this kind; the pleasure of life and the joy of existence are based thereon, however much our puritans and asexual “morality-fanatics” may strive against this fact. And it is well that the sexual impulse has been “civilized,” that there are now so many spontaneous modes of its discharge, that the sphere of auto-erotism increases pari passu with the growth of civilization. Many new, finer, and nobler incitations and stimuli stream therefrom into love and life, upon which they exercise a rejuvenating and strengthening influence. Still, this light throws a shadow, inasmuch as fantastic and unnatural aberrations of the sexual life are also apt to ensue.

Auto-erotism (including its grosser form, masturbation) is therefore, to a certain extent, a physiological manifestation; it becomes morbid only in certain conditions—that is to say, in individuals who are previously morbid. This is, indeed, an old medical doctrine, that there exists a physiological masturbation faute de mieux, and a morbid masturbation in cases of neurasthenia, mental disorder, and other troubles. The same is true of auto-erotism in its entire extent. When Fürbringer describes masturbation as “an unnatural gratification of the sexual impulse,”[397] this is only partly true. There exists a natural, physiological masturbation, a normal auto-erotism. Metchnikoff shares this view.[398] He says: “It is man’s constitution itself that permits the premature development of sexual sensibility, before the reproductive elements are mature.” The ultimate cause of such auto-erotic manifestations as belong neither to the category of “vice” nor to that of “crime” is to be found, he thinks, in a disharmony in the nature of man in respect of the premature development of sexual sensibility. For this reason we meet with these manifestations just as much among the[411] lowest races of mankind as we do among civilized peoples; even among animals auto-erotism is a widely diffused phenomenon. This can be observed, not only among the monkeys (perhaps already a little civilized) of our Zoological Gardens, which masturbate freely coram publico, but it may be seen also in horses, which shake the penis to and fro until seminal emission occurs; also in mares, which rub themselves against any available firm object. We see the same thing in wild deer. Even elephants masturbate. Among primitive races masturbation is, perhaps, even more general than among civilized races. Among South African tribes, Gustav Fritsch reports, masturbation is actually a popular custom.

Havelock Ellis has described the entire auto-erotic instrumentarium, and it appears from his account that savage races manufacture onanistic stimulatory apparatus for women quite as elaborate as those which are produced by the most highly developed lewd industry of civilized peoples. Most frequently articles in everyday use are employed for auto-erotic gratification—as in Hawaii, bananas; in our own part of the world, cucumbers, carrots, and beetroots. Further, in the vagina and bladder have been found pencils, sticks of sealing-wax, empty reels, bodkins, knitting-needles, needle-cases, compasses, glass stoppers, candles, corks, tumblers, forks, toothpicks, pomade-boxes, cockchafers,[399] hens’ eggs, and, with especial frequency, hairpins.

I may allude here, in passing, to the fact that C. Posner refers the discovery of various bodies in the male urethra to other causes than masturbation in some cases. He states that often they have been introduced by other persons than the one in whom they are found, and is of opinion that the introducer is a man with sadistic tendencies, and usually homosexual (see C. Posner, “The Introduction of Foreign Bodies into the Male Urethra, with Remarks on the Psychology of such Cases,” published in Therapie der Gegenwart, September, 1902). In the year 1862 masturbation with the aid of hairpins was so widely practised in Germany that a surgeon invented a special instrument for the removal of hairpins from the female bladder! At the present day this hairpin masturbation is extremely common.[400][412] Still more elaborate are artificial imitations of the male penis, the so-called godemichés (gaude mihi, dildoes, consolateurs, “bijoux indiscrets,” etc.),[401] of which we find representations in ancient Babylonian sculpture, in Egypt, and in the “Mimiamben” of Herondas [402] (third century before Christ); and since very ancient times they have been in use in Eastern Asia, where the Spaniards found them in the Philippines. Particularly well known are the wax phalli of the Balinesian women. In Europe, as early as the twelfth century, Bishop Burchard of Worms condemned the use of artificial penes. Their use was especially common at the time of the Italian renascence; the technique of their employment became continually more elaborate. The culmination was reached in the eighteenth century France. No less a man than Mirabeau, the celebrated French politician, in his erotic romance, “Le Rideau Levé, ou l’Education de Laure,” describes such an artificial phallus, and I append his description in order to enable the reader to represent to himself the extremely elaborate technique that was used in the application of such auto-erotic instruments:

“The instrument resembled in every respect the natural penis. The only difference consisted in this, that from the apex to the root it was shaped in transverse waves, in order to render the rubbing action more powerful. Made entirely of silver, it was covered with a kind of smooth and very hard varnish, giving it the natural colours. For the rest, it was very light and thin, being hollow. Through the middle of the hollow interior there passed a round tube, made also of silver, and about twice the diameter of a goose-quill, and within this tube was a piston; the tube was firmly closed at the other end by means of a screw. This screw was perforated, and firmly soldered to the base of the head. Consequently there was an empty space between the central tube and the outer wall of the instrument. This outer cavity of the godemiché was filled with water warmed to blood-heat, and then closed with a well-fitting cork. The small central tube was filled with a thin, whitish solution of isinglass (!), which was previously prepared. The warmth of the water was immediately communicated to the isinglass solution; and the latter then represented, as far as was possible, the human semen.”

This description dates from the year 1786! But even to-day apparatus of this kind are advertised in the catalogues of certain[413] traders, under the title of “Parisian Rubber Articles.” Whether they really exist I do not know, for I have never actually seen anything of the kind. Havelock Ellis assumes that they are still used to-day. In brothels, prostitutes use at the present time very primitive leathern phalli, such as were described by Herondas and Aristophanes, for erotic practices and demonstration.

In addition to these, there are numerous other methods of purely peripheral-mechanical masturbation. Thus, the rubbing and movement of the genital organs in bicycle-riding, horse-riding, very frequently in working the treadle of a sewing-machine, and in travelling on the railway, may give rise to masturbatory stimulation. Very commonly in women merely rubbing the thighs against one another is sufficient to induce a sexual orgasm; whereas men almost always need to have recourse to more powerful manipulation, such as manual friction (manustupratio).

What are the general physiological factors of auto-erotic phenomena, more especially of masturbation? In this connexion it is interesting to note that auto-erotism is almost always a precursor of completely developed sexuality, and manifests itself a long time before puberty; and may even appear soon after birth, for the older and more recent medical literature of the subject contains numerous observations of masturbation in sucklings, not to speak of masturbation in older children. The auto-erotism of sucklings is purely peripheral in its nature, and depends upon the mechanical stimulation of certain parts of the body, the first “erogenic” zones of man. Freud enumerates among the regions of the body by the stimulation of which sexual pleasure is most readily obtained, the lips of the infant, which, in sucking the mother’s breast or its substitute, receive an instinctive perception of pleasure, in which the stimulation produced by the warm flow of milk also plays a part. This “ecstatic sucking” of infants is auto-erotic in character. Not infrequently, while sucking in this voluptuous manner, the infant simultaneously rubs certain sensitive parts of the body, such as the breast and the external genital organs. A kind of orgasm occurs, followed by sleep. Freud aptly compares this phenomenon with the fact that in later life sexual gratification is often the best means of inducing sleep. Freud also regards the masturbation of sucklings as being within certain limits a physiological phenomenon, as exhibiting on the part of Nature an intention “to establish the future primacy of these erogenic zones for sexual activity.”[403]

With the onset of puberty the auto-erotic instincts are newly stimulated; new sources of auto-erotism become active, principally owing to the development of the genital organs and to the evacuation of the reproductive products. Various theories have been propounded to explain by what means the sexual tension occurring at puberty is induced, this sexual tension being regarded as the ultimate cause of the masturbation of sexually mature human beings. The most plausible hypothesis is the chemical theory of sexual tension and sexual excitement, which was explained in more detail above (p. 47). It may be that, as Freud assumes, a substance generally diffused throughout the organism is destroyed by the stimulation of the erogenic zones, and that the products of decomposition of this substance give rise to a discharge of sexual energy; it may be that the reproductive organs themselves produce such chemical substances, sexual toxins. This assumption is supported by the experimental observation that when in animals the ovaries and all the nerves connected with these organs have been removed, and consequently the ordinary periodic recurrence of sexual activity is no longer seen, if now ovarian extract is injected into the body of such animals, rutting once more occurs. Starling introduced the term “hormone” to denote these chemical sexual substances. They appear also to play a part in connexion with certain abnormalities and perversions of the sexual impulse—a matter to which we shall return later. R. Kossmann also speaks of a “neuro-chemical” injury—a kind of intoxication of the nervous system induced by “retained secretions or excretions of the reproductive organs.”[404]

The same author also advances the neuro-mechanical theory of sexual tension. He understands by this that the purely mechanical distension of the organs belonging to the reproductive apparatus exercises a mechanical stimulus on the genital nerves, and thus has a reflex action upon the centres of the brain and spinal cord, which reflex stimulation is allayed by orgasm and ejaculation. Haig explains the feeling of relief after masturbation, and the consequent discharge of sexual tension, as rather dependent upon the mechanism of the blood-pressure. He remarks:

“Since the sexual act gives rise to a low and falling blood-pressure, it must necessarily alleviate conditions which are due to high and increasing blood-pressure—for example, mental depression and ill-humour—and[415] if my observations are correct, we have here an explanation of the relation between conditions of high blood-pressure with mental and physical depression, on the one hand, and masturbatory practices on the other, for such practices alleviate this condition, and are readily indulged in for this purpose” (quoted by Havelock Ellis).

The statement made to Dr. Garnier by a monk, thirty-three years of age, bears out this view:

“If no nocturnal seminal emissions occur, the tension of the semen gives rise to general depression, headache, and sleeplessness. I admit that sometimes, in order to obtain relief, I lie upon the abdomen, and so produce a seminal discharge. I immediately feel freed, as if a burden had been lifted from me, and sleep returns” (ibid., p. 273).

Similar motives for masturbation are alleged by many otherwise healthy onanists. They apply, moreover, in an equal degree to the normal, not excessive, sexual intercourse of ordinary human beings. Persons belonging to the most diverse classes of society—men of letters, shopmen, labourers, etc.—of whom I have inquired regarding the effect of seminal emissions, whether produced by masturbation or by coitus, have unanimously agreed in describing to me this sense of “freeing” from a burden, from pressure, from harmful substances accumulated in the body—a sense of mental energy and creative power after such discharges of sexual tension not exceeding normal limits. The frequency of these discharges varies in different individuals; in one the intervals were short, in another they were long. This point has a very important bearing upon the “question of sexual abstinence,” and we shall return to it in the discussion of that topic.

Masturbation is often the means for inducing sleep and repose; it dulls nervous sensibility, and connected with this is the fact that pain is often allayed by masturbation. Here I may refer once more to the previously quoted (p. 44) view of a talented young alienist, Edmund Forster, that, in association with sexual tension, there occurs an increased stimulation of the pain-perceiving nerves of the genital organs. It is conceivable that sexual tension, especially if it depends upon chemical causes, also increases pains arising from other areas of the body, and that the discharge of sexual tension would thus alleviate or completely allay these pains. Coe reports (American Journal of Obstetrics, 1889, p. 766) the case of a woman who was accustomed by masturbation to obtain immediate relief of intense menstrual ovarian pains. It is very remarkable that these pains were accompanied by a powerful sexual impulse, which ceased when[416] the pain ceased, and did not return during the intermenstrual period. Here we have a striking testimony of the accuracy of Forster’s view. The phrenologist Gall was aware of the manner in which masturbation relieves pain.

In addition to these more natural causes of masturbation, which in themselves suffice to explain the wide diffusion of the practice, we have also to consider masturbation dependent upon seduction and upon morbid states.

To seduction must be referred all the phenomena of group-masturbation (masturbation on the large scale) in schools,[405] training-ships, barracks, factories (especially in this case as regards female employees!), prisons, etc. One leads another astray, and masturbation is diffused like an epidemic disease; the individuals are subjected to the influence of the suggestion of the crowd, which they are unable to resist. Thomalla describes boarding-schools in which masturbation was practised for a wager, and that boy won the prize in whom seminal emission first occurred! He further speaks of a school club in which obscene readings were held, and in which by means of forbidden pictures the boys were sexually excited until erection occurred, then followed general masturbation, also accompanied by wagers.

This group-masturbation is the best proof of the fact that those who masturbate are not simply individuals with an inherited morbid predisposition; for nothing is easier to suggest than masturbation. Havelock Ellis [406] reports the following case of an unmarried healthy young woman, thirty-one years of age, which throws a strong light on this suggested manifestation:

“When I was about twenty-six years of age, a female friend informed me that she had masturbated already for several years, and was so much enslaved by the habit that she suffered seriously from its ill-effects. I listened to her account with sympathy and interest, but felt rather sceptical, and I resolved to make the attempt on myself, with the intention of understanding the matter better, so that I might be able to help my friend. With a little trouble I succeeded in awakening what had hitherto slumbered in me unknown. I intentionally allowed the habit to become stronger, and one night—for I usually did it just before going to sleep, never in the morning—I really experienced an extremely agreeable sensation. But the next morning my conscience was aroused, and I felt pains also in the back of the head and along the spine. For a time I discontinued the habit, but later began it again, masturbating with considerable regularity once a month, a few days after each menstruation.... The habit overcame[417] me with alarming rapidity, and I soon became more or less its slave.... In conclusion, I must say that masturbation has proved to me one of the blind chances in my life’s history, out of which I have derived many valuable experiences.”

Frequently local morbid changes in or near the genital organs lead to the practice of masturbation, such as skin troubles, intestinal worms, phimosis, inflammatory states of the penis or near the entrance of the vagina, prurigo and other itching affections of the penis, constipation, urinary anomalies, etc. Further, mental disorders, epilepsy, and degenerative nerve troubles, are frequent causes of masturbation. Masturbation has been observed after epileptic paroxysms in patients who at other times never masturbate. There is no doubt that neurasthenia powerfully predisposes to masturbation. Excessive masturbation is almost always the consequence, not the cause, of associated neurasthenia; it is “the manifestation of a disease in course of development or of a permanently existing degenerative predisposition.”[407] To these cases of invincible, habitual, excessive masturbation Oppenheim’s view applies—that the disposition to onanism is often inherited. A characteristic instance of this is offered by an observation of Block’s (Havelock Ellis, op. cit., p. 240) in the case of a little girl, who began to masturbate at the early age of two years, and had probably inherited this tendency from her mother and grandmother, for they had both masturbated throughout life, whilst the grandmother had actually died in an asylum of “masturbatory insanity.” In the majority of cases in which masturbation makes its first appearance in sucklings we have to do with such an inheritance. In many cases the peculiar oscillatory movements of sucklings may merely be the expression of the sense of general comfort, as Fürbringer believes, and may have nothing to do with actual masturbation; but, on the other hand, it cannot be denied that veritable masturbation may be observed in the first and second years of life. Havelock Ellis, J. P. West, and Louis Mayer have reported such cases. In children somewhat older than this—from three years upwards—seduction and suggestion certainly play a great part. The author of “Splitter” was told by a professor that, when visiting an institution for small children in St. G[allen], he saw a girl about three years of age who was making suspicious movements. The matron, whose[418] attention was called to the matter, said that almost all babies were already infected when they first came to the institution (“Splitter,” p. 375).

Another disputed question relates to the diffusion of masturbation in the female sex. Is the practice commoner or less common among women than among men? Metchnikoff [408] is of opinion that in girls it is much less common than in boys, because sexual excitability generally develops much later in the female sex. Female monkeys masturbate only in exceptional cases, whereas in male monkeys masturbation is very common. The circumstance which Metchnikoff adduces in further support of his view of the rarity of masturbation in women—that, namely, most girls are enlightened regarding sexual sensibility only after marriage—proves very little, because the sensations aroused in woman by masturbation are of a very different nature from those produced by coitus, and coitus often first makes them acquainted with entirely new sensations. Tissot regards masturbation as commoner in women than in men; Deslandes believed that there was no difference between the sexes. Lawson Tait, Spitzka, and Dana, inclined rather to Metchnikoff’s view as to the greater rarity of the practice among women. Albert Eulenburg considers masturbation “not quite so common among young women as among young men,” but still “far more common than parents, teachers, and the laity of both sexes as a rule imagine.”[409] Havelock Ellis considers that after puberty masturbation is commoner in women because men can then much more readily obtain gratification in a normal manner by means of intercourse with the other sex. Otto Adler estimates the frequency of masturbation to be very great, because he regards it as the principal cause of deficient sexual sensibility in women, which latter condition he also believes to be extremely common, although he does not go so far as to accept Rohleder’s enormous proportion of 95 masturbators in every 100 women (!).[410] L. Löwenfeld, who characterizes Rohleder’s and Berger’s (99 %) estimates as exaggerations, considers that the frequency of masturbation in women is not so great as in men.[411] In reality, masturbation, given similar circumstances and causes, is probably diffused to an approximately equal extent among both sexes.

But this relates only to peripheral-mechanical masturbation; from this “psychical onanism” has rightly been separated—that form of masturbation in which, simply by ideas, without the assistance of manual stimulation of the genital organs, sexual excitement is caused and the orgasm is induced. Psychical onanism, of which Eduard Reich [412] remarked that our own time nourishes it to the fullest possible extent, develops in the majority of cases out of masturbation proper. In this form the imagination is tasked with representing all the factors of normal sexual gratification. The simple physical act suffices only in the first beginnings of this vice. Every practised onanist understands that he must soon call his imagination to his aid in order to produce sexual gratification, and that ultimately ideas alone dominate the entire libido, and the orgasm often enough terminates an act which in every respect has throughout remained purely ideal.

“So great is the power of imagination,” remarks the experienced Rouband, “that quite alone, without the assistance of physical stimulation, it can produce the venereal orgasm, with ejaculation of the semen, as happened to one of my fellow-students every time he thought of his beloved.”[413]

Hammond even knew an actual sect of such “onanists by means of simple ideal unchastity,” who formed a sort of club or society, and who were known to one another by certain signs.[414] A patient related to him that in his thoughts of women whom he met, or those who were sitting opposite to him in the railway-carriage, he was accustomed to undress them in imagination; he then would represent to himself very plainly their genital organs, and during this representation he experienced very active voluptuous sensations, culminating in ejaculation. Löwenfeld has also observed several such cases. Eulenburg speaks of an “ideal cohabitation.” The ideas are usually of a lascivious nature, but this is not always the case. Von Schrenck-Notzing reports the case of a lady twenty years of age in whom the simple idea of men, but also agreeable sensory perceptions, such as theatrical scenes, or musical impressions, or beautiful pictures, gave rise to the sexual orgasm.[415]

Allied with psychical onanism is the brooding over sexual ideas—the delectatio morosa of the theologians—and erotic excitement associated with dream-imaginations, or “sexual day-dreams” (Havelock Ellis). This is the spinning out of a continuous erotic history with any hero or any heroine, which is carried on from day to day. Most commonly this occurs in bed before going to sleep. Sexual activities form the material of these histories. We often find carefully worked out and more or less erotic day-dreams in young men, and especially in young women, frequently containing perverse elements. This dreaming, according to Havelock Ellis, does not necessarily lead to masturbation, although it often induces seminal discharges. It occurs both in healthy and in abnormal persons, especially in imaginative individuals. Rousseau experienced such erotic day-dreams. The American author Garland, in his novel, “Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly,” has admirably described the part played by a circus-rider in the erotic day-dreams of a normal healthy girl during the period of puberty.[416]

In close relationship with these psychical-onanistic day-dreams there stands another phenomenon, to which, as far as I know, I was the first to refer, which I have denoted by the term erotographomania.[417] There are numerous men and women who induce their lovers—male or female, as the case may be—prostitutes, masseuses, etc., to write to them letters with a sexually stimulating content; or also, as very frequently occurs, they themselves write such letters, containing numerous obscenities. Such correspondence, filled with ardent erotism, seems recently to have made its appearance as a peculiar refinement of sexuality; this also has the effect of a kind of psychical onanism. The interchange of obscene letters of this character recently played a part in the trial of two homosexual individuals in East Prussia. There exists, also, a comparatively blameless, more or less physiological, erotographomania of the time of puberty, in which most passionate letters are written to imaginary lovers, and the still obscure sexual impulse finds a satisfaction in these erotic imaginations.

After this brief account of the various forms and varieties of masturbation, we now turn to consider the consequences of the practice. In the course of time there has been a remarkable change of views in respect of this matter. The true founder of[421] the scientific literature of masturbation, Tissot, in his celebrated monograph (“Masturbation; or, the Treatment of the Diseases that result from Self-Abuse”; St. Petersburg, 1774), regarded masturbation as the evil of all evils, and deduced from it all possible severe troubles. His book bears as motto the verse by Von Canitz:

It is dominated by a thoroughgoing pessimism. In this view he is followed by Voltaire, in his “Dictionnaire Philosophique,” and by the authors of the first seventy years of the nineteenth century. Such gloomy views are expressed, above all, by Lallemand, in his celebrated book upon involuntary losses of semen; but they are shared by German physicians also, as, for example, B. Hermann Leitner, in his treatise, “De Masturbatione” (Buda-Pesth, 1844), and in the preface to his book we read: “The writers who speak of the terrible results of self-abuse do not exaggerate; on the contrary, their picture is not sufficiently gloomy.”[418] Modern medical science has, however, reduced these exaggerations to a reasonable measure. For this we have, above all, to thank W. Erb and Fürbringer. The old belief in the enormous dangers and the eminent injuriousness of masturbation, still remains as a bugbear in certain popular writings, some of which have been published in hundreds of editions. Who has not heard of the “Selbstbewahrung” (“Self-Abuse”) of Retaus,[419] the prototype of this dangerous literature, which must be regarded as the principal source of sexual hypochondria; frequently, also, it induces direct sexual stimulation, because it does indeed describe the devil, but describes also voluptuousness!

At the present day all experienced physicians who have been occupied in the study of masturbation and its consequences hold the view that moderate masturbation in healthy persons, without[422] morbid inheritance, has no bad results at all. It is only excess that does harm; but even excess in healthy persons does less harm than in those with inherited morbid predisposition. I may express the matter in this way: it is not masturbation (Ger. Onanie) that is harmful, but “onanism” (Ger. Onanismus)—that is to say, the habitual and excessive practice of masturbation, continued for a number of years, which certainly has an injurious influence on health. The boundary line at which the harmless masturbation (Onanie) ceases and the injurious onanism (Onanismus) begins cannot generally be defined. The difference between individuals makes their reactions in this respect very different. For example, Curschmann reports the case of a talented and brilliant author who, notwithstanding the fact that he had masturbated to excess for eleven years, remained physically and mentally vigorous, and pursued his literary labours with notable success. Fürbringer reports a similar case in a University lecturer. The following case, which came under my own observation, shows that even excessive masturbation need not impair health and working powers. A man of letters, forty years of age, probably misled by a nursemaid in the first instance, had masturbated without intermission since the age of five, and since puberty had done so several times a day (three to ten times), without any interference with his powers for work. He is a big, powerful, healthy man, of a really imposing appearance. No one would suspect him to be a habitual masturbator. That from the masturbation (Ger. Onanie) of childhood and youth there developed a condition of formal onanism (Ger. Onanismus) in the adult is in this case principally to be ascribed to the continued abuse of alcohol. The patient drinks daily twelve to fourteen glasses of Munich beer. He is also a heavy smoker. No evidence of inherited predisposition to masturbation can be obtained. For the patient the female sex exists only in the imagination; he has very rarely had sexual intercourse, and avoids ladies’ society, although he has good fortune with women. It is the same with masturbation as it is with sexual intercourse: the effects vary according to the individual. Recently masturbation and coitus have been compared in this respect. Sir James Paget in his lecture on “Sexual Hypochondriasis” says: “Masturbation does neither more nor less harm than sexual intercourse practised with the same frequency in the same conditions of general health and age and circumstance.” Erb and Curschmann go even further; for they consider that masturbation has less influence on the nervous system than coitus. In reality,[423] however, masturbation is almost always more harmful than coitus. The reasons for this are obvious. In the first place, masturbation is begun much earlier, generally at an age when the body has not yet developed any marked capacity for resistance. Masturbation in childhood is, therefore, especially harmful.[420] Löwenfeld (op. cit., p. 127) is of opinion that self-abuse begun before virility is attained more readily gives rise to weakness of the nervous system than masturbation begun later in life. In neuropathic children he saw several times, as a consequence of masturbation, well-marked general nervousness, paroxysms of anxiety, sleeplessness, and arrest of mental development. In the second place, masturbation is more dangerous than coitus in this way—that it can be carried out much more frequently, on account of the more frequent opportunities, so that masturbation four, five, or even more, times in a single day is by no means rare. In the third place, the spiritual influence of masturbation is much more harmful than that of normal coitus. The “solitary” vice influences the psyche and the character in the mere child. The youthful masturbator seeks solitude, becomes shy of human beings, reserved, morose, unhappy, hypochondriacal. In the adult the sense of the debasing character and of the sinfulness of masturbation is much more lively; self-confidence departs; the masturbator regards himself as absolutely “enslaved” by his vice, the eternal struggle against the ever-recurring impulse gives rise more to mental depression than to actual physical harm. From this there results a whole series of diseases of the will, for by masturbation much less harm is done to the intellect than to the vital energy, the capacity for spiritual and physical activity. The cold, blasé manner of many young men, who seem never to have known the natural youthful joy of life, the whole “demi-virginity” of modern young girls—all these are without doubt dependent upon masturbation and upon psychical onanism. The egoism of the onanist in the sexual relationship increases his egoism in other respects, gives rise to cold-heartedness, and blunts the more delicate ethical perceptions. The campaign against masturbation as a group manifestation is eminently a social campaign for altruism; it insists that young people should take their share in all questions relating to the common good. Peculiar extravagances and unnatural characteristics in art and literature may also be partly attributed to masturbation. Many[424] works clearly bear its imprints. Thus Havelock Ellis rightly refers in this connexion to the peculiar melancholy in Gogol’s stories, for Gogol masturbated to great excess. It would be possible to mention also certain writings of our own time which inevitably give rise to such a suspicion.

The reader will do well to consult the interesting discussion of masturbation from the philosophical standpoint by Schopenhauer (“Neue Paralipomena,” ed. Grisebach, pp. 226, 227).

The physical consequences of immoderate and habitual masturbation may also be really serious. The eye especially suffers manifold injuries, as has been proved by the investigations of Hermann Cohn. Irritable states of the conjunctiva, spasms of the eyelids, weakness of accommodation, subjective sensations of light, and photophobia, may result from masturbation. The heart also is sympathetically affected. Krehl even speaks of “masturbator’s heart” as a consequence of the long-lasting nervous hyperexcitability, which injures the heart and the vessels, and is manifested by irregularity of the pulse and by sensations of pressure and pain in the cardiac region, by palpitation, etc. Discontinuance of the habit leads to an immediate disappearance of all these alarming symptoms. Very important is also the causal connexion between masturbation and nervous or mental disorders. Here, however, as Aschaffenburg has recently insisted, we must distinguish clearly between masturbation resulting from previously existing nervo-psychical troubles, in which a vicious circle develops—for here the masturbation is partly the consequence of the original trouble, partly the cause of an aggravation of this trouble—and the effects of onanism on the healthy central nervous system. Here Aschaffenburg is in agreement with the views of those who consider these effects are less serious than earlier writers were accustomed to assume. Aschaffenburg also recognizes that the most harmful effect is to be found in the psychical influence of masturbation, in the continuous, but ever-vain, contest against the habit. This is the source of the majority of the hypochondriacal and other troubles. He often succeeded, by the discovery of this psychical mode of origin, in putting an end to a number of morbid manifestations. As soon as the patient becomes aware that these have a purely mental cause, he at once feels himself freed from them. That masturbation is never a direct cause of mental disorder is now generally recognized by alienists.[421] At the most, masturbation is no more than a favouring element in the production of[425] such disorder. “Masturbatory insanity” occurs only in those with marked hereditary predisposition, and who already have been extremely neurasthenic.[422]

But masturbation can unquestionably give rise to purely local changes in the genital organs, such as inflammatory states of the prostate gland, spermatorrhœa, and prostatorrhœa; in women fluor albus, excessively painful menstruation, and other disturbances of the menstrual function, and in connexion with these phenomena there may appear the morbid picture of “sexual neurasthenia,” which we have soon to describe.

A very serious result of onanism (not of Onanie) is the disinclination to normal sexual intercourse to which the habit gives rise, and the production of sexual perversions. The former is more marked in the female sex, the latter more in the male sex. Masturbation is the principal cause of sexual frigidity in women and of a disinclination to normal intercourse. Undoubtedly psychical influences here play the principal part; but also a certain blunting of the sensations of the genital organs by means of excessive masturbatory stimulation. They are no longer susceptible to the normal stimulatory influence of coitus. Moreover, masturbation is often effected by stimulation applied to some definite portion of the female reproductive organs, most frequently to the clitoris or the labia; and these parts in such cases are not sufficiently stimulated by coitus. In the male the especially sensitive portions of the penis are stimulated alike by masturbation and in coitus, for which reason man, notwithstanding the practice of masturbation, is much more readily able to obtain sexual gratification in the course of ordinary sexual intercourse. Notwithstanding this, there are also certain peculiar methods of masturbation in the male, the effect of which is not attained by coitus. In such cases men also may fail to induce the sexual orgasm by ordinary intercourse.

The close relationship of masturbation to sexual perversions is obvious. The more frequently the onanistic act is repeated, the more the normal sensibility is blunted, the stronger and more peculiar are the stimuli, which must be of a nature diverging from the ordinary, demanded in order to induce a sexual orgasm. The content of the lascivious ideas must be varied more and more frequently, and soon passes entirely into the sphere of the perverse. Gradually these perverse sexual ideas become more firmly rooted, and ultimately develop into complete sexual perversions. A classical example of this is the case reported by[426] Tardieu [423] of a man who was in the habit of masturbating seven or eight times every day, and ultimately inflamed his imagination to the point of representing the act of intercourse with female corpses. At length he passed to the practical carrying out of this horrible idea, which had now assumed definite sadistic characters. He arranged to obtain a view of opened female bodies, killed dogs, dug up human corpses—all in order thereby to provide satisfaction for his imagination, which had been disordered in consequence of masturbation, and thus to obtain sexual gratification. In the etiology of pseudo-homosexuality masturbation unquestionably plays a part—a fact to which Havelock Ellis has drawn attention.[424] The Mexican “mujerados” are trained for pæderasty by means of masturbation repeated several times daily. Ideas of bestial intercourse may even be aroused by masturbation. Von Schrenck-Notzing [425] reports the case of a woman who had masturbated for thirty years, and ultimately came to represent to herself in imagination that she was having intercourse with a stallion.

The prospects of the satisfactory treatment and cure of masturbation are unquestionably greater in the case of children. To attain perfect success, parents, teachers, and physicians must co-operate. Above all, it is necessary to relieve any local and general morbid conditions favouring the practice of masturbation. The diet should be light and unstimulating, the clothing and bedding light and cool. In the year 1791 the body physician of the Schaumburg-Lippe family, Dr. Bernhard Christian Faust, published a remarkable work under the title “How to Regulate the Human Sexual Impulse,” with a preface by the celebrated pedagogue J. H. Campe (Brunswick, 1791). In this book he maintained the thesis that the principal cause of masturbation in boys was the wearing of breeches. According to him, the wrapping up of children in swaddling clothes causes premature stimulation of the sexual organs. Later, in consequence of wearing breeches, there is produced “a great and damp warmth, which is especially marked in the region of the sexual organs, where the shirt falls into folds” (p. 46). Also, the boy, “when he wishes to pass water, must take his little penis out of his breeches. At first, and for a long time after he begins to wear them, the little boy cannot manage this himself; other children,[427] maids, and menservants, help him, and pull and play with his sexual parts. By this handling, pulling, and playing, which he himself does, or which others do for him, with his sexual organs, the boy is led (also the girl, who very often assists, and whom the blameless boy, out of gratitude, wishes to help in return) into constant acquaintanceship with parts which he would otherwise have regarded as sacred, unclean, and shameful. The child becomes accustomed to play with his sexual organs, and occasional masturbation develops into habitual self-abuse, all brought about by wearing breeches” (p. 45). To prevent all this, he suggested that boys from nine to fourteen years of age should wear clothing resembling rather that of girls. Then these children would be “according to Nature, children, and would ripen late; and the human sexual impulse would come under control, and mankind would be better and happier” (p. 217).

Although the far-reaching and systematic development of this thesis appears ludicrous, still, there is an element of truth in it, and unsuitably tight and warm clothing certainly favours the tendency to masturbation.

According to the suggestion of Ultzmann, in the case of nursing infants and of small children, the hands may be confined in little bags or tied to the side of the bed. The methods of the older physicians, who appeared before the child armed with great knives and scissors, and threatened a painful operation, or even to cut off the genital organs, may often be found useful, and may effect a radical cure. The actual carrying out of small operations is also sometimes helpful. Fürbringer cured a young fellow in whom no instruction and no punishment had proved effective, by simply cutting off the anterior part of his foreskin with jagged scissors. In the case of a young lady who often in company indulged her passionate impulse towards masturbation, he brought about a cure by repeated cauterization of the vulva. Other physicians perforate the foreskin and introduce a ring. Cages have even been provided for the genital organs to prevent masturbation, the key being kept by the father (!). Enveloping the penis in bandages without any opening has also been tried. Corporal punishment sometimes has a good effect. Of the greatest value is continuous care, to safeguard the children against seduction. “Parents, protect your children from servants,” exclaimed Rétif de la Bretonne. Valuable also are earnest warnings and explanations, increase of energy and force of will (by sports and games, and by work in the garden, and by the setting of tasks which stimulate ambition). Climatic cures[428] and hydro-therapeutic methods are also valuable means in the treatment of masturbation. The same measures may be employed in the treatment of masturbation in adults. In their case, however, psycho-therapeutics plays the principal part. In many cases here also local cauterization of the urethra and massage of the prostate may bring about a cure. Utterly perverse would it be to introduce youthful onanists to actual sexual intercourse, after the manner of the Parisian “soup-merchants,” as the common speech names them, who, in order to cure their youthful scholars of masturbation, take them into brothels.[426]

Masturbation is intimately connected with irritable nervous weakness, or “neurasthenia,” this typical disease of civilization, and more especially with the genital form of the disease, “sexual neurasthenia.” In an analysis of 333 cases of neurasthenia Collins and Philipp found that 123 cases—that is, more than one-third—resulted from overwork or from masturbation.[427] Freud, von Krafft-Ebing, Savill, Gattel, and Rohleder see in masturbation the true cause of neurasthenia. Fürbringer, Löwenfeld, and Eulenburg are of opinion that other injuries must also come into play in order to produce the typical picture of sexual neurasthenia. It is certain that very frequently the order of causation is reversed, neurasthenia being the primary and masturbation the secondary disorder. Masturbation is then only a symptom of sexual neurasthenia. The same duplex mode of consideration may also be applied to the other morbid phenomena of which the clinical picture of sexual neurasthenia is composed. Every one of these symptoms of irritable weakness, the excessive sexual excitability, the deficient sexual sensibility, the seminal discharges, and the impotence, can, like masturbation, exhibit a certain independence, can be induced by various causes, and may lead to sexual neurasthenia; it may be, on the other hand, that they first developed in the soil of sexual neurasthenia. It is often impossible to determine the true beginning of the vicious circle. It therefore appears to be more practical to describe the morbid picture of sexual neurasthenia (which we owe to Beard)[428] according to its individual symptoms, as is done also by A. Eulenburg [429][429] in an admirable essay, and by L. Löwenfeld in his well-known work on “The Sexual Life and Nervous Disorders.”

The abnormal increase in the sexual impulse (sexual hyperæsthesia, satyriasis, nymphomania) begins at the point at which the normal sexual impulse is exceeded; and that point is subject to wide individual variations, according to the age, race, habits, and external influences. The normal sexual impulse can also be temporarily increased by special circumstances—as, for example, by prolonged sexual abstinence, and by various kinds of erotic stimulation, without our being justified in speaking of “hyperæsthesia.” This is always an abnormal condition, which may be referred to various causes. It is more frequent in men (“satyriasis”) than in women (“nymphomania”); it may be permanent or periodic; it almost always arises from lascivious ideas, and, according to its cause, is accompanied by a greater or less diminution of responsibility, or even by complete lack of responsibility. The readiness with which sexual ideas give rise to an abnormally increased desire and to reaction on the part of the genital apparatus is characteristic of sexual hyperæsthesia; and this may attain such a degree that the man (or woman) may really be “sexually insane,” and, like the wild animals, rush at the first creature he meets of the opposite sex in order to gratify his lust; or he may be overpowered by some abnormal variety of the sexual impulse, so that he seizes in sexual embrace any other living or lifeless object, and in this state may perform acts of pæderasty, bestiality, violation of children, etc. In these most severe cases we can always demonstrate the existence of mental disorder, general paralysis, mania, or periodical insanity, and very often of epilepsy (Lombroso), as a cause. In a more chronic and milder form, sexual hyperæsthesia is observed after excessive masturbation, often also in association with a congenitally neuropathic constitution. Löwenfeld describes a peculiar form of nocturnal sexual hyperæsthesia occurring in married men, especially men in the forties or fifties, who for various reasons are compelled to abstain from conjugal intercourse, and who live continently. In the daytime these patients were free from their trouble; it appeared only at night. Soon, or some hours after going to sleep, a violent, painful, enduring erection of the penis (priapism) set in, which disturbed their sleep, and left them in the morning with a feeling of enervation. In such a case obviously there is a hyperexcitability of the genital erection centre. The erection results as a reflex effect of stimuli proceeding from the genital organs, but manifests itself only when,[430] during sleep, the inhibitions proceeding from the brain are in abeyance. This nocturnal priapism may, according to Löwenfeld’s observations, last for years.[430]

Sexual hyperæsthesia in women, or “nymphomania,” is, in its slighter forms, also in most cases a consequence of excessive masturbation. Such women do not so much exhibit a more powerful inclination towards sexual intercourse, which, on the contrary, is incompetent to satisfy their abnormal and perverse sexual excitability. We rather see in them an impulsion to obtain new sensations in their sexual organs in any possible way. These are the women who, for example, consult the gynæcologist as often as possible, because examination with the speculum or other manipulations induce in them sexual excitement. During the climacteric—the time when menstruation ceases—such states are also met with. Nymphomania proper always develops upon the foundation of severe neurasthenia and hysteria, or of direct brain and mental disorder. Then is produced the type of the “man-mad” woman, as described by Juvenal in the person of the Empress Messalina, who in the brothel gave herself to all comers, without obtaining complete satisfaction of her sexual desire. Such types exist also at the present day. Thus, the brothers de Goncourt in their Diary reported the case of an old housekeeper who for several decades indulged in the most lascivious love orgies, had innumerable lovers, and a “secret life full of nocturnal orgies in strange beds, full of nymphomaniac lusts.”[431] There recently lived in Charlottenburg the wife of a workman, well known on account of her incredible sexual ardour and man-mania. Her husband, a professional stabber, was imprisoned for life. His wife often gave herself in a single day to four or five different men; every male creature that approached her she asked to perform the sexual act with her.—The following almost incredible case of this nature is reported by Trélat:

Madame V., of a strong constitution, agreeable exterior, good-natured manner, but very reserved, came under the care of Trélat on January 1, 1854. Notwithstanding the fact that she was sixty years of age, she still worked very diligently, and hardly spared herself time for meals. Nothing in her outward appearance or in her actions indicated during her stay in the asylum that she was in any way affected with mental disorder. During the four years not a single obscene word, not a gesture, not the slightest passionate movement, indicated anger or impatience.

[431]

Since her earliest years she has pursued handsome men and given herself to them. When a young girl, by this degrading conduct she reduced her parents to despair. Of an amiable character, she blushed when anyone spoke a word to her. She cast her eyes down when in the presence of several persons; but as soon as she was alone with a young or old man, or even with a child, she was immediately transformed; she lifted her petticoats, and attacked with a raging energy him who was the object of her insane love. In such moments she was a Messalina, whereas a few instants before one would have regarded her as a virgin. A few times she met with resistance, and received severe moral lectures, but far more often there was no obstacle to her desires. Although various distressing adventures occurred, her parents arranged for her marriage, in the hope thereby to put an end to the moral disturbance. But her marriage was only a new scandal. She loved her husband passionately; and she loved with the like passion every man with whom she happened to be alone; and she exhibited so much cunning and cleverness that she made a mock of any attempts at watching her, and often attained her end. Now it was a manual worker busy at his trade, now some one walking past her in the street, to whom she spoke, and whom she brought home with her on any possible excuse—a young man, a servant, a child returning from school! In her exterior she appeared so blameless, and she spoke so gently, that every one followed her without mistrust. More than once she was beaten or robbed; but this did not prevent her continuing the same way of life. Even when she had become a grandmother there was no change.

One day she enticed a boy, twelve years of age, into her house, having told him that his mother was coming to see her. She gave him sweets, embraced and kissed him, and as she then began to take off his clothes and approached him with obscene gestures, the boy strove to resist her. He struck her, and he related everything to his brother, twenty-four years of age. The brother entered the house pointed out by the boy, and abused the corrupt woman to the uttermost, saying: “In such circumstances one helps oneself, without having recourse to law, in order not to bring one’s name into disrepute by public proceedings. I hope this disturbance will teach you not to behave in this way again.” While this scene was going on, the woman’s son-in-law chanced to come in, realized the situation before there was time to tell him anything, and at once took sides with the incensed young man.

She was shut up in a convent, where she behaved in so good, sweet, amiable, and modest a manner, that no one would have believed that she had ever committed the slightest fault, and representations were made to the effect that she ought to be allowed to return to her home. All the inmates of the convent had been charmed by the zeal with which she took part in the religious exercises. When she was free again, the scandalous doings were immediately resumed, and so it went on all through her life.

After she had reduced her husband and children to despair, they finally hoped that age would extinguish the fire with which she was consumed. They were mistaken. The more excesses she committed, the more she wanted to commit, the more vigorous she appeared. It is hardly credible that such debased ideas and habits[432] should leave intact such a sweet expression of countenance, a voice so youthful, a behaviour so full of calm repose, and a glance of such clear assurance. She became a widow. Her children, on account of her horrible mode of life, could not any longer keep her at home, and they sent her to a distant place, where they provided her with an allowance. Since she was now old, she was at length compelled to offer payment for the shameful services which she demanded; and as the small allowance she received did not suffice for this purpose, she worked with untiring zeal in order to be able to pay the great number of her lovers.

To see the old, alert woman sitting at her work, as I myself saw her, when aged seventy or upwards, without spectacles, always cleanly and carefully, but not strikingly, dressed, with a simple and honourable appearance, and an open countenance—to suspect her shameful mode of life would never occur to anyone. Several of the wretched men who were paid by her related how diligent she was. She assured Trélat of her morality, in the hope that he would discharge her, and so enable her to resume her mode of life. Trélat could not agree to this, and he succeeded in obtaining from one of these men an accurate account of her shameless loves.

This corrupt woman preserved her repose of manner, her excellent appearance, and her honourable demeanour until her death. She died at the age of seventy-four years from a cerebral hæmorrhage. There was no remarkable change in the brain (Journ. de Méd. de Paris, 1889, No. 16).

With regard to the treatment of abnormal sexual hyperexcitability, the severer forms—satyriasis and nymphomania—urgently need asylum treatment. In the slighter forms favourable results will be obtained by means of psycho-therapeutics, the internal use of sedatives (such as monobromide of camphor and bromide of potassium), regulation of the diet, suitable clothing and bedding.[432]

The converse of sexual hyperæsthesia is sexual anæsthesia, or the abnormal diminution of the sexual impulse. It occurs in both sexes as a congenital condition, owing in such cases to atrophy or absence of the genital organs, after exhausting diseases, or in consequence of arrest of development of the reproductive organs from unknown causes. This latter condition is denoted by A. Eulenburg by the name of “psycho-sexual infantilism.” The same author also terms sexual anæsthesia “sexual loss of appetite.” It is commoner in women than in men. It is often merely apparent—a pseudo-anæsthesia—because[433] the man does not understand how to awaken the still slumbering sexual perceptions (vide supra, p. 86). Recently Otto Adler has written a comprehensive and interesting monograph on this “Deficient Sexual Sensibility in Women” (Berlin, 1904). According to him, the statement of Guttzeit, that of ten women, four have no sensation at all “in coitu,” and submit to it without any agreeable sensation at all during the friction, and without any intimation of the intense pleasure of ejaculation—that is, that 40 % of women suffer from coldness and lack of sensibility, from “frigidity”—is indeed somewhat exaggerated in respect of the percentage; but still it is a correct expression of the fact that deficient sexual sensibility is much commoner in women than it is in men, in whom Effertz,[433] for example, estimates the frequency of frigidity at only 1 %.[434] In women various circumstances explain the frequency of deficient sexual sensibility. First of all, masturbation lowers sexual excitability in women much more than it does in man, and, above all, it blunts sensibility for normal sexual intercourse, both by means of psychical influences and by the insensibility of the external genital organs, owing to deficient stimulation of the clitoris during normal intercourse, whereas this organ is most powerfully stimulated during masturbation. Sexual frigidity also occurs in women in consequence of maladroitness and brutality of the man in coitu, giving rise rather to pain than to voluptuous sensations, and very frequently being the cause of the first onset of the so-called vaginal spasm, or “vaginismus.”[435] It is also due in some cases to impotence on the part of the man.

In an interesting and valuable work, Carl Laker, in the year 1889, described, as “A Peculiar Form of Perversion of the Sexual Impulse in the Female” (German Archives of Gynæcology, 1889, vol. xxxiv., No. 3, pp. 293 et seq.), cases of sexual frigidity in woman in coitu, which are not to be regarded as cases of “anæsthesia sexualis,” since the sexual impulse was normal—indeed, frequently was increased—and it was sexual gratification in normal intercourse which was completely wanting. In these cases gratification was obtainable only by simple or mutual onanism. There existed a normal inclination towards the other sex, associated with mental and physical health. The author assumes that, in consequence of some anatomical abnormality, stimulation of the sensory nerves by which the voluptuous sensation is perceived, especially those of the clitoris, failed to occur; but perhaps by a change of posture in coitu this stimulation can still be effected. The case previously reported by me on page 86 belongs to this category of relative or temporary sexual anæsthesia; whereas in cases of genuine absolute sexual anæsthesia the sexual impulse also is in abeyance at the outset, or disappears in consequence of excesses and in female libertines and in prostitutes.

The treatment of deficient sexual sensibility in women must, above all, take into consideration psychical influences, and depends, therefore, more on the husband or lover than it does on the physician; the conditions of intercourse must be adapted to the particular circumstances of the case (as by change of posture in coitus, preparatory tenderness, etc.). Painful sensibility in vaginismus can sometimes be cured by mechanical treatment, by the removal of painful remnants of the hymen, by the cure of small lesions, and also by extension by means of the speculum. It also appears, as is evidenced by an observation of Courty, that at the time of impregnation there occurs a stronger stimulation and voluptuous sensation in coitu in women who are at other times frigid.

Sexually frigid women of the lower classes are apt, as Effertz points out, to become prostitutes. During the practice of their profession they always keep a cool head, because they are at first and always sexually insensitive, and can devote their whole energy and regulate all their actions towards the plunder of the man. The following case reported by Effertz (op. cit., p. 51) illustrates this connexion very clearly:

“I was once consulted by a very highly placed hetaira on account of supposed articular rheumatism. When I informed her of my diagnosis of lues, she was greatly moved, and said to me that I should[435] not therefore think the worse of her. She was better than her occupation; she had never followed it on account of evil passions; she was quite insensitive; she had done it only in order to provide for her parents freedom from care in the evening of their life, and to secure the future of her small child. She also told me on this occasion that she owed her success to her coldness, for which condition she was extremely thankful. She never gave herself for less than 1,000 marks (£50). At the same time, she made a mock of her colleagues—those stupid and wicked girls who frequently, when their heads were fired by champagne, would give themselves for nothing, and would even run after men.”

Otto Adler describes Madame de Warens, in Rousseau’s “Confessions,” as a type of such a femme de glace. Frigid women marry with comparatively greater frequency than women who are sexually very excitable, because their natural reserve endows them with greater value in the eyes of men, and also offers a certain security for their faithfulness. Such marriages are naturally in almost all cases unhappy, for the man soon grasps the true nature of the case, and since most will say with Ovid, odi concubitus qui non utrimque resolvunt, he seeks outside the house some response for his love.[436] In some cases, indeed, frigid women make a pretence of experiencing libido and the sexual orgasm, so that the man is deceived. In some cases, also, notwithstanding a manifest frigidity on the part of the wife, the marriage is none the less happy when the husband is partially or wholly impotent, and voluntarily renounces coitus. Such a case I myself recently observed.

“The case was that of a merchant, physically and bodily in excellent health, aged a little under forty years, who, since the eleventh year of his age down to the present time, has continued to masturbate (between the eleventh and eighteenth years of his life, twice daily). He has often had ejaculation without erection. When twenty years of age, he frequently attempted coitus, but could not obtain an erection. Generally speaking, he never had an erection when his attention was directed to the matter, but only without his co-operation, on other occasions than those of attempted sexual intercourse. Thus, until his engagement, in the thirtieth year of his age, he had never completed normal coitus, but had only obtained sexual gratification by means of masturbation, and therefore married with considerable hesitation, although during the eleven months of his engagement he had masturbated much less frequently. On the wedding-night, however, and later, it appeared that his wife had a natural disinclination to coitus, was extremely frigid, and only had traces of sexual sensation when, by means of onanistic stimulation on the part[436] of her husband, her libido was slightly stimulated. Spontaneously she never felt any desire for sexual gratification, not even in consequence of masturbation. The two have lived for seven years in most happy married life, and love one another tenderly, without ever having completed coitus. This deficient sensibility in the wife, and her failure to respond, have naturally not relieved the impotence of the husband, and he gratifies himself now, as before, by solitary masturbation.”

This case proves that the capacity for love is to a certain extent independent of the strength of the libido; frigid men and women can be thoroughly “erotic”; that is to say, they can experience the need for tenderness, just as “erotomania”—that is to say, the excessive longing for love—is completely different in its nature from satyriasis and nymphomania (= excessive sexual desire).[437]

Julius Pagel and other authors have recently drawn attention to the fact that the condition of “erotomania”—excessive amativeness—was fully described by the ancient and medieval physicians, who regarded it as a morbid state. He published (in the Deutsche Medizinal-Zeitung, 1892, p. 841) under the title, “A Historical Contribution to the Chapter of ‘Cures by Disgust,’” the translation of a passage from the Lilium Medicinæ of Bernhard von Gordon in Montpelier, a well-known and favourite compendium of the beginning of the fourteenth century, in which, following the example of Avicenna, the amor (h)ereos was numbered among the melancholicæ passiones, and was considered to constitute a particular section of the group of diseases of the brain (see the edition of the Lilium Medicinæ, p. 210 (Lyons, 1550)). It is, unfortunately, impossible here to deal at any length with the exceedingly instructive and remarkable contents. One of the methods of treatment was to find an old hag as hideous and repulsive as possible, who was to hold under the nose of the erotomaniac a chemise stained with menstrual blood, saying at the same time, talis est amica tua. We may remark, in passing, that this genuine medieval “cure by disgust” diverges, much to its disadvantage, from the manner in which in antiquity (three centuries before Christ) Erasistratos, the pupil of Aristotle, a celebrated physician of the Alexandrian school, cured the son of King Antiochus, who had fallen in love with his stepmother Stratonica. An account of the ancient therapeutic art is also to be found in another work by J. Pagel, “Introduction to the History of Medicine” (Berlin, 1898). In a comprehensive[437] work, “The History of Love Considered as a Disease,” this topic has recently been considered by Hjalmar Crohns. Here we have a theme the literature of which is very extensive, and which might be suitably dealt with in a special treatise.

In the male, sexual frigidity in the majority of cases is associated with sexual weakness or with impotence—that is to say, with the impossibility of copulating or of procreation. The former variety of sexual incapacity (impotentia cœundi) is, properly speaking, peculiar to the male. The second form—true “sterility” (impotentia generandi)—occurs in women as well as in men.

In the case of male impotence, various symptoms, preliminary disturbances, and associated phenomena, make their appearance, and these we shall have to describe separately, since they often occur as independent disorders.

This is, above all, true of the outflow of sexual secretions from the urethra, seminal losses (pollutions[438] and spermatorrhœa), and the evacuation of the secretion of the prostate gland, the so-called “prostatorrhœa.” The literature of these conditions, which are partly physiological (as a proportion of pollutions) and partly morbid, is enormous. Of fundamental importance, notwithstanding the serious exaggerations of the author, is the celebrated work of Dr. M. Lallemand, “Involuntary Losses of Semen.” In recent times this important province of sexual pathology has been more especially advanced by the researches of leading German physicians, above all by those of Curschmann and Fürbringer.

The most important question with regard to seminal losses or pollutions in any case is this: have we to do with physiological processes, lying within the range of health, or have we to do with morbid processes?

As normal, not morbid, seminal losses Lallemand regarded pollutions in healthy, sexually mature, continent individuals, occurring spontaneously during sleep, associated with erection of the penis and voluptuous sensations. He rightly regarded these as physiologically necessary, indicated their purpose to be the[438] discharge of sexual tension, the prevention of an excessive accumulation of the reproductive products, and compared their effect with that of hæmorrhages from the nose, which are so common in youth, and in most cases are distinctly beneficial. But he drew attention to the indeterminate, fluctuating boundary-line between normal and morbid pollutions. This latter point of view is dealt with also by Eulenburg (“Sexual Neurasthenia,” p. 171), in opposition to other authors who regarded all pollutions, even the physiological, as abnormal. In practice, however, it is generally not difficult to distinguish between physiological and morbid seminal losses. The former are characterized, not only by the distinctive signs already mentioned, but also by their occurrence at longer intervals, and by the absence of any disadvantageous effect upon the general state of health. As soon as pollutions have such a deleterious influence they are morbid; and they are generally morbid when they occur abnormally early, before puberty, with abnormal frequency, at abnormal times of the day, and in association with abnormal conditions of the genital organs. According to Fürbringer, the normal intervals between pollutions in the case of continent youths vary between ten and thirty days. Löwenfeld considers pollutions occurring once a week, and even the transient occurrence of pollutions on several successive nights, as a result of sexual excitement, as being still within normal bounds. But if these repeated pollutions within a single week, or even within a single day, continue for a long time, we are always concerned with morbid pollutions. These sometimes occur not only at night, but also—a fact to which the German physician Wichmann, in his dissertation De Pollutione Diurna (Göttingen, 1782), drew attention—they occur by day (“diurnal pollutions”), in the waking state, without masturbation or coitus, upon slight mechanical or physical stimulation. In such cases erection of the penis is often completely wanting; ejaculation of the semen takes place with the organ flaccid, and even without any voluptuous sensation. In many cases, indeed, these pollutions are accompanied by actual painful sensations in the genital organs, and instead of voluptuous dreams or thoughts, the nocturnal ejaculation is accompanied by anxious dreams, the daylight pollution by an extremely disagreeable sensation. Commonly in these pollutions ordinary semen is at first evacuated—a mixture of the secretions of the testicles, the prostate, the vesiculæ seminales, and Cowper’s glands—containing numerous spermatozoa. After the trouble has lasted a long time the[439] semen becomes thinner (owing to its containing a smaller proportion of the thick testicular secretion) and more transparent; the spermatozoa are less numerous and mostly undeveloped, and ultimately they may be completely absent. Löwenfeld observed a peculiar form of pollution in which the semen was ejaculated only in drops, or might be completely wanting—that is to say, there might be a pollution without ejaculation, purely a voluptuous orgasm.[439]

In such cases Löwenfeld was able to prove that it is not the loss of semen which weakens, as Lallemand assumed, but that it is the nervous disturbance of the lumbar spinal cord which plays the principal part. This irritable weakness of the lumbar spinal cord may have existed for a long time before, or may have developed only as the result of repeated pollutions or of excessive sexual excitement; it may give rise, not only to proper seminal emissions, but, in addition, to “spermatorrhœa”—that is to say, to the outflow of semen accompanying urination or defecation; and it may also cause the rarer “prostatorrhœa”—the outflow of the secretion of the prostate gland. A long duration of all these morbid discharges has a serious effect on the health, and induces the typical picture of sexual neurasthenia. As a cause of seminal losses we must mention masturbation, excessive sexual intercourse, chronic inflammation of the urethra (especially after gonorrhœa), stricture of the urethra, rectal affections, alcoholism, diabetes, and tabes dorsalis.

In women, also, processes analogous to pollution may be observed, although much more rarely than in men, and generally as a consequence of masturbation practised for several years. According to Adler (op. cit., p. 130), pollutions—that is to say, evacuations of the secretion of the vaginal glands and of the uterine mucous membrane, as well as of the secretion of Bartholin’s glands near the vaginal inlet—never occur in chaste and intact virgins, but only in women who have already learned the enjoyment of sexual intercourse, and who are subsequently compelled to lead a continent life. For this reason pollutions are a “trouble of young widows,” and occur in young girls only when they have learned to know the nature of sexual pleasure by means of masturbation. Eulenburg remarks (“Sexual Neurasthenia,” p. 174):

“In connexion with lascivious dreams there occur spontaneous, more or less abundant, discharges of the clear muco-gelatinous secretion of the glands. These form a striking manifestation of sexual[440] neurasthenia in women, and can be compared with the morbid pollutions occurring in similar circumstances in male neurasthenics. We hear less about them, however, and they are insufficiently known, even by medical men. For this reason especially, when they occur in association with physical virginity and a normal genital condition in other respects, they do not usually receive sufficient attention.”

The older physicians, especially those of the eighteenth century,[440] described these pollutions in women very well and thoroughly; in erotic and pornographic literature they have always played a great part. An interesting observation on peculiar processes analogous to pollutions is reported by Paul Bernhardt.[441] A hysterical sempstress, twenty-five years of age, as the result of any kind of annoyance, experienced sexual excitement completely resembling the sensation of sexual intercourse, and ending with a discharge of mucus. This was, however, never accompanied by any trace of voluptuous sensation; on the contrary, it gave rise to lumbar pains. Also, when she dreamed of anything disagreeable or had nightmare, this condition recurred. Erotically the patient is very indifferent, and denies the practice of masturbation.

To the category suggested by P. Bernhardt of sexual excitement induced by anxiety and trouble belongs the case reported to me by Dr. Emil Bock of a boy of fifteen years of age, who, when very anxious about his inability to complete a school task, experienced an ejaculation for the first time. To the literature of impotence belongs the work by Nicolo Barrucco, “Sexual Neurasthenia, and its Relations to the Diseases of the Genital Organs.” Regarding physiological pollutions, and the trifling difference between them and normal seminal discharge during coitus, Schopenhauer makes some apt observations in his “Neue Paralipomena,” pp. 230, 231.

In the treatment of pollutions, which always demands the most careful medical observation and examination of the individual case, the most important measures are dietetic and hygienic[441] treatment, change of scene from town to country, and especially to mountain air, methodical hydrotherapeutic measures, warm baths, massage, electricity, hyperalimentation, the use of bromides, local treatment of the urethra, etc., etc.

The last and most important of the phenomena connected with sexual neurasthenia is sexual weakness or impotence in its various forms.[442]

We distinguish in the male two principal forms of impotence: (1) “Impotentia coeundi”—that is, incapacity for erection of the penis and the completion of coitus; (2) “impotentia generandi”—that is, the impossibility of fertilization (owing to want of semen or to the lack of fertilizing quality in this fluid).

Congenital malformations of the genital organs giving rise to impotence are extremely rare. Gyurkovechky, amongst 6,000 men fit for military service, found three such men only. More frequently are acquired defects met with as causes of impotence, such as complete or partial loss of the penis and testicles, as in eunuchs and castrated persons. It is well known that, notwithstanding the removal of the external genital organs, sexual desire may persist; and when the penis is retained, though the testicles have been removed, erection and copulation are possible, providing the castration was effected after puberty. But it is obvious that in most cases potency is very markedly interfered with, and ultimately it may entirely disappear. More light is thrown on the question by the occurrence of impotence after unilateral castration. A tragical case of this latter kind is reported by von Gyurkovechky (op. cit., p. 71):

“A former colleague of mine at the University of Vienna had to have one of his testicles removed in consequence of obstinate inflammation resulting from gonorrhœa; thereafter the second testicle underwent complete atrophy. The much-to-be-pitied, handsome, elegant, and amiable young man remained for some years capable of performing coitus, was greatly pleased with himself for this reason, and paid ostentatious court to ladies. Still, he was seldom in a position to perform coitus, and after three years he completely withdrew himself from the society of ladies, and became gradually morose[442] and reserved, until one day he disappeared from Vienna, discontinued his studies, and never let any of us hear from him again. This case has remained very vividly in my memory, and it illustrates most clearly the influence of virile potency upon the entire being of the individual.”

If the second testicle remains intact, the capacity for sexual intercourse is not interfered with; and reproductive capacity also persists, although it may be diminished in degree.

An important source of sterility in the male, in which the capacity for sexual intercourse remains unimpaired, is bilateral epididymitis, consequent upon gonorrhœa. This represents more than 50 % of all the cases of incapacity for procreation in the male. Finger found in 85 % of cases of epididymitis that the spermatozoa were absent from the semen (the so-called “azoospermia”); and Fürbringer is led by his own experience to believe that 80 % of men who have had double epididymitis are incapable of procreation. Thus we may really speak of “gonorrhœal sterility in the male.” In many sterile marriages the fault lies with the husband, as was first clearly proved by F. Kehrer’s fundamental investigations. And the no less momentous gonorrhœal sterility in women is also, in the majority of cases, ultimately dependent upon the husband, who has presented his wife with “gonorrhœal infection as a wedding gift.”[443]

An extremely small size of the penis, also a relatively small size of this organ in cases of obesity and tumours, malformations of the penis, also the by no means rare mechanical hindrances to erections due to injuries and indurations in the corpora cavernosa (especially as a result of gonorrhœal inflammation)—all these may make coitus impossible. Fürbringer and Finger have also seen peculiar chronic shrinking processes of the corpora cavernosa occur independently of gonorrhœa and tumours. All these conditions give rise to incomplete erection, in which the penis is bent at an angle at some point or other, or is curved, so that it cannot be introduced into the vagina (chordee).

All the hitherto described forms of impotentia coeundi are less frequent than those in which the external genital organs are completely intact, and in which we have to do simply with imperfection or complete failure of erection in consequence of various general disorders.

Erection of the penis is induced both centrally from the brain (by voluptuous ideas), and from the spinal cord (by direct[443] stimulation), and also peripherally from the genital organs (by friction of the glans penis), by stimuli proceeding from the urethra, bladder, prostate, seminal vesicles, rectum, and the neighbourhood of the genital organs (as, for example, the buttocks), and may be either of a morbid or of a physiological character. When there are inflammatory conditions of the genital organs, especially gonorrhœa of the anterior and posterior urethra, erections occur very readily. From the full bladder there also proceed stimuli giving rise to erection, thus inducing the well-known “morning erection,” utilized by many who would otherwise be completely impotent. Blows on the buttocks also give rise to erections—a subject to which we shall return when we come to discuss flagellation.

The nature of erection can be very briefly described as consisting in a stiffening of the penis by the profuse streaming of blood into the reticular spaces of the corpora cavernosa, enlarged by stimulation of the erection nerves. The consequent erection of the penis is dependent upon the action of a particular muscle—the ischio-cavernosus muscle.

Impotence when the external organs are intact is in most cases due to central causes, and ultimately to psychical causes, even though severe bodily affections or local morbid states play a predisposing part (the so-called “functional impotence”).

This impotence is sometimes one of the earliest symptoms of diabetes mellitus and of chronic Bright’s disease with contracted kidney, also of severe conditions of exhaustion—to which consumption offers a significant exception, signalized already by the old saying, phthisicus salax—of obesity, and of tabes dorsalis, in which the sexual potency gradually disappears, but libido outlasts the capacity for erection. Certain poisons also particularly damage potency. This is especially the case with alcohol, the deleterious influence of which on potency has already been described (pp. 293, 294). Georg Hirth goes so far as to recognize a special “impotentia alcoholica.”

“Above all, no alcohol,” says he, “especially not as a means for producing erection. In youth a man needs no such stimulus, and in age he will be apt to find, with the porter in Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ (Act ii., Scene 3), that ‘drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery,’ for, as he says, ‘it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance; it makes lechery, and it mars him; it sets him on and takes him off; it persuades him and disheartens him; makes him stand to and not stand to: in conclusion, equivocates him into sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.’”[444]

Fürbringer’s view, that alcohol, taken up to the degree of slight intoxication, rather increases potency, in connexion with which he refers to sexual invalids who are only able to perform sexual intercourse in a state of moderate intoxication, cannot be regarded as generally true. It is possible that in these admitted sexual invalids alcoholic intoxication overcomes stronger psychical inhibitions, which in the state of sobriety had hindered erection. For the normal individual alcohol is not a means for the increase of sexual potency, but the reverse.

The free use of tobacco certainly also impairs sexual potency.[445] Nicotine and love are as little compatible as alcohol and love. Fürbringer, Hirth, and Eulenburg, ascribe to the excessive use of tobacco a diminution in sexual potency. The following interesting passage is from the Diary of the De Goncourts (op. cit., p. 89):

“There is an antagonism between tobacco and women. The taste for one diminishes the taste for the other. So true is this, that passionate Lotharios usually give up smoking, because they feel or believe that tobacco diminishes their sexual appetite and their powers of love.”

Coffee and tea, taken in excess, and, above all, morphine, are also antagonistic to potency. Dupuy has observed the frequent occurrence of impotence in men who were in the habit of drinking large quantities of strong coffee (five or six breakfast-cups every day). Sexual potency returned as soon as the use of coffee was discontinued; whilst when the use of the beverage was resumed the impotence again appeared (Comptes Rendus de la Société de Biologie, 1886, No. 27).

The majority of cases of functional disturbances of potency depend upon nervous impotence. It is the form which at the present day the physician most frequently encounters. It is intimately connected with the state of “irritable nervous weakness,” or sexual neurasthenia, the most important symptom of which is represented by “psychical” impotence. There exist, also—and this justifies the independent consideration of psychical impotence—numerous cases of impotence without neurasthenia (Fürbringer). This remarkable form occurs especially in perfectly healthy young husbands, who often before were completely potent, and had previously effected coitus in a perfectly normal[445] manner, or had lived a quiet, continent life, without having injured themselves in any way by masturbation. Such individuals, in consequence of the excitement, shame, and embarrassment of the wedding-night, often suffer from psychical impotence. Réti [446] speaks of “impotence due to compassion,” arising from “the sympathy felt with the pains suffered by the still virgin wife” when the attempt at coitus is made.

“The young married pair kiss one another and vie with one another in tenderness, but when the matter becomes serious—when the husband wants to enjoy his rights as a husband—the wife experiences incredible anxiety; she trembles in all her limbs, writhes, screams, and weeps. The man becomes exhausted, and at length, when the wife is resigned, and willing to surrender herself to her fate, he has become unfitted for his share in intercourse.”

It is clear that these forms of psychical impotence, which appear in very various shades, are mostly transient phenomena, and exhibit a good prospect of complete cure.

Much more difficult is the matter when we have to do with cases, becoming commoner every day, of psychical impotence in consequence of sexual perversions. Sadistic, masochistic, fetichistic, and homosexual inclinations may, in certain individuals, predominate to such an extent that either copulation cannot be effected without the preliminary gratification of these perverse instincts, or else the latter entirely usurp the place of normal coitus, which has become, generally speaking, quite impossible (relative and absolute psychical impotence in consequence of sexual perversions). To the former category belong, for example, those cases, which are by no means rarely seen, in which homosexual persons are only able to have intercourse with their wives after preliminary caresses by their male friends; or masochists must be subjected to a preparatory flagellation in order to become potent. In the second category copulation has become quite impossible; the orgasm takes place only in connexion with the activity of the perverse impulse, and there often exists an actual repugnance to normal coitus.

Well known also is that rare relative psychical impotence in which the man can perform coitus only with prostitutes, whereas he is impotent as regards decent women. This, however, may often be associated with the existence of sexual perversions, which are gratified only during intercourse with prostitutes.

Another form of relative psychical impotence is temporary impotence, in which the potency is entirely subject to custom,[446] and a change in the custom induces impotence. Thus, Frenzel reports the case of a man who had always had intercourse with his wife immediately on going to bed, and proved completely impotent when this habit was interrupted, and he now wished to perform the act early in the morning. Only gradually did he recover his lost potency and become able to adapt himself to the changed conditions.[447]

Another form of impotence by no means rare, and occurring in otherwise healthy men, is that produced by powerful mental activity or artistic production, the impotence of literary men and of artists. It is usually of a transient nature,[448] manifesting itself only during the periods of intellectual activity, and it is explicable in accordance with the law of sexual equivalents, according to which the sexual potency appears in the latent form of spiritual productive activity. A remarkable case of this impotence of literary men is reported by the just quoted Frenzel.[449] Allied with this variety of impotence is the form due to transient mental distraction, to instantaneous ideas, which suddenly act as psychical inhibitions. These sudden ideas can be of a very varied content—joyful, sad, anxious, annoying; in every case they are capable of annulling the already existing potency, and of making the further erection of the penis impossible. Such conditions occur alike in healthy persons and in those who are readily excitable and neurasthenic. A classical instance of this nature is J. J. Rousseau’s adventure with the Venetian courtesan Giulietta, which he describes very vividly in his “Confession.” He went to see her full of passionate desire for sexual enjoyment, but Nature “had put into his head a poison against this unspeakable happiness” for which his heart yearned. Hardly had he glanced at the beautiful girl than an idea came to him which moved him to tears, and completely diverted him from his purpose. He became more deeply absorbed in this idea, the sexual desires completely disappeared, and he was no longer in a position to prove his manhood. To this tragi-comic episode we owe the exclamation of the disappointed girl, which has passed into a proverb: “Lascia le donne e studia la matematica” (“Leave women alone, and go and study mathematics”). In the reflective love of Kierkegaard, Grillparzer, Alfred de Musset, and other men of remarkable genius, there is also recognizable an element of impotence.

The majority of all cases of impotence belong to the class of true nervous, neurasthenic impotence, and these are diffused especially among the circles who supply the greatest contingent to the ranks of neurasthenics in general—that is, among officers, merchants, physicians, and other classes of the cultured part of our population whose professional duties are arduous. Among the causes of neurasthenic impotence, excessive masturbation and chronic gonorrhœa, with its consequences, play the principal part. Neurasthenic impotence manifests itself, above all, by abnormal conditions of erection and ejaculation, either of which may by itself be diminished or completely prevented; or, again, both may exhibit abnormalities, whilst in some cases even erection may be very frequent, unusually powerful, and long-lasting (the so-called “priapism”), whilst ejaculation and voluptuous sensation are completely wanting, and these erections are in most cases accompanied by very painful sensations. An extremely characteristic symptom of nervous impotence is a premature discharge of the semen, not merely ante portas, but often even at the first signs of activity of the libido sexualis, at which time erection may be very well developed. In other cases, again, erection occurs, but no ejaculation of the semen. Finally, both may be completely wanting (the so-called “paralytic impotence”).

The following cases, which came under my own observation, show some of the above-mentioned types of impotence:

1. A man, twenty-nine years of age, married for ten months, complains, after obviously excessively frequent enjoyment of his conjugal rights, of a sense of weakness and weariness after intercourse, such as he has never previously experienced, as well as of a continually earlier ejaculation, latterly even on simple contact of his penis with the vulva. Erection is always present and is powerful. On further inquiry he admitted that in his four-weeks’ honeymoon he had connexion once daily, and thenceforward two or three times a week.

2. A man, twenty-one years of age, states that a year and a half ago for the first time he endeavoured to have sexual intercourse; he has never yet succeeded in completing coitus. Since the age of fourteen years he has suffered from frequent pollutions and from marked sexual excitability. He has often tried to effect coitus, but there has always resulted precipitate ejaculation, with his penis in a flaccid condition. He has, properly speaking, only morning erections, dependent upon a full bladder. It is possible that a marked varicocele on the left side has something to do with the genesis of this impotence.

3. A man, forty-eight years of age, has noticed for some years a distinct decline in sexual potency. Ejaculation always occurs shortly before immissio membri, when the penis is flaccid or only semi-erect. If erection is complete, on the other hand, then ejaculation fails to occur.

Very peculiar, and offering a kind of analogy to vaginismus in women, is impotence consequent upon excessively painful sensibility of the glans penis, as a result of sexual neurasthenia or of local inflammatory processes (balanitis, etc.). The pains during coitus in these cases are often so severe that those thus affected completely abandon any attempt at intercourse.

The question whether impotence can result from sexual abstinence is still disputed. Fürbringer does not know of any certain cases. According to Virey,[450] by “complete and continuous abstinence from intercourse” in the male the organs by which the semen is prepared—the testicles, the seminal vesicles, and the vasa deferentia—and also the penis, become smaller, “unsightly, wrinkled, and inactive.” Galen reports the same of the athletes of the Roman Empire, men who had to live a life of strict continence. Virey alludes to an “extremely chaste saint, in whom after death no trace of genital organs could be discovered” (!). That absolute abstinence must ultimately limit potency, if only by psychical means, is a priori probable.

Recent observations confirm the view that long-continued absolute sexual abstinence exercises a harmful influence upon potency, and especially upon potentia coeundi. As a proof of this, I may more especially mention two cases of University professors, not yet thirty years of age, both of whom until a little while ago had had no experience of sexual intercourse, one having remained continent during two years of married life! Quite recently both of them repeatedly attempted normal coitus, but with complete failure quoad erectionem. Von Schrenck-Notzing [451] also reported a case of this character not long ago, in which, notwithstanding the strong desire for normal sexual intercourse, in the case of a literary man thirty-five years of age, who prior to marriage had lived a life of complete abstinence, and had never practised masturbation, every attempt at coitus proved a failure.

Finally, we have to consider the more or less physiological presenile and senile impotence which accompanies the commencement of old age, but naturally occurs at very different times in different individuals, for some men are already old at the age of forty years, and others are not yet old at the age of seventy years. Von Gyurkovechky dates the first decline in the sexual powers from the fortieth year of life, and considers that normally these powers are completely extinguished at about[449] sixty-five years. But there are numerous exceptions. Complete potency in respect of libido, erection, and ejaculation has been observed in men of seventy and eighty years; and isolated cases have even been recorded in which men of ninety and one hundred years have procreated children.[452] In the sense of Metchnikoff and Hirth, who in their writings proclaim the prevention of senility as a hygienic ideal, this physiological potentia senilis is no Utopia, and a future scientific macrobiotic will defer the onset of old age by from ten to twenty years.

“I do not ask,” says Georg Hirth, “that the man in advanced age should play with his sexual powers; but that he should possess the consciousness of being able to use them—that I do demand” (“Ways to Love,” p. 462).

The treatment of impotence in the male in its various forms is indeed a difficult matter in individual cases, more especially in view of the great number of existing methods of treatment; but treatment promises good results when it is based upon an exact, critical, individual analysis of the separate causes and symptoms. It is partly local and partly general. In the case of impotence resulting from excessive masturbation, or in the case of the well-known “gonorrhœal” impotence, good results will be obtained from slight cauterization of the urethra and massage of the prostate, local carbonic-acid douches or carbonic-acid baths, warm or cold sitz-baths, or electrical treatment, with which, however, great care must be exercised. In some cases imperfect erection will be benefited by the application of a 10 % ethereal solution of camphor, in the form of friction or a spray, to the entire genital region. Mechanical apparatus have also been employed to favour erection, as, for example, the so-called “schlitten,” consisting of a conducting instrument for an insufficiently erect penis, made up of two thin, suitably shaped laminæ of metal, or the “erector” of Gassen, which works in a similar manner. Apparatus of this nature are useful only to this extent, that they give the penis a certain purchase. We cannot allow that they possess any other effect, any more than Gassen’s other apparatus, the “compressor,” the “cumulator,” and the “ultimo” (Löwenfeld, Fürbringer). Any local changes that can be detected as having some connexion with the occurrence of impotence must receive attention. This is obvious; and[450] no less obvious is the treatment of any general disorders which may give rise to the impotence. As regards the general treatment of impotence, psychical influence must first be considered. In most cases this must take the form of temporary withdrawal of the thoughts from the sexual sphere in general, for which the strict prohibition of sexual activity (masturbation, etc.) forms the foundation; in addition, will and self-confidence must be strengthened. In these matters an intelligent wife can do much to supplement the work of the physician. Sometimes a mere change in the mode of life or in the relations between husband and wife, above all, a change in the mode of performing sexual intercourse (a change in posture, greater responsiveness on the part of the wife, etc.), may have a manifest curative influence. The treatment of the neurasthenia which may have caused the impotence will also have a favourable effect. Alcohol and tobacco are best entirely forbidden. Innumerable drugs have been recommended for the treatment of impotence. The belief in the beneficial effect of cantharides is as much a superstition as the belief in the aphrodisiac action of celery, asparagus, caviare, and truffles. Certainly all these may cause excitement of the genital organs, but this is merely due to an increased flow of blood to these organs, which is of a very fugitive nature, and when the effect is often repeated (especially when cantharides is used for this purpose), it may have serious consequences. The influence of these substances may be compared with the purely stimulating effect of flagellation. More confidence may be placed in phosphorus, strychnine, and, above all, in yohimbin, a drug prepared from the bark of a West African tree,[453] which is warmly recommended in cases of neurasthenic impotence by Mendel and Eulenburg. Having myself seen good results from the use of Yohimbin Riedel in two cases of pre-senile gonorrhœal impotence, I can confirm the favourable judgment of Eulenburg. In the case of pre-senile impotence in a man nearly sixty years of age yohimbin was the only means which, after several years’ intermission, enabled him once more to have erections, and repeatedly to perform coitus. Eulenburg reports the case of a man, which is probably unique, in whom, after a few days’ use, yohimbin restored sexual potency after he had been impotent for twelve years! This interesting drug is certainly a valuable enrichment of our aphrodisiac armamentarium, and the first drug of this[451] nature to which the name of a specific against impotence can justly be given.

Quite recently Eulenburg, Posner, Nevinny, and others, have warmly recommended as a true specific in cases of functional impotence a combination of lecithin with the active principle of the Brazilian plant Muira Puama. This new drug is by Eulenburg termed “muiracithin.”

From the above-described individual troubles (masturbation, sexual hyperæsthesia, sexual anæsthesia, pollutions, and impotence) is composed the clinical picture of sexual neurasthenia, which, however, is manifested also by other symptoms, among which we must mention certain perceptions of anxiety and certain coercive ideas, such as the condition, known also to the laity, of agoraphobia, which is very frequently met with in sexual neurasthenia; also the fear of travelling alone by railway, or sudden anxiety in the theatre or concert-hall, in the form of the fear of fire, with the accompanying irresistible impulse to rush out into the open; further, lumbar pains and neuralgia of the genital organs, and anomalies and pains connected with the evacuation of urine; an inclination to sexual perversions; gastric affections,[454] such as nervous retching and vomiting, painful cramps of the stomach, loss of appetite, also excessive hunger, nervous dyspepsia, etc.; migraine and heart troubles of manifold kinds. It is not to be wondered at that when sexual neurasthenia is markedly developed, and when several of the above-described manifestations occur, the disease may pass on into a condition of complete mental exhaustion, associated with morbid irritability and hypochondriacal and melancholy ideas. We then ultimately see the development of typical sexual hypochondria.

The treatment of sexual neurasthenia—which in the last-described general symptom-complex occurs also in women, associated in their case with amenorrhœa, dysmenorrhœa, or menorrhagia[455]—consists for the most part in the already described treatment of the individual symptoms. In addition, we have to make use of hyperalimentation, hydro-therapeutic methods, gymnastic treatment, general massage, and climatic cures.

[396] Havelock Ellis, “The Sexual Impulse and the Sense of Shame.”

[397] Fürbringer’s article, “Masturbation,” in Eulenburg’s Real-Enzykldopädie der gesamten Heilkunde, vol. xvii., p. 523, third edition (Vienna and Leipzig, 1898).

[398] Metchnikoff, “The Nature of Man,” pp. 95-99.

[399] A French erotic work describes how an impotent man, in the hope of obtaining an erection, allowed a cockchafer to crawl about his penis.

[400] Probably the following case of an onanist, sixty-four years of age, is unique. It is reported by A. Wild (“A Contribution to the Refinements of Masturbation,” published in the Münchener Medizinische Wochenschrift, No. 11, 1906). He introduced a twig of a pine-tree into the urethra, and in such a way that when the attempt was made to draw it out, the pine-needles acted as barbs; consequently the twig broke off short, and it was necessary for the medical man to remove it with the aid of dressing forceps!

[401] Cf. the complete historical and literary account of godemichés, given in my “Sexual Life in England,” vol. ii., pp. 284-292 (Berlin, 1903).

[402] Cf. the explanation of this passage by Iwan Bloch, “Were the Ancients aware of the Contagious Character of Venereal Diseases?” published in the Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, No. 5, 1899.

[403] S. Freud, “Three Papers on the Sexual Theory,” pp. 37, 42 (Leipzig and Vienna, 1905).

[404] R. Kossmann, “Is the Medical Man Justified in Recommending Extra-Conjugal Sexual Intercourse?” published in the Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1905, vol. iii., p. 126.

[405] Cf. R. Thomalla, “Masturbation in the School: its Consequences and its Suppression,” published in the Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1906, vol. v., pp. 63-68.

[406] H. Ellis, “The Sexual Impulse and the Sense of Shame.”

[407] Gustav Aschaffenburg, “The Relations of the Sexual Life to the Origin of Nervous and Mental Disorders,” published in the Münchener Medizinische Wochenschrift, 1906, No. 37, p. 1794.

[408] Metchnikoff, “The Nature of Man” (English edition), p. 96.

[409] A. Eulenburg, “Sexual Neuropathy,” p. 80 (Leipzig, 1895).

[410] Otto Adler, “Deficient Sexual Sensibility in Woman,” p. 112 (Berlin, 1904). Mendel observed excessive masturbation in hypochondriacal women (Deutsche Medizinal-Zeitung, 1889, No. 15, p. 180).

[411] L. Löwenfeld, “The Sexual Life and Nervous Disorders,” fourth edition, p. 114 (Wiesbaden, 1906).

[412] Eduard Reich, “Immorality and Immoderation,” p. 122 (Neuwied and Leipzig, 1866).

[413] Felix Roubaud, “Treatise on Impotence and Sterility in Man and Woman,” third edition, p. 7 (Paris, 1876).

[414] W. A. Hammond, “Sexual Impotence in the Male and Female Sexes.”

[415] A. von Schrenck-Notzing, “Therapeutic Suggestion in Cases of Morbid Manifestations of the Sexual Sensibility,” pp. 66, 67 (Stuttgart, 1892).

[416] Cf. Havelock Ellis, “The Sexual Impulse and the Sense of Shame,” pp. 184-186.

[417] Iwan Bloch, “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. ii., pp. 107, 108 (Dresden, 1903).

[418] On p. 18 of his treatise he goes so far as to say: “There is no disease of the body or the mind which cannot be referred to masturbation.”

[419] Eulenburg refers also to “Persönliche Schutz,” by Laurentius; the “Jugendspiegel,” by Bernhard; the “Johannistrieb,” by B. Mohrmann; the “Krankheit der Welt,” by A. Damm.

[420] According to A. Jacobi (“The History of Pædiatry, and its Relation to Other Arts and Sciences,” p. 66 (Berlin, 1905)), this is not true of quite young children, at ages of from one to ten years, in whom masturbation does less harm than in half-grown or adult individuals.

[421] Cf. H. Rohleder, “Die Masturbation,” pp. 185-192 (Berlin, 1899).

[422] Cf. L. Löwenfeld, op. cit., p. 137.

[423] A. Tardieu, “Étude Médico-Légale sur les Attentats aux Moeurs,” p. 114 (Paris, 1878).

[424] Cf. my “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. i., p. 135.

[425] Von Schrenk-Notzing, op. cit., p. 9.

[426] Cf. A. Weill, “The Laws and Mysteries of Love,” p. 101 (Berlin, 1895).

[427] Havelock Ellis, op. cit., p. 266.

[428] G. M. Beard, “Sexual Neurasthenia,” second edition (Leipzig and Vienna, 1890).

[429] A. Eulenburg, “Sexual Neurasthenia,” published in Deutsche Klinik, 1902, vol. vi., pp. 163-206.

[430] L. Löwenfeld, op. cit., pp. 273, 274.

[431] Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, “Leaves from a Diary.”

[432] “During my life I have had under observation many a lecherous man and many a wanton woman, and I have always found that, without exception, voluptuous persons clothe themselves very warmly, and sleep under very warm bed-clothes. In earlier years I have reported several cases observed by me of warm clothing of the genital organs on the part of women who distinguished themselves by lasciviousness, and I could increase the number of examples of this kind by several dozen” (E. Reich, “Immorality and Intemperance,” pp. 43, 44).

[433] O. Effertz, “Neurasthenia Sexualis,” p. 46 (New York, 1894).

[434] Effertz estimates the frequency of frigidity in women at about 10 per cent. The truth probably lies midway between the views of Effertz and those of Guttzeit.

[435] By vaginismus we understand involuntary convulsive contraction of the vaginal muscles, associated with abnormal sensibility of the vaginal inlet, dependent on masturbation, or induced by the above-mentioned painful sensations and injuries which occur in maladroit and brutal coitus (this is by far the commonest cause of vaginismus), especially when the penis is very large and the vaginal inlet very small, or when the female genital organs are further forward than usual. Vaginismus generally arises from small injuries and lacerations, produced in this manner; with the physical sense of pain is associated also psychical anxiety with regard to renewed attempts at intercourse; and in this way the reflex spasm is produced. Sometimes the vaginal spasm does not begin until after the penis has been introduced, so that this organ is retained (penis captivus). A few years ago a remarkable case of this kind occurred in Bremen. One of the dock labourers was having sexual intercourse in an out-of-the-way corner of the docks, when the woman became affected with this involuntary spasm, and the man was unable to free himself from his imprisonment. A great crowd assembled, from the midst of which the unfortunate couple were removed in a closed carriage, and taken to the hospital, and not until chloroform had been administered to the girl did the spasm pass off and free the man!

[436] A very clever study of the conditions here described will be found in a recent English novel, “Mr. and Mrs. Villiers,” by Hubert Wales (Heinemann, London, 1907).—Translator.

[437] Rozier describes two typical examples of feminine erotomania (“The Secret Aberrations of the Female Sex,” pp. 123-128; Leipzig, 1831).

[438] Pollutions.—This term has not perhaps as yet acquired a right of residence in the English tongue, but I use it because it is needed. There is no other word which can be employed as a general term (1) to include all involuntary emissions of semen, whether nocturnal or diurnal; and (2) to include involuntary sexual orgasm in the female as well as in the male. In the female the term “seminal emission” is inapplicable; but the term “pollution” can be applied in English (as it is in German) to either sex. By American writers the term “pollution” is now generally used (see, for instance, Allen, “Disorders of the Male Sexual Organs,” Twentieth Century Practice, vol. vii., p. 612 et seq.).—Translator.

[439] L. Löwenfeld, op. cit., pp. 206, 207.

[440] Swediaur relates: “I have, although much more rarely, seen the aforesaid diseases also in the other sex” (he speaks of diurnal pollutions). “At the present time I have under treatment a woman, twenty-eight years of age, who for a year and a half, since the time when she had a miscarriage, suffers from very frequent involuntary nocturnal pollutions, which are induced by very voluptuous dreams, and are accompanied by all the symptoms of wasting of the spinal cord, which Hippocrates describes as a disease peculiar to the male sex.” Quoted by L. Deslandes, “Masturbation and other Aberrations of Sexual Intercourse,” p. 204 (Leipzig, 1835).

[441] Paul Bernhardt, “Processes Resembling Pollutions Occurring in Women, without Sexual Ideas or Lustful Feelings,” published in Die ärztliche Praxis, 1903, No. 17, pp. 193-197.

[442] The best recent work on impotence is Fürbringer’s “The Disturbances of the Sexual Function in Man,” second edition (Vienna, 1901). See also Frenzel, “On Incapacity for Procreation” (Wittenberg, 1800); F. Roubaud, “Traité de l’Impuissance et de la Stérilité chez l’Homme et chez la Femme” (Paris, 1878); V. von Gyurkovechky, “Pathology and Therapeutics of Impotence in the Male” (Vienna and Leipzig, 1897); J. Steinbacher, “Impotence in the Male,” fifth edition (Berlin, 1892); W. A. Hammond, “Sexual Impotence in the Male and Female Sexes” (Berlin, 1891); A. Eulenburg, “Sexual Neurasthenia” (pp. 177-183); Leopold Casper, “Impotentia et Sterilitas Virilis” (Munich, 1890).

[443] W. Schallmayer, “Infection as a Wedding Gift,” published in the Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1903, vol. iv., pp. 389-419.

[444] G. Hirth, “Ways to Love,” pp. 461, 463.

[445] Jacquemart reports a striking case of impotentia coeundi, which he saw in an engineer who received an appointment in a State tobacco factory. After he had resigned his appointment, the patient fully recovered his sexual powers (cf. Loebisch, article “Tobacco,” in Eulenburg’s Real-Enzyklopädie, 1900, vol. xxiv., p. 19).

[446] S. Réti, “Sexuelle Gebrechen,” second edition, p. 15 (Halle, 1904).

[447] J. S. T. Frenzel, “Impotence,” Part I., p. 164 (Wittenberg, 1800).

[448] In some cases it is said to have given rise to permanent impotence.

[449] Frenzel, op. cit., pp. 155, 156.

[450] J. J. Virey, “Woman,” p. 367 (Leipzig, 1827).

[451] Von Schrenck-Notzing, “Studies in Crimino-Psychology and Psycho-Pathology,” p. 176 (Leipzig, 1902).

[452] The Englishman Thomas Parr, who attained the age of one hundred and fifty-two years, remarried at the age of a hundred and twenty years, and his wife is said “to have noticed no defects in him on account of his age” (cf. William Ebstein, “The Art of Prolonging Human Life,” p. 70 (Wiesbaden, 1891)).

[453] In the drug trade we find two brands, known respectively as “Yohimbin Spiegel” and “Yohimbin Riedel”; both preparations are of equal value. [In a letter to the translator under date January 8, 1908, Dr. Bloch writes that “Yohimbin Riedel” is preferable to “Yohimbin Spiegel.”]

[454] Cf. Alexander Peyer, “Affections of the Stomach Associated with Disorders of the Male Genital Organs” (Leipzig, 1890).

[455] Cf. Koblanck, “Some Clinical Observations on Disturbances of the Physiological Functions of the Female Reproductive Organs,” published in the Zeitschrift für Geburtshilfe und Gynäkologie, vol. xliii., No. 3. Moriz Porosz (“Sexual Truths,” pp. 213-218; Leipzig, 1907) devotes with good reason a special chapter to the neurasthenia of young married women. The change from the virgin state into married life often gives rise to such transient neurasthenic conditions in the young wife, especially when there exists any sort of disharmony in respect of marital intercourse.

CHAPTER XVII
THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASPECT OF PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS

“I hope that in the not distant future, for the advancement of science, physicians will be glad to ally themselves with folk-lorists and ethnologists.”—Frederick S. Krauss.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XVII

Anthropological and clinical views of sexual anomalies — Ubiquity and enduring nature of psychopathia sexualis — Secondary rôle of civilization and degeneration — The fable of “the good old times” — The ungrounded fear of degeneration — “Nervous degeneration” in earlier times — Recent arguments against the degeneration theory — Metchnikoff’s book, “The Nature of Man” — Georg Hirth’s idea of “Hereditary Enfranchisement.”

Elements of the anthropological theory of psychopathia sexualis — The need for variety in sexual relationships — Sexual perversions in healthy persons — The effect of external influences — Morbid impressions — Artificial production of perversions (repetition, suggestion, imitation, seduction) — Importance of sexual differentiation — Congenital character of perversions — The diffusion of perversions among savage races — Examples — Immorality in the country — Influence of race and nationality — Of age and sex — Social differences — Influence of civilization — Influence of conventionality — The unrest of the present day — Spiritual configuration of modern perversity.

Appendix: Sexual Perversions due to Diseases. — General survey — Epilepsy and sexual perversions — Other mental diseases-Syphilis and sexual perversions — Abnormalities of the genital organs.

CHAPTER XVII

In my “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” published in the years 1902 and 1903, I for the first time attempted to deal systematically, from the standpoint of the anthropologist and ethnologist, with the great province of the so-called “psychopathia sexualis,” the field of sexual aberrations, degenerations, anomalies, perversities, and perversions. I started from the point of view that, in order to obtain new ideas regarding the nature of psychopathia sexualis, and in order to revise the old ideas in the light of recent knowledge, we must keep before our eyes, not one-sidedly “the sick man,” but comprehensively “man as man,” both as civilized man and as savage man.

Previously the doctrine of psychopathia sexualis had been dominated exclusively by clinical, purely medical conceptions. Observations had been limited to morbid phenomena, occurring in individuals with an abnormal vita sexualis. Thus there had arisen a general view of the nature of sexual anomalies, by which these anomalies were allotted almost entirely to the province of the physician, and were described as stigmata of degeneration. H. J. Löwenstein,[456] Häussler,[457] and Kaan,[458] in the third and fifth decades of the nineteenth century, were the first to adopt this medical point of view of sexual aberrations; and finally, in the last quarter of the same century, Richard von Krafft-Ebing [459] converted modern sexual pathology into a comprehensive scientific system,[460] which stands and falls with the idea of degeneration.

Von Krafft-Ebing is, and remains, the true founder of modern sexual pathology. Without wishing in the slightest degree to underestimate the value of the clinical researches he carried out in this province of research, characterized by precision and profound scientific zeal—without undervaluing for a moment these extraordinary services—I am compelled to point out that his purely medical view of sexual aberrations is one-sided, and to[456] insist that it must be amplified and rectified by anthropological and ethnological researches.

Let us leave the hospital and the medical consulting-room; let us make a journey round the world; let us observe the sexual activity of the genus homo in its manifold phenomena, not as physicians, but as ordinary observers; let us compare the sexuality of the civilized human being with that of the savage: then we shall recognize the vast extension of our visual field for the comprehension of psychopathia sexualis; we shall see how the civilized and temporary phenomenon becomes absorbed into the general human phenomenon, presenting amid all local variations the same fundamental lineaments. Psychopathia sexualis exists everywhere and at all times. Culture, civilization, and diseases play only the parts of favouring, modifying, intensifying factors.

I do not go so far as Freud, who, on account of the now generally recognized wide diffusion of perverse sexual tendencies, is compelled to adopt the view “that the rudiments of perversions are the primeval general rudiments of the human sexual impulse, out of which the normal sexual mode of behaviour is developed in the course of evolution, in consequence of organic changes and psychical inhibitions”;[461] but I do maintain that sexual perversities and perversions appertain to the human race as such, and independently of civilization. I am convinced that they are supplementary to normal sexual manifestations, and that their diffusion among civilized and savage peoples extends far more widely than the circle of true degenerative phenomena.

The sexual impulse, as a purely physical function, is neither an object of comparison nor a distinctive characteristic between primitive and civilized humanity. The “elementary ideas” of humanity return everywhere again in the elementary manifestations of sexual aberrations.

From the investigations collected and published in the above-mentioned work I have been led to the firm conviction, which I must now put forward as a scientific truth based upon the teaching of anthropology, folk-lore, and the history of civilization, that at the present day, in our time so widely decried as “nervous,” “degenerate,” and “overcivilized,” not only are there no more sexually “perverse” persons than there were in former days—let us think only of the middle ages, with their frightful excesses, appearing in epidemic diffusion—but, further, that the greater part of the perversions of the present day are not to be regarded[457] as “degenerations” at all; and, finally, that the factors which are to weaken and undermine the vital forces of a nation must be something other than purely sexual factors. For sexual aberrations alone have, taken as a whole, but a trifling influence in effecting the decadence of a nation. They first gain such an influence in combination with causes, which we cannot now discuss, of an economic and political nature.

As old as humanity is the fable of the good old times, of the golden youth of the human race, of the glorious past, to which an always corrupt, physically and morally rotten present is supposed to have succeeded.[462] The ancients held this view; it recurred at the time of the renascence; and since the time of Rousseau’s unfortunate condemnation of all civilization, it has been, in the hands of all zealots, moral fanatics, backsliders, and guardians of conventional morality, a greatly prized weapon, and one, also, of great power when used to influence the ignorant and easily misled. Anthropology, the history of primitive man, and the history of civilization in general, have utterly destroyed this beautiful dream of the good old times and of the better days of the past. Nothing has been left but the ever more beautiful present!

The critical and far-sighted Lessing opposed Rousseau’s hypothesis of corruption by means of “civilization.” It was true, he said, that Athens, standing so high in civilization, and at the same time so corrupt, passed away; but the virtuous Sparta, did not this also pass away? Rousseau himself had to admit that the destruction of civilization would be of no use, that the world would then relapse into barbarism, and that the corruption would none the less persist. The philologist Muff,[463] discussing this question, added that if civilization had not come, vice would still have been dominant, and that civilization, involving as it does intellectual progress, provides also the means for counteracting vice.

Physicians and natural philosophers have long protested against the theory of the corrupt and degenerate “present.” For instance, a countryman of Rousseau’s, Dr. Delvincourt,[464] exclaimed:

“How false is the assumption of the fanatics and the pious who attribute to the moral corruption of our century the majority of diseases, and, above all, venereal diseases; who maintain that the race is degenerating; and who thunder an anathema against modern young men, whom they would gladly muzzle as we muzzle an animal.”

Must we, then, he asks, at a moment when civilization is marching forward with giant strides, have our ears wearied with sophisms which can no longer deceive even the ignorant masses? And he shows how since primeval times, everywhere, all over the earth, vice has been diffused. He rightly points to the innumerable monuments de turpitude of all ages.

About the same time (be it noted, more than sixty years ago) in Germany the celebrated natural philosopher Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, in an academic speech with the distinctive title “The Fear that Progressive Intellectual Development will Lead to Physical National Degeneration: A Demonstration that this Fear is entirely devoid of Scientific and Medical Foundation” (Berlin, 1842), opposed the belief in the unwholesome influence of civilization upon the popular strength and popular morals. Of special interest to us are his remarks upon the alleged deleterious influence of civilization upon sexuality. He says (p. 8):

“The occurrence of puberty in warm climates at a comparatively early age (from ten to fifteen years), in cold climates somewhat later (from fourteen to eighteen years), is a natural measure of human intelligence and power; and if our sexually mature youths at school, at the time at which their development has naturally progressed to this point, experience also sexual stimulation, this is entirely according to the nature of things, and only imposes upon those in charge of schools, and upon parents, the special duty of watchfulness in these respects. Even if secret vice becomes general anywhere among young fellows in a manner open to regret, still, this does not mean that our schools are the cause of physical weakness, of overstimulation, and of deterioration of the people and of the epoch; it merely indicates a local deficiency in energetic purposive education, and a lack of the necessary watchfulness over the youths in the particular institution in which the trouble has occurred, or that the family life of the children thus affected is less strictly moral than we could wish; and the evil is only to be overcome by counteracting its especial causes. In many cases we may compare outbreaks of premature sexuality with epidemics of disease, which also find entrance through lack of sufficient care. Just the same is it in respect of the great mass of adults who, by exhortation and example on the part of those whose business it is to give them counsel, are in most cases so easily led in the right direction, but who, in the absence of such judicious treatment, often give way to the most unbridled licentiousness. The student of popular history will easily find numerous instances of cause and effect, now of the former and now of the latter kind.”

Ehrenberg comes to the conclusion, most encouraging to ourselves and to our time, and one which may be unhesitatingly accepted, that the entire history of humanity, in so far as that history is open to us, leads us to believe, not that the progress of civilization [465] has given rise to infirmity or to nervous overstimulation of the people, but, on the contrary, that as the centuries pass, our bodies are as powerfully developed as formerly, and that there is an ever-happier development of all the nobler human activities, such as can only result from an improvement in our mental faculties.

At the fifty-ninth Congress of German Natural Philosophers and Physicians, held at Berlin in the year 1886, the celebrated physicist Werner von Siemens, discussing the same problem in a formal speech, proved the nullity of the hypothesis of the evil influence of civilization upon the physical and moral nature of humanity, and expressed himself as fully convinced that

“our activity in research and discovery conducts humanity to higher stages of civilization, ennobles humanity, and makes ideal aims more easily accessible; that the coming scientific age will diminish poverty and illness, will increase the enjoyment of life, and will make humanity better, happier, and more contented with its lot.”

“Has humanity degenerated?” asks a celebrated specialist,[466] who, owing to the nature of his speciality, has been able to obtain exhaustive information regarding what is often believed to be a symptom of degeneration—namely, falling out of the hair and baldness—and he answers:

“Certainly not! In the process of civilization, which has lasted for many thousands of years, our organization has not experienced any serious convulsion of its fundamental nature. Superficially only have the battles we have had to fight made any mark upon us.”

To a frightful extent in earlier times the great infective epidemic diseases decimated civilized humanity, to an extent which is hardly[460] realized at the present day, and those of more powerful constitution were undoubtedly carried off quite as much as those endowed with weaker powers of resistance. Bubonic plague, small-pox, leprosy, the sweating sickness, scarlatina, cholera, and syphilis (which at its commencement was a far more severe disease than it is at the present day), have often annihilated the blossoms of youth; and yet mankind as a whole has not suffered therefrom. Formerly there were much more violent and obstinate nervous troubles than our modern “nervousness,” which, to a large extent, represents merely a phenomenon of adaptation, not a disease in the proper sense of the term. St. Vitus’s dance, the dancing mania, and similar psycho-nervous epidemics, disturbed medieval humanity, without, however, giving rise to any permanent injury, and without causing progressive degeneration. And the most frightful sexual excesses can do no harm to the strength of the nation.

With regard to this point, the reputed connexion between sexual excesses and the political downfall of a nation, Carl Bleibtreu [467] rightly remarks:

“Ancient Rome produced its greatest men during a period of moral degeneration. The finest blossoms of Hellenic civilization coincided with a period of fundamental immorality. We might easily urge that after Pericles, Phidias, Aristophanes, Euripides, Alcibiades, and Socrates, the decay of the Greek race began, notwithstanding the fact that much later in Greek history the vital force of the nation was proved by the appearance of men of the first rank, such as Alexander, Aristotle, and Demosthenes. But this rejoinder does not help us much, for in the earliest days of Greek history, in the legal codes of Solon and Lycurgus, we find the most notable and clear indications that precisely in respect of sexual relationship, and more especially in regard to marriage and the procreation of children, the morals of this fresh and youthful race were disordered to the greatest possible extent.

“Just the same do we find it at the time of the Italian renascence and at the time of the Hohenstaufen dynasty—a complete confusion of sexual relationships. The eighteenth century, also, notwithstanding all the justified jeremiads of Rousseau regarding the widespread unnaturalness of the time, and notwithstanding all the sorrows of the young Werther, was distinguished by the production of an incredible abundance of men of genius; and in contemporary France, the country which was most severely affected by this moral decay, there flourished the generation to which such men as Mirabeau and Napoleon belonged—men whose unparalleled vitality influences us to this moment.”

Finally, I must refer to two leading authors of recent years, Eli Metchnikoff and Georg Hirth, whose writings exhibit a remarkable[461] similarity in respect of general philosophical foundation. Both have energetically opposed the unfounded fantasies of degeneration (there exists also a justified campaign against the continuously effective causes of degeneration in the form of alcohol, syphilis, etc.), and both have advocated a belief in life and in the life-force.

In his work “The Nature of Man” (English translation by Chalmers Mitchell; Heinemann, 1903), Metchnikoff advances an “optimistic philosophy,” in opposition to the pessimistic degenerative theory of our time, of which latter P. J. Möbius may be regarded as the chief advocate, and he proves how the imperfections and “disharmonies” of the human organism may give place to a further development and perfectibility of human nature, and this precisely in connexion with culture and civilization. It is now that humanity first begins really to live.[468] Mankind has not degenerated in consequence of civilization, but has, on the contrary, by means of civilization, first attained the possibility of establishing “physiological old age” and “physiological death.” Our device is not backwards, but forwards! The pessimists cry out: “Existence has no meaning! For what purpose do we live, and for what purpose do we die?” This dreadful “for what purpose” with which Friedrich von Hellwald concludes his history of civilization, disturbs day by day emotional minds. Metchnikoff proves that this problem is connected with the existence of the disharmonies of human nature. But evolution continues to transform these disharmonies into harmonies (“orthobiosis”). Thus the aim of human existence lies in “the completion of the entire physiological cycle of life with a normal old age, so that, with the cessation of the instinct to live, and with the appearance of the instinct for natural death, the cycle comes to an end.” This is, to a certain extent, the scientific formulation of the “superman” of Nietzsche, who based upon quite similar considerations his opposition to the hypothesis of degeneration, and who, out of the disharmonies, imperfections, and pains of life, also created the conviction of a progressive evolution, and thus, like Metchnikoff, thoroughly affirmed life. Metchnikoff’s ideal human being of the future is realizable, but only by means of the principles of science and intelligent culture.

Similar views to those of Metchnikoff are advanced by Georg Hirth. He, above all, has introduced into science the most[462] felicitous conception of “hereditary enfranchisement.”[469] Thus to the pessimistic degeneration theories and the psychical paralysis evoked by the idea of “hereditary taint” (we now hear the expression from every mouth), Hirth opposes a word of power, a word expressing “an energetic opposing stream of tendency.” Thus the incontestable fact finds simple expression, that

“The requirements of all individuals through millions of generations constitute an inalienable, progressively influential common possession of the whole of humanity, an impulsive force based upon natural law, which marches victoriously forward over the sins and failures of individuals.... That is to say, that in our entire organism, so long as it continues to live, in addition to the disturbing influences which we have inherited or have acquired by our own faults, there exists also a mass of old and new constructive influences, which work towards the restitution of the former condition.... Enfranchisement by means of primevally old, healthy, and strong reproductive cells is stronger than the quite recent tainting by means of weakly and diseased germs. If it were not so, the entire human race would long since have passed away, for there can hardly exist a single family tree at the foot of which there are not somewhere worms gnawing.”

I cannot here examine more closely the extremely interesting foundation of this view, which rightly places in the foreground the capacity for self-regeneration, for the removal of morbid vital stimuli, and their replacement by new and healthy vital stimuli, and which notably limits the extension of hereditary “tainting.” The conclusion which Hirth draws from this view is identical with that of Metchnikoff—namely, that our life remains capable of upward progress, a view which Hirth everywhere happily employs in his battle “with the forces of obscurity and degeneration.”

The theory of degeneration finds a thorough scientific refutation also in the admirable work by Dr. William Hirsch, “Genius and Degeneration: a Psychological Study” (Berlin and Leipzig, 1904). At the end of the book (p. 340) the writer says:

“In view of the investigations I have made, we are necessarily led to the conclusion that the authors mentioned have by no means adduced proof of a general degeneration of the civilized nations. Humanity need not be alarmed with regard to the alleged ‘black plague of degeneration,’ and the world need be as little concerned by these fables of the ‘twilight of the nations’ as by Herr Falb’s prophecies of the approaching destruction of our planet.”

It cannot be denied that the wide diffusion of the deleterious means of sensual gratification (alcohol, tobacco, etc.), the increase in the number of large towns, and the rapid growth in their population, by means of which prostitution and the spread of venereal diseases are especially favoured, constitute important etiological factors for the degeneration of the race. Still, the wide diffusion of public hygiene, which is more and more brought under the notice of the individual, affords here an effective counterpoise. “Enfranchisement” in Hirth’s sense is here clearly manifested.

After we have seen that the “degeneration” of our time, to the medical idea of which we shall return to speak more exactly in the next chapter, is not greater now than it was in earlier epochs, and that sexual anomalies have always existed, let us return to consider this point, to the anthropological view of psychopathia sexualis.

In my “Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis” I have collected the general human phenomena of the sexual impulse in primitive and civilized states—that is, the everywhere recurring fundamental lineaments and phenomena of the vita sexualis peculiar to the genus homo as such.

As the principal result of this inquiry, the following propositions appear to me to be established:

Degeneration cannot be employed, as von Krafft-Ebing has employed it in his “Psychopathia Sexualis,” as a heuristic principle in the investigation, recognition, and judgment of sexual aberrations and perversions.

At the most, degeneration is no more than a favouring factor of the diffusion of sexual abnormalities, an influence which increases the frequency of their appearance.

On the contrary, the ultimate cause of all sexual perversions, aberrations, abnormalities, and irrationalities, is the need for variety in sexual relationships peculiar to the genus homo, which is to be regarded as a physiological phenomenon, and the increase of which to the degree of a sexual irritable hunger is competent to produce the most severe sexual perversions.

In contrast with this, “degeneration” or diseases play only a subordinate part, and can be invoked for the explanation of only a small number of sexual aberrations—at most for those which come to the notice of physicians on account of pathological conditions or in foro. In fact, the majority of cases of sexual perversions which come the way of the physicians in clinical or forensic relationships are pathological, but these constitute only[464] a minority of all cases. The large majority of cases do not come within the scope of degeneration.[470]

Freud, in his “Three Essays on the Sexual Theory,” recognizes the justice of my view, and on p. 80 he writes:

“Physicians who have first studied perversions in well-marked examples and peculiar conditions are naturally inclined to regard them as signs of disease or as stigmata of degeneration, just as in the case of sexual inversion. Daily experience has shown that the majority of these transgressions—at any rate, the less marked of them—constitute a seldom lacking constituent of the sexual life of healthy persons. In favourable conditions the normal individual may exhibit such a perversion for a considerable length of time in the place of his normal sexual activity; or the perversion may take its place beside the normal sexual activity. Probably there is no healthy person in whom there does not exist, at some time or other, some kind of supplement to his normal sexual activity, to which we should be justified in giving the name of ‘perversity.’”[471]

A second important factor in the genesis of sexual anomalies is the ease with which the sexual impulse is affected by external influences, the associative inclusion of manifold external stimuli in sexual perception itself, the “synæsthetic stimuli,” as I myself have called them, in the amatory life of mankind. In this way gradually all the relations of art, religion, fashion, etc., to sexuality have developed, and they offer, in conjunction with the sensory impressions and the psychical and physical imaginative associations which accompany the sexual act, an incredibly rich material for the manifold realizations of the sexual need for variation.

The need for variety in sexual relationships, in conjunction with the sexual “demand for stimulation” (Hoche),[472] plays a great part, especially in the occurrence of sexual perversions in adult persons and at a more advanced age of life. The effect of external influences is most clearly noticeable in childhood, when it is experienced most deeply and in a most enduring manner, and when it can become permanently associated with sexual perception (Binet and von Schrenck-Notzing).

Alexander von Humboldt, in his “Cosmos” (vol. ii., Introduction), drew attention to the well-known experience that “sensual impressions and apparently chance occurrences are, in the case of youthful emotional individuals, often capable of determining the entire course of a human life.” Freud draws attention to the psychological fact that impressions of childhood, which have apparently been forgotten, may, notwithstanding, have left the most profound marks upon our psychical life, and may have determined our entire subsequent development. The impressions of childhood are often incorporated fate. For this reason, for example, the children of criminals become criminals themselves, not because they are “born” criminals, but because, as children, they grow up in the atmosphere of crime, and the impressions they here receive become firmly and deeply rooted in their natures. Hence the campaign against crime must in the first place take into consideration the education of the children of criminals!

From the need for variety in sexual relationships, and from the effect of external influences, we deduce the possibility and the actual frequency of the acquirement and the artificial production of sexual perversions and perversities; and these, in proportion to the intensity of the sexual impulse (very variable in strength in different individuals, according to the ease with which it is excited), will appear now earlier, now later, will be now transient and now enduring.

The third important etiological factor in the origination of sexual perversions is the frequent repetition of the same sexual aberration. There can be no doubt whatever that the normal human being can become accustomed to the most diverse sexual aberrations, so that these become perversions, which appear in healthy human beings just as they do in the diseased.

Fourthly, suggestion and imitation play an extremely important r?e in the vita sexualis alike of primitive and of civilized nations, in accordance with which certain aberrations in the sexual sphere become diffused with great rapidity, and make their appearance as customs, fashions, and psychical epidemics. Those who everywhere trace perversities from morbid rudiments underestimate the powerful influence which example and seduction exercise in the human sexual life. This is especially noticeable to-day in those sexual perversions which have become national customs. The most celebrated example is that of Hellenic pæderasty, reputedly introduced from Crete, but probably in the first place originated by a few genuinely homosexual[466] individuals, who in their own interest transmitted artificially by suggestion their peculiar tendencies to a few heterosexual individuals, until at last the love of boys became a national custom which every heterosexual man adopted. The momentous part which modern prostitution, and more especially brothels, plays in the suggestion of perversions has already been mentioned. It is a matter to which we shall frequently have occasion to return. Schrank alludes (“Prostitution in Vienna,” vol. i., p. 285) to a prostitute who enjoyed a “European reputation” as an artist in sexual perversities of every kind, and who enjoyed the nickname of “the Ever-Virgin,” because she allowed men every possible kind of enjoyment except that of regular normal intercourse (which she avoided for fear of becoming impregnated).

Fifthly, the difference between man and woman in the essence, the kind, and the intensity, of sexual perception (sexual activity in man, sexual passivity in woman) constitutes a rich source of sexual aberrations, most of which belong to the provinces of masochism and sadism.

Sixthly, and lastly, in otherwise healthy individuals there occur at a very early age, and probably in consequence of congenital conditions, changes in the direction and the aim of sexual perception, variations from the type of differentiated heterosexual love. Genuine homosexuality is the principal phenomenon to be considered under this head. It occurs in perfectly healthy individuals quite independently of degeneration and of civilization; and it is diffused throughout the whole world.

From all these facts may be deduced the untenability of a purely clinical and pathological conception of sexual aberrations and perversions. We must now accept the point of view that, although numerous morbid degenerate and psychopathic individuals exhibit sexual anomalies, yet these identical anomalies and aberrations are extraordinarily common in healthy persons.

Ethnological research, for more exact details of which I may refer to my own work already mentioned, and to the pioneer works of Ploss-Bartels,[473] Mantegazza,[474] Friedrich S. Krauss,[475] and Havelock Ellis,[476] has adduced stringent proof that sexual aberrations[467] and perversions are ubiquitous, diffused throughout the entire world, just as much among primitive races as among civilized nations, that on the psycho-physical side they are “elementary ideas” in Bastian’s sense, that they recur everywhere in a qualitatively identical manner as a result of similar conditions. As it is with prostitution, so it is also with sexual perversions—a tendency to sexual aberration is deeply rooted in human nature. It is a primitive, purely anthropological phenomenon, which is not strengthened by civilization, but, on the contrary, is mitigated thereby. Charles Darwin rightly points out that the hatred of sexual immorality and of sexual aberrations is a “modern virtue,” appertaining exclusively to “civilized life,” and entirely foreign to the nature of primitive man. Primitive man revelled in wild indecency (as Wilhelm Roscher also proves), in sexual perversions, and libertinism.[477] The sexual aberrations of civilized mankind are for the most part imitations of the examples given by primitive peoples.

Thus, the well-known “stimulating rings” of European rubber manufacturers (cf. Weissenberg, in the “Transactions of the Anthropological Society of Berlin,” 1893, p. 135) correspond to the “stimulating stones” of the Battaks (Staudinger, op. cit., 1891, p. 351), to the “penis stones” of the savage Orang Sinnoi in Malacca (Vaughan Stevens in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1896, pp. 181, 182), the “ampallang” of the Sunda Islands (see Miklucho-Maclay in the “Transactions of the Anthropological Society of Berlin,” 1876, pp. 22-28). The “renifleurs” and “gamahucheurs” of the Parisian brothels and houses of accommodation find their typical analogues in the urine fetichists and cunnilingi of the Island of Ponape, in the Carolines (cf. Ploss-Bartels), who are, in truth, far removed from the fin-de-siècle life. And what a perverse imagination have the women of this same island! According to Otto Finsch (Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1880, p. 316), the men of this island have all only one testicle, because in boys at the age of seven or eight years the left testicle is removed by a piece of sharpened bamboo. This is said to make the men more desirable to the women! Among the Masai, for similar reasons, circumcision is effected in such a manner that a portion of the prepuce is left behind to form a kind of firm button of skin. “This mode of circumcision is greatly prized by the women. Among the black races, indeed, everything turns round the question of sensual enjoyment[468]” (“Medical Notes from Central Africa,” by M. C., published in the Deutsche Medizinische Presse, 1902, No. 14, p. 116). And how can our roués compete with the Tauni islanders of the South Seas? These select certain women, who are not allowed to marry, but are reserved as simple “objects of sensual pleasure,” and with these every kind of sexual artifice is practised (Dempwolf, “Medical Notes on the Tauni Islanders,” published in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1902, p. 335).

Thus between primitive and civilized races in these respects there are no important differences; and according to recent researches we find the same may be said with regard to civilized nations, that there is no difference between town and country.[478] I quote here the account given by an experienced author sixty years ago:

“People usually believe that in the country morals are much better than in the towns, but this belief is quite erroneous. Brothels and professional prostitutes naturally cannot exist in the country, but nearly every peasant-girl in the country is equivalent to a secret prostitute. It is incredible what sexual excesses go on between the masculine and feminine inhabitants of the villages. Every barn, every shed, every haystack, every copse, bears witness to this. Especially disadvantageous to morals is it when in the heat of summer persons of different sexes work side by side, half undressed, in remote fields for the whole day, and lie down to rest side by side.”[479]

We may here allude to a fact that we shall have to discuss later—that young men, after the conclusion of their term of military service, carry back with them to the country the knowledge of sexual excesses and perversities which they have acquired in the town, and thus diffuse these tendencies more and more widely.

Since sexual anomalies constitute a phenomenon generally characteristic of humanity, race and nationality, as such, have less to do with the matter than is commonly imagined. The Mongol and the Malay are not less voluptuous than the Semites, or than many Aryan races. Among the Semites, the Arabs and the Turks are pre-eminently sexually perverse nations. They seek sexual gratification indifferently in the female harem and in the boys’ brothel (see numerous descriptions of travellers on the moral customs of Turkey, the Levant, Cairo, Morocco, the Arabian Soudan, the Arabs in Africa, etc.). Among the Aryan races the[469] Aryans of India must be considered pre-eminent as refined practitioners of psychopathia sexualis, which they have reduced to a system. In addition to recognizing forty-eight figuræ Veneris (different postures in sexual intercourse), they practise every possible variety of sexual perversion; and they have in various textbooks [480] a systematic introduction to sexual immorality. Here there is manifestly no trace of morbid conditions, of degeneration, or of psychopathia; it is simply a matter of popular manners and customs. Sexual perversion among the Greeks and the Romans, two other Aryan nations, is too well known to need detailed description. In modern Europe the French were at one time believed to lead the way in sexual artifices. For a long time this has ceased to be true, and, in fact, never was true. They do, indeed, excel, if one may use the expression, all other nations in the outward technique and in the elegance of their sexual excesses. To them from very early times there has been ascribed a certain preference for the skatological element in the sexual life; but according to the recent researches of Friedrich S. Krauss regarding the Slavs, published in his “Anthropophyteia,” this alleged pre-eminence is extremely doubtful. That among the Slavs sexual perversions of every kind have an extraordinarily wide diffusion has been shown by this investigator by the collection of an enormous mass of material. It is also very generally known that the English from early days have exhibited a marked tendency to sadistic practices, and especially to flagellation. I will return later to this remarkable phenomenon. The French accuse the Germans of an especial tendency to homosexuality (le vice Allemand), but there are no sufficient grounds for this accusation. In psychopathia sexualis, the Germans are as cosmopolitan as they are in other respects.

With regard to the age of the individual in relation to sexual perversions, the frequency of these is greater after puberty than before,[481] and the frequency increases with advancing years. The time at which the imagination unfolds its greatest activity, the commencement of manhood, is extremely favourable to the origination of sexual aberrations, and to their becoming habitual practices; and, again, the age at which the sexual powers begin to decline, and when for their incitation new stimuli are[470] needed, is one at which abnormal varieties of sexual gratification frequently originate.[482]

Which sex is more inclined to abnormalities of the sexual impulse, the male or the female?

The primitively more powerful sexual impulsive life of man in association with his greater use of alcohol makes him distinctly more inclined to follow sexual bypaths than woman, whose sexuality at first develops very gradually, and experiences, in consequence of motherhood, powerful inhibitions to the development of any sexual anomalies. On the other hand, the much more difficult development of voluptuous sensations in women, by means of normal coitus, is not rarely the cause of a tendency to perverse varieties of sexual intercourse. They often seduce man in this direction, and excel him in the discovery of sexual artifices. Among primitive races, where the relationships are clearest, this is still easily recognizable, whereas by civilization the matter is often obscured. All the artificial deformities of the male genital organs amongst savages, which give the man much more trouble than pleasure, but which, on the other hand, increase the voluptuous enjoyment of the woman during the sexual act, cannot otherwise be explained except on the ground of an original demand on the part of women. To this category belong incisions in the glans penis, and the implanting of small stones in the wounds until the skin has a warty appearance (Java); perforation of the penis to enable rods beset with bristles, feathers, rods with balls (the well-known “ampallang” of the Dyaks of Borneo), bodkins, rings, bell-shaped apparatus, to be inserted through these perforations; the wrapping up of the penis in strips of fur with the hair outwards, or enveloping it in a leaden cylinder, etc. The feminine imagination has proved inexhaustible in this direction. Miklucho-Maclay, the great authority on the sexual psychology of the savage races of the Malay Archipelago and the South Sea Islands, declares it to be extremely probable that all these customs and all these apparatus were invented by or for women. The women reject all men who do not possess these stimulating apparatus on the penis. Finsch and Kubary confirm this, and state that in most cases it is the frigidity of the women which makes them desire such means of artificial stimulation. Among civilized races, also, abundant material can be collected with regard to sexual perversities[471] among women, as has recently been done by Paul de Régla in “Les Perversités de la Femme” (Paris, 1904), and by René Schwaeblé in “Les Détraquées de Paris” (Paris, 1904).

The following case shows that European women sometimes demand artificial changes in the male genital organs, in order to increase their voluptuous sensations. Some years ago a man, fifty years of age, was admitted into the syphilis wards of the Laibacher Hospital. The discharge from the penis was, however, found to be due merely to balanitis. On examination the greatly enlarged penis was found to be perforated by rod-shaped objects, and an incision through the skin showed that these were pins and hairpins. The pins were about two inches long, with brass heads the size of a peppercorn, and they were at least ten in number. One of the pins was run partly into the testicle. After the foreign objects had been removed, the man informed us that his mistress had stuck these in, in order that she might experience more ardent sensations. The pins were all subcutaneous; several of them ran right round the penis.

Social differences in respect of the frequency of sexual perversions do not exist. Sexual perversions are just as widely diffused among the lower classes as among the upper. A. Ferguson, Havelock Ellis, Tarnowsky, and J. A. Symonds are all in agreement regarding this fact, which, indeed, in view of the anthropological conception of psychopathia sexualis, does not require additional explanation.

Finally, we come to the last and most important point—to the question of the relation of culture and civilization to psychopathia sexualis. Even though psychopathia sexualis is in its essence independent of culture, is a general human phenomenon, still we cannot fail to recognize that civilization has exercised a certain influence upon the external mode of manifestation, and also upon the inner psychical configuration of sexual aberrations. Especially as regards the latter—the psychical relationships—the perversity of the civilized man is more complicated than that of primitive man, although in essence the two are identical.

The modern civilized man is in respect of his sexuality a peculiar dual being. The sexuality within him leads a kind of independent existence, notwithstanding its intimate relationship to the whole of the rest of his spiritual life. There are moments in which, even in men of lofty spiritual nature, pure sexuality becomes separated from love, and manifests itself in its utterly elementary nature beyond good and evil. I expressed earlier the idea that this frequent phenomenon reminded me of the “monomania[472]” of the older alienists. “Il y a en nous deux êtres, l’être moral et la bête: l’être moral sait ce que mérite l’amour véritable, la bête aspire à la fange où on la pousse,” we find in a French erotic work (“Impressions d’une Fille” par Léna de Mauregard, vol. i., pp. 57, 68; Paris, 1900).

No other human impulsive manifestation is so ill adapted as sexuality to the coercion and conventionality which civilization necessarily entails. Carl Hauptmann, in an interesting socio-psychological study, “Unsere Wirklichkeit” (“Our Reality”; Munich, 1902), has described very impressively this frightful conventionality, especially characteristic of our own time, which so painfully represses the “reality” of love, suppresses everything primitive in it, banishes it into the darkness of its own interior, and only allows the conventionally sanctioned forms of sexual love to subsist. This coercion, this outward pressure, develops a volcano of elementary sexuality, which usually slumbers, but may suddenly break out in eruption, and give free vent to excesses of the wildest nature. Dingelstedt in his poem “Ein Roman,” has excellently described this condition:

“If love nowadays so often manifests itself in the form of aberration or passion, this is almost always to be explained by the hindrances of every kind which have been opposed to it. No other feeling is so hindered, opposed, detested, and loaded with material and moral fetters. We know how education makes a beginning in this way, declaring that love is something forbidden, and how the hardness of economic life continues the process. Hardly has a young man or a young girl gone out into life, hardly have they begun to feel their way[473] into society, but they encounter a thousand difficulties which are opposed to their living out their life from a sexual point of view. How would it be possible that, in the limits of such a society, love could become anything else but a fixed idea of the individual, and how could it fail to give rise to continuous restlessness? Nature does not allow herself to be inhibited by our artificial social arrangements. The need for love within us remains active; it cries out in unsatisfied desire; and when no answer is forthcoming, beyond the echo of its own pain, it takes a perverse form. The love which is prevented from obtaining complete satisfaction and repose is to many an intensely painful torment.... The over-rich imagination and the unsatisfied longing give rise to the most horrible and abnormal forms of love. Above all, in a society which will make no room for love, the love-passion must give rise to the greatest devastation. The impulse to love which is repressed by the organization of society does not only fight violently for air—the inevitable consequence of any pressure—but it discovers also all those artifices and corruptions which are supposed to make the enjoyment of love more intense. Conscious of being despised by society, it endeavours to regain by violence what is wanting to it in sensuality.”

The struggle for reality in love, for the elementary and the primitive, manifests itself in the search for the greatest possible contrast to the conventional, to the commonly sanctioned mode of sexual activity. Love cries out for “nature,” and comes thereby to the “unnatural,” to the coarsest, commonest dissipation. This connexion has been already explained (pp. 322-325). Certain temporary phenomena exhibit also this fact—for example, the remarkable preference for the most brutal, the coarsest, the commonest dances, mere limb dislocations, such as the cancan, the croquette (machicha), the cake-walk, and other wild negro dances, which rejoice the modern public more than the most beautiful and gracious spiritual ballet. It was only when the above-described connexion became clear to me that I was able to understand the remarkable alluring power of these dances, which had hitherto been incomprehensible to me.

An additional factor which favours the origination of sexual perversions is the unrest always connected with the advance of civilization, the haste and hurry, the more severe struggle for existence, the rapid and frequent change of new impressions. Fifty years ago the celebrated alienist Guislain exclaimed:

“What is it with which our thoughts are filled? Plans, novelties, reforms. What is it that we Europeans are striving for? Movement, excitement. What do we obtain? Stimulation, illusion, deception.”[484]

There is no longer any time for quiet, enduring love, for an inward profundity of feeling, for the culture of the heart. The struggle for life and the intellectual contest of our time leaves the possibility only for transient sensations; the shorter they are, the more violent, the more intense must they be, in order to replace the failing grande passion of former times. Love becomes a mere sensation, which in a brief moment must contain within itself an entire world. Modern youth eagerly desires such experience of a whole world by means of love. The everlasting feeling of our classic period had been transformed, more especially among our leading spirits, into a passionate yearning to reflect within themselves truly the spirit of the time, to live through in themselves all the unrest, all the joy, all the sorrow, of modern civilization.

From this there results a peculiar, more spiritual configuration of modern perversity, a distinctive spiritualization of psychopathia sexualis, a true wandering journey, an “Odyssey” of the spirit, throughout the wide province of sexual excesses. Without doubt the French have gone furthest in this direction, and the names of Baudelaire, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Verlaine, Hannon, Haraucourt, Jean Larocque, and Guy de Maupassant, indicate nearly as many peculiar spiritual refinements and enrichments of the purely sensual life.

We have no longer to deal with the pure love of reflection, as in the case of Kierkegaard and Grillparzer, and in the writings of young Germany, where, indeed, reflection predominates, but which still more extends to the direction of higher love. Contrasted with this is the simple lust of the senses, by means of which new psychical influences are to be obtained. Voluptuousness becomes a cerebral phenomenon, ethereal. In this way the most remarkable, unheard-of, sensory associations appear in the province of sexuality—true fin-de-siècle products which are, above all, specifically modern, and could not possibly exist in former times. For it is always the same play of emotion, the same effects, the same terminal results: ordinary voluptuousness. The dream of Hermann Bahr, of “non-sexual voluptuousness,” and the replacement of the animal impulse by means of finer organs, is only a dream. The elemental sexual impulse resists every attempt at dismemberment and sublimation. It returns always unaltered, always the same. It is vain to expect new manifestations of this impulse. Such efforts end either in bodily and mental impotence, or else in sexual perversities. In these relationships the imagination of civilized man is unable to create[475] novelties in the essence; it can do so only as regards the objective manifestations. This is confirmed by the increase of purely ideal sexual perversities in connexion with certain spiritual tendencies of our time. Martial d’Estoc, in his book, “Paris Eros” (Paris, 1903), has given a clear description of these peculiar spiritual modifications of sexual aberrations. (It is interesting to note that Schopenhauer remarks, in his “Neue Paralipomena,” pp. 234 and 235: “The caprices arising from the sexual impulse resemble a will-o’-the-wisp. They deceive us most effectively; but if we follow them, they lead us into the marsh and disappear.”)

APPENDIX
SEXUAL PERVERSIONS DUE TO DISEASE

It is the immortal service of Casper and von Krafft-Ebing to have insisted energetically upon the fact that numerous individuals whose vita sexualis is abnormal are persons suffering from disease. This is their monumentum ære perennius in the history of medicine and of civilization. Purely medical, anatomical, physical, and psychiatric investigations show beyond question that there are many persons whose abnormal sexual life is pathologically based.

I shall not here discuss the peculiar borderland state between health and disease, the existence of which can be established in many sexually perverse individuals; I shall not refer to the “abnormalities,” the “psychopathic deficiencies,” the “unbalanced,” etc.; nor shall I discuss the question of the significance of the stigmata of degeneration, because these will be adequately dealt with in connexion with the forensic consideration of punishable sexual perversions.

Here we shall speak only of actual and easily determined diseases which possess a causal importance in the origination and activity of sexual perversions. The great majority of these are, naturally, mental disorders.

Von Krafft-Ebing, to whom we owe the most important observations regarding the pathological etiology of sexual perversions, enumerates the following conditions: Psychical developmental inhibitions (idiocy and imbecility), acquired weak-mindedness (after mental disorders, apoplexy, injuries to the head, syphilis, in consequence of general paralysis), epilepsy, periodical insanity, mania, melancholia, hysteria, paranoia.

Among these, epilepsy possesses the greatest importance.[485] It comes into play much more frequently as a causal morbid influence in the case of sexually perverse actions and offences than has hitherto been believed. The psychiatrist Arndt maintains that wherever an abnormal sexual life exists, we must always consider the possibility of epileptic influence. Lombroso assumes that all premature and peculiar instances of satyriasis are instances of larval epilepsy. He gives several examples in support of this view, and also a case of Macdonald’s which illustrates the connexion between epilepsy and sexual perversity.[486] Especially in the so-called epileptic “confusional states” do we meet with sexually perverse actions; exhibitionism and other manifestations of sexual activity coram publico are frequently referable to epileptic disease. Similar impulsive sexual activities and similar confusional states are seen after injuries to the head and in alcoholic intoxication, also after severe exhaustion. Many cases of “periodic psychopathia sexualis” are due to epilepsy.

Senile dementia and paralytic dementia (general paralysis of the insane), also severe forms of neurasthenia and hysteria, often change the sexual life in a morbid direction, and favour the origin of sexual perversions.

It is a fact of great interest that Tarnowsky and Freud attribute to syphilis an important rôle in the pathogenesis of sexual anomalies. In 50 % of his sexual pathological cases Freud found that the abnormal sexual constitution was to be regarded as the last manifestation of a syphilitic inheritance (Freud, op. cit., p. 74). Tarnowsky observed that congenital syphilitics, and also persons whose parents had been syphilitic, but who themselves had never exhibited any definite symptoms of the disease, were apt later to show manifestations of a perverse sexual sensibility (Tarnowsky, op. cit., pp. 34 and 35). Obviously this is to be explained by the deleterious influence upon the nervous system (perhaps by means of toxins?) which syphilis is also supposed to exert in the causation of tabes dorsalis and general paralysis of the insane. When investigating the clinical history of cases of sexual perversion, it appears that previous syphilis is a fact to which some importance should be attached.[487]

From syphilis we pass to consider direct physical abnormalities and morbid changes in the genital organs as causes of sexual anomalies. In women prolapsus uteri sometimes leads to perverse gratification of the sexual impulse—for example, by pædication;[488] in men, shortness of the frænum preputii plays a similar part,[489] also phimosis. Wollenmann reports the case of a young man suffering from phimosis, who, at the first attempt at coitus, experienced severe pain, and since that time had an antipathy to normal sexual intercourse. He passed under the influence of a seducer to the practice of mutual masturbation. Only after operative treatment of the phimosis did his inclination towards the male sex pass away, and the sexual perversion then completely disappeared.[490]

CHAPTER XVIII
MISOGYNY

“Thou priestess of the most flowery life, how is it possible that such things should draw near to thee—one of those pale phantoms, one of those general maxims, which philosophers and moralists have invented in their despair of the human race?”—G. Jung.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XVIII

Non-identity of misogyny with homosexuality — History of misogyny — Misogyny among the Greeks — Christian misogyny the true source of the modern contempt for women — Characteristics of modern misogyny — De Sade and his modern disciples (Schopenhauer, Strindberg, Weininger) — Scientific misogyny (Möbius, Schurtz, B. Friedländer, E. von Mayer) — Distinctions between the individual varieties — Counteracting tendencies — Beginnings of a new amatory life of the sexes — A common share in life — Freedom with, not without, woman.

CHAPTER XVIII

Before proceeding to the consideration of homosexuality I propose to give a brief account of contemporary misogyny, in order to avoid confusing these two distinct phenomena under one head, and also to avoid making the male homosexuals, who are often erroneously regarded as “woman-haters,” responsible for the momentarily prevalent spiritual epidemic of hatred of women. This would be a gross injustice, because, in the first place, this movement has in no way proceeded from the homosexual, but rather from heterosexual individuals, such as Schopenhauer, Strindberg, etc.; and because, in the second place, the homosexual as such are not misogynists at all, and it is only a minority of them who shout in chorus to the misogynist tirades of Strindberg and Weininger.

The misogynists form to-day a kind of “fourth sex,”[491] to belong to which appears to be the fashion, or rather has once more become the fashion, for misogyny is an old story. There have always been times in which men have cried out: “Woman, what have I to do with you? I belong to the century”;[492] times in which woman was renounced as a soulless being, and the world of men became intoxicated with itself, and was proud of its “splendid isolation.”

Of less importance is it that the Chinese since ancient times have denied to woman a soul, and therewith a justification for existence,[493] than that among the most highly developed civilized races of antiquity such men as Hesiod, Simonides,[494] and, above all, Euripides, were all fierce misogynists. In the “Ion,” the “Hippolytus,” the “Hecuba,” and the “Cyclops” we find the[482] most incisive attacks on the female sex. The most celebrated passage is that in the “Hippolytus” (verses 602-637, 650-655):

In this passage we have the entire quintessence of modern misogyny. But Euripides betrays to us also the real motive of misogyny. In a fragment of his we read “the most invincible of all things is a woman”! Hinc illæ lacrimæ! It is only the men who are not a match for woman, who do not allow woman as a free personality to influence them, who are so little sure of themselves that they are afraid of suffering at the hands of woman damage, limitation, or even annihilation of their own individuality. These only are the true misogynists.

It is indisputable that this Hellenic misogyny was closely connected with the love of boys as a popular custom. To this we shall return when we come to describe Greek pæderasty.

Among the Romans woman occupied a far higher position than among the Greeks—a fact which the institution of the vestal virgins alone suffices to prove. Among the Germans, also, woman was regarded as worthy of all honour.

The true source of modern misogyny is Christianity—the Christian doctrine of the fundamentally sinful, evil, devilish nature of woman. A Strindberg, a Weininger, even a Benedikt Friedländer, notwithstanding his hatred of priests—all are the last offshoots of a movement against the being and the value of woman—a movement which has persisted throughout the Christian period of the history of the world.

“If I were asked,” says Finck,[496] “to name the most influential, refining element of modern civilization, I should answer: ‘Woman, beauty, love, and marriage’! If I were asked, however, to name the most inward and peculiar essence of the early middle ages, my answer would be: ‘Deadly hostility to everything feminine, to beauty, to love, and to marriage.’”

The history of medieval misogyny was described by J. Michelet in his book “The Witch.” Since woman and the contact with woman were regarded as radically evil, it followed that in theory and practice asceticism was the ideal; celibacy was only the natural consequence of this hatred of woman; so also were the later witch trials the natural consequence. Therefore to this medieval misogyny, in contrast with modern misogyny, which represents only a weak imitation, we cannot deny a certain justification. The misogyny of the middle ages was earnestly meant; but it has become to-day mere phrase-making, dilettante imitation, and ostentation. In contrast with the utterances of the modern misogynist, the coarse abuse of women by such a writer as Abraham a Santa Clara has a refreshing and amusing character.[497]

Modern misogyny is certainly an inheritance of Christian doctrine, and a tradition handed down from much earlier times, but still it has its own characteristic peculiarities. Misogyny is, however, now much more an affair of satiety or disillusion than of belief or conviction; whereas in the days of medieval Christianity belief and conviction were the effective causal factors of misogyny. In addition, among our neo-misogynists we have the factor of the spiritual pride of a man who, from the standpoint of academic theoretical culture (which to men of this kind appears the highest summit of existence), looks down upon women, whom he regards as mentally insignificant, while he sympathizes with her “physiological weak-mindedness.” He smiles on her with pity, and completely overlooks the profound life of emotion and feeling characteristic of every true woman, which forms a counterpoise to any amount of purely theoretical knowledge—quite apart from the fact that women of intellectual cultivation are by no means rare.

If, in fact, we regard the lives of those who have reduced modern misogyny to a system, we shall be able to detect the above-mentioned causes in their personal experiences and impressions. The first important modern advocate of misogyny, the Marquis de Sade, lived an extremely unhappy married life, was deceived also in a love relationship, and nourished his hatred of women by a dissolute life and a consequent state of satiety.

And as regards Schopenhauer, who does not recall his unhappy[484] relations with his mother? For he who has really loved his mother, he who has experienced the unutterable tenderness and self-sacrifice of maternal love, can never become a genuine, thoroughgoing woman-hater. But the mutual relationship of Schopenhauer and his mother was rather hatred than love. Beyond question, also, his infection with syphilis, to which I was the first to draw attention, played a part in his subsequent hatred of women.

Strindberg, in his “Confessions of a Fool,” has himself offered us the proof of the causal connexion between his misogyny and his personal experiences and disillusions; and in Weininger’s book we can read only too clearly that he had had no good fortune with women, or had had disagreeable experiences in his relations with them.

De Sade, who, perhaps, was not unknown to Schopenhauer,[498] was the first advocate of consistent misogyny on principle. It is an interesting fact, to which I have alluded in an earlier work (“Recent Researches regarding the Marquis de Sade,” p. 433), that de Sade’s and Schopenhauer’s opinions on the physical characteristics of women are to some extent verbally identical. While Schopenhauer, in his essay “On Women” (“Works,” ed. Grisebach, vol. v., p. 654), speaks of the “stunted, narrow-shouldered, wide-hipped and short-legged sex,” which only a masculine intellect when clouded by sexual desire could possibly call “beautiful,” we find in the “Juliette” (vol. iii., pp. 187, 188) of the Marquis de Sade the following very similar remarks on the feminine body: “Take the clothes off one of these idols of yours! Is it these two short and crooked legs which have turned your head like this?” This physical hatefulness of women corresponds to the mental hatefulness of which de Sade gives a similar repellent picture (“Juliette,” vol iii., pp. 188, 189). In all his works we find the same fanatical hatred of women. Sarmiento, in “Aline et Valcour” (vol. ii., p. 115), would like to annihilate all women, and calls that man happy who has learned to renounce completely intercourse with this “debased, false, and noxious sex.”

Quite in the spirit of de Sade, to whom the misogynists of the Second Empire referred as an authority, Schopenhauer, in the previously quoted essay “On Women,” Strindberg, in the “Confessions of a Fool,” and Weininger, in “Sex and Character,[485]” preached contempt for the feminine nature;[499] and this seed has fallen upon fruitful soil in modern youth. Every young blockhead inflates himself with his “masculine pride,” and feels himself to be the “knight of the spirit” in relation to the inferior sex; every disillusioned and satiated debauchee cultivates (as a rule, indeed, transiently) the fashion of misogyny, which strengthens his sentiment of self-esteem. If we wish to speak at all of “physiological weak-mindedness,” let us apply the term to this disagreeable type of men. As Georg Hirth truly remarks (“Ways to Freedom,” p. 281), such masculine arrogance is merely a variety of “mental defect.”

Unfortunately, this misogyny has intruded itself also into science. The work of P. J. Möbius,[500] notwithstanding the esteem I feel for the valuable services of the celebrated neurologist in other departments, can only be termed an aberration, a lapsus calami.[501] But he does not stand alone. The admirable work of Heinrich Schurtz, also, upon “Age Classes and Associations of Men” (Berlin, 1902), is permeated by this misogynist aura; not less so is the equally stimulating work, “The Vital Laws of Civilization” (Halle, 1904), by Eduard von Mayer. This book, in association with the equally thoughtful and compendious work “The Renascence of Eros Uranios” (Berlin, 1904), by Benedikt Friedländer, and in conjunction with the efforts of Adolf Brand, the editor of the homosexual newspaper Der Eigene, and Edwin Bab (cf. this writer’s “The Woman’s Movement and the Love of Friends”; Berlin, 1904), to found a special homosexual group demanding the “emancipation of men,” have been the principal causes of the belief that the male homosexuals are the true “repudiators of woman,” and that from them has proceeded the increasing diffusion of modern misogyny. I repeat that this connexion is true only for the above-named group; that, on the contrary, genuine misogyny has been taught us by the world’s typically heterosexual men, such as Schopenhauer and Strindberg. Benedikt Friedländer and Eduard von Mayer preached, above all, a “masculine civilization,” a deepening of the spiritual relationships between men; whereas Strindberg and Schopenhauer,[486] and even Weininger, really leave us in uncertainty as to what they imagine is to take woman’s place. All five agree in this, that the “intercourse” of man with woman is to be limited as much as possible; but only the two first-named openly and freely advocate homosexual relationships, or at least a “physiological friendship” (B. Friedländer), between men. Schopenhauer, Strindberg, and Weininger did not venture to deduce these consequences. Yet this is the necessary consequence of misogyny based on principle.

To the heterosexual men—and such men form an enormous majority—the noble, ideal, asexual friendship of man for man appears in quite another light from that in which it appears to the misogynist, to whom it is to serve to replace sexual love, whereas for heterosexual men friendship for other men is a valuable treasure additional to the love of woman.

Is there, then, any reason for this contempt and hatred for woman? Do not the signs increase on all hands to show us that new relationships are forming between the sexes, that a number of new points of contact of the spiritual nature are making their appearance—in a word, that an entirely new, nobler, most promising amatory life is developing? I will not fall into the contrary error to misogyny and inscribe a dithyramb of praise to feminine nature, as Wedde, Daumer, Quensel, Groddeck, and others, have done; but I merely indicate the signs of the times when I say that woman also is awakening! Woman is awakening to the entirely new existence of a free personality, conscious of her rights and of her duties. Woman, also, will have her share in the content and in the tasks of life; she will not enslave us, as the misogynists clamour, for she wishes to see free men by her side. What would become of woman if men became slaves? How could slaves give love?

Life has to-day become a difficult task both for man and for woman. Man and woman alike must endeavour to perform that task with confidence in their respective powers; but each, also, must have confidence in the powers of the other—a confidence which becomes palpable in the form of love or friendship, so that those who feel it have their own powers strengthened.

Not “Free from woman” is the watchword of the future, but “Free with woman.”

CHAPTER XIX
THE RIDDLE OF HOMOSEXUALITY

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XIX

Actual existence of original congenital homosexuality — Its distinction from pseudo-homosexuality — Homosexuality an anthropological phenomenon, not a manifestation of degeneration — Secondary origin of “homosexual neurasthenia” — Rarity of stigmata of degeneration among homosexuals — Early spontaneous appearance of homosexuality — As an essential product of personality — Homosexuality in the child — Physical and mental characteristics of completely developed homosexuality — Effeminate and virile urnings — Physical peculiarities of the homosexual — Mental peculiarities — Diffusion — Numbers — Ethnology of homosexuality — Earlier history and literature — Celebrated homosexual individuals — Modes of activity of homosexual love — Relations between homosexual and heterosexual individuals — Mode of sexual intercourse — Examples — Social relationships of the homosexual — Places of rendezvous — The “Allée des Veuves” of Paris — An adventure of Victor Hugo’s — Urning clubs in the Second Empire — Urning balls at Paris — Social relationships of the homosexuals of Berlin — Meeting-places of urnings — Men’s balls in Berlin — Male prostitution — Male brothels — Blackmail — § 175 — Criticism of this section — Demonstration of the necessity for its repeal — Blackmail of homosexuals and suicide — Need for the diffusion of general enlightenment regarding homosexuality — Activity of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee — Homosexuality in women — The smaller percentage of genuine female homosexuals — “Thoughts of a Solitary Woman” — Relations of homosexual women to men — The Woman’s Movement and homosexuality — Sexual relationships of tribades — The “protectrices” — Social life of tribades — Lesbian prostitution.

Appendix: Theory of Homosexuality. — Homosexuality a heterogeneous sexuality — Insufficiency of the theory of intermediate stages — My own theory of homosexuality — The significance of homosexuality in relation to civilization.

CHAPTER XIX

Homosexuality—love between man and man (uranism), or between woman and woman (tribadism), a congenital state, or one spontaneously appearing in very early childhood—I consider “a riddle,” because, in fact, the more closely in recent years I have come to know it, the more I have endeavoured to study it scientifically, the more enigmatical, the more obscure, the more incomprehensible, it has become to me. But it exists. About that there is no doubt.

In the years 1905 and 1906 I was occupied almost exclusively with the problem of homosexuality, and I had the opportunity of seeing and examining a very large number of genuine homosexual individuals, both men and women. I was able to observe them during long periods, both at home and in public life. I learnt to know them—their mode of life, their habits, their opinions, their whole activity, not only in relation to one another, but also in relation to other non-homosexual individuals and to persons of the opposite sex. This experience taught me the indubitable fact that the diffusion of true homosexuality as a congenital natural phenomenon is far greater than I had earlier assumed;[502] so that I find myself now compelled to separate from true homosexuality the other category of acquired, apparent, occasional homosexuality, of the existence of which I am now, as formerly, firmly convinced. I denote this latter by the term “pseudo-homosexuality,” and treat of it in a separate chapter.

Formerly I believed that true homosexuality was only a variety of pseudo-homosexuality—in a sense larval pseudo-homosexuality. Now, however, I must recognize that true homosexuality constitutes a special well-defined group, sharply distinguishable from all forms of pseudo-homosexuality. From my medical observations, which have been as exact and objective as possible, I must draw the conclusion that among thoroughly healthy individuals of both sexes, not to be distinguished from other normal human beings, there appears in very early childhood, and certainly not evoked by any kind of external influence, an inclination, and after puberty a sexual impulse, towards persons of the same sex; and that this inclination and this impulse[490] are as little to be altered as it is possible to expel from a heterosexual man the impulse towards woman.

Above all, in this definition of true original homosexuality I lay the stress upon the word “healthy”; for von Krafft-Ebing, though he admits the existence of congenital homosexuality yet regards it as a morbid degenerative phenomenon, as the expression of severe hereditary taint and of a neuro-psychopathic constitution; and this view is shared by many alienists.[503] Now, we must admit that a portion of genuine homosexuals—just as is the case with a portion of heterosexual individuals—possess such a morbid constitution; and we must acknowledge that yet another portion exhibit manifestations of nervousness and neurasthenia, which, beyond doubt, have developed during life out of an originally healthy state, in consequence of the struggle for life, the painful experience of being “different” from the great mass of people, etc.; but we ascertain that a third, and, in fact, the largest, section of original homosexuals are thoroughly healthy, free from hereditary taint, physically and psychically normal.

I have observed a great number of homosexuals belonging to all ages and occupations in whom not the slightest trace of morbidity was to be detected. They were just as healthy and normal as are heterosexuals. At an earlier date, though I was not yet aware of the relatively great frequency of true original homosexuality, it had become clear to me, on the ground of my own anthropological theory of sexual anomalies, that homosexuality might just as well appear in healthy human beings as in diseased. Therein I have always agreed with Magnus Hirschfeld, the principal advocate of this view, in opposition to the theory of the degenerative nature of homosexuality. For me there is no longer any doubt that homosexuality is compatible with complete mental and physical health.

It is very interesting to note that von Krafft-Ebing himself later came to the same view, and thus formally abandoned the degenerative hypothesis. In his “New Studies in the Domain of Homosexuality” he writes:[504]

“In view of the experience that contrary sexuality is a congenital anomaly, that it represents a disturbance in the evolution of the sexual life, and of the physical and mental development, in normal relationship to the kind of reproductive glands which the individual possesses, it has become impossible to maintain in this connexion the idea of ‘disease.’ Rather, in such a case we must speak of a malformation, and treat the anomaly as parallel with physical malformation—for example, anatomical deviations from the structural type. At the same time, the assumption of a simultaneous psychopathia is not prejudiced, for persons who exhibit such an anatomical differentiation from type (stigmata degenerationis) may remain physically healthy throughout life, and even be above the average in this respect. Of course, a difference from the generality so important as contrary sexual sensation must have a much greater importance to the psyche than the majority of other anatomical or functional variations. In this way it is to be explained that a disturbance in the development in the normal sexual life may often be antagonistic to the development of a harmonious psychical personality.

“Not infrequently in the case of those with contrary sexuality do we find neuropathic and psychopathic predispositions, as, for example, predisposition to constitutional neurasthenia and hysteria, to the milder forms of periodic psychosis, to the inhibition of the development of psychical energy (intelligence, moral sense), and in some of these cases the ethical deficiency (especially when hypersexuality is associated with the contrary sexuality) may lead to the most severe aberrations of the sexual impulse. And yet we can always prove that, relatively speaking, the heterosexual are apt to be much more depraved than the homosexual.

“Moreover, other manifestations of degeneration in the sexual spheres, in the form of sadism, masochism, and fetichism, are relatively much commoner among the former.

“That contrary sexual sensation cannot thus be necessarily regarded as psychical degeneration, or even as a manifestation of disease, is shown by various considerations, one of the principal of which is that these variations of the sexual life may actually be associated with mental superiority.... The proof of this is the existence of men of all nations whose contrary sexuality is an established fact, and who, none the less, are the pride of their nation as authors, poets, artists, leaders of armies, and statesmen.

“A further proof of the fact that contrary sexual sensation is not necessarily disease, nor necessarily a vicious self-surrender to the immoral, is to be found in the fact that all the noble activities of the heart which can be associated with heterosexual love can equally be associated with homosexual love... in the form of noble-mindedness, self-sacrifice, philanthropy, artistic sense, poietic activity, etc., but also the passions and defects of love (jealousy, suicide, murder, unhappy love, with its deleterious influence on soul and body, etc.).”

According to my own investigations and observations, the relationship between health and disease is among homosexuals[492] originally identical with that among heterosexuals, and only in the course of life, in consequence of the social and individual isolation of the homosexual, which acts on them as a psychical trauma, is this relationship somewhat altered in favour of the predominance of disease. Here, however, we have, as a rule, to do chiefly with acquired nervous troubles and disorders, with the development of a peculiar type of “homosexual neurasthenia,” and in these cases by superficial observers there may easily be a confusion between post hoc and propter hoc.

Magnus Hirschfeld, who unquestionably possesses, relatively and absolutely, the greatest experience in the domain of homosexuality, maintains [505] that, according to his material of investigation—and this is of gigantic extent—at least 75 % of homosexuals are born of healthy parents and of happy marriages, often prolific marriages, and that nervous or mental anomalies, alcoholism, blood-relationship, and syphilis are no more frequent among the ancestors of homosexuals than among the ancestors of those endowed with normal sexuality. Only among from 20 to 25 % of homosexuals was he able, in conjunction with E. Burchard, to find hereditary taint. Only in 16 % could they find well-developed “stigmata of degeneration”; and, indeed, those with stigmata were throughout hereditarily tainted. This view is supported also by the facts (to which I already alluded in my “Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis”) that homosexuality is universally diffused in space and time; that it is independent of civilization, occurs among savage races who are not exposed to the conditions giving rise to degeneration in the same degree as civilized races; and that it is prevalent in the country, where the degenerative influence of life in large towns is not operative.

The most important characteristic of genuine homosexuality, its spontaneous appearance very early in life, which can only be referred to natural inheritance, appears to me to be a fact proved altogether beyond dispute. Men of the highest and most respected professions—above all, judges, practising physicians, men of science, theologians, and scholars—have described themselves to me as having been through and through homosexual from early childhood, so that I am thoroughly convinced that primary homosexuality makes its appearance at any rate very early in life.

The reports of physicians are of especially great importance. Hirschfeld (op. cit., p. 12) quotes the utterance of a leading alienist, himself homosexual: “I can and must declare that I have never known a case of homosexuality which I could regard[493] as other than congenital,” and the accuracy of this statement has been confirmed to me personally by several homosexual physicians. The idea “congenital” harmonizes very well with the demonstrable casual objective cause of the first homosexual tendencies, which we are able to learn in almost every case of homosexuality. These can, as is well known, also occur transiently in heterosexual individuals—a matter which is discussed in the chapter “Pseudo-Homosexuality.” In the case of genuine homosexuality, however, these homosexual activities play from the very beginning a predominant rôle, and remain permanent, because they result from a natural inheritance, from a deeply rooted impulse. This is shown in the following interesting autobiography of a man of letters thirty years of age:

“From my earliest childhood there was something girlish in my whole nature, both outwardly and (more especially) inwardly. I was very quiet, obedient, diligent, sensitive to praise and blame, rather bright. I associated chiefly with adults, and was generally beloved. Sexual activity began in me unusually early. When I was about six years of age a tutor sat down on my bed, in which I was lying in a fever. He caressed me, and with his hand membrum meum tetigit. The voluptuous sensation which resulted was so intense that it has never disappeared from my memory. At school, where I always distinguished myself by my application and success, I sometimes enjoyed mutual ‘feeling’ with several other boys. From which side I inherited the unusual intensity of the sexual impulse I do not know, but I remember that when I was about twelve years old I already suffered a good deal from sexual desire, and that it came to me as a solution of a great difficulty when a comrade instructed me in the practice of masturbation. It is remarkable that for some time afterwards there was no evacuation of semen. When this first appeared I was very much alarmed and disquieted, but I soon became accustomed to it, and this the more readily because I had no doubt whatever that all men regularly indulged in the same pleasure. This ‘paradisaical’ state did not, however, last for long; and after a time, when I recognized the unnatural and dangerous nature of my conduct, I conducted a severe and unsuccessful contest against my desires. In my life generally I had a good deal to bear, and I can say that I have hardly preserved a single really pleasant memory of my past; and yet I could look back to this past with a certain pride and satisfaction if it had not been that the sexual side of my life has left such gloomy shadows in my soul.

“I remember that from very early days my eyes involuntarily turned with longing towards elderly vigorous men, but I did not pay much attention to this fact. I believed that I only practised masturbation (the influence of which I doubtless exaggerate in memory to some extent) because it was not possible for me to have sexual intercourse with women. I was accustomed sometimes to have friendly association with young girls, who appeared to be extremely attracted towards me. I always took care, however, that such love tendencies[494] were nipped in the bud, because I felt that it was impossible for me to go any further with them. Ultimately I determined to seek salvation in intercourse with prostitutes, although they were disagreeable to my æsthetic and moral feelings; but I got no help here: either I was unable to complete the normal sexual act, or in other cases it was completed without any particular pleasure, and I was always consumed with anxiety with respect to infection. I had, indeed, often the opportunity of forming an ‘intimacy’ with a woman, but I did not do it, and always supposed that my failure to do so depended upon my ridiculous bashfulness and upon the excessive sensitiveness of my conscience. But though there is some truth in both of these suggestions, I have not taken into account the principal grounds—namely, that I am congenitally homosexual, and that I feel no physical attraction, or almost none, towards the other sex. This suffices to explain the fact (which can be explained in no other way) that when masturbating I almost always represented in imagination handsome elderly men. In my lascivious dreams, also, such men play the principal rôle. These longings were so powerful that it was impossible that I should not soon have my attention directed to them; but as I could not understand them and would not take the matter seriously (I knew, indeed, that man must feel drawn towards woman, and not towards man), I continued unceasingly and despairingly to fight against these fixed ideas, while at the same time with varying success I endeavoured to cure myself of masturbation; for in the first place it now gave very little satisfaction, and in the second place it destroyed my hopes of eventually procreating healthy children. I had almost come to believe myself no longer competent for the sexual life when I noticed one day that the view of a membrum virile set my blood flowing fiercely. I then remembered that this had sometimes happened before, although to a less marked extent. I was now compelled to recognize that I was not the same as every one else. This fact, which I had before suspected, and of which I now became more and more firmly convinced, reduced me to despair, which was all the greater because in other ways I felt extremely unhappy, and because I did not dare to speak of it to any human being. Sometimes I still thought that there must be some ‘misunderstanding,’ and that there must be some salvation for me. Then it happened that a simple girl fell in love with me, and I went so far as to enter into an intimacy with her, although I openly assured her that as far as I was concerned it was simply a matter of physical enjoyment, and that I could not in any way make myself responsible for her future, for which reason care must be taken that there should be no offspring. During this intimacy, which lasted several months, I sometimes overcame my enduring inclinations towards men, but completely to suppress them was impossible. My association with the girl was still continuing, when one day in a public lavatory I saw an elderly gentleman whose appearance greatly pleased me. He looked at me tentatively. Cautiously he leaned over, in order membrum meum videre; he gradually drew near to me, moved his shaking hand and ... membrum meum tetigit. I was so much surprised and alarmed that I ran away, and avoided for some time afterwards passing by the same place. All the stronger, however, was the impulse to find this remarkable man once more, and this was not at all difficult. What[495] an enigma such a man seemed to me! How could it happen that he dared to do that of which I had always been able only to think, to dream, with heart-quaking and horror? Could there, perhaps, be another man like this—perhaps several such exceptional beings? A short period convinced me that I was not quite alone in my way of feeling; but this was a weak consolation. Rather, since that time—that is to say, during the last five years—my inward battle has become more unbearable, for earlier my only battle was to reject homosexual ideas, and to overcome the habit of solitary self-abuse. Now sometimes I practise with another mutual onanism (to me the proper ‘natural’ mode of sexual gratification), and yet I cannot forgive myself for doing it because it is effected in so unæsthetic a manner, and is associated with such dangers. Notwithstanding all my endeavours, however, I have never been able to resist the temptation for a long time together; and thus I am hunted always by my impulse as by a wild animal, and can nowhere and in nothing find repose and forgetfulness. I have frequently changed my place of residence, but I always before long form new ‘relationships.’ The tortures which I suffer in consequence of the incomparable power of the impulse are greater them I can possibly express in words. I can only wonder that I did not lose my reason, and that in the eyes of my friends and acquaintances I am now, as before, ‘the most normal of all human beings.’ In the senseless and utterly unsuccessful contest with an impulse which, as far as I am concerned, is wholly, or almost wholly, congenital, I have lost the best of my powers, although I have long recognized the fact that this impulse in and by itself is neither morbid nor sinful, for a divergence from the norm is not a disease, and the gratification of a natural impulse, which in no respect and for no human being leads to evil consequences, cannot be regarded as sinful. Why, then, must I continue to strive against this impulse like a madman? Because it is very generally misunderstood, so unpardonably condemned. What help is it that I am now surrounded by love and respect? I know that so many would turn away from me with horror if they were to learn my sexual constitution, although it is a matter which does not concern them at all. Scorn and contempt would then be my lot. I should be regarded by the majority of human beings as a libertine; whereas I feel and know that, notwithstanding all the sensuality of my nature, I have been created for some other purpose than simply to follow my lustful desire. Who will believe that I suffer in the struggle with myself? Who will have compassion upon me? This idea is intolerable. I am condemned to eternal solitude. I have not the moral right to found a home, to embrace a child who would give me the name of ‘father.’ Is not this punishment sufficiently severe for God knows what sins? Why, then, should the consciousness be superadded that I am a pariah, an outcast from society? Owing to the opinion of society regarding the homosexual—an opinion based upon ignorance, stupidity, and ill-nature—society drives these unhappy beings to death (or to a marriage which in their case is criminal), and then triumphantly exclaims: ‘Look what degenerate beings they are!’ No, they are not degenerates, those whose lives you have made unbearable; they are for the most part spiritually and morally very healthy human beings. I will speak of myself. Why do I long for death? Certainly not because I am mentally abnormal.[496] I am no morbid pessimist, and I know well enough that life can be very beautiful. But, unfortunately, it cannot be so for me; for my life is a hell; I am intolerably weary of my internal conflict; it has become horribly difficult to me to play the hypocrite, to pretend continually to be a happy man rejoicing in life; I am bending beneath the burden of my heavy iron mask. Recently I had myself hypnotized, in order to have my thoughts turned away as far as possible from sexual matters. My hypnotist said to me: ‘You see, you will be at rest now,’ and involuntarily in sleep I had to swallow these words, ‘Be at rest’! Good God, is that possible? Does the ‘normal’ man know how this word sounds in our ears? Who will understand my intolerable pain? Perhaps my dear parents could have done so, as they loved me above all, as if they had a presentiment that I should be the most unhappy of their children; but they have been dead for several years, and so, notwithstanding my numerous relatives and friends, I stand quite alone in this world, and vainly seek an answer to the questions ‘Why?’ and ‘Wherefore?’”

Genuine homosexuality exhibits, like heterosexuality, the character of an impulse arising from the very nature of the personality, which, in activity from the cradle to the grave, expresses the continuity of the individual in respect also of this peculiar sexual tendency. Thus there does not exist a homosexuality limited merely to a certain age of life, as to childhood or youth, to maturity, or even to old age. Hence we must distinguish from genuine homosexuality the pæderasty of old men described by Schopenhauer, which does not begin till old age appears. We must distinguish, also, the love of Greek boys for elderly men; these must be included in the category of pseudo-homosexuality. An inclination which, like original homosexuality, is an outflow of the essential nature of the individual concerned, cannot disappear so long as the individual himself persists, cannot begin or end except with the beginning or end of his life. Homosexuality extends throughout the lifetime, and if by any cause whatever—for example, enforced marriage—it is apparently temporarily suppressed, it always reappears. It seems very doubtful if there really exists, as von Krafft-Ebing [506] assumes, a genuine retarded homosexuality—that is, original homosexuality which does not manifest itself until a comparatively advanced age. There do, doubtless, exist transient cases of pseudo-homosexuality, which have in some cases developed in those previously heterosexual, and which in other cases are superimposed upon a bisexual basis. These belong to the category of “acquired” homosexuality, which is always a pseudo-homosexuality.

The course of life of genuine homosexuals is a complete expression of the results of simple inversion of the sexual impulse, and the homosexual type makes its appearance in childhood. The fact of the “difference” between the homosexual and others is not experienced merely by the person himself, but is also noticed very early by those who have care of him. The “girlish” (in the case of female homosexuality, “boyish”) and “peculiar” nature is often observed by members of the family, by comrades, and by tutors, and gives rise to the use of nicknames. These manifestations and perceptions are a valuable objective confirmation of the subjective sensations of homosexual children. A Protestant clergyman whose homosexual son also studied theology remarked to M. Hirschfeld: “He was from the very beginning different from my five other sons.” The physical and moral peculiarities presently to be described are often manifested in very early childhood. Hirschfeld has frequently been able to diagnose “homosexuality” in children from ten to fourteen years of age. He alludes, among others, to a very timid boy, twelve years of age, who suffered from migraine, who cried frequently, who kept himself apart from his schoolfellows, and corresponded daily with a boy friend. He was fond of flowers and music; he had very little inclination to mathematics (according to Hirschfeld, a somewhat characteristic phenomenon in cases of homosexuality). The examination of the boy, who was extremely bashful, showed that the genital organs were still completely undeveloped, the penis resembling that of a boy of four years, whilst the breasts were markedly developed like those of a girl at the commencement of puberty.

I doubt whether the fondness on the part of boys for girls’ games, or on the part of girls for boys’ games, can be regarded as a symptom of diagnostic importance in regard to the existence of homosexuality, for a fondness for playing with girls and for cooking may often be observed in boys who later prove thoroughly heterosexual. Still, these things do play a great part in the autobiography of homosexuals, and have, in fact, great importance in cases in which these tendencies persist after puberty, when the heterosexually differentiated psyche would, after the transitory episode of these youthful games, display activities now corresponding to the fully developed sexual sensibility.

Puberty is the most important period with regard to the final determination of homosexuality by means of particular physical and mental characteristics.

The consideration of the physical and mental characters of male[498] homosexuals leads clearly to the distinction of two different types—the effeminate and the virile urnings. With regard to the relative numbers of these two types there exist no definite data. Hirschfeld, in his “Urnings,” describes chiefly the type of the more or less effeminate urnings—that is, of those who show the greatest resemblance to the feminine nature—and does not express an opinion as to whether the number of effeminate homosexuals is greater than the number of virile homosexuals—that is, of those whose nature is predominantly masculine. Another experienced observer of urnings, Dr. J. E. Meisner,[507] is of opinion that in the majority of cases the male type of homosexuals is encountered rather than the female. According to my own observations, it appears to me that the number of virile and of effeminate urnings is about identical.[508] There are certainly numerous virile homosexuals, or rather homosexuals of a thoroughly masculine build of body, without great deviations from the normal type, who yet have a more or less feminine mode of sensibility. The distinction between effeminate and virile homosexuals would appear therefore to be only relative, and for the majority of cases Hirschfeld’s remarks (“Urnings,” p. 86) apply:

“A homosexual who was not distinguishable physically and mentally from the complete man is a being I have not yet encountered among fifteen hundred cases, and I am therefore unable to believe in the existence of such until I personally encounter one.”

More especially after removing any beard or moustache that may be present, we sometimes see much more clearly the feminine expression of face in a male homosexual, whilst before the hair was removed they appeared quite man-like. Still more important for the determination of a feminine habitus are direct physical characteristics. Among these there must be mentioned a considerable deposit of fat, by which the resemblance to the feminine type is produced, the contours of the body being more rounded than in the case of the normal male. In correspondence with this the muscular system is less powerfully developed than it is in heterosexual men, the skin is delicate and soft, and the complexion[499] is much clearer than is usual in men. Last winter I attended an urnings’ ball, and I was much impressed, when looking at the décolleté men, with the remarkable whiteness of their skin on the shoulders, neck, and back—also in those who had not applied powder—and by the fact that the little acne spots almost always present in normal men were absent in these. The peculiar rounding of the shoulders was also remarkable, from its resemblance to what one sees in women.

According to Hirschfeld, the skin of the urning almost always feels warmer than his environment. He refers the expression commonly used among the people (in Germany), “warm brothers,” to this circumstance, and derives the Latin homo mollis (“soft man”) from the softness of the skin and of the muscular system (though in my opinion this term is applied rather to the entire effeminate, soft nature of the urning). Of great interest is the relation between the breadth of the shoulders and the width of the pelvis in homosexual men. Whilst the breadth of the shoulders of heterosexual men is several centimetres in excess of the width of the pelvis, and in women the width of the pelvis is greater than the breadth of the shoulders, according to Hirschfeld in the urning there is little or no difference between these two measurements. This, in respect of the bodily structure, would completely justify the expression “intermediate stage,” and would give the homosexual man a position between the heterosexual man and the heterosexual woman. Still, there are, without doubt, numerous virile homosexual men in whom this great width of the pelvis is not present. Investigations regarding the corresponding relationships among homosexual women have not to my knowledge hitherto been made. Very striking is the often luxuriant growth of hair, especially in the effeminate types, whereas the virile homosexuals are in this respect more approximate to normal men, baldness being common among them.

Our attention having been recently directed by the investigation of H. Swoboda to the existence of equivalents of menstruation in men, the occurrence of such equivalents among urnings is of interest. Hirschfeld reports the case of an effeminate homosexual who since the age of fourteen had suffered at intervals of twenty-eight days from migraine, associated with severe pains in the back and loins, so that his stepmother said to him: “It is with you just as it is with us.”

The gait and the movements of effeminate urnings also have a somewhat womanly appearance, and attract the attention even of[500] one who is not in the secret. Short, tripping paces and elegant movements are characteristic of the effeminate.

In an earlier chapter we came to the conclusion that the fully adult normal woman was approximate in physical characteristics rather to the child and to the youthful human being than to the adult man; and in this connexion it is of interest that we must describe as a distinctively feminine characteristic the peculiarity of many male homosexuals, which enables them for a long time to preserve a youthful appearance and demeanour.

Very remarkable is the behaviour of the voice. The change in the voice may not occur at all, or does not occur till very late. The capacity for singing soprano or falsetto is also long preserved. Others, in whom the change of voice had failed to occur, were able to lower the pitch considerably by practice. A typical and well-known example is that of the baritone singer Willibald von Sadler-Grün, whom I had the opportunity of hearing recently, when, under the name of “Urany Verde,” he made a professional journey through Germany, and sang his songs dressed as a woman. He said of himself: “My voice has never cracked in a definite way. At twenty-three years of age I could sing soprano, and can still do so to-day, at the age of thirty. The deeper tones for speech and singing I acquired only by instruction and practice” (Hirschfeld, “Urnings,” p. 65). In this typical effeminate, the breasts also had a completely feminine character, as, according to Hirschfeld, is by no means rare in boy urnings, who at puberty experience swelling of the breasts, associated with painful sensations.[509] I must, however, maintain, in opposition to Hirschfeld, that abnormally marked development of the breasts is by no means rare in perfectly normal heterosexual men. For the diagnosis of homosexuality, the imperfect development of the larynx, and the failure of the voice to crack, are more important than the marked development of the breasts. I remember distinctly that in the case of a fellow-student of mine years ago his high voice used greatly to strike me. To-day I am able to understand how this fact[501] was associated with his complete disinclination to sexual intercourse with women and his insensibility to feminine charms in general; and I am able in his case to diagnose homosexuality with absolute certainty.

In the case of virile homosexuals, all the above-mentioned physical peculiarities are far less noticeable. In their outward appearance they much more nearly resemble heterosexual men, but still they always have comparatively more of the feminine in their nature than the latter. Such a typically virile homosexual, in whose appearance the impression of femininity was entirely absent, I was able recently to recognize during a railway journey, in the course of which he confided to me misogynous opinions against other fellow-travellers, and also said that in the whole of his life—he was a man of a little over thirty—he had not had intercourse with women more than three or four times. During the long wait of the train at a station I took the opportunity, having mentioned that I was a physician by profession, to ask him if he was not homosexual, a fact which he at once admitted. Already in very early childhood he had felt himself distinctly drawn only towards masculine beings, and had never experienced the least inclination towards women. In this case also any kind of outward influence was excluded, because he had grown up at home and chiefly in a feminine environment. As I have already said, in appearance he was masculine, and he himself stated that he had no physical characteristics which suggested a feminine impression. That this is the case in numerous virile homosexuals is proved by the distinctive fact that many of them are professional soldiers, especially officers, in respect of whose appearance virility is very strongly insisted on.

The mental qualities of male homosexuals correspond fully to the physical, and occupy a middle region between the psyche of the heterosexual man and that of woman. But every emotional element is in them more prominent than energetic will-power and clear-sighted reason. Something soft and pliable is characteristic of the majority of urnings. This adaptability manifests itself in good-humouredness, in inclination to self-sacrifice, but, above all, in a most astonishing mobility of the imaginative life, which seems to be something characteristic of the homosexual, and to explain his frequent artistic capacity, above all his talents for music, for which vocation, indeed, his less fixed and more sketchy nature especially fits him, but also for poetry, painting, acting, and sculpture. “For all the fine arts,” says Hirschfeld, “from cooking and artistic needlework to sculpture,[502] we find that urnings have exceptional talent.” The inclination to intellectual occupation is distinctly greater among homosexuals than the inclination to bodily work. Associated with this is the ambition to distinguish themselves mentally above those by whom they are surrounded. Hirschfeld’s assertion that homosexuals belonging to the lower classes exhibit intellectual predominance over their environment, I am able emphatically to confirm, after frequent conversations with homosexual workmen and menservants. The peculiarity of their congenital tendencies has here early given rise to a certain intellectual profundity, has early taught these men to reflect about the world and about human existence. Every homosexual is a philosopher for himself. Most heterosexuals, especially those of the lower classes, never arrive at thinking so much about themselves and about their relations to the external world, as is a matter of course among homosexuals. The imaginative, the dreamy, is much more predominant in the homosexual than a crude sense of reality. This expresses itself particularly in his love, which far less frequently and exclusively than among the heterosexual takes the form of a gross and material sensuality. On the contrary, it permits us to recognize the inward need for tenderness and delicacy, for a peculiar ideal colouring. Goethe has contrasted this latter with the more sensual heterosexual love; he speaks of the

“remarkable phenomenon of the love of men for each other. Let it be admitted that this love is seldom pushed to the highest degree of sensuality, but rather occupies the intermediate region between inclination and passion. I am able to say that I have seen with my own eyes the most beautiful manifestations of this love, such as we have handed down to us from the days of Greek antiquity; and as an observant student of human nature I was able to observe the intellectual and moral elements of this love.”[510]

The ideal conception of Platonic—that is, of homosexual—love was a non-sensual, assexual love. The psychical element also plays an important part in modern uranism—a part overlooked or underestimated, whereas the sensual side is exaggerated.

Homosexuality as an anthropological phenomenon is diffused throughout all classes of the population. We find it among workmen just as much as among aristocrats, princely personalities, and intellectual heroes. Physicians, lawyers, theologians, philosophers, merchants, artists, etc., all contribute their contingents to uranism. If the extraordinarily frequent occurrence[503] of homosexuality in the highest classes of society, especially in the leaders of the aristocracy, may possibly be brought into relationship with the processes of “degeneration,” still, on the other hand, numerous homosexuals are derived from healthy families, such as have not transmitted hereditary taint through a long series of ancestors. Recently G. Merzbach [511] has studied the relationship between homosexuality and the choice of a profession, and has proved that this choice is usually a consequence of the natural tendency. Thus we find an especially large number of homosexuals engaged in the production of ready-made clothing and in other manufacturing trades; others become music-hall comedians playing women’s parts, actors, dancers. Actors and singers appearing on the stage as women are to a large extent original homosexuals.[512] Among hairdressers and waiters we find also a relatively large number of urnings.

As regards the diffusion of homosexuality, the data obtainable up to the most recent times have been extremely contradictory. The first exact information is to be found in the work of a physician, published under the name of M. Kertbeny,[513] on “§ 143 of the Prussian Criminal Code of April 14, 1851, and its Continuance as § 152 in the Proposal for a Criminal Code for the North German Bund” (Leipzig, 1869). The author enumerates in Berlin 10,000 homosexuals among 700,000 inhabitants (equal to 1·425 %). A patient of von Krafft-Ebing, living in a town of 13,000 inhabitants, was acquainted with 14 urnings; and in another town of 60,000 he knew of at least 80. Many other equally uncertain estimates are recorded by Magnus Hirschfeld. They vary between 2 % and 0·1 %—vary, that is to say, within very wide limits. In view, therefore, of the importance of the exact determination of the number of homosexuals, which I myself had earlier declared to be desirable, we owe great thanks to Magnus Hirschfeld for having made an attempt [514] to obtain some exact data regarding this matter. He deduces from a compilation of thirty test investigations (reports regarding homosexuals in various classes of the population), and by means of an inquiry made with sealed letters, that the proportion of male homosexuals[504] to the population is about 1·5 %. That is a very much greater percentage than has hitherto been assumed to exist. Formerly I doubted the accuracy of this figure, but since numerous respected, honourable, well-behaved persons, of whom I had not suspected it, have assured me that they have been homosexual since childhood, I have no longer any doubt regarding the approximate accuracy of Hirschfeld’s statistics. The enquiry made by Dr. von Römer in Amsterdam gave similar results, for he found the proportion of homosexuals to be 1·9 %. A third enquiry made by Hirschfeld among the metal-workers of Berlin gave a proportion of 1·1 %.

Normal heterosexual love was reported in about 94 to 96 % of the three inquiries.

“An imposing recognition of the love of man for woman, a powerful manifestation of the provision for the preservation of the species, and a contradiction to the fear that the uranian element in the population could ever seriously impair the well-being of the great majority” (Hirschfeld).

As “bisexual”—that is, as exhibiting tendencies towards both sexes—the average of the three enquiries reported 3·9 %, of whom, however, 0·8 % were mainly homosexual.

The total number of the purely and mainly homosexual was thus 2·2 %. Hence, according to the results of the last census of 1900, in the total population of the German Empire, numbering 56,367,178, there would be about 1,200,000 homosexuals; whilst of the population of Berlin, numbering 2,500,000, 56,000 would be homosexual.

In the interest of the scientific and social study of homosexuality, it is urgently necessary that these statistical investigations should be pursued, for if it should appear that the above estimates really apply to the whole Empire—which I do not feel justified in assuming without further evidence, since it is naturally possible that Berlin might contain a relatively greater number of homosexuals—uranism would, in fact, have a greater social importance than it has hitherto been assumed to possess. In any case, the number of urnings is large enough to make them appear a remarkable anthropological variety of our race.

The truth of this assertion is supported by the fact of the ubiquitous diffusion of uranism in time and space. In addition to homosexuality as a popular custom, genuine homosexuality also played a part in antiquity; and F. Karsch [515] has proved in[505] an admirable book its occurrence among all savage races, although unquestionably numerous cases of non-genuine homosexuality must have been included. That homosexuality is in no way a sign of “degeneration” is proved also by the fact that it is more widely diffused among the still thoroughly vigorous Germans and Anglo-Saxons than it is among the Latin peoples. It is especially frequent in the German Ostsee provinces. It existed among the ancient Scandinavians.[516] Recently F. Karsch has announced the publication of ethnological researches on homosexuality, the first volume of which has already been issued, under the title “Homosexual Life among the Inhabitants of Eastern Asia: the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Koreans”[517] (Munich, 1906). In the preface he states expressly that he treats not only of original homosexuality, but also of artificially produced or acquired homosexuality—that which I call “pseudo-homosexuality.”

My earlier view, that true homosexuality is rare among the Jews, I find it necessary to revise, for recently I have made the acquaintance of numerous Jewish homosexuals.

For the earlier history and literature of homosexuality the most important, and, in fact, nearly exhaustive, sources are the article “Pæderasty,” by Meier, in Ersch and Gruber’s “General Encyclopædia,” section iii., part 9, pp. 149-189 (Leipzig, 1837); Rosenbaum’s “History of Syphilis in Antiquity,” pp. 119-227 [518] (Halle, 1893); and, finally, the writings of the earliest German student of homosexuality, containing numerous interesting data, the Hanoverian official Karl Heinrich Ulrichs,[519] who, under the pseudonym “Numa Numantius,” published numerous works devoted to the emancipation of homosexuals, and to the proof of the congenital nature of homosexuality. The general title of these works is “Anthropological Studies on the Sexual Love of Man for Man.” They were published under various peculiar separate titles, such as: “Vindex” (Leipzig, 1864); “Inclusa” (Leipzig, 1864); “Vindicta” (Leipzig, 1865);[506] “Formatrix” (Leipzig, 1865); “Ara Spei” (Leipzig, 1865); “Gladius Furens” (Kassel, 1868); “Memnon” (Schleiz, 1868); “Incubus” (Leipzig, 1869); “Argonauticus” (Leipzig, 1869); “Araxes” (Schleiz, 1870); “Uranus” (Leipzig, 1870); “Kritische Pfeile” (Stuttgart, 1879). In addition, Ulrichs, whose lifetime extended from 1825 to 1895, published uranian poetry under the title of “Auf Bienchens Flügeln” (“On the Wings of the Bee”); Leipzig, 1875. These writings, most of which are very rare in their original editions (although many were reprinted in the year 1898), contained a number of new points of view for the consideration of homosexuality, which have been recognized as sound by recent investigators.

Important contributions to the knowledge of homosexuality are afforded us by the studies of the life and works of celebrated and intellectually distinguished urnings. As unquestionably homosexual we may mention the poet Platen,[520] Michael Angelo,[521] Heinrich Hössli,[522] Heinrich Bulthaupt,[523] Johannes von Müller (the historian),[524] King Henry III. of France,[525] the musician Franz von Holstein,[526] Peter Tschaikowsky,[527] the authors Count Emmerich von Stadion and Emil Mario Vacano,[528] Duke August von Gotha,[529] George Eekhoud,[530] and the Belgian sculptor Jérôme Duquesnoy (1602-1654).[531] The following celebrated persons have also been regarded as urnings, but, as it appears to me, on[507] insufficient proofs: Frederick the Great; J. J. Winkelmann, who at most was bisexual, since we know of passionate letters written by him to a woman; and Alexander von Sternberg,[532] of whom the same is true; the reformers Beza [533] and Calvin,[534] who have unquestionably been wrongfully accused; and finally Byron and Grillparzer,[535] without troubling to enumerate hypotheses utterly without foundation. It is unquestionably a fact that a large number of intellectually prominent men were genuine homosexuals, and that their abnormal congenital tendencies did not prevent their doing important work in other spheres of activity. But this happened notwithstanding, and not, as many talented apologists wish to prove, because of their uranism.

When we pass to consider the activity of homosexual love, we find that homosexuals may, and actually do, love either other homosexual or heterosexual individuals. According to the account given by Meisner (“Uranism,” pp. 19, 20), the amatory ideal of most homosexual men is a heterosexual man, and intercourse between two urnings is, properly speaking, only a matter of necessity. But by several homosexuals with whom I discussed the matter this view was declared to be erroneous; in the majority of cases the attraction between two homosexuals plays the principal rôle. Ulrichs endeavoured to provide a theoretical justification for the sexual relationship between two homosexuals, and maintained (cf., for example, “Inclusa,” pp. 64, 65) that Nature destined the heterosexual, or “dioning,” as he calls them, by no means for woman alone, but also for the urning, for the “fulfilment of the sexual purposes of Nature, not directed towards reproduction.” According to Hirschfeld (“Urnings,” pp. 22, 23), it is unquestionable that, whilst many homosexuals greatly prefer to associate with those who also feel in a uranian manner, and whilst to many also it is a matter of indifference whether or not those with whom they have sexual relations are themselves endowed with contrary sexuality, quite a number of urnings feel attracted exclusively to normal, sexually powerful natures. As a rule, it is not difficult for homosexuals to gratify their inclinations in intercourse with heterosexual individuals. A middle-aged urning informed me that young[508] heterosexual men almost always acceded in this matter to the expressed wish of homosexuals—in the first place from simple curiosity, and in the second place by no means rarely from sexual excitement. Indeed, according to this authority, effeminate homosexual men often produce in powerfully sensual heterosexual men the impression of femininity, and are seduced by the latter to mutual masturbation, especially in a state of alcoholic intoxication. Not infrequently does it happen—a striking example having come to my knowledge—that a young heterosexual has a love intimacy with a girl, and yet occasionally, when he is for any reason unable to have sexual intercourse with her, he very willingly transfers his affections to a homosexual man. Male prostitutes are also, to a large extent, heterosexual men who give themselves to homosexuals for pecuniary reward. Occasionally, moreover, heterosexual men mistake very effeminate urnings going about in women’s clothing for genuine women, and have intercourse with them in this belief—a belief which these latter are clever enough to keep up until the last possible moment.

Passing now to the consideration of the special circumstances of sexual attraction, we find that the true love of boys,[536] or rather the love of children (pædophilia), is rare in homosexuals. The age chiefly preferred is that between seventeen and twenty-five years, alike by mature homosexual men and by old men. On the other hand, it is by no means an exceptional phenomenon for youths, or even mature men, to feel attracted exclusively by elderly men (the so-called “gerontophilia”). There exists also a heterosexual “gerontophilia”—that is to say, abnormal love exhibited by young men for old women, or by young women for old men. Thus Féré reports (“Note sur une Anomalie de l’Instinct Sexuel: Gerontophilie,” published in the Journal de Neurologie, 1905) the case of a man twenty-seven years of age who was sexually attracted only by white-haired, elderly women. He referred this to an impression received in very early youth. When four years old he slept in the same bed with an elderly lady, a family friend, who was visiting the house, and he then for the first time experienced sexual excitement. He had a dislike to young girls and young married women. A white-haired elderly woman whom he loved dyed her hair light brown, whereupon he ceased to care for her. Further, effeminate urnings prefer virile homosexuals; whereas many of these latter have a great dislike[509] to effeminates and to men in women’s clothing—to those male “women” who adopt by preference feminine nicknames, such as Louisa instead of Louis, Georgina instead of George, and who speak to one another as “sister,” just as the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus wished to be addressed as “mistress” instead of “lord.” Many urnings love beardless men; others love men with a moustache or a full beard; many homosexuals are fascinated by bright-coloured cloth, just as women are. Moreover, every possible individual detail may here have an attractive force, just as is the case with heterosexual love (the hair, the stature, the gait, the eyes, the intelligence, and the character).

Ideal love and the gratification of the grossest sensuality are also the two poles between which the amatory manifestations of male homosexuals oscillate. Many confine themselves to simple contacts, caresses, kisses and embraces. Most frequently sexual gratification is obtained by mutual masturbation. The idea that the non-homosexual especially associates with the word “pæderasty” is “pædication”[537]—that is, immissio membri in anum. This sexual act is, however, far less frequent than it is commonly assumed to be by heterosexuals. According to Magnus Hirschfeld, it occurs only in 8 %, according to G. Merzbach only in 6 %, of all cases of intercourse between male homosexuals. In an essay on pædication which I possess, written by a homosexual, it is represented as much commoner, and as “the most natural and least harmful means of gratification.” According to a verbal communication made to me, the author of this essay knew of one hundred cases of pædication in which no harm had resulted. Frequently coitus inter femora takes the place of pædication; still more frequently “fellation,” or coitus in os, and the widely diffused “tongue kiss.”[538] Other perverse manifestations of the homosexual impulse also occur, such as anilinctus, fetichism, masochism, sadism, exhibitionism, etc., just as they occur in heterosexual individuals.

With regard to the relations of true homosexuals to women, generally speaking they loathe sexual intercourse with woman, but they do not dislike woman herself. Women, on the contrary, are greatly liked by most homosexuals; effeminate urnings more especially gladly seek their society, in order to gossip with them[510] about all kinds of feminine belongings. Marriages are often contracted by homosexuals who are really ignorant as to their own condition, or who hope to conceal it from the world, or simply for pecuniary considerations. They result most unhappily if the wife has need of love, and understands the real nature of the case; or, again, if she becomes jealous of her husband’s male lovers; but when the wife is frigid, they may turn out quite happily. They are, however, always very unnatural. Hirschfeld [539] has thoroughly discussed the question of the marriage of homosexuals, and has also alluded to the occasional marriages between homosexual men and homosexual women. The fact proved by him that among homosexuals the impulse towards the preservation of the species is almost entirely wanting—not more than 3 % have the wish to possess children—shows how little fitted they are for the purposes of marriage.

The above-described sexual relationships may be illustrated by a few original reports taken from the autobiographies of homosexuals. For example, a homosexual man, twenty-seven years of age, writes:

“When I was young, from four to six years of age, I loved to look at the male generative organs, without knowing why they attracted me. I liked to look at sculpture and pictures representing male nudity. I detest woman’s work and the fashions of the day: a simple costume suffices for me. I learned the ‘great secret of the world’ when I was twelve years old, but woman had no interest for me, and I was always asking little boys of from ten to fourteen years of age to show me their private parts. I commenced to have carnal intercourse with boys (aged eighteen to twenty-four) when I was myself twenty-four. Only coitus inter femora, face to face, never from behind. I always assume the active rôle. A young man from eighteen to twenty-four years of age is to me like a woman. A woman is to me a thing (!), not so a man. Perhaps it is original, odd for our time; but what is to be done? Woman is a machine for producing children, and nothing more. I am not married, and never shall marry.”

“I was about five years old when, walking with a nursemaid in the pleasure gardens, I saw a man masturbating. Although I did not know what he was doing, the picture busied my imagination for many years. In my dreams, up to the age of fourteen years, the thought of living together with a companion of the same age as myself played the principal part. At the age of thirteen I fell in love with a schoolfellow, who was, however, but little inclined towards me. What perhaps especially interested me in him was that he brought sexual enlightenment to our class. Through moving to another town[511] I lost sight of him. Although at that time I knew nothing of the real sexual life, still I sought for objects which excited my sensuality.

“An unknown man of about thirty-five years of age seduced me, and practised pæderasty with me on the first occasion that he met me. I felt that there was something altogether wrong about this practice, but was too weak to withdraw myself from his influence. After about three months he disappeared. Now also I knew what masturbation was, for in the school this practice was common.

“At the age of eighteen I left the school, and as in my comrades the impulse towards women now showed itself, I, for my part, felt all the more how everything directed me towards man. I often endeavoured, in obedience to the urging of my friends, to form relationships with women of the half-world, but this always filled me with the greatest horror and repugnance. To me it is a dreadful feeling when I notice that a woman is interested in me. All the more, on the other hand, did the male sex interest me. When I love a man I do not think (only) of sexual union, but I try to read in him what I am myself prepared to give: a sole interest, faithfulness, unselfish surrender. If I love a man, anyone else is nothing to me.

“Every man of standing of twenty to forty years of age is interesting to me—every one who is not positively repulsive—but most of all anyone who possesses a distinguished psyche. In isolated cases sympathy has also led me to love.

“The kiss is of the highest importance to me, and precisely because I regard love as created only for a holy purpose, so that human beings may be mutually ennobled and morally advanced by this passion, it has always been repulsive to me to observe how men flirt with one another, just as is the case with heterosexuals. For this reason I am disinclined to visit places of general resort—such as, for example, the Casino of Dresden, where all kinds of people come together. I have met hardly any other urning who shares my sentiments in this respect.”

A homosexual physician, thirty-two years of age, gives the following account of his sexuality:

“I cannot tell you at what age sexual inclinations first appeared in me. My sexual impulse is directed towards males. Before and during the time of puberty the impulse was quite indeterminate. I believe that at this time I even cherished the idea of some day carrying out intercourse with a girl. But this was not love; it was a purely physical desire. The spiritual side of the impulse was at this time completely wanting. The sexual impulse now extends only towards young men. I have hitherto had sexual intercourse neither with males nor with females, but I believe that I should be competent for the normal sexual act. This act, however, would give me no pleasure; it would be nothing more than masturbation. I feel complete indifference towards the female sex, but I do not feel hatred or disgust. Sexual dreams [540] relate always to persons of the same sex. On the stage, in[512] the circus, it is always the men who interest me more than the women. In addition, I admire celebrated actresses and female singers, but my interest in them is purely artistic. From this standpoint also I am fully able to do justice to the beauty of young women, and have often wished to paint a girl, but this interest is always that of a painter—the colour of the hair, the complexion, interesting features. Social intercourse with persons of the other sex is quite unrestrained. The sense of shame I feel more in regard to women, but still I have also a strong sense of shame with regard to men. I always have a great difficulty to overcome when I have to take off my clothes in the presence of other men, and it is also very difficult to me to urinate when other men are present.

“My love exists only towards youths from the ages of seventeen to twenty-four, or, to speak more strictly, towards youths at the time of puberty. One of these of whom I am fond is sixteen years of age, but sexually he is completely mature, so that every one imagines him to be twenty.

“The direction of my sexual impulse has first become perfectly clear to me since reading the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages. I was already fully aware of the fact that young men were especially interesting to me, but had not previously understood that this interest was of a sexual nature. I had, indeed, heard of pæderasty—the case of Krupp and others—but I imagined that these individuals had developed such a tendency in consequence of satiety. ‘You,’ I said to myself, ‘are purer and nobler in sentiment. Pæderasty is loathsome to you; no human being will ever understand you.’

“Every young man at the age of puberty awakens in me a certain sexual interest. This is especially the case when they are slender and wiry in build, not fat, with well-developed, but not excessively powerful, muscles, with gentle and modest character. Roughness always suffices to destroy completely the commencement of inclination. Sturdy, plump youths, and those with an excessive development of fat under the skin, or with a wide, feminine aspect of the buttocks, leave me comparatively cold. The youthful forms embodied in Grecian sculpture are my ideal type. It is indispensable that they should be beardless, or at most have the merest beginnings of a beard. A youth with a heavy moustache leaves me cold; he is too masculine for me. Intellectual culture plays no part in the attraction; modesty and gentleness are necessary to render an intimate relationship possible. I find no preference for any particular profession. I have, indeed, pedagogic inclinations, but these appear to me to play no part in producing attraction, but come into action only later. One whom one loves is one in whom one would be glad to produce spiritual perfection. The attraction depends, in the first place, upon beauty of the body; beauty of the face is only of secondary importance. Smell has no influence upon the attraction.”

It will be noted that this writer, now thirty-two years of age, has hitherto had no experience of sexual intercourse, either[513] heterosexual or homosexual. This is characteristic. Homosexuals in general, in contrast to heterosexuals, often proceed at a comparatively late age to actual experience of their sexual impulse in action. He goes on to describe the first beginnings of his love for a beautiful youth, eighteen years of age. He writes:

“My eyes watched every movement of the body, which continually displayed new beauties. I should have loved to fall upon his neck and kiss him. For sexual intercourse he appeared to me too pure, too noble; I should rather have lain before him in the dust and prayed to his beauty. I felt that I should have been a poet in order to be able to clothe in the right words this delicate and holy sentiment. And I must shut this all up within myself, must remain outwardly cold. It was enough to drive me to madness! Have compassion on us, and allow us at least an embrace, a kiss. That certainly can do no one any harm, and for me it would be a good action. The distressing tension which tortures us to death would be for the time relaxed. I always have a feeling that the process of sexual attraction must be of an electrical nature. I seem to myself to be charged with electricity, the tension increasing up to the highest point when the beloved is near me, and a prolonged contact or a stroking with the hand already suffices to bring about a certain calming of the nerves. The tension is to some degree diminished. The various components of sexual enjoyment appear to be developed in human beings with very different strength. In this way it is explicable that in one person the odour of the loved one, in another the changing tones of the voice, in a third the taste of the kiss (the tongue kiss), is most stimulating. It is, indeed, even conceivable that there exists a purely mental sexual enjoyment, and that to some individuals merely to look at the beloved person, or to read a letter from him, suffices.

“Sexual intercourse had hitherto never been practised, but I can asseverate that the mode of my desire is rather feminine. It would be my ideal if the loved one should feel sexual ardour for me; I should be a willing sacrifice. I should like to possess feminine sexual organs, in order to appear desirable to the loved one.

“I have battled powerfully against my nature, and have felt very unhappy. I regard myself as physically and mentally healthy. I have received at birth a double nature (alas! two souls dwell within my breast). My body is that of a man, my soul rather that of a woman; hence the conflict, hence my sexual desires, considered outwardly and only from the physical point of view, are contrary to nature. Alas! my soul can be seen by no one.

“Why do I only love a young man? Because he in ideal fashion enlarges my nature. My sexual sensibility is mainly feminine, and is directed, therefore, towards the masculine, and more especially towards the masculine in the time of youth, because the feminine sensibility in my nature is damped by a small masculine note. The effeminate urning probably loves the complete man as the best complement of his own nature. The slightly masculine note of my own sexual perception demands also in the man whom I love a slight feminine note, such as we find in the youth. He has, in fact, something feminine[514] in him—beardlessness, no immoderate strength of the muscular system, a gentle disposition, receptive emotions—and yet he is masculine and sexually mature. Sexual maturity is a necessary part of every love. The young man, therefore, is the ideal conception of my nature. My love is as great, as holy, and as pure, as heterosexual love; it is capable of self-sacrifice. Believe me, for a loved one who fully understood me in every respect, I would gladly go to my death.

“Ah! how painful it is to us when we are regarded as debauchees or as sick persons!”

I must say that the above account, given to me by a much respected medical colleague, one whose nature is characterized alike by intellectual power and ideal sensibility, has made the deepest impression upon me, and has been an important influence in confirming my views regarding the nature of original homosexuality. Similar oral communications have been received by me from other physicians who have been homosexual from childhood onwards, one a neurologist and the other an alienist, and I attribute the greatest importance to the account given by this colleague of mine, who has a twofold understanding of the matter in question—as physician and as homosexual. It is also important to note that uranian physicians declare the majority of homosexuals to be physically and mentally healthy, a fact which I myself had not previously doubted, and that they contest the general validity of the degeneration theory.

Whilst in the smaller provincial towns and in the country homosexuals are for the most part thrust back into themselves, compelled to conceal their nature, or at most able to communicate only with isolated individuals of like nature with themselves, in the larger towns from early days the homosexuals have been able to get into touch with one another. Certain meeting-places—places of rendezvous for urnings only—have been formed; in certain streets and squares there have been formed urning-clubs, boarding-houses, and restaurants, and even urning-balls, while certain health resorts are to a degree monopolized by them. Moreover, the individual social groups of the homosexuals form unions. Thus, for example, Hirschfeld [541] reports the existence of an evening association consisting exclusively of homosexual princes, counts, and barons. Such pæderastic meeting-places and unions existed in the eighteenth century in Paris. From this time until about 1840 certain dark lateral alleys of the Champs Elysées, the thickets from the Place de la Concorde to the Allée des Veuves, between the Grand Avenue des Champs Elysées and the Cour de la Reine, served from the commencement[515] of twilight for the rendezvous of homosexuals, not simply as a place of masculine prostitution, but as a meeting-place of urnings in general, who here in the dark sought and found love. The central point of this evening activity was the Allée des Veuves (now known as the Avenue Montaigne), the “Widow’s Alley”—“widow” was at that time the term used to denote the passive pæderast. This region of the Champs Elysées was to a certain extent monopolized by the homosexuals. They would not tolerate here the presence of any heterosexuals; they closed the entrances with cords, and placed guards at the openings of the alleys, who demanded a pass-word from every comer. Even the police did not venture into this dark region.

“Victor Hugo, who in the year 1831 lived in the Rue Jean Goujon in this neighbourhood, often accompanied his friends who had been visiting him part of the way home at a late hour of the night. They walked in groups, talking of literature and art as far as the Place de la Concorde. There the celebrated poet parted from his guests and returned alone homewards, composing new verses by the way. He often noticed individuals who, as he passed the entrance to the Rue des Veuves, watched him from afar off without speaking to him. He could not believe that these people were thieves, and asked himself what could be the cause of their always waiting in this lonely place; but notwithstanding the frequent occurrence of these scenes, he made no further inquiry into the matter. But once in the midst of his poetical reverie he was disturbed by a man who stepped forward from the darkness of a thicket, and with a polite greeting said to him: ‘Sir, we beg you not to wait any longer in this place. We know who you are, and we should not wish that any one of us who does not know you should cause you any uneasiness.’ ‘What are you doing there, then?’ answered Victor Hugo. ‘Every evening I see people walking about here, and disappearing among the trees.’ ‘Don’t concern yourself about it, sir,’ was the brisk answer; ‘we disturb no one and do no one any harm, but we shall not permit anyone to disturb us or to do us any harm; we are here in our own grounds.’ Victor Hugo understood, bowed, and pursued his way. As on another evening, walking with his friends, he wished to pass through another alley running parallel to the Allée des Veuves, he found that this was closed by a number of chairs, which were fastened together with cords. ‘There is no thoroughfare,’ called out a threatening voice; but another, speaking more quietly, added: ‘We beg Monsieur Victor Hugo on this occasion to pass along the other side of the Avenue des Champs Elysées.’”[542]

During the Second Empire the Allée des Veuves maintained its former position as a place of rendezvous for homosexuals. An urnings’ club, the members of which belonged to the highest[516] classes of society, being persons of the Imperial Court, senators, great financiers, etc., had their meeting-place in a beautifully furnished hotel in the Allée des Veuves, in which soldiers of the Empress’s bodyguard (Dragons de l’Impératrice) and of the Hundred Guard of the Emperor served, in return for valuable presents, as the beloved of the various distinguished urnings, for which function the term “faire l’Impératrice” came into use. In the hotel there also lived from time to time transient unknown persons, who were only admitted after showing a kind of medal bearing a secret inscription. When the police made an examination of the hotel, they found a number of women’s dresses and similar articles, such as those which the Empress Eugénie was accustomed to wear on festival occasions. Numerous letters were also discovered which had been exchanged by the members of the club and their favourites of the Hundred Guard or of the Empress’s guard. A report was made to the Emperor of the results of the examination of this house. When he saw that persons of the highest position, and bearing most celebrated names, were involved in the affair, he at once ordered that the matter should be dismissed, and said to the Procureur-General: “We must spare our people and our country from such a scandal, which would do no one any good, and would do a great deal of harm.” In fact, almost no details of this affair became public.[543] Tardieu gave an account of another urnings’ club of the Second Empire, where there were concealed closets, on the walls of which erotic pictures were displayed. The manner in which the urnings made acquaintance with homosexuals is shown in a police report of July 16, 1864, in which the conduct of a literary homosexual, “un vieux monsieur fort bien et puissamment riche,” is described in the following terms:

“He enters the Café Truffaut, sees a young soldier who pleases him. By the intermediation of the waiter he makes an appointment, and departs without waiting for an answer. If the soldier agrees, he goes to the appointed place of meeting, and never goes alone, because Father C——n (the elderly urning) is well known. As soon as the two have met, other soldiers make their appearance, beat the old man, and compel him to give them all the money which he has about him. He does this willingly, and without ceasing prays for pardon. When he has not a single sou left, and when he has also given up his watch, he goes away weeping, and continually repeating the words, ‘What a miserable man I am!’”

This elderly urning was manifestly also a masochist, and therefore a very suitable victim of blackmailers, whom we here see at their work. In the police report to which we have already referred homosexual orgies are also described, the participants in which assumed women’s names and practised mutual masturbation and fellation, and also carried out obscene practices with a bitch. When Oscar Metenier in his book “Vertus et Vices Allemands” (Paris, 1904) states that Berlin has a monopoly in the matter of urnings’ balls, which, in his opinion, were not possible in Paris, he is unquestionably wrong as regards the time of the Second Empire. In this police report two typical urnings’ balls are mentioned. One of these took place in a house in the Place de la Madeleine, belonging to E. D., a man of business, who gave the ball on January 2, 1864. The second urnings’ ball was given by the Vicomte de M. in the Pavilion Rohan, Rue de Rivoli, on January 16, 1864, at which at least 150 men, many of them in woman’s clothing, took part. In many cases the appearance was so deceptive that even those who had invited the guests were not always able to determine the sex with certainty.

It is doubtless true that there is no other town in which there are so many social unions of homosexuals as there are in Berlin. Hirschfeld records—in addition to private parties—dinners, suppers, evening parties, five o’clock teas, picnics, dances, and summer festivals of homosexuals, which are arranged every winter by urnings, and by female homosexuals or their friends. Moreover, the male and female homosexuals meet in certain restaurants, cafés, eating-houses, and public-houses frequented only by themselves.[544]

Such localities exclusively for the use of urnings exist in Berlin to the number of eighteen to twenty. There are also social literary unions, such as the club “Lohengrin,” the antifeministic “Gesellschaft der Eigenen,” the “Platen-Gemeinschaft,” etc. There are also cabarets (public-houses) for urnings. Hirschfeld, in his book “Berlin’s Third Sex,” written in a popular style, but extremely valuable owing to the clearness of his descriptions, gives an exhaustive account of all these institutions for urnings, and for further details I may refer my readers to this interesting work, the authenticity of which I am able to confirm as the result of my own visits to the above-mentioned places of meeting for urnings.[545]

In Paris there no longer exist places of entertainment frequented solely by urnings. In this respect they are replaced by certain Turkish baths, whose patrons are almost without exception homosexuals—men whose age varies from about twenty years upwards. In the industrial quarter, in the neighbourhood of the Place de la République, there existed a few years ago a Turkish bath, visited almost exclusively by young homosexuals between the ages of fifteen and twenty years. On the great boulevard there is a bath of a very expensive character, visited only by wealthy homosexuals, frequented, among others, by a celebrated French composer.[546]

A peculiar species of meeting-places for the urnings of Berlin is represented by the soldiers’ public-houses in the neighbourhood of the barracks, where soldiers are met and treated by homosexuals, and where arrangements are made for subsequent meetings. There also exists a “soldiers’ promenade,” where the soldiers walk up and down and offer themselves to homosexuals. Athletes also enter freely into relationships with homosexuals.

Urnings’ balls are to-day especially characteristic of Berlin. Von Krafft-Ebing has described them in detail, and recently also Hirschfeld has alluded to them in the above-mentioned work. I myself not long ago attended such a “men’s ball,” at which from eight hundred to a thousand homosexuals were present, some in men’s clothing, some in women’s clothing, some in fancy dress. The homosexuals dressed as women could have been distinguished from real women only by those in the secret. More particularly do I recall an elegant sylph, who, on the arm of a partner, glided across the hall—“glided” is the correct expression. During the dance his delicate features were leaning on the shoulder of the man, and he coquetted continually with ardent black eyes. I really believed this was a woman, but was assured that it was a male hairdresser. In the case of another urning dressed as a woman the diagnosis was rendered easier by a well-developed moustache.

The seamy side of the relationships of homosexuals in public life is constituted by the so-called “male prostitution,” which existed even in ancient times, and in our own day was especially well organized during the Second Empire, as we learn from the details given by Tardieu. The ranks of male prostitution are recruited partly from homosexual and partly from heterosexual[519] men of the lower and more poverty-stricken classes, who give themselves for payment to well-to-do urnings, and are practised in all the arts of elaborate coquetry (they use rouge, make a coquettish display of male charms, etc.). These are the so-called “aunts.” In all large towns there exists what is called a “Strich” (promenade), where male prostitutes are accustomed to walk, in order to attract their clients. In Berlin the principal promenades are the Friedrichstrasse, the Passage,[547] and some of the walks in the Tiergarten. Like female prostitution, so also male prostitution has its “houses of accommodation”; and in France there even existed, and still exist, typical “male brothels.” From 1820 to 1826 such a brothel was to be found in the Rue du Doyenne in Paris. In the neighbourhood of the Louvre the male inmates of this establishment were even subjected to regular medical examination, in order to protect their clients from venereal infection. With the fall of twilight the visitors made their appearance, and were received by young effeminates.[548] Still worse was another form of male prostitution, at the time of the Restoration, and in the earlier years of the reign of Louis Philippe—namely, the so-called grande montre des culs in the Rue des Marais, where a number of male prostitutes displayed and offered their charms to the homosexuals visiting the place. A detailed account of the way in which this was done cannot be given, but is sufficiently indicated by what has already been said.[549]

Male brothels exist even at the present day in Paris. Thus, at the end of the year 1905 in the Rue St. Martin there was a small hotel whose homosexual proprietor not only let rooms to urnings for a brief stay, but also kept on the premises five or six young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two years, whose services were always available for homosexuals for payment. Besides this hotel there existed also in the year 1905 a kind of male brothel in the house of an urning, where at midday half a dozen young fellows were to be found, or could be fetched at brief notice, for the choice of homosexual visitors, for whose use a room was available at so many francs per hour.[550]

A phenomenon intimately related with male prostitution is blackmail, or “chantage.” Tardieu (op. cit., pp. 128-130) describes these relationships in vivid colours, and lays stress on the close relationship between male prostitution and criminality. Blackmail has become to-day a kind of special profession,[551] which is not directed solely against homosexuals, but also against heterosexuals, and the punishment of which cannot be too severe. Frequently these individuals, whose activity is a danger to the community at large, persecute their victims for many years in succession. Tardieu reports the case of a celebrated literary man, “whose purse the blackmailers regarded as their own.” For more than twenty years in succession he was plucked by successive generations of blackmailers, who considered him an assured source of income. He was “passed on from one to another.” As a rule, blackmailers wait for their victims in public lavatories; they suddenly assert that they have been indecently assaulted, and demand hush-money, which is commonly given to them, even by heterosexuals. A case of the last-mentioned kind recently occurred in Berlin, when a quite innocent young merchant was being plundered in this way, and his wife, by a courageous denunciation of the shameless blackmailer, freed him from this tyranny. It is, however, unquestionable that blackmail often ensues upon real advances on the part of homosexuals, and after the performance of sexual acts; and there is no doubt that in Germany the existence of § 175 of the Criminal Code has been most advantageous to professional blackmailers, has led to numerous scandals (alike disagreeable and dangerous to the community), and has given rise to numerous suicides.

“Unnatural vice between two persons of the male sex, or between a man and an animal, is punishable with imprisonment; it can also be punished with loss of civil rights.”

This paragraph of the Imperial Criminal Code is identical with § 143 of the former Prussian Criminal Code. Similar ordinances,[552] in some cases even more severe, are found in the laws of Austria-Hungary, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Bulgaria, the State of New York, most of the cantons of Switzerland, and more especially in Great Britain, where the most severe punishments[521] are inflicted, and, at any rate logically, are inflicted also on women who practise homosexual intercourse. On the other hand, punishment for homosexual intercourse has been completely abolished in France, Belgium, Holland, Portugal, Turkey, Italy, Spain, the Swiss Cantons of Genf, Wallis, Waadt and Tessin, the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg, the Principality of Monaco, and in Mexico.

§ 143 of the Prussian Criminal Code was adopted as the basis of § 175 of the German Criminal Code, in view of “the consciousness of right of the people,” who “condemn such practices not only as vicious, but also as criminal.” But this consciousness of right is based upon defective knowledge, and upon an erroneous view of homosexuality. As soon as we recognize that in homosexuality we have to do with a primary natural disposition, and as soon as this view has permeated wide circles of the population, the old consciousness of right will be replaced by a new one, which will demand the repeal of a criminal law, by which a natural phenomenon is regarded as a vice and a crime, and is esteemed as infamous. My studies in recent years having convinced me that in homosexuality we have to do with a typical biological phenomenon, I feel that I must unhesitatingly approve of the efforts of the Scientific and Humanitarian Committee, founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, which aims at making the people understand the nature of homosexuality, and demands the repeal of § 175 of the German Criminal Code. All the more is this reform demanded because real homosexual crimes can be very readily dealt with by means of the sections of the Criminal Code relating to sexual delinquencies in general.

Apart from this general codification of the injustice of § 175, and apart from the above-mentioned tragical consequences of the existence of this section, it is also necessary to point out that the expressions used therein are absurd and illogical.

1. Unnatural vice between men is punished, whereas that between women is left impune. But why should this latter be the case, if we adopt the standpoint (which we have, indeed, seen to be untenable) that homosexual intercourse is in itself vicious and criminal—why should homosexual intercourse between women be less vicious and criminal than homosexual intercourse between men?

2. The idea “unnatural vice” is equally absurd and inconsequent, and makes justice in respect of these offences absolutely impossible. By this term is understood not merely pædication (immissio membri in anum), but also any kind of intercourse[522] between men “resembling sexual intercourse”—that is, coitus in os, coitus inter femora, even simple frictio membri—whilst mutual masturbation and other perverse practices are not punishable.

3. § 175 does not safeguard any citizen,[553] for the sexual freedom of the individual is not disturbed in any way by the intercourse between two adult men who fully understand what they are doing, nor is the general moral sense injured in any way if the act is not seen by any third person. In this latter respect, however, § 183 of the Criminal Code, which punishes annoyance to the public by improper conduct, already affords sufficient protection.

4. If § 175 is maintained with especial reference to the existence of professional male unchastity, von Liszt has rightly replied to this contention that the latter form of unchastity can be rendered harmless by a modified reading of § 361b of the Criminal Code, just as the protection of virtue can be safeguarded by other sections of the Code.

5. The effectiveness of § 175 is extremely limited. According to Hirschfeld (“Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages,” vol. vi., p. 175), no more than 0·007 % of the existing punishable homosexual practices of the present day are detected and punished. Therefore a few isolated individuals are punished for an offence which thousands of others commit with impunity.

6. When § 175 of the Criminal Code was drawn up, the law-givers knew absolutely nothing about the homosexual impulse as an essential outcome of the personality; they merely wished to punish heterosexuals who committed homosexual practices, not to punish genuine homosexuals (cf. Numa Prætorius, “The Question of the Responsibility of Homosexuals,” published in the Monthly Review of Criminal Psychology, edited by G. Aschaffenburg, 1906, p. 561).

The worst and most tragic consequence of § 175 is the permanent infamy and social contempt suffered by persons who, without any blame to themselves, have a mode of sexual perception diverging from that of the great majority. The state itself commits a crime when it enrols in the category of vice and crime a biological phenomenon which has recently been recognized as such even by the Evangelical and Catholic Churches,[554] and has been freed[523] by these Churches from the stigma of immorality. The continuance of this great injustice is the frequent cause of the suicide of homosexuals, especially of such as are men of exceptional spiritual and moral cultivation, and frequently before they have actually indulged in their homosexual impulse, the best proof that we have to do, not with vicious, but with unhappy men, who are unable to bear the misery of being socially despised and unjustly misunderstood by their associates. How many suicides from homosexual grounds occur it is impossible to establish exactly. We can only suspect the cause from certain attendant circumstances. A highly respected literary man writes to me regarding this question of the suicide of homosexuals: “When a fine young fellow, suffering frightfully as a result of his inherited disposition, shoots himself, his family will rather suggest that the cause was a chancre (which he has never had), than they will admit his homosexuality.” Several such cases have come under his notice. “A better cause,” he suggests, “for the suicide would have been unhappy love, for that is the actual truth.” Zola,[555] speaking of the letters of a homosexual, says that they exhibited “the most heart-breaking cry of human agony” that he had ever known.

“He earnestly resisted yielding to such shameful, lustful love, and he longed to know whence came this contempt of all men, whence this continuous readiness of the law-courts to crush him down, when in his flesh and blood were inborn a disgust towards woman, whilst he had brought into the world with him a true feeling of love towards man. Never had one possessed by a demon, never had a poor human body given up to and tortured by the unknown powers of the sexual impulse, so painfully expressed his misery. Have we not here a truly physiological case definitely displayed before our eyes—an inversion, an error, on the part of Nature? Nothing, in my opinion, is more tragical, and nothing demands more urgently investigation and a means of cure, if such can possibly be found.”

The complete enlightenment of the people would give rise to a spontaneous change in their conception of homosexuality, to which, moreover, the greater number of homosexuals belonging to the better classes could contribute, if they would freely and[524] openly admit their tendencies. The secrecy and hypocrisy of many urnings is partly responsible for the hitherto prevailing false views on homosexuality. We cannot spare them this reproach.

Finally, § 175 is not merely an injustice to homosexuals, but it is also a danger to heterosexuals, in consequence of the blackmail which is so intimately associated with the existence of this section. It is not enough that these criminals of the most debased kind, who to a small extent only are recruited from the ranks of male prostitutes, reduce numerous unhappy urnings to social and financial ruin, and drive many others to suicide or to crime, of which the remarkable case of a County Court Judge a few years ago afforded a typical example. These wretches also dare with ever-greater success to make use of § 175 for the purpose of blackmailing completely normal heterosexuals. In fact, they often succeed better with these latter than they do with homosexuals, because to the normal man the idea of being regarded as homosexual is so repulsive.

A remedy for all these evils—for the suicides as well as for the blackmailing—can only be found in the enlightenment of the whole people—the first and most important thing to do—and in the unconditional repeal of § 175 of the Criminal Code.

It has been a most useful service on the part of the Scientific and Humanitarian Committee—a service the value of which has not yet been sufficiently recognized—that it has endeavoured, above all, to bring about the enlightenment of the people by means of popular writings,[556] and of the learned by means of scientific publications, such as the most successful Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages (8 volumes, 1899-1906), and by means of lectures, by the convocation of public meetings, by petitions, etc.

The petition of the committee to the legislative bodies of the German Empire, asking for the repeal of § 175 of the Criminal Code, was signed by 5,000 persons belonging to the circles of men of science, judges, physicians, priests, schoolmasters, authors, and artists, among whom were some of the most celebrated names of cultured Germany. I cite here a few only: Ferdinand Avenarius, Hans von Basedow, Woldemar von Biedermann, H. Bulthaupt, Professor Crédé, Albert Eulenburg, Theodor Gaedertz, Rudolf von Gottschall, Franz Görres, O. E. Hartleben, Gerhart Hauptmann, S. Jadassohn, Hermann Kaulbach, R. von[525] Krafft-Ebing, Joseph Kürschner, H. Kurella, Walter Leistikow, Leppmann, Max Liebermann, G. von Liebig, Detlev von Lilieneron, Franz von Liszt, Berthold Litzmann, Ph. Lotmar, John Henry Mackay, Mendel, Friedrich Moritz, P. Näcke, Paul Natorp, Albert Neisser, Max Nordau, A. von Oechelhäuser, A. von Oppenheim, J. Pagel, Pelman, R. Penzig, Placzek, Felix Poppenberg, Rainer Maria Rilke, O. Rosenbach, Wilhelm Roux, Max Rubner, Benno Rüttenauer, Johannes Schlaf, Arthur Schnitzler, A. von Schrenck-Notzing, Alwin Schulz, Moritz Schwalb, Georg Schweinfurth, Adolf von Sonnenthal, K. von Tepper-Laski, H. Unverricht, Max Verworn, A. Vierkandt, Richard Voss, Hans Wachenhusen, Felix Weingartner, Adolf Wilbrandt, Ernst von Wildenbruch, F. von Winkel, E. von Wolzogen, Ernst Ziegler, Theobald Ziegler, Theophil Zolling.

In addition, we might mention that in the year 1904 not less than 2,800 German physicians, as well as 750 head masters and masters of higher schools, signed the petition to the Reichstag for the repeal of § 175. Owing to certain scandals by which the highest circles were sympathetically affected—I need recall only the cases of Hohenau, Krupp, Israel, von Schenk, etc.—the conviction has been forced upon members of the most influential political circles that the repeal of the paragraphs of the Criminal Code relating to urnings is an unconditional necessity. We may, therefore, expect that the repeal will be effected within the next few years.

Compared with true original homosexuality in men, the same condition in women is of considerably less importance, because in women homosexuality is undoubtedly much less common than it is in men. In comparison with the number of urnings, the number of female homosexuals—of “urnindes,” “Lesbian lovers,” or “tribades”—is relatively small; whereas in many women, even at a comparatively advanced age, the so-called “pseudo-homosexuality” (see the next chapter) is much more frequently met with than it is in men. In the case of heterosexual men it is usually impossible to induce a homosexual mode of perception or to give rise to any kind of taste for homosexual activity; whereas in heterosexual women the corresponding change certainly occurs much more easily. Tendernesses and caresses play, indeed, among normal heterosexual women a rôle which makes it easier for us to understand how readily in woman pseudo-homosexual tendencies may arise. Still, it is impossible to doubt the existence also of original homosexuality[526] in women. These are the cases in which, just as in urnings, the homosexual impulse appears in very early childhood, often long before puberty, in which case also the girl is distinguished from her heterosexual comrades in external appearance, exhibiting indications of a masculine build of body (slight development of the breasts, narrowness of the pelvis, development of a moustache, a deep voice, etc.); but such indications may be entirely absent, and the girl may not be distinguished from others in any respect beyond the perverse direction of the sexual impulse. These true tribades are much rarer than the false tribades, the pseudo-Lesbian lovers. For example, when visiting an urnings’ ball we may be quite sure that 99 % of the male homosexuals assembled there are true homosexuals; but at a tribades’ ball—such, also, are given in Berlin—certainly a much smaller percentage are “genuine”; the bulk of the women present are pseudo-homosexuals. I here append the interesting reminiscences of a genuine urninde, by which this relationship between original homosexuality and pseudo-homosexuality in women is very clearly shown:

Thoughts of a Lonely Woman!

“Born in the country, the daughter of a merchant, I grew up as a very dreamy being, with an unceasing yearning after something unknown, beautiful, great—with a longing to become a singer or an artist. At the age of twelve I was already completely ‘woman,’ very luxuriantly developed, although still half a child, filled always with an uncontrollable longing for a beloved feminine being who should kiss me and caress me, whom I was to regard with love and with a sentiment of self-sacrifice. At the age of thirteen I came to live with relatives in a provincial town, where for a year I attended a young ladies’ school. Of my dreams no single one could be fulfilled. My mother, who was widowed when I was only three years old, had a severe economical struggle, being encumbered with six small children. After my elder brothers and sisters were married, I myself, being then twenty-four years of age, had to go out into the world to seek my own living, ignorant of the world and its dangers, delivered up to commonness and intrigue. I got a position in the house of a widow, filling the post of ‘companion.’ My ‘principal,’ a woman sixty years of age, was at first unsympathetic to me, but she treated me in a loving and motherly manner, which pleased me, for I was of a pliant and receptive disposition. Gradually I became her confidante. Every evening I had to get into bed with her (I slept close by); I must touch her with my hands. I did not then really understand why I had to stroke her legs; but one evening this sexagenarian guided my hand into a forbidden place. Now it became clear to me that this woman still had erotic perceptions. I felt how she quivered under my touch, pressed me firmly to herself, etc.; but I, for my part, felt nothing. It might[527] have been different had she been a friend of my own age. I had not at that time any idea that ‘psychically’ I was different from other girls. I had an unceasing yearning for love, not directly sensual love, but spiritual love, out of which sensual love might later develop. Among the inmates of our house was a young merchant, a fine-looking man, who besieged me with his love, and, after long hesitation, I at length one day consented to give him the best that woman has to give. He took possession of my body with brutal voluptuousness. I was under the delusion that he would make me his wife. I had in the sexual act no perception at all, and was disillusioned. One day my seducer told me that he was going to be married, asking me to return him the ring he had given me, and offering me money. Moved to the inmost soul, without any human being to give me counsel or help (from a feeling of shame I had not disclosed the matter to my principal), I threw the ring at him, resigned my position, and made myself independent. I will only say in a few words how I had to struggle, to fight for my existence, how I was lied to and deceived by rascally men. When I came to Berlin I heard and read of homosexual love, but could not find what I dreamed of—namely, spiritual love, out of which sensual love might spring. I learned to know homosexual women, but they exhibited to me such elemental passion, brutality, sensuality, that, notwithstanding all my yearning for ‘homosexual’ love, I remained unresponsive. Only in kissing the lips of a woman sympathetic to me I have experienced an agreeable sensation, but that sweet state which I was able to induce in others by contact with them was in me not forthcoming. I began to wonder whether Nature had denied me this sensation, though I was myself also a normally developed woman. For years I lived ‘ascetically,’ since I regarded myself as a ‘psychological’ problem—I avoided every kind of intercourse—I only had a desire for tenderness and caresses. I often loved handsome women, feeling the wish to kiss them and to touch them, and I had learned to know women of the kind who prostitute themselves to other women for money. These were hateful to me, and never could I form a friendship with such, because they knew only common brutal sensuality, towards which I was not responsive.

“Some years ago I suffered from a severe abdominal and nervous disorder. I have already passed my fortieth year. After an illness lasting two years, I still feel the desire for homosexual love. Hitherto I have lived unhappily, continually asking myself why Nature has treated me so cruelly. Is it not possible once at least to enjoy this perception? A few weeks ago I made the acquaintance of a married woman, whose husband has been impotent for years, whilst she, on the other hand, is a very passionate character. Unfortunately, this woman, although in other respects she is very sympathetic to me, is upon a comparatively low plane of culture, and, what frightens me more, she has an intimacy with a female friend who is quite uncultured, but who resembles her in respect of sexual love, and who night after night lies with her in bed beside the husband, and the two women indulge their perverse voluptuousness, the friend playing the ‘man’s’ part. I have seen many strange things in my course through life, but such a marriage is a new experience to me. The man terms himself an artist, a painter, and allows his wife free play in bisexual love. I believe that this man himself experiences a titillation of the senses when he sees[528] the two women together, and also that he makes drawings of ‘acts,’ out of which he makes a profit. In this house I have seen into a deep abyss, yet other bisexual women visit it. Although I have found my peace disturbed by these women, although I have been to a certain extent intoxicated, the conditions are too repulsive to me—since this woman is sunk into a morass deeper than she herself understands. Only through me does she begin to understand it. But a longer intercourse with her is impossible, for she lacks all the qualities that I look for in a woman whom I could love. In actual fact I envy this creature, for she is happy, since she experiences to the full those sweet sensations which Nature denies to me. Are there any more beings unhappy like myself? Perhaps the acquaintanceship with a woman whose feelings were similar to my own would be a happiness, if Fate would only have so much pity upon me as to throw a sorrowful companion in my way. I hope for it, but I do not believe that it will happen.

“To what sex do I really belong?”

In the love-history of this genuine urninde the ideal element is especially manifest; likewise the instinctive disinclination to man, which, remarkably enough, is often more powerfully developed in strongly feminine characters than in the more masculine tribades, as the prototype of which latter we may mention the painter Rosa Bonheur. During childhood Rosa Bonheur felt herself to be a boy, and preferred the society of boys to that of girls.[557] Throughout her life, notwithstanding her homosexual love, she felt strong sympathy with men. Such a double relationship occurs also among urnindes of the first kind. Even the true urninde, I may say, is not so extremely homosexual as is the true urning. Take, for example, the following account [558] of an original homosexual, and you will see the difference:

“I have not lost any of the valuable things of life—far otherwise. Many-sided, many-shadowed intellectual sympathy leads any man of lofty mind into harmony with me. There emanates unconsciously from my soul a profound, tender charm. My friends find me necessary to them. I share their interests. In our relationship there pass between us the most wonderful shades of sympathetic feeling—what the French so expressively speak of as l’amitié amoureuse. Thus my mode of being becomes absorbed into that of my friend, a peculiar melody passes to and fro between us, and a peculiar melody sounds in the stillness of my own soul. All the fine and delicate sensations which I have received from my friends become in me transformed into poietic force—the ecstasies of my spirit assume form and substance. From the spiritualization of the impulse there springs a stream clear as crystal, there arise passion and ardour; my exceptional soul lifts me upwards, above all sorrows and vexations. In this way is a talent conceived, and amid ecstasy it is born.”

The need for a spiritual contact with men is among homosexual women much stronger than the corresponding inclination on the part of urnings for spiritual contact with woman natures. For this reason there is no doubt that the “Woman’s Movement”—that is, in the movement directed towards the acquirement by women of all the attainments of masculine culture—homosexual women have played a notable part.[559] Indeed, according to one author,[560] the “Woman’s Question” is mainly the question regarding the destiny of virile homosexual women. I find it necessary to doubt whether, as Hammer maintains,[561] the raging hatred of men—the converse quality to the anti-feminism of the male urnings—really proceeds from the uranian group of the Woman’s Movement, for there exist no literary documents of importance to prove the suggested connexion. Homosexual women of intellectual weight have also assured me that among them there does at times exist an enmity to men on principle, just as, mutatis mutandis, misogyny has been developed as a system both from the heterosexual and from the homosexual side. For the diffusion of pseudo-homosexuality the Woman’s Movement is of great importance, as we shall see later.

The individual and social relationships of feminine uranism are nearly the same as those of male uranism. In both cases there exists an entire scale, running from pure Platonism to ardent sensuality. One kind of Platonic tribades are those described by Catulle Mendés in his sketch “Protectrices.” These are ladies of position who allow themselves the luxury of a “protégée,” generally a girl employed at the theatre, with whom during the performances they exchange glances, whose expenses they pay, with whom they go out driving, without the matter proceeding to actual sexual relations. In other cases, however, sensual gratification is the desired goal, which is attained by kisses, embraces, friction of the genital organs, or cuninilinctus (the so-called “Sapphism”). In this intercourse one party—the “father”—plays the active part, the other—“the mother”—the passive part. There exist passionate and intimate relationships of long duration—true “marriages”—among tribades. Thus, d’Estoc reports (“Paris-Eros,” p. 58) relationships of this kind which have lasted thirty years. Still, as a general rule,[530] feminine homosexuals change their relationships more frequently than male homosexuals. An elderly tribade, whose correspondence lies before me, had within four years three love relationships. In these relationships jealousy plays an even greater part than in heterosexual liaisons. Two sympathetic urnindes who lived together described to me very vividly the joys and sorrows of the amor lesbicus. The cause of the troubles is always a tertia, never a tertius gaudens.

Like the urnings, the tribades also have their meeting-places, jour fixes. One such meeting, at which four genuine female homosexuals and one male homosexual assembled, I had the opportunity of attending. They have their parties, and even their balls, at which the virile tribades appear in men’s clothing,[562] and (as also when at home) use male nicknames. There also exist female prostitutes who devote their services entirely to urnindes. This tribadistic prostitution is especially widespread in Paris. Such prostitutes are called gouines, or gougnottes, or chevalières du clair de lune. Theatrical agents are said to be especially occupied with tribadistic procurement. There also exist tribadistic brothels in Paris.[563]

APPENDIX
THEORY OF HOMOSEXUALITY

Original, congenital, enduring homosexuality would appear to be an exclusively human peculiarity. It is very doubtful whether a similar condition exists among animals. We recognize among the lower animals homosexual acts, but no homosexuality.[564] Thus we have no philogenetic starting-point for the explanation of homosexuality. Moreover, homosexuality is fundamentally different from the other sexual perversions, sadism and masochism. These represent quite extreme forms of biological phenomena, an abnormal increase of physiological impulsive manifestations that occur in the normal heterosexual life, as part of sexuality in general. But homosexuality is an alteration in the direction of the very impulse itself—a change in the very[531] nature of sexuality. To put the matter shortly, it is the appearance of a sexuality heterogeneous to and not corresponding with the bodily structure. To define homosexuality as the appearance of a feminine sexual psyche in a masculine body, or of a masculine sexual psyche in a feminine body, does not apply to all cases—for example, it does not apply to virile urnings or to tribades who remain womanly. The definition of homosexuality as a sexuality which does not correspond to the bodily structure embraces both these possibilities.

Whenever homosexuality in men is associated with a marked development of feminine secondary sexual characters, or in women with a marked development of masculine secondary sexual characters, the homosexual sensibility may be said to have to some extent a physical basis, but not completely so. For the “intermediate stage theory” proposed by Hirschfeld—the intermixture of feminine and masculine characters—may apply satisfactorily to “bisexuality,” to indeterminate sexual sensibility; but it does not apply to the thoroughly one-sided, monistic sexual sensibility, directed only towards members of the same sex, and often appearing very early, before the days of puberty. Moreover, in heterosexual male individuals the external appearance may at times suggest that there is a strong intermixture of feminine characters. These men, though heterosexual, have a womanly appearance.

The “intermediate stage theory” of Hirschfeld, which von Krafft-Ebing also appears to have recognized in his last work (“New Studies in the Subject of Homosexuality”), a theory which explains homosexual phenomena as dependent upon the existence of transitional stages between the sexes (“sexual links” of Hirschfeld), and which, moreover, erroneously includes the typical hermaphrodite states—this interesting theory explains a portion only of original homosexuality. It fails in cases in which homosexuality occurs in the absence of any divergence from type—for example, in those cases in which male individuals with thoroughly normal masculine bodies exhibit marked homosexual sensibility in early childhood, long before puberty. But these are the cases which offer the greatest possible difficulties to a scientific explanation. Hic Rhodus, hic salta!

Ulrich’s “feminine soul in a masculine body” applies to effeminate urnings, such as he was himself. But is the mode of sensibility of virile homosexuals “effeminate”? Why do we speak of a third sex? Here lie difficulties which we cannot overcome without further assistance.

How does it come to pass that the central organs in homosexuals do not correspond to the peripheral sexual organs, although the latter are formed embryologically long before the former, so that the central organs should properly be guided in their development by the peripheral organs? But they are not so guided. That is only explicable in this way—that the association between the central organs and the peripheral organs is interrupted by a third influence, and that this last influence has a peculiar effect upon the central organs altogether independent of the nature of the reproductive glands.

1. The so-called “undifferentiated stage” of the sexual impulse (Max Dessoir) may often fail to appear in cases in which the sexual impulse, either in heterosexuals or homosexuals, is definitely directed before puberty unmistakably towards the members of one particular sex. Especially in homosexuals do we often see before puberty the clear and unmistakable direction of the sexual impulse towards members of the same sex.

2. A critical theory of homosexuality must also explain the extreme cases; above all, it must also explain male homosexuality associated with complete virility.

3. The sexual organs and the reproductive glands cannot be the determining cause, because homosexuality makes its appearance in association with thoroughly typical male reproductive organs; nor can the brain be the determining cause in cases of true homosexuality, for, notwithstanding the intentional and unintentional operation of heterosexual influences on thought and imagination, homosexuality cannot be eradicated, and continues to develop.

4. Since this homosexuality often makes its appearance as an inclination (not as the sexual impulse) long before puberty, and before the proper activity of the reproductive glands is developed, it appears a reasonable suggestion that in homosexuality some physiological manifestation associated with “sexuality,” but not directly associated with the reproductive glands, undergoes a change which results in an alteration of the direction of the sexual impulse.

6. The most obvious influences to think of in this connexion are chemical influences, changes in the chemistry of sexual tension, which latter is certainly to a large extent independent of the reproductive glands, since it may persist in eunuchs. But the nature of this sexual chemistry is still entirely obscure.

Such a way of conceiving the process is thoroughly reasonable and tenable on scientific grounds, as was shown by E. H. Starling and L. Krehl [565] in their communication to the Scientific Congress at Stuttgart in the year 1905, regarding disturbances of chemical correlation in the organism, especially disturbances of the chemical influences proceeding from the reproductive organs. All minuter details regarding these “sexual hormone” (to use Starling’s own phrase) are still unknown, but the experiments to which we alluded in an earlier chapter have proved their existence. In my view, the anatomical contradiction, the natural monstrosity, of a feminine—or, at any rate, an unmanly—psyche in a typical masculine body, or that of a feminine or unmanly sexual psyche associated with normally developed and normally functioning male genital organs, can only be explained in this manner by taking into account this intercurrent third factor. This can be deduced very readily from some early embryonic disturbances of sexual chemistry. This would also explain why it is that homosexuality so often occurs in perfectly healthy families, as an isolated phenomenon which has nothing to do either with inheritance or with degeneration. When von Römer, on the contrary, describes homosexuality as a process of “regeneration,” we must maintain that for this view there are no sufficient grounds. Here begins the riddle of homosexuality; for me, at any rate, it is one. My own theory only attempts to explain the proper physiological connexions of homosexuality better, and, above all, more scientifically than earlier theories. With regard to the ultimate cause of the relatively frequent occurrence of homosexuality as an original phenomenon, this theory has, however, nothing to say.

I do not suggest that I am able for a moment to find the ultimate reason of the being and nature of homosexuality. There remains here a riddle to be solved. But from the standpoint of civilization and reproduction homosexuality is a senseless and aimless dysteleological phenomenon, like many another “natural product”—as, for example, the human cæcum. In an earlier chapter I drew attention to the fact that civilization has entailed an increasingly sharp sexual differentiation—that is, the antithesis between “man” and “woman” has become continually[534] clearer. The distinction between the sexes is a product rather of civilization than of primitive nature. All sexual indifference, all sexual links, are primitive characters. Eduard von Mayer rightly believes that in the earliest days of the human race homosexuality was much more widely diffused than it is at present, that, in fact, it came into being side by side with heterosexual love. Civilization by means of inheritance, adaptation, and differentiation, has continually more and more limited the extent of the homosexual impulse. Unquestionably the homosexual human being, as human being, has the same right to exist as the heterosexual. To doubt it would be preposterous. Also, as a sexual being, in so far as only the individual aspect of love comes under consideration, the homosexual has an equal right. But for the species, and also for the advancement of civilization, homosexuality has no importance, or very little. It is obvious that, as a kind of enduring “monosexuality,” it contradicts the purposes of the species. Equally obvious is it that the whole of civilization is the product of the physical and mental differentiation of the sexes, that civilization has, in fact, to a certain extent, a heterosexual character. The greatest spiritual values we owe to heterosexuals, not to homosexuals. Moreover, reproduction first renders possible the preservation and permanence of new spiritual values. In the last resort the latter are not possible without the former. However obvious it may appear, we must still repeat that spiritual values exist only in respect of the future, that they only attain their true significance in the connexion and the succession of the generations, and that they are, therefore, eternally dependent upon heterosexual love as the intermediary by which this continuity is produced. The monosexual and homosexual instincts permanently limited to their own ego or their own sex are, therefore, in their innermost nature dysteleological and anti-evolutionistic. In speaking thus we leave entirely out of consideration the possibility that temporarily and for the purposes of individual development they may possess a relative justification.[566]

Moreover, the majority of homosexuals have a deeply rooted sentiment of the lack of purpose and the aimlessness of their[535] mode of sexual perception, and this often gives them a very tragical and pitiable expression. Especially in the case of noble, spiritually important homosexuals, true carriers of civilization, is this sense of the incongruity between homosexuality and life most plainly felt. Even the talented Numa Prætorius (Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, vol. vi., p. 543) recognizes that—

“The love of the majority of men towards the other sex, based upon heterosexual impulse, has undergone a development and refinement, and has obtained a significance which makes homosexual love, in comparison with it, play quite a subordinate part.”

[502] “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. i., p. 219.

[503] Lombroso, at the Sixth International Congress of Criminal Anthropologists at Turin, May, 1906, actually drew a parallel between congenital homosexuality and the congenital tendency to crime! That this parallel is utterly non-existent and that crime and homosexuality differ toto cælo is shown luminously by Paul Näcke (“Comparison between Criminality and Homosexuality,” published in the Monatsschrift für Kriminalpsychologie, 1906, pp. 477-487).

[504] Published in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, edited by Magnus Hirschfeld, vol. iii., p. 5 (Leipzig, 1901). Cf. also the account of the newer views by P. Näcke, “Problems in the Domain of Homosexuality,” published in the Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie, 1902, vol. lix., pp. 805-829 (this writer also maintains the existence of normal, healthy homosexual individuals).

[505] Magnus Hirschfeld, “Der Urnische Mensch,” p. 139 et seq. (Leipzig, 1903).

[506] Von Krafft-Ebing, “Retarded Homosexuality,” published in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, 1901, vol. iii., pp. 7-20.

[507] J. E. Meisner, “Uranism, or the so-called Homosexual Love,” p. 11 (Leipzig, 1906).

[508] Max Katte (“Virile Homosexuals,” published in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, vol. vii., p. 94; Leipzig, 1905) remarks that it is an error on the part of recent writers in the domain of homosexuality to describe and vindicate so prominently the effeminate type of homosexual man, and to neglect the virile type. The same is true as regards the description of the corresponding types of homosexual women.

[509] This occurs also in heterosexual boys. I extract the following passage from the unpublished autobiography of a homosexual physician: “When puberty occurred I am not able to say—I expect it was about the age of sixteen or seventeen—but I know certainly that I noticed at the time of puberty a swelling of the breasts. There was only a slight forward curvature, which did not extend much beyond the areola, and was painful on pressure. I remember distinctly that I was anxious about the matter, and was afraid that there was some inflammation beginning. However, the same seems to occur in every normal man. A student whom I asked about the matter said that he had noticed a swelling of the mammary glands about the age of fifteen; recently, at the age of seventeen, he has had his first pollutions; his sexual sensibility is normal.”

[510] “Goethe’s Letters,” vol. vii., p. 314: letter of December 29, 1787, from Rome to Karl August (Weimar, 1890).

[511] G. Merzbach, “Homosexuality and Occupation,” published in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, 1902, vol. iv., pp. 187-198.

[512] Cf. W. S., “Woman-Man on the Stage,” published in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, vol. ii., pp. 313-325.

[513] This writer is also the inventor of the word “homosexual,” which is found for the first time in his book.

[514] Magnus Hirschfeld, “Result of the Statistical Investigations regarding the Percentage of Homosexuals,” published in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, 1904, vol. vi., pp. 109-178.

[515] F. Karsch, “Uranism or Pæderasty and Tribadism among Savage Races,” published in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, 1901, vol. iii., pp. 72-201.

[516] “Traces of Contrary Sexuality among the Ancient Scandinavians: Reports of a Norwegian Literary Man,” published in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, 1902, vol. v., pp. 244-263.

[517] Regarding homosexuality in Japan, cf. also “Pæderasty in Japan,” by Suyewo Iwaya, published in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, 1902, vol. iv., pp. 264-271.

[518] In the second volume, now in course of preparation, of my work on “The Origin of Syphilis,” will be found a detailed critical investigation, based upon the most recent data, of homosexuality and pseudo-homosexuality in ancient times and during the middle ages.

[519] Cf. “Four Letters of Carl Heinrich Ulrichs (‘Numa Numantius’) to his Relatives,” published in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, 1899, vol. i., pp. 36-96 (with portrait).

[520] Ludwig Frey, “The Spiritual Life of Count Platen,” published in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, 1899, vol. i., pp. 159-214; and 1904, vol. vi., pp. 357-448.

[521] Numa Prätorius, “Michael Angelo as an Urning,” op. cit., 1900, vol. ii., pp. 254-267.

[522] F. Karsch, “Heinrich Hössli,” op. cit., 1903, vol. v., pp. 449-556. Hössli was the author of the work “Eros: the Greek Love of Men” (Glarus and St. Gallen, 1836 and 1838, 2 vols.), which, according to Karsch, represented for our own time what Plato’s “Symposium” and “Phædrus” represents for antiquity. Karsch gives an excellent table of the contents and an analysis of the books under consideration.

[523] J. E. Meisner, “Uranism,” p. 16 (Leipzig); also verbal communications by Meisner, who was personally acquainted with Bulthaupt, to myself.

[524] F. Karsch, “Our Sources for the Consideration of Reputed and Real Urnings,” “Johann von Müller the Historian (1752-1809),” published in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, 1902, vol. iv., pp. 349-457.

[525] L. S. A. M. von Römer, “Henry III., King of France and Poland,” op. cit., vol. iv., pp. 572-669.

[526] J. E. Meisner, op. cit., p. 17.

[527] Magnus Hirschfeld, “Sexual Transitional Stages,” Plate XXXII. (Leipzig, 1905).

[528] Op. cit., Plate XXXII.

[529] F. Karsch, “Duke August the Fortunate (1772-1822),” published in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, 1903, vol. v., pp. 615-693.

[530] Numa Prätorius, “Georges Eekhoud: a Preface,” published in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, 1900, vol. ii., pp. 268-277.

[531] G. Eekhoud, “An Illustrious Urning of the Seventeenth Century, Jerom Duquesnoy, the Flemish Sculptor,” op. cit., pp. 277-287.

[532] F. Karsch, “A. von Sternberg, the Novelist,” op. cit., 1902, vol. iv., pp. 458-571. He obtained sexual gratification by masturbating while looking at masculine posteriora, but also frequently had relations with women.

[533] F. Karsch, “Theodor Beza, the Reformer (1519-1605),” op. cit., pp. 291-349.

[534] H. J. Schouten, “The Alleged Pæderasty of the Reformer John Calvin,” op. cit., 1905, vol. vii., pp. 291-306.

[535] Hans Rau, “Franz Grillparzer and his Amatory Life.” (Berlin, 1903).

[536] The love of boys, the “pæderasty,” of the Greeks related to young adult men.

[537] I have used the established spelling for this word, although probably its more correct spelling would be “pedication” (derived from pedex = podex).

[538] Cf. P. Näcko, “The Kiss of the Homosexual,” published in the Archives for Criminal Anthropology and Criminal Statistics, by H. Gross, 1904, vol. xvii., Nos. 1, 2, p. 177. Cf. also the reports on the tongue kiss published in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, 1905, vol. vii., pp. 757-759.

[539] M. Hirschfeld, “Are Sexual Intermediate Stages Suited for Marriage?” published in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, 1901, vol. iii., pp. 37-71.

[540] We owe to Näcke the recognition of the importance of sexual dreams in the diagnosis of homosexuality and heterosexuality. Cf. his essay, “The Forensic Significance of Dreams,” published in the Archives for Criminal Anthropology, 1889, vol. iii.; also P. Näcke, “The Dream as the Most Delicate Reagent for the Detection of the Mode of Sexual Sensibility,” published in the Annual Review of Criminal Psychology, 1905.

[541] M. Hirschfeld, “Berlin’s Third Sex,” p. 26 (Berlin and Leipzig, 1905).

[542] The description of this interesting scene, with other details regarding the organization of the homosexuals of Paris, is found in the work of Pisanus Fraxi (Henry Spencer Ashbee). “Centuria Librorum Absconditorum,” pp. 406-416 (London, 1879) (based upon personal reports by Paul Lacroix).

[543] Ambroise Tardieu, “Offences against Morality from the Point of View of State Medicine,” German translation by F. W. Theile, pp. 133, 134 (Weimar, 1860).

[544] There are also numerous places of public resort which are indeed largely attended by urnings, but are also frequented by heterosexuals.

[545] Cf. in this connexion also the remarks of P. Näcke, “A Visit to the Homosexuals of Berlin,” published in the Archives of Criminal Anthropology, 1904, vol. xv., Nos. 1 and 2.

[546] Cf. P. Näcke, “Quelques Détails sur les Homosexuels de Paris,” published in the Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle, 1905, new series, iv., No. 138. See the reference in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, 1906, vol. viii., pp. 795, 796.

[547] Cf. “The Secrets of the Berlin Passage,” pp. 19, 20 (Berlin, 1877).

[548] Cf. Pisanus Fraxi, “Centuria Librorum Absconditorum,” pp. 404-406 (London, 1879) (according to the reports of Paul Lacroix, who himself was a witness of the occurrences).

[549] Op. cit., pp. 404-407.

[550] Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, 1906, vol. viii., pp. 796, 797. According to d’Estoc (“Paris-Eros,” pp. 207, 208), the male prostitutes in these brothels are more especially men from southern countries—Italians, Orientals, Berbers, and negroes.

[551] Cf. Ludwig Frey, “Characterization of Blackmail,” published in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, 1899, vol. i., pp. 71-96.

[552] Cf. Numa Prætorius, “The Criminal Character of Homosexual Intercourse, Considered Historically and Critically,” published in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, 1899, vol. i., pp. 97-158.

[553] Cf. Z. Richter, “Does § 175 afford any Protection? A Criminalogical Study,” published in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, 1900, vol. ii., pp. 30-52.

[554] “Opinions of Roman Catholic Priests on the Attitude of Christianity towards the Criminal Prosecution of Homosexual Love” (Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, 1900, vol. ii., pp. 161-203); “What Position should the Church Assume towards Homosexual Love and its Criminal Prosecution?” by an Evangelical Theologian (op. cit., vol. iii., pp. 204-210); Caspar Wirz, “Urnings before the Church and Scripture” (Orthodox-Evangelical) (op. cit., vol. iv., pp. 63-108); “Homosexuality in the Bible,” by a Catholic priest (op. cit., vol. iv., pp. 199-243); “From the Memoirs of a (Catholic) Priest” (op. cit., pp. 1172-1178).

[555] A letter from Emile Zola to Dr. Laupts on the problem of homosexuality; translated, with an introduction, by Rudolf von Beulwitz (Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, 1905, vol. ii., pp. 371-386).

[556] “What should the People know about the Third Sex?” An instructive work, published by the Scientific and Humanitarian Committee (Leipzig, 1904).

[557] Cf. “The Truth about Myself: Autobiography of a Contrary-Sexual,” published in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, vol. iii., pp. 292-307.

[558] M. F., “How I See the Matter,” op. cit., pp. 308-312.

[559] Cf. Anna Rüling, “What Interest has the Woman’s Movement in the Solution of the Homosexual Problem?” (Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, vol. vii., pp. 131-151).

[560] Arduin, “The Woman’s Question and Sexual Intermediate Stages” (op. cit., 1900, vol. ii., pp. 211-223).

[561] W. Hammer, “Tribadism in Berlin,” p. 97 (Berlin, 1906).

[562] Cf. “A Description of an Urnindes’ Ball,” given by M. Hirschfeld, “Berlin’s Third Sex,” pp. 56, 57.

[563] Cf. Martial d’Estoc, “Paris-Eros,” p. 59 et seq.

[564] Cf. F. Karsch, “Pæderasty and Tribadism among Animals as recorded in Literature,” published in the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, 1900, vol. ii., pp. 126-160; P. Näcke, “Pæderasty in Animals,” published in the Archives of Criminal Anthropology, 1904, vol. xiv., pp. 361, 362.

[565] L. Krehl, “The Disturbance of Chemical Correlations in the Organism” (Leipzig, 1907). Here, on p. 3, we find: “If we are compelled to assume that many varieties of cells in their rudimentary condition already bear the imprint of a masculine or feminine nature, still this masculine or feminine nature doubtless only undergoes its real development under the enduring chemical influence of the ovaries and the testicles.”

[566] This latter view has been maintained especially by Max Katte, in his treatise “The Purpose of the Existence of Homosexuals” (Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages, vol. iv., pp. 272-288), but he completely ignores the evolutionary points of view. In the same way, Hans Freimark neglects them (“The Meaning of Uranism,” p. 14; Leipzig, 1906); he regards homosexuality as a transition to a state in which “mankind will no longer need gross material contact for purposes of reproduction.”

CHAPTER XX
PSEUDO-HOMOSEXUALITY (GREEK AND ORIENTAL PÆDERASTY, HERMAPHRODITISM, BISEXUAL VARIETIES)

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XX

Connexion between pseudo-homosexuality and bisexuality — Great antiquity of the idea of bisexuality — Magnus Hirschfeld’s treatise on bisexuality — Bisexuality of the time of puberty — Pseudo-homosexual tendencies at this period of life — Examples (Gutzkow, Grillparzer) — On the large scale — Analogy to the pseudo-heterosexuality of youthful homosexuals — Persistence of bisexuality — The “Junores” — Delusion of sexual metamorphosis — Cultivation of pæderasts — Women-men and men-women — Brouardel’s type of effeminate Parisian street-arab — Homosexuality in the state of trance — Pseudo-homosexuality owing to the lack of heterosexual intercourse — Anal masturbators — Pseudo-homosexuality of prostitutes — Temporary pseudo-tribadism in Paris — Pseudo-uranism as a popular custom — Explanation of the Greek love of boys — Its fundamental difference from modern true homosexuality — Value of the noble asexual friendship of men for men — A letter of Gutzkow’s — The Platonic Eros and Græco-Oriental pæderasty — Bisexuality in German romanticism — Explanation of this — Hermaphroditism — Previous under-estimation of the importance of hermaphroditism — Recent researches — True hermaphroditism — Pseudo-hermaphroditism — Male and female apparent hermaphrodites.

CHAPTER XX

The dispute whether homosexuality is a congenital or an acquired phenomenon was one hitherto impossible to settle, because the whole province of those homosexual manifestations for which I suggest the name of “pseudo-homosexuality” had not been separated with sufficient clearness from true homosexuality for the essential difference between the two classes to receive accurate expression. True homosexuality is congenital. It is an original, permanent, essential outflow of the personality: pseudo-homosexuality, on the contrary, is either a homosexual sensibility suggested from without, transient, and not associated with the essence of the personality; or else it is merely apparent homosexuality, the illusion being dependent upon hermaphroditism or upon some other physical or mental abnormality.

The pseudo-homosexuality of the former category is explicable only by means of the fact of “bisexuality,” the existence of which has been scientifically proved only within recent years. By bisexuality we understand the possibility of two distinct modes of sexual perception occurring in one and the same person; and this, again, finds its explanation in the bisexual germinal vestiges which exist in every individual. There remains in every man a vestige of woman, in every woman a vestige of man, in a sense in a state of potential energy, which, however, is capable, by the action of various external influences, of being transformed into kinetic energy; but this vestige always plays a small part in comparison with the true specific sexual nature. This bisexuality was discussed in an earlier chapter of this book (pp. 39, 40 and 70, 71), and was there characterized as a phenomenon secondary in every respect, to which no great importance could be attached. The idea of bisexuality is not new; neither Fliess nor Weininger was its discoverer. It was already known to the ancients.[567] Heinse, in “Ardinghello,” gives expression to the idea in almost the same words as Weininger (see p. 40). Recently Magnus Hirschfeld [568] has collected the historical and literary details of the subject of bisexuality.

Bisexuality manifests itself more especially at the period of puberty, during the time of obscure yearnings and impulses—the so-called indifferent period which precedes the awakening of the sexual impulse. Physical bisexuality, therefore, often enough corresponds to psychical bisexuality. In the boy there is a trace of girlishness, in the girl a trace of boyishness; we have the two types of the dreamy youth and of the tomboy. Then there readily arise delicate inclinations between individuals of like sexes, especially as the result of continuous companionship, so that an obscure impulse of transient homosexual perception manifests itself between two boys, or between two girls, of the same age; or, again, this transient homosexuality may take the form of a worshipful admiration of an older person of the same sex. Gutzkow distinguished these two forms of pseudo-homosexuality, of which he had had experience in his own person. In his “Secular Pictures,” vol. i., pp. 50, 51 (Frankfort, 1856), he remarks:

“The feeling of love originates in most feminine natures, not from the quiet consideration of the secrets of love, but from a magnetic attraction towards other individuals, whom they regard as being better and more beautiful than themselves. Commonly the love for a man is preceded by an often illimitable love for a woman. Young girls fall in love with older girls—a phenomenon which often occurs also in boys, as I myself experienced when a boy, feeling the most ardent passion for one of my comrades, who now is extremely disagreeable to me.”

A similar explanation suffices for the transient tender love exhibited by Grillparzer towards Altmüller (cf. Grillparzer’s “Diary,” edition of Glossy and Sauer, pp. 24-26; Stuttgart). In boarding-schools, barracks, and training-schools we often find these pseudo-homosexual liaisons. The prison is said by Parent-Duchatelet to be a high-school of tribadism. He and other French authors report the epidemic diffusion of homosexual practices in prisons for women. Whenever homosexuality appears suddenly in an epidemic manner, affecting large numbers of individuals, we have to do, not with genuine original uranism, but with pseudo-homosexuality. As regards boarding-schools, which exhibit a lascivious environment extremely open to manifestations of this kind, Hans von Kahlenberg, in his “Nixchen,” p. 41 (Vienna, 1904), has vividly described the matter.

Youthful bisexuality is to be found in slighter forms in almost every human being, but it is a typical phenomenon of puberty, and disappears with the passing of this epoch, to make room for[541] the completely developed heterosexuality of the adult. There occurs also in homosexuals, in whom homosexual sensibility first makes itself definitely manifest after puberty, a quite analogous inclination to the other sex before and during puberty. Thus, a typical homosexual twenty-three years of age, who now exhibits horror feminæ, related to me that at the age of sixteen or seventeen years he was very fond of girls, and pursued them a great deal, but without definite sexual desire. This transient obscure attraction of homosexuals towards the other sex is a kind of “pseudo-heterosexuality.”

Sometimes bisexuality will continue after the period of puberty, and in exceptional cases will persist throughout life. According to Hirschfeld, this occurs especially in men of genius, and in those inclined to become priests or schoolmasters. But in most cases even then one or other impulsive tendency—the heterosexual or the homosexual—is predominant. These individuals have been called “psychical hermaphrodites” (von Krafft-Ebing). These bisexual varieties may manifest themselves in very various ways, in most cases gynandry or androgyny is purely spiritual, and finds expression only in association with particular tendencies, especially fetichistic tendencies. The two following very remarkable cases throw a clear light on this peculiar form of bisexuality. We may as well accept for the more or less specific form of bisexuality described in these cases the suggested name of “junores.”

1.The case of a psychical hermaphrodite:

N. N., an American journalist, thirty-three years of age, writes: “From earliest youth I had an impulse to appear dressed in women’s clothing, and whenever I had an opportunity I had elegant body linen made for me, silken chemises, and whatever was the fashion. Even as a boy I used to borrow my sister’s clothing and wear it secretly. Only later, after my mother’s death, was I able to give free rein to my wishes, and I came into the possession of a wardrobe resembling that of the most elegant lady of fashion. Although compelled in the daytime to appear as a man, still I wear, under these clothes, a complete outfit of women’s underclothing—stays, open-work stockings, and everything proper to a woman, a bracelet also, and patent-leather women’s boots, with elegant high heels. When the evening comes, I breathe more freely. Then I can throw off the burdensome mask, and feel wholly woman. Wrapped in a tea-gown of an elegant cut, and wearing the finest underclothing, I am able to occupy myself in my favourite employments, among which may be mentioned the study of the primitive history of mankind, or I give myself up to some routine duties. A feeling of repose takes possession of me, such as is impossible during the day, when I have to wear men’s clothing. Although fully woman, I do not feel any need to give myself to a man.[542] I feel flattered, certainly, if, when appearing in women’s dress, I please others, but I have no definite sexual desire towards my own sex. It may be that I have not yet discovered my alter ego. Notwithstanding all my well-developed feminine customs, I married, and am the father of a powerful, beautiful girl, who exhibits no tendencies whatever resembling mine. My wife, an energetic, cultured lady, was fully aware of my passion, but hoped in the course of time to wean me from it. In this, however, she was not successful. I performed my marital duties, but I gave myself up all the more to my customs. My wife obtained a separation, and at the time at which I now write she is intimate with another man, and is pregnant. My physique is thoroughly masculine, with the exception of the pelvis and of the calves of the legs, which are feminine in form. Summary: Outward appearance masculine. When wearing women’s dress I have completely the corresponding figure—waist, 20 inches; chest measurement, 34 inches; height, 176 centimetres (5 feet 9 inches); weight 125 pounds. Hands long and narrow, sensibility feminine. When wearing men’s clothing I feel a certain uneasiness. When I see an elegant lady or actress, I think how well I should appear in her dress. I have an abundance of earrings, pearls, lace scarves, and similar articles of adornment, and at a dance I give myself up to the idea of how delightful it would be to appear in women’s dress. If it were possible, I should completely abandon men’s clothing.”

2. “At about the age of fifteen and a half years I began to take an interest in women’s dress. I felt an inward impulse, which drove me to the windows of the shops displaying articles of women’s dress—corsets, etc. In shoemakers’ windows it was the women’s boots and shoes which attracted my attention rather than the men’s. The same was the case with dress fabrics, among which self-coloured materials for women’s dress pleased me best. Beautiful blue stuffs (satin) especially attracted me; also, I had an ardent love for blue velvet. As time passed, I felt a desire to possess such things, and to wear them. But since at home I had no means to spend in this way, whilst the desire sometimes was so violent as to give me no rest, I endeavoured to resist it with all the religious and rational grounds I could call to mind; yet this was of little help to me, for whenever I met a woman clothed to my taste, the longing was immediately reawakened. If I met a woman whose appearance aroused this desire (which henceforth I will call my ‘costume-stimulus’), I looked round, in order to overcome this costume-stimulus, to try to find a woman who displeased me. Within me there raged a conflict (which at that time was obscure even to myself) between the masculine nature and the feminine. One day the feminine in me gained the victory, as it impelled me (when my parents were absent from the house) to try on some of my sisters’ clothes; but as soon as I had put on the corset I had an erection, immediately followed by an ejaculation of semen. This gave me no gratification; on the contrary, I was very angry that putting on the corset should have given rise to an ejaculation of semen. At varying intervals I repeated this attempt to dress myself as a woman, and in doing so always endeavoured to avoid anything that could give rise to an erection. Gradually I succeeded in this matter of dressing; but I was now consumed also with the desire for caressing a feminine being, and therefore the dressing alone failed to satisfy me. Moreover,[543] this dressing-up also failed to give me real pleasure, because I did not possess any costume which really suited me; but still, apart from sexual excitement, it produced a feeling of well-being. After I had dressed up as a woman, my imagination always busied itself with the idea of how beautiful it would be if I had a beloved before whom I might display myself unrestrainedly, just as I then was. In these fancies I always pictured to myself a girl of my own age, with long hair and well-developed breasts and hips. This imagination generally resulted in a pollution, which I sometimes endeavoured to prevent by taking off the articles of clothing as rapidly as possible.

“By a colleague I was initiated into the practice of masturbation. He explained to me that if I had no woman who would give herself to me, I was in a position to satisfy myself. The first time I resisted the impulse; but the costume-stimulus tormented me, and I had discovered that after a seminal emission I was at peace for a time; moreover, when dressing up, I was always exposed to the danger of being discovered, and so I began the practice of self-abuse. Masturbation did not give me proper gratification, and therefore, after practising it, I always experienced a great feeling of regret and also a feeling of exhaustion; moreover, it did not produce the feeling of well-being which resulted from dressing up as a woman.

“I was shy, and was very readily embarrassed in the presence of the female sex; I therefore avoided seeing much of women; I avoided it, also, on account of my costume-stimulus. It would have been preferable to me if, physically, Nature had made me a woman, so that I could have gone about freely among girls of my own age. For the reasons already given I did not learn to dance; moreover, the turning round made me very giddy, and from the age of seventeen and a half to nineteen years I suffered from attacks of syncope. At about the age of twenty-two years I fell in love with my present wife, who attracted me on account of her grace, her figure, and her character. My wife was even more bashful than myself. My inclination drew me towards her, but on account of my costume-stimulus, I avoided being alone with her. From now onwards I began to consider what I could possibly do in order to explain to my betrothed my true nature, but all the attempts which I made were failures. After six months’ engagement, I left the place where my betrothed was living. The engagement lasted seven years before we were married. The principal reason for the delay was that we were both impecunious. When I was alone with my betrothed, I was always thinking of my costume-stimulus. Shortly before we were married I told my betrothed in a letter of my peculiar tendency, for I felt it was my duty to do so. She could not understand how I could find pleasure in dressing myself up as a woman. At first she was indifferent regarding my costume-stimulus; later she thought it was morbid, an impulse bordering on the insane. I often had to call my imagination to my help in order to produce an erection. My marriage became more unhappy year by year. My wife, on account of my morbid tendency, suspected me of all possible perversities, and was of opinion that an individual predisposed as I was could not be capable of true, upright love for a woman. How I was to get woman’s clothing to my taste I did not know. In my marriage I was no better off as regards the costume-stimulus, but rather worse. I had more sleepless nights on account of this costume-stimulus[544] than I had had before I married. As time passed, I became continually more ill-humoured, and was occasionally cross to my wife, which afterwards made me very sorry. In the sleepless nights I puzzled how I could possibly manage that my wife should not concern herself any more about the costume-stimulus, and how I could possibly fulfil my wishes in this respect. Gradually I succeeded in winning my wife to my side to this extent, that she agreed to make a costume for me, but I must not have many such.

“My wife was always looking for a reason. She believed that dressing up must have some cause, or must produce in me some effect, which I was unwilling to tell her. She was continually tormenting me about this; she would not believe that I spoke the truth, and she no longer felt any confidence in me. She believed that every one must perceive that I had this morbid impulse. She endeavoured to learn something about the matter from other women. Those whom she asked could only tell her evil and common things about men with tendencies like mine; some said I must be unconditionally an urning; others that I must have intercourse with other women behind my wife’s back; others that I wanted to lay aside men’s clothing in order to please girls under age, and so on. I suffered horribly from these false accusations.

“I endeavoured once again, in an essay I composed, which I entitled ‘The Junores,’ to make the matter clear to my wife. By junores I indicated men who wished to assume, or who did assume, the outward appearance of women in the matter of clothing, demeanour, and figure, but who sexually were masculine. All this was of no help to me. Our life together became continually more unbearable with the lapse of time; often there were scenes which had the most depressing effect on my mind. After violent scenes there occurred in me nocturnal pollutions, accompanied by no sensation of pleasure; also after these scenes erections were for a long time incomplete, so that a kind of impotence ensued.

“After every new accusation which my wife made against me I avoided going home in the evening. I wandered for hours in by-streets, overwhelmed by a feeling of futility and vacuity; my nerves all vibrated; sometimes I could not keep my limbs still. If I had had no children, or if I had known that they would be properly cared for, I should have known what to do in such a mood. One thing still torments me. Will my children be hereditarily tainted?”

I have myself seen both of these cases. The men concerned appear somewhat nervous, but they are otherwise quite healthy and manly, and both deny that they feel any sexual inclination towards men. The desire to wear women’s clothing, and to feel as a woman, may also make its appearance as a morbid phenomenon later in life, in the form of the “delusion of sexual metamorphosis” (metamorphosis sexualis paranoica); or it may be artificially induced, as among the ancient Scythians and among the Mexican “mujerados.” These latter are selected as men originally most powerful, and entirely free from any feminine appearance, and by incessant riding on horseback and by excessive[545] masturbation they are made impotent (through atrophy of the genital organs) and effeminate, so that there may even occur a secondary development of the breasts (Hammond). All this belongs to the category of pseudo-homosexuality.

With regard to numerous historical women-men and men-women—such as, for example, the celebrated Chevalier d’Eon, Mademoiselle de Maupin (immortalized by Gautier in the romance of this name), and many other women going about in men’s clothing, or men going about in women’s clothing—it is, as a rule, no longer possible to determine whether they were genuinely homosexual, pseudo-homosexual, or bisexual.

I regard, however, the interesting type of effeminate Parisian street-arab, described by Brouardel at the Second Congress of Criminal Anthropologists at Berlin in the year 1889, as characteristically and originally homosexual.

“At the age from twelve to sixteen years the lad is still small, grasps ideas very slowly, and has little will-power. At the time of puberty he has experienced an inhibition of development, and his bodily growth has remained stationary. The penis is thin and flaccid, the testicles are small, the pubic hair is scanty, the skin is smooth, and the beard is very thin; the skeleton does not develop fully, like that of the normal male; the pelvis becomes wide, and the general outlines of the body become rounded (potelées) because there is an undoubted deposit of fat in the subcutaneous tissues, so that the breasts also become enlarged.”

This state persists. Brouardel found it still present in individuals of twenty-five to thirty years of age. These children of great towns are characterized by intellectual sterility and by incapacity for procreation. This type is found also among the well-to-do middle classes, and from such, according to Brouardel, the décadents are recruited, while the effeminate gamins either become professional pæderasts, or undertake the preparation of articles de Paris.[569]

Magnus Hirschfeld gives an account of a peculiar form of pseudo-homosexuality occurring in an individual who in ordinary life was asexual.[570]

The person concerned was an extremely effeminate and neurasthenic member of a spiritualistic club, who in his normal condition felt sensual attraction neither to woman nor to man,[546] but who in the trance state felt himself to be an Indian woman, and then became inspired with an ardent passion for one of his fellow-members.

Also in chronic intoxications, especially in alcoholism, pseudo-homosexuality may make its appearance, in some cases as an enduring and in others as a transient condition.

An important category of pseudo-homosexuality is constituted by persons in whom it arises owing to insufficient opportunity for sexual intercourse with members of the opposite sex—as, for example, in the absence of women on board ship, in monasteries, in prisons for men, in the French foreign legion; and as regards lack of men in nunneries, and in the case of unmarried or unhappily married women, who supply a large contingent to pseudo-tribadism.[571] An account of pæderasty in prisons is given by Charles Perrier, “La Pédérastie en Prison” (Lyons, 1900).

In this category we must also mention the “debauchee pæderasts” for which truly existent kind of pseudo-homosexuals I propose the name of “anal masturbators.” These are heterosexual individuals in whom either primarily the anus plays the part of an erogenic zone, or in whom this region becomes erogenic in consequence of the exhaustion of all other varieties of sexual stimulus. Hammond, von Schrenck-Notzing, and Taxil have proved the existence of these anal masturbators and the frequent occurrence in them of pseudo-homosexual tendencies.[572]

An interesting phenomenon is the pseudo-homosexuality of female prostitutes. We certainly encounter among prostitutes a number of genuine tribades, who owe their adoption of professional prostitution to the existence of this original tendency to homosexual love, because in their relations with men the heart plays, and can play, no part (see above, p. 434). Prostitutes who are heterosexual by nature may become homosexual for two reasons: first, by intercourse with, and owing to the influence of, truly Lesbian associates, in whom the inward sense of solidarity possessed by all prostitutes is especially strong; in the second place, in consequence of the antipathy to intercourse with men, created by their experience of life, and striking always deeper roots, for they learn to know man only in his brutal sexual coarseness. The continuous compulsion to which they are subjected to satisfy the animal sensuality of worn-out roués[547] by the most disgusting procedures ultimately produces in them the most unconquerable antipathy to the male sex, so that all the delicate sensibility of which they are capable is directed towards their own sex. The homosexual union appears to them, as Eulenburg rightly points out (“Sexual Neuropathy,” pp. 143, 144), to be something “higher, purer, and comparatively blameless.” They regard it in a more ideal light than sexual intercourse with men. Women owners of brothels also favour tribadistic love, because thereby they safeguard the prostitutes in their houses from the influence of souteneurs.[573]

As J. de Vaudère describes in his “Demi-Sexes,” pseudo-tribadism is especially diffused in Paris as a fashionable practice, and manifests itself here in the form described by Martineau,[574] of a temporary homosexuality, which is subserved by an extensive prostitution, and which clearly exhibits its pseudo-homosexual characteristics by its intermittent appearance in the form of spiritual epidemics.

Unquestionably we have to do with pseudo-homosexuality also in all those cases in which homosexual love makes its appearance as a national custom among a percentage widely exceeding the usual percentage of ordinary homosexuality. The typical example of this kind is the love of boys of ancient Greece—“pæderasty,” in the better sense of the word. Since in this work I am discussing the sexual life of the present day, I do not propose here to deal at length with this interesting topic, and must refer the reader to the second volume (in course of preparation) of my work on “The Origin of Syphilis,” in which I have discussed the subject at considerable length.

Since the Hellenic love of boys was a widely diffused custom, the origin of which may be directly referred to Crete, indirectly to the Orient, it is evident that only a fraction of the pæderasts can have been true homosexuals. The majority were pseudo-homosexuals. It is possible that the custom was first introduced by original homosexuals, and also that it was subsequently maintained by these. But soon it became a general practice for a man to regard his wife simply as a “procreative machine,” and to seek for true spiritual love from a youth. Since to the men of antiquity woman had no soul and no individuality, the love of boys appeared to them something natural and morally justifiable. It would, however, be completely unnatural if for the[548] heterosexual community of our own time we wished to reintroduce the antique love of boys, since we modern men have learned that woman also has a soul; that she also has the same justification as man for the development of her human nature; that she can be, and ought to be, the object of individual, spiritual, profound love. I rejoice, that those who are fighting for the rights of the genuine congenital homosexuals, that men like Magnus Hirschfeld, Numa Prætorius, and other investigators, have recently expressed themselves in energetic terms as opposed to those whose aim is a sort of propaganda for the diffusion of the love of men among heterosexuals—whose endeavour it is, in fact, to introduce a formal cult of uranism. This movement can do nothing but harm to the just cause of homosexuals.

No one can prize more highly than I do myself a noble friendship between men, which at the present day is far too little practised;[575] no one can wish more heartily than I do that men could speak to one another of love, without being exposed to the suspicion of homosexuality.[576] In a certain sense I am in thorough agreement with the beautiful demonstrations of Heinrich Schurtz and Benedict Friedländer on masculine friendship as a normal fundamental impulse of humanity and as the foundation of social intercourse.[577] But this friendship between heterosexual men, based upon natural sympathy and community of occupation, has not the least sexual admixture, whereas only in the beautiful dialogues of Plato can the Greek love of boys, which some advocate at the present day, be ascribed to the spiritual Eros.[578] In[549] reality, however, the Greek love of boys degenerated into the grossest sensuality, since the youth stimulated sexual desire like a woman, and was used as such,[579] so that the originally ideal character of the relationship disappeared.

In the Oriental love of boys [580] this ideal element was probably never present, and sensual relationships played the principal part from the very first. The boys’ brothels of the Mohammedan East were visited by heterosexual men just as much as by homosexuals. The same men derived pleasure from intercourse both with women and with boys. Bisexuality was in this case put into practice as a matter of course.

German civilization also passed through an epoch in which bisexual activities of feeling were clearly manifest in both sexes, without, however, leading at any time to the physical practice of pseudo-homosexuality. This remarkable period was the time of transition between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The “Sturm und Drang” had quieted down; its fiercely active forces had been controlled; its vigorous will had been pacified, and guided in concrete directions; its kinetic energy had in a sense become potential in two new formative and emotional tendencies of the time, which progressed side by side, and, notwithstanding all the differences between them, influenced one another mutually to a considerable extent—classicism and romanticism. Classicism, under the stimulating influence of Winckelmann, looked back to the “noble simplicity and quiet greatness” of the antique, to the beauty exhibited simply in form, whose wonder Goethe more than any other has made manifest to us. Romanticism, on the other hand, was the term employed to indicate the boundless enlargement and increasing profundity of the emotional life, of which the formless is especially characteristic. This appears most clearly in the work of Novalis, Tieck, and Wackenroder; but both tendencies meet in the sphere of the sexual. I need only mention the name of Winckelmann to indicate how markedly the purely æsthetic contemplation,[581][550] and the purely æsthetic enjoyment, of the beautiful human form must have favoured the development of homosexual modes of perception. We may in this connexion speak of the “Greek Renascence.” On the other hand, the romantic mood, the deepening of the individual life of feeling, the eternal searching for new, peculiar sensations, was very apt to awaken those activities of feeling slumbering so deeply beneath the threshold of consciousness, which we to-day denote by the term “bisexuality.” In Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde,” for example, we find frequent allusions to this bisexual mode of perception, as in the place in which he speaks of a confusion of the masculine and feminine rôles in the love contest. When, in so much of the published “Correspondence” of this period, kisses, embraces, caresses, and tendernesses between two men or two women appear to fly to and fro, it may be that this is neither to be regarded as purely homosexual perception, nor as a simply conventional contemporary custom, but rather as the very characteristic expression of a tendency to bisexual imaginations and dreams induced by the hypertension, overdriving, and artificial increase, of the emotional life. Thus only, for example, can we explain the passionate profusion of tenderness which appears in many of the letters of Jean Paul, written by him to men; for Jean Paul was unquestionably heterosexual.[582]

The same is true of the women of this time. According to Welcker, the friendships of the women of the romantic period exhibited this character of a Platonic love. Since the dominion of romanticism “influenced emotional young men in very various ways, in more than one morally strict circle, two women friends were so inseparable and so indispensable to one another that those round them used sometimes to laugh at this amativeness, of which, however, a serious suspicion was impossible.”[583]

An interesting proof of the existence of pseudo-homosexuality[551] among the women of that time is afforded by a passage [584] from a romance by Ernst Wagner (1760-1812), one of the scholars of Jean Paul. The book is entitled “Isidora,” and in it the Lesbian love-scene between the Princess Isidora and her friend Olympia is very plainly described, although both of them at the same time are passionately in love with men.

The last and not unimportant phenomenal form of pseudo-homosexuality is hermaphroditism. It is a remarkable fact that only in recent years has science attempted a serious study of hermaphroditic states, which previously, as Blumreich [585] points out, were to a large extent ignored, both as regards their social importance and their frequency. It was the great service of Neugebauer [586] and Magnus Hirschfeld [587] that they drew general attention to these remarkable sexual intermediate stages, and proved their eminent practical importance, which had previously been suspected by no one. How completely the matter had been ignored is proved by the remarkable fact that the new Civil Code for the German Empire completely ignores the juridical determinations of the former Prussian Civil Code regarding hermaphrodites, alleging that there existed no persons whose sex was indeterminate or indeterminable!

The so-called “true hermaphroditism”—the condition in which male and female reproductive glands (testicles and ovaries) are met with in a single individual—is one of the greatest rarities. By the investigations of Salen (1899), Garré-Simon (1903), and Ludwig Pick (1905), the existence of such individuals with mixed[552] reproductive glands (“ovotestes”) has been proved as an actual fact. Walter Simon, in the one hundred and seventy-second volume of Virchow’s Archives, has described the rare case of true hermaphroditism observed by Garré. In a person twenty-one years of age, brought up as a man, and having thoroughly masculine feelings, there suddenly occurred, associated with swelling of the breasts (gynecomasty), monthly recurring hæmorrhages, proceeding from the supposed intertesticular fissure; also from time to time, associated with voluptuous erection of the penis, there was discharged whitish mucus, and the libidinous ideas connected with this discharge referred always to women. The physical structure and facial expression of this individual were feminine; the build of the thorax, the shoulders, and the shape of the arms exhibited male characteristics. In a right-sided swelling, resembling an inguinal hernia, were found a testicle-ovary (Ger. Hodeneierstock), an epididymis, a parovarium, a spermatic cord, and a Fallopian tube.

More frequent than these cases, in which naturally the determination of sex is practically impossible, are cases of pseudo-hermaphroditism, which also possess the greatest importance in connexion with the problem of pseudo-homosexuality. In these cases of pseudo-hermaphroditism the reproductive glands are, in fact, distinctively male or female, but the characteristics of the excretory organs and of the external genital organs do not enable us to determine the sex, for they are in part male, in part female, and in part completely undifferentiated, which is to be explained as dependent upon an incomplete or entirely wanting differentiation of the primitively identical rudiment of the external genital organs of the two sexes (inhibition of the processes of growth at some stage of development). Thus there arises pseudo-hermaphroditismus masculinus, in cases in which the genital fissure is not completely closed, so that the urethra possesses a fissure below (hypospadias); also the two halves of the scrotum may fail to join, so that a fissure is left between them, simulating a vaginal inlet. Since in these cases the testicles are commonly retained within the abdominal cavity, or else appear in the inguinal region, simulating an inguinal hernia, the penis is believed to be a kind of enlarged clitoris, and the individual is mistaken for a woman (erreur de sexe). If it further happens that, on account of the supposed inguinal hernia, the individual is ordered to wear, and continues to wear, a truss, the testicular tissue disappears completely as a result of pressure atrophy, and the correct diagnosis becomes more difficult than ever. I[553] recently saw a case of this kind in a male hermaphrodite, twenty-two years of age, who had been brought up as a woman. He had, however, always felt attraction towards women, and, having a large membrum, he was able, notwithstanding the existence of hypospadias, to complete regular coitus. In the ejaculated semen the examining physician had not found any spermatozoa; but in this case the testicles had doubtless atrophied in consequence of the wearing of a truss. This pseudo-hermaphrodite has recently published the history of his upbringing as a “woman.” The work is of great interest from the psychological point of view, and is entitled “A Man’s Years as a Girl,” by “Nobody” (Berlin, 1907).

Where the reproductive glands are female there results a pseudo-hermaphroditismus femininus in cases in which the external genital organs of this female pseudo-hermaphrodite exhibit a certain similarity with the genital organs of the male—for example, when the clitoris is exceptionally large, and the labia majora have grown together, so that the vaginal inlet appears to be wanting. In this case also there may be a mistake in diagnosis, and, consequently, the individual having been educated as a man, apparent homosexuality may result when the natural sexual inclination towards the male manifests itself in due course.

In both varieties of pseudo-hermaphroditism there exist very various anatomical and physiological possibilities in respect of the relationship of the secondary sexual characters to the anatomical character of the reproductive glands, in respect of the menstrual equivalents in male pseudo-hermaphrodites, in respect of the relationship of the sexual impulse to the reproductive glands, in respect of the greater or less strength of the impulse, in respect of periodic genital hæmorrhages in male pseudo-hermaphrodites, in respect of possible sexual aberrations, etc. For more exact details I must refer the reader to the works of Neugebauer and Hirschfeld. Here I will only refer to a case described by the last-named author, of a male pseudo-hermaphrodite, forty years of age, Friderike S., who had been brought up as a “woman,” who at a very early age had exhibited an inclination towards women only, and an antipathy to sexual intercourse with men. In this individual a reproductive gland resembling a testicle could be detected, out of which there issued a structure resembling the spermatic cord. In the left inguinal canal was an atrophied reproductive gland of indeterminate character. The membrum was something between penis and[554] clitoris. The labia majora and minora bounded a short cæcal vagina. Internal female reproductive organs could not be detected. On the other hand, there appeared to be a prostate gland. In the sexual secretion, which was discharged by a different opening from the urine, H. Friedenthal was able to detect very numerous completely normal spermatozoa, whereby the male character of this pseudo-woman was completely proved, and whereby also the alleged “homosexual” tendencies were now shown to be heterosexual.

CHAPTER XXI
ALGOLAGNIA (SADISM AND MASOCHISM)

“We must continually keep before our minds the fact that in no other department of life so much as in the sexual life do we find side by side, and closely associated each with the other, the noblest and the basest, the superhuman and the subhuman, because the finest and the deepest roots of our spiritual and bodily existence spring, for the most part, from this subsoil; and we must remember that man would not be able to sink so deep, far beneath the level of animality, if he had not first raised himself by his own powers, in conflict with Nature and with himself, through an immeasurable height of civilization.”—Albert Eulenburg.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXI

Algolagnia, or painful voluptuousness — Biological roots of algolagnia — Its rôle in the civilized life of mankind — Connexion between pain and voluptuousness — Pain in the vita sexualis — Sadism and masochism — Physiological algonagnistic phenomena — The sexual enjoyment of spiritual pain — Philosophical views on this subject — Weltschmerz and pessimism as sources of pleasure — The joy of grief — Cruelty as intermediator in the production of algolagnia — Theories of cruelty — The enjoyment of power — Nietzsche’s justification of cruelty as a factor in civilization — Sadistic and masochistic phenomena of civilization — Examples from the present day — Increase of sexual desire by means of emotional concussion — Evolutionary theory of algolagnia — Cruelty of woman — Debauchees and prostitutes — “Tropical frenzy” as an especial form of sadism — Various explanations of tropical frenzy — Influence of sexual differences between man and woman — Genesis of the “hen-pecked” state and of “mistress-rule” — Coquetry and flirtation — Frequent association with sadism and masochism — Flagellation as the principal form of algolagnia — Imitation of physiological algolagnia — Exciting influence of massage and friction — Various factors of the sexual influence of passive flagellation — Active flagellation — Chance occurrences leading to the development of flagellomania — Sexual influence of whipping upon children — Examples — “Schoolmaster’s flagellantism” (Dippoldism) — Examples — Flagellation and prostitution — Flagellation brothels — Inclination of woman to flagellation — A Parisian “school” — “Corset discipline” — Sadistic bodily injuries and lust-murder — Characteristics of lust-murder — “Girl stabbers” — Other forms of sadistic bodily injury — Sexual vampirism — Offences against property committed from sadistic motives — Vitriol throwing — Sadistic arson — Sexual kleptomania — Symbolic forms of sadism — Verbal sadism — Erotic dictionaries — Verbal exhibitionism — Example — Other varieties of symbolical algolagnia — Satanism — Wide diffusion of passive algolagnia, of masochism — Passive algolagnia — Examples — Masochistic instrumentarium — A masochistic “torture-chamber” — Masochistic prostitution — Letter of a masochist — A “slave” — Characterization of male masochists — A very typical case of masochism — Masochism in women — Letter of a female masochist.

Appendix: A contribution to the psychology of the Russian revolution (History of the development of an algolagnistic revolutionist).

CHAPTER XXI

The homosexual and pseudo-homosexual phenomena described in the preceding chapters constitute a far from universal variety of sexual impulse, but “algolagnia” is much commoner. This name was introduced by Schrenck-Notzing as a general term for the phenomena of sadism and masochism, since these two sexual aberrations are closely related one to the other.

Algolagnia, or painful lasciviousness, if we exclude from consideration its most extreme manifestations, such as lust-murder and suicide from lust, belongs unquestionably to the most widely diffused of sexual aberrations; indeed, in its slighter forms it is almost universal. An experienced woman told Havelock Ellis [588] that she had known only one single man who was entirely free from sadistic lust; and, on the other hand, there are few women in whose sexuality no algolagnistic phenomena are demonstrable. This is natural, for algolagnia, differing in this respect from other sexual aberrations, has the deepest biological roots. Its nucleus, pleasure in the pain of others or in one’s own pain (the term “pain” being here used in the very widest significance, both physical and mental), is an elementary phenomenon of amatory activity. “Love is in its very nature pain,” we read in the “Divan” of the Persian poet Rûmi. It is certain that we have here to do with an anthropological phenomenon, one that is normal within wide limits. Algolagnia plays the greatest rôle in the individual life of single human beings and in the civilized life of humanity at large. It enables us to get a view into the hidden depths of the human spirit, and displays to us the remarkable phenomenon of the association of primeval animal instincts with the highest spirituality. It at the same time debases love, and renders it more profound, and it touches the most secret aspects of our nature.

sings Joseph Lauff in his “Geisslerin” (Cologne, 1901). Is there any pleasure without pain? is there any love without sorrow? He who is familiar with the history of civilization will answer these questions in the negative. Pain is a civilizing factor of the first rank; it is the necessary pre-condition and the inevitable accompaniment of pleasure and the affirmation of life. This is the central idea of the philosophy of Nietzsche. The pain of love is only a special case of the great immeasurable Weltschmerz and Weltlust (world-pain and world-joy), which move us so deeply in the powerful descriptions of Schopenhauer, and have always been the most lofty objects of contemplation to philosophers and to students of civilization.[589]

That love-pleasure and love-pain, the forces of creation and destruction—yes, indeed, that love and death (which Leopardi in a wonderful poem celebrated as twin brothers)—are separated only by a “thin veil” (Havelock Ellis), was an idea first expressed in the celebrated work of the formidable Marquis de Sade,[590] whose books, taken as a whole, are merely a paraphrase of the idea of the connexion between pain and voluptuousness; and, moreover, de Sade does not recognize this connexion only in active algolagnia—that is, in the infliction of pain, the voluptuousness of cruelty, the so-called “sadism”—but he recognizes it equally in passive algolagnia, in the suffering of pain, the voluptuousness of being tortured, in the state named after the author Sacher-Masoch, “masochism.” De Sade, who was the first consistent advocate of the anthropologico-ethnological theory of psychopathia sexualis, himself collected almost all the facts regarding the biological roots of painful lasciviousness, and regarding algolagnistic phenomena in ethnology and in the history of civilization.

The foundation for the understanding of active and passive algolagnia is constituted by the fact that we have here, in the first place, to do with a purely biological phenomenon, which makes its appearance in every normal love. The sexual act exhibits to us pain and pleasure in an indissoluble association. Love’s embrace is a “sweet pain,” a painful pleasure.[591]

The nature of the sense of voluptuousness is still rather obscure, but it is certain that painful sensations make their appearance as its accompaniment, probably indeed as an actual part of voluptuousness. I may remind the reader of the interesting remarks of Edmund Forster, mentioned on p. 44, regarding the conception of sexual tension as a stimulation of the pain-perceiving nerves of the genital organs. Still more clearly is pain reflected (pain both active and passive) in the love-embrace itself, in the phenomena [592] which we previously (pp. 50-51) described, such as fierce embraces, convulsive seizures, grinding of the teeth, screaming and biting, both on the part of the man and on the part of the woman. Lucretius (“De Rerum Natura,” iv., verses 1054-1061) gave a vivid description of the normal sadistic and masochistic accompaniments of coitus. In this association sadism certainly predominates on the part of the man, though not exclusively; and, contrariwise, masochism predominates, though not exclusively, on the part of the woman. The sadistic “love-bites,” for example, are more frequently given by the woman, especially among savage races,[593] but among the Slavonic peoples it is the man rather who practises the “biting-kiss” during the sexual act.[594]

How closely these phenomena are connected with the ideas of blood and cruelty, and how this connexion is favoured by the[560] redness and the flow of blood during sexual excitement, are matters previously discussed (p. 51); and in my “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis” (vol. ii., pp. 39-41) I have considered the question at greater length. In the same category must also be placed the sexually stimulating influence of red colours.

In association with these algolagnistic manifestations, so long as they remain within physiological bounds, we do not so much see actual physical pain, the actual infliction of suffering or cruelty, as the idea thereof, as mental pain; indeed, actual pain is often not lustful, as such, but only in idea. Eulenburg,[595] especially, has rightly drawn attention to this mental intensification of algolagnia. Mental pain and tears give a wonderful depth to love, increase passion, as Goethe describes in his “Stella.” Love needs pain, in order to be perceived as love. Why? Because pain is something new, a contrast to pleasure, whose eternity would be unbearable. This is described very clearly in the “Letters of Ninon de L’Enclos,” which, though apocryphal, are not less psychologically interesting (German edition, pp. 220, 221; Berlin, 1906).

“Change in the spiritual state is important to the happiness of both the lovers. And what could better provide this advantage than a separation? Have you never experienced the sweetness of a tender separation? The disquiet, the commiseration, the tears which accompany the departing lover, are they not something most valuable to a delicate, sensitive soul? Commonly, lovers regard separation for a few days as an evil. But if they examined the nature of their reputed pain a little more closely, they would soon perceive that this pain does not make a purely disagreeable impression on the soul; on the contrary, an entrancing joy lies hidden therein. The pain enfolds a delightful charm; and we learn that the heart, however much it may be moved with sympathy, always finds itself in an agreeable mood as soon as it is able to exercise its sensibility.”

Similarly, G. H. Schneider remarks (op. cit., pp. 126, 127), that in all love relationships there arises a need for becoming aware of

“the contrast between the pain and the ecstasy of love, by misunderstandings, by transient mental torment, by momentary jealousy on the part of the woman, or by sportive or earnest threats; and this need is gratified instinctively by man, because he feels instinctively that love without it disappears or will disappear.”

He explains this necessity for pain and sorrow in love as dependent upon a degree of exhaustion, a fatigue of the nerve-centres concerned, which demand a period of repose. In the ancestors of the human race, and in the lower animals, this repose was obtained by the alternation of quite opposite feelings, such as love and hate; thus the occasional stimulation of those centres also by which pain is perceived is a physiological necessity for the nervous system.

Nothing, in fact, is harder to bear than a succession of beautiful days; this is true even of love. Why is it that the very best, unalterably tender wives or husbands are so frequently deceived? Certainly it is because they often forget that with the sweetness of love it is necessary to intermingle a little bitterness, and so to allow their partner now and again to experience the “joy of grief.”

Mental pain as a general sociological, literary, and philosophical phenomenon, manifests itself as Weltschmerz and pessimism. Both modes of perception conceal intense feelings of pleasure. Schopenhauer, who was well aware of this fact, remarks (“Works,” ed. Grisebach, i., 508) that the recognition of the sorrows of existence, of the misery which extends itself over the whole of life, is accompanied by a secret joy, which by the “most melancholy” of all nations was termed the “joy of grief.” Admirably also has Kuno Fischer, in his account of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, described the pleasure to be found in the pessimistic mode of perception; and O. Zimmermann has written an interesting psychological work upon the “Joy of Grief” (second edition; Leipzig, 1885).

The pleasure anyone experiences in his own pain, or in that of another, constitutes the nucleus of all algolagnistic phenomena, and to cruelty as an intermediator in this painful lasciviousness there belongs only a secondary rôle. The deeply-rooted instinct of cruelty, which first manifests itself in early childhood, is biologically associated with the perception of pain. Various theories of cruelty have been propounded. Thus, according to Schopenhauer,[562] cruelty gives rise to pain in another, in order to diminish its own pain; and, according to this view, it is only a means of treatment for the relief of one’s own pain. More illuminating is the explanation of the English psychologist Bain, who derives cruelty from the consciousness of power and the enjoyment of power, from the delight felt in dominating the tortured individual. Nietzsche is the most celebrated apostle of this diffusion of power, this enjoyment of power in the “superman,” and by means of the “masterful morality.” He formally does homage to cruelty as a means of advancing towards higher civilization.

“Almost everything,” he says, “which we call higher civilization depends upon the spiritualization and deepening of cruelty.... That which constitutes the painful pleasure of comedy is cruelty; that which is agreeable to our senses in the so-called tragic sympathy—fundamentally, indeed, whatever is pleasurable to us up to the most intense and delicate metaphysical horror—obtains its sweetness only from the intermingled ingredient of cruelty. That which the Romans enjoyed in the arena, that which Christ enjoyed in the Passion of the Cross, the Spaniards regarding an auto-da-fe or a bull-fight, the Japanese of to-day, with his love for the tragic, the Parisian workman who has a passion for sanguinary revolutions, the Wagnerian rejoicing in the spectacle of Tristan and Isolde—all alike enjoy, all alike are suffused with secret ardour as they drain the Circe’s cup of ‘cruelty.’

“We must therefore,” he continues with justice, “for ever deny the absurd psychology which attempted to teach regarding cruelty that it arose only from the view of another’s pain! There exists an abundant—over-abundant—joy also in one’s own pain, in making one’s own self suffer; and whenever man persuades himself—it may be only to self-denial in the religious sense, or to self-mutilation like the Phœnicians and the ascetics, to self-torment in religion, to the puritanic convulsive penitence, to the vivisection of conscience, and to Pascal’s sacrifice of the intellect—in all these alike he is lured onwards and impelled forwards by his cruelty alone, by that dangerous emotion of cruelty directed against himself.”

With a few brilliant words Nietzsche thus describes the principal phenomena of algolagnia. Ethnology and the history of the world offer us in equal measure numerous interesting proofs of the primitive tendency of human nature to sadistic and masochistic manifestations. We must learn to recognize the diffusion throughout the entire world of active and passive algolagnia, making its appearance in the most diverse forms, in order to understand many occurrences of the present day. In my “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis” (vol. ii., pp. 43-75, 95, 96, 109-113, 120-157, 228-240) I have collected these anthropological and ethnological data, regarding the universal diffusion of algolagnia in all epochs and in all countries;[563] and I have referred to the occurrence of sadism and masochism as affecting mankind in the mass, a fact of particular importance in this connexion. To give some examples: Campaigns, gladiatorial combats, man-hunts, beast-baiting, bull-fights,[596] sensational dramas, public executions, inquisition and witch trials, lynch-law as practised to-day in North America,[597] in the behaviour of the crowd of onlookers at the former punishment of the pillory, especially also in revolutions, of which to-day once more we have the most horrible examples in Russia (cf. also the appendix to this chapter), in the primeval custom of marriage by capture, in cannibalism, the belief in witches and werwolves, in slavery, flagellantism, and the scourgers of the middle ages, the horrible “satanism” of the same period, gynecocracy or the dominion of woman, the service of women of the Minne epoch, the Italian cicisbeato, and the Slavonic sexual slavery of men, asceticism and martyrdom, the ethnological diffusion of skatological, koprological, and urolagnistic practices, etc. These facts suffice to prove that in all times, and among all nations, sadism and masochism, in all the forms we still observe to-day, were most widely diffused; and to show that they arise from certain instincts deeply rooted in the soul of the people, whose existence even to-day manifests itself everywhere. Take, for example, the following extract from the Vossische Zeitung, No. 475, October 10, 1906:

“A great automobile race which took place in Long Island at the beginning of the month presented certain features reminding us of the old gladiatorial games. Three men were killed during the race, a woman and a boy were so seriously injured that at the time of writing they are at the point of death, and from twenty to thirty persons suffered fractures and other grave injuries. From all parts of the United States as many as half a million persons had assembled to see the races. At the very outset the huge crowd was in a state of hysterical excitement. The Automobile Club had taken the utmost care in its preparations for the safety of the course, and had shut it off on both sides by a net 8 feet in height. This protecting wall was, however, torn down by the crowd, which pressed in everywhere, especially at those places which the cars were to pass at their highest speed. Notwithstanding all the warnings of the police, those in search of sensation only tried to get out of the way when the cars were close upon them. At a turning in the course there were assembled 1,000 persons belonging to the best circles of New York society. Every time when, at this dangerous point, one of the cars had an[564] accident, these people rushed forwards, in order to see as closely as possible what was going on; the women screamed and fainted from excitement, while the police bludgeoned the people blindly, in order to make room for the following cars, and in order to prevent worse evils. The spectators were as if mad with the desire to see blood. A lady who was pressing forward with the crowd, when one of the cars had upset, expressed her disappointment plainly, ‘Oh dear, there is no one killed!’”

In an essay entitled “Russia as It Now Is,” regarding the Russian punitive expeditions against the revolutionaries, the St. Petersburg correspondent of a German paper reports:

“These expeditions have long forgotten the political purpose of their ‘mission’; they murder simply out of congenital lust to murder, from racial love of blood, from plainly perceptible morbid perversity. The shooting of boys, the flogging of women, without mentioning the still worse ‘punishments’ which we cannot even venture to describe, which take place in the presence of, or with the actual assistance of, the greater and lesser provincial satraps, and regarding which I have collected extensive material—all produced in me, who have been a student of criminal psychology, very remarkable reflections.”

In these cases, no doubt, the principal cause of the actions in which cruelty becomes pleasurable is the powerful emotional disturbance, the violent excitement, which, again, increases sexual desire. De Sade himself was familiar with the fact that excitement produced by strong emotions had a powerful influence upon sexual processes; that it increased them, changed them, and led to abnormal manifestations. “All sensations increase one another mutually.” Anger, fear, rage, hatred, cruelty, increase sexual tension, and therewith also increase the pleasure of the discharge of that tension. Bouillier [598] drew attention to the fact that frequently in men, who otherwise have exhibited in their life very genial and sympathetic natures, it is not the desire of blood and suffering in itself which evokes sexual cruelty, but it is the desire for this associated increase in emotions. Similarly, Horwicz [599] explains the joy of martyrdom also as dependent upon the powerful sexual stimulation which it produces.

A peculiar form of sexual excitement associated with emotional disturbance has been described by Charles Féré, under the name of ergophilia (“Note sur une Anomalie de l’Instinct Sexuel: Ergophilie,” published in Belgique Médicale, 1905). The case was that of a woman, twenty-six years of age, who when a child of four[565] had first experienced sexual excitement at a fair while watching a little girl juggler of her own age playing with three balls. Subsequently every time when this scene occurred to her memory she had a sexual orgasm; also when once at a circus she was watching some gymnasts whose performance was characterized by elegance and ease, she had the same experience. The same also occurred when she saw a man use a scythe. In a frigid marriage she always returned to these imaginations, as the only means of obtaining sexual gratification. Féré is right in distinguishing from sadism this form of sexual excitement induced by the view of elegant bodily exercises. The generally exciting view of movement had in this case a special exciting influence upon the genital organs of an obviously hysterical person. Perhaps also the case reported by Amrain (Anthropophyteia, vol. iv., p. 242) is similar to this—a case in which a man fifty-three years of age was sexually excited by the spinning round of prostitutes on rapidly rotating stools.

Helvetius, Bain, Lully, James, Herbert Spencer, Steinmetz, and many other psychologists and anthropologists, have endeavoured to explain on evolutionary grounds this intimate association between the emotions, and to establish an association between cruelty and sexuality. They suggest that the gratification of sexual needs is for the individual a love-battle, involving the sacrifice of numerous opponents in order to gain the favour of the beloved being. In this way there arose an association between the shedding of blood and sexual enjoyment; and the rage of battle, as Marro very rightly insists, may sometimes be suddenly transferred from the rival to the female herself, and thus assume a sadistic character. Definite traces of this connexion may still be observed among the popular customs of many nations, as, for example, in New Caledonia, where the girls are pursued by their lovers into the bush, and, after they have been overpowered, and after sexual intercourse has taken place, “they are brought back, bitten, bruised, scratched, covered with bites on the shoulders and the back of the neck.”

I regard the emotional theory of cruelty as the best, because it provides the easiest explanation of all the facts; and above all, because it also explains the frequently observed cruelty of woman, who, as the more easily excited creature, displays a higher, more artificial kind of cruelty than man, whose balance is not so easily disturbed by his emotions. Montaigne [600] makes the acute observation that cruelty is usually accompanied by a feminine[566] softness. Havelock Ellis [601] also remarks that the most extreme, most elaborate degree of sadism is commonly associated with a somewhat feminine organization.

We might explain the cruelty of women, and that of enervated, effeminate voluptuaries from fear and cowardice, from the debasing consciousness of the weakness of their own personality, which by means of cruelty takes revenge on the strength of another, and transiently luxuriates in the associated intoxication of power, in the mere idea of superiority. It is certainly in this way that we must explain the horrible cruelty of worn-out debauchees, such as is described by de Sade in his romances. Such types also were Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Domitian, Heliogabalus, and Cæsar Borgia; among women, Catherine de Medici and those “delicate Creole women who, after enjoying voluptuous pleasure in intercourse with a negro slave, proceed to enjoy the further pleasure of seeing the man unmercifully flogged.”[602]

In addition, the blunting of the senses which results from long-continued sexual excesses demands the stronger stimulus of cruelty. Just as in the debauchee, so also in the prostitute, this blunting of the senses induces a predisposition to sadism. Many prostitutes and masseuses become sadists quite as much from inclination as from custom (the latter from intercourse with masochistic clients); and they find sexual pleasure in tormenting men, regarding themselves as incorporate ideals of “mistresses.”

Among Europeans, residence in hot climates gives rise to a peculiar form of tropical cruelty, the so-called “tropical frenzy.” The psychology of this condition is complex. Various predisposing causes must concur in order to produce tropical frenzy. In the first place, it occurs almost exclusively in Europeans who fill official positions giving them very extensive powers, such as they did not enjoy before leaving home. Those who become affected live usually in regions in which all the limitations of conventional morality and of social relationships with their fellow-countrymen are laid aside, so that the civilized man is in a position which enables him to follow without restraint his own inward impulses; also he finds himself in contact with an “inferior” race, which he regards and treats as half or completely animal.[603] The influence of climate is also of great importance, as Hans von Becker assumes. Owing, it may be, to the intense[567] heat, disturbances of metabolism ensue, and by the formation of toxins, the central nervous system and the psyche are injured, and thus there is induced a “tropical moral insanity,” a morbid impulsiveness, associated with complete loss of understanding of ordinary ethical and moral principles. Or, again, it is possible that, as Plehn believes, the abnormally high temperature gives rise to acute outbreaks only in chronic alcoholists, taking the form of tropical frenzy. In any case, this disorder is with especial frequency characterized by marked sadistic practices, as is proved by the colonial scandals of every country. In connexion with this, we do not need any further demonstration of the manner in which the institutions of slavery and serfdom have always induced and furthered sadistic instincts, and, speaking generally, the same is true of all relationships by which isolated individuals are given uncontrolled powers over the bodies and lives of their fellow-men.

A chief cause of algolagnia, of active algolagnia, but more especially of the passive form, is to be found in the diverse sexual demeanour of man and woman respectively, and this, again, depends upon the difference between the masculine and feminine natures. Opposed to the stormy, eager activity of the man, we have the quiet passivity of the woman. The latter has aptly been compared to a magnet which, notwithstanding its own apparent immobility, still irresistibly attracts and holds fast the iron (the man), making the latter in a sense her slave; upon this passivity depends the unmistakable superiority of woman in purely sensual love. Physical nature alone gives her an advantage over man, just precisely in the point to which she outwardly appears subordinated to him. Thus, among the Indians of Central Brazil man is officially lord and master of woman—and does what she wills.[604] Thus it has always been in the highest grades of civilization also, wherever sensual relationships have been solely effective in determining the relative positions of men and women. The true “henpecked husband” (I say “true,” because there also exist such in appearance only) of our European civilization is the man who, from the beginning, has been subjected to the domination of his wife in consequence of his own immoderate sexual needs; by these needs he has been permanently placed under her control, and this control has secondarily been extended to other relationships. This is the psychological secret of the henpecked state, just as it is also of the “mistress[568] rule,” which, beginning as a purely sexual relationship between king or prince on the one hand and his mistress on the other, later extends also to the domain of political activity. The greater the sexual passivity and coldness of the woman, the more readily does she gain dominion over the man. A favourite means for this purpose is the practice of “coquetry” (a matter previously discussed), which can also be defined as the activity of women in fettering men to themselves and in bringing them under feminine dominion. The Anglo-Saxon “flirt” is only a lighter shade of “coquette,” representing rather spiritual-æsthetic coquetry, whilst the true coquette makes use of purely sensual means, and speculates upon sex only, without reference to the intellectual qualities. “A truly coquettish woman listens with pleasure to the rankest flattery of the most insignificant individual; she takes the trouble to stimulate the desires of the most contemptible being, although she is daily surrounded by longing admirers.”[605] Joseph Peladan relates in one of his romances how a distinguished lady, while getting into her carriage, intentionally displayed her leg to a poor man standing by, although at the very same moment she was coquetting audaciously with a gentleman of her own rank. Woman instinctively aims at the subjection of man, and voluptuous stimulation serves her as the best-tried means of doing this. In so far as man becomes the “slave” and victim of his sensuality, does he exhibit a masochistic disposition; but, in so far as by his force and his intelligence he overcomes this sexual dependency, and by means of his natural activity and energy displayed also in sexual relationships, behaves heedlessly and brutally to the woman, who has now become completely passive, does the sadistic element preponderate in him. From this we are able to understand how it is that sadism and masochism may often appear in the same person; they are only the active and the passive form respectively of the algolagnia which lies at the basis of both of them, and in which the true essence of both these phenomena subsists.

When in the following paragraphs we briefly describe the individual phenomena and types of sadism and masochism, we do this always with the tacit implication that the majority of types are not pure forms either of sadism or masochism, but represent a mixture of both. This is especially true of the most widely diffused of all algolagnistic perversions, the so-called flagellomania (sexual desire for flagellation or flagellantism)—that[569] is to say, flogging and whipping, or being flogged and whipped in order to induce sexual excitement. An elaborately critical account of sexual flagellantism in its physiological, psychological, literary, and historical relationships is to be found in the second volume of my work on “The Sexual Life in England,” pp. 336-481 (Berlin, 1903). In this passage there is a fairly complete collection, alike of the older and of the newer literary material devoted to this topic.[606]

Flagellation is, therefore, the principal means by which sadistic tendencies become active, because in this manner all the physiological sadistic accompaniments of sexual intercourse unite, and make their appearance with a stronger potentiality. It is an imitation and a conscious synthesis of these sadistic accompaniments, which in their most primitive form are to be seen in the lower animals. Especially in the case of tritons and salamanders we can observe a typical flagellation, effected by means of the tail, prior to coitus. The voluptuous gratification during flagellation varies in character according as the flagellation is active or passive. The nature of the latter is as follows: by vigorous friction and blows, especially in the region of the genital organs, and more particularly on the buttocks, a peculiarly increased voluptuous stimulus is induced by the painful sensations. Simple massage and friction of the skin suffices to produce such an effect, especially after warm baths, as has long been known in the East, and is employed in the so-called “Turkish baths.” More especially, the rubbing of the buttocks evokes a purely physical reflex stimulation of the spinal and sympathetic ejaculatory centre; still more rapidly is this produced by flogging and whipping of these parts (the so-called “lower discipline”). The painful sensations are said ultimately to undergo complete transformation into voluptuous sensations; unquestionably the imagination must here render much assistance, and the masochistic element is especially marked in those who undergo passive flagellation. The increased flow of blood to the genital organs, to which the flagellation necessarily gives rise, must also obviously play a part in evoking and strengthening the voluptuous sensation. Simultaneously also this congestion gives rise to erection of the[570] penis; hence the very ancient employment of flagellation to relieve impotence, alluded to by Petronius in a celebrated passage of his “Satyricon.”

In the case of active flagellation, the voluptuous stimulation is mainly of a sadistic nature; the view of the parts quivering under the lash, becoming red or even bleeding, the cries of the person who is being whipped, the erotic influence of the kallipygian charms, here play the principal rôle.

The inclination to flagellation, both passive and active, is generally aroused by some chance occurrence, such as looking at a flogging, when the spectator finds himself to be in a state of sexual excitement and recognizes its cause—as, for example, in consequence of the official and ritual practice of flogging in schools, prisons,[607] barracks, monasteries, etc., also by whipping and giving blows in social games. Especially dangerous is the whipping of children, whose sexual impulse is only too often aroused by blows upon the buttocks, and then, unconsciously, this excitement is in their minds permanently endowed with a causal connexion with whipping, from which ultimately a perversion (flagellomania) is induced. Well known is Rousseau’s description of this connexion in his “Confessions.” I append the following description by a patient of this tendency to flagellation:

“In a similar way to that which you describe, flagellantism was unfortunately awakened in me in early youth. This was first developed in me by the fact that my parents allowed the maidservants to exercise a far-reaching right of chastisement. When I was fourteen years old, I still received whippings from the servants, with my father’s knowledge and consent; and these whippings, since my father had forbidden any other kind of chastisement as harmful to health, took place on the buttocks, and were always effected after this region of the body had been bared. I still remember most vividly that when I was at the age mentioned a maidservant who was hardly two years older than myself switched me in this region with especial zeal. I remember also that when I was in my ninth year, owing to the free use which the maidservants commonly made of their privilege, I had entirely ceased to dread this chastisement; indeed from that time I often intentionally incurred a whipping by the maids, which was not difficult; and from the age of fourteen years I personally gave the maidservants my permission to chastise me in the above manner without the knowledge of my parents, and was always thrown by it into a state of sexual excitement. Such excitement was also produced in me by merely witnessing the chastisement of my two sisters, who were somewhat younger than[571] myself, both of whom were still beaten with a switch when they were fifteen years of age. As regards my two sisters, this did not lead to desire on their part that this procedure, which was always disagreeable to them, should be frequently repeated, but they were always glad to see me whipped; and, as a matter of fact, my own sensation of pleasure was greatly increased by their being present, and moreover, especially in later years, I always enjoyed it more if the maidservant whipped me in the presence of her friends or if one of them let me hold her hand during the process. I especially preferred being struck with the bare hands, although occasionally I endured severe whippings with the stick or with the dog-whip at my own special request.”

In a second case which came under my own observation, the person affected being a lawyer, then twenty-eight years of age, the cause of the development of his flagellomania was different and more indirect.

At the age of eleven or twelve years he was lying on the top of a dog-kennel and masturbating, and he had tied his feet to the top of the kennel, lest, when in a state of sexual excitement, he might fall off. Since then he had always felt an impulse to have himself tied, which he sought to satisfy in boyish games (robbers, police, etc.); this always induced in him agreeable sexual feelings, which were further increased by onanistic friction. At the age of fifteen there became associated with this desire to be tied a further need to be whipped while he was tied up. This patient has a disinclination to normal coitus and to the female genital organs, but he desires to receive flagellation only from women. Two successive attempts at normal sexual intercourse were unsuccessful. The patient induced in a maidservant the inclination to passive and active flagellation, and this woman, although she resisted at first, was subsequently, six months later, a passionate flagellant. In other respects the patient is thoroughly healthy, and has been through his one-year term of military service in the cavalry.

With regard to the origin of “schoolmaster’s sadism,” which is, unfortunately, very widely diffused, the well-known case of the schoolmaster Dippold recently gave a horrible example.[608]

The teacher or schoolmaster may, at the commencement of his activity, be entirely free from any flagellantic tendency. This tendency makes its appearance in the course of the customary exercise of his duties of physical chastisement. This gradually induces in him a sense of sexual pleasure. As long as these chastisements are kept within normal bounds, and only occasionally undertaken, we have to do merely with a tendency, with an aberration of sexual gratification, such as occurs in numerous healthy individuals, even when they are not teachers or schoolmasters,[572] persons who seek and find an opportunity for the exercise of these tendencies in the brothel or with “masseuses.” When, however, a systematic flagellomania develops, and the person affected no longer merely chastises, but maltreats and tortures, and does this habitually and with bestial cruelty, as in Dippold’s case, we certainly have always to do with sadism developed in the soil of a morbid predisposition. The following cases appear to be of this nature:

1. A case which reminds us of that of Dippold recently appeared before the Second Criminal Chamber in Hamburg. The accused was a man belonging to the cultured classes, who had had a University education, had become a reserve officer, and had filled many other positions, finally that of the editor of a journal published by an advertising firm. The accused lived in Berlin in the years 1900 to 1903. There he formed an intimacy with a woman, whom he induced to entrust him with her son, for the continuance of his education. Going himself to live in Hamburg in July, 1903, the boy was sent to him in that town in January, 1904, and was placed in a boarding school. “In order not to be disturbed in his teaching,” the man also rented a room in the neighbourhood of the school. When engaging this room he asked the landlady if there were curtains to cover the windows. On the first day on which she visited the room the landlady noticed that the accused flogged the boy, and as she did not wish to allow this in her dwelling, she reported the matter to the police. After some time the woman learned by questioning the boy certain remarkable facts, especially with regard to the “educational methods” which the accused had carried out in Berlin, and in her report to the police she added certain details, which led to the arrest of the accused. The accused admitted that he had caned the boy severely, and he declared that he had done this only for educational reasons, as the boy was of a bad character. In this respect the statement of the accused was confuted by the evidence of the boy’s teacher in Berlin, that of his teacher in Hamburg, and that of the inmates of the pension in which he lived; all of these gave him a very good character. With respect to the mode of chastisement, the details of which were heard in camera, the court held that there was no doubt that the accused had chastised the boy, not for educational reasons, but on account of perverse tendencies of his own, and condemned him to imprisonment for one year and loss of civil rights for two years. It is a noteworthy fact that the accused, during the latter part of this period of association with the boy, had lived in a happy marriage with a young woman.

2. A disciple of Dippold. The following remarkable case was published in the Berliner Tageblatt, No. 629, December 11, 1903: A furniture-polisher of this town accosted boys whom he met in the street, gave them some trifling commission, and so arranged matters with them that they must ultimately return to him at his room. Here he gave himself out to be a detective officer, showed the boy a token which he pretended was his official commission, and then gave the boy a severe lecture. “He regretted,” he said in conclusion, that, owing to the misconduct of the lad, it would be necessary to fine his[573] parents, unless the offences were condoned by the immediate chastisement of the boy. The “detective” easily persuaded his victims that it would be better to accept the immediate flogging. After he had stretched his victim across his knees and beaten him with a stick, he looked to see that the blows had not made too obvious marks, and sent the lad away with a further brief admonition. In most instances the boys who had been whipped concealed what had happened from their parents; but still the matter came to light, and this new Dippold is to be tried for causing grievous bodily harm, and for the false pretence that he occupied an official position. The accused is a young man, twenty-five years of age, and, with his small and slender figure and with a blonde moustache, he makes rather the impression of a young man of eighteen.

Very frequently the tendency to flagellation is at first artificially evoked in brothels. Hogarth, in his “A Harlot’s Progress,” has rightly depicted the switch as a necessary requisite of the interior of a brothel, and this simple instrument of flagellation is rarely absent from a prostitute’s dwelling. It appears to be England alone, the classical country of flagellomania, in which actual “flagellation brothels” have existed.[609] A historical example is that of the celebrated establishment of Theresa Berkley, the inventor of an especial apparatus for the whipping of men, the so-called “Berkley-Horse.” It appears that in England the female sex has a taste for active and passive flagellation; and we find that a German author [610] attributes to woman a greater inclination towards flagellomania than that exhibited by man. This tendency is encouraged by certain male flagellants, who obtain sexual gratification by the flagellation of women. Guénolé (op. cit., pp. 151, 152) reports the existence of secret places in Paris where young women and girls combine to form a kind of “school,” in which male sadists carry out “instruction” with the switch!

In connexion with flagellation we must consider the peculiar tendency to the fettering of the individual to be flogged, who desires to be rendered defenceless. For this purpose various apparatus exist of the same kind as the “fettering-chair” invented in the eighteenth century by the Duke of Fronsac.[611] Of the same nature also is the impulse to wear very tight shoes and gloves[574] and very small corsets, the so-called “corset discipline,” in which the person affected, who may be of either sex, is laced up very tightly in a very small corset. This is met with chiefly in England, especially in association with sexual flagellation.

In comparatively rare cases flagellomania is a morbid condition by which responsibility is entirely abrogated; but from the medico-legal point of view responsibility is impaired or suspended in the majority of cases of well-marked sadism, which we have now to describe. To this category belong:

1. Sadistic Bodily Injuries and “Lust-Murder.”—The main types of this category are the “girl-stabbers” and the “lust-murderers,” who simply for the purpose of producing sexual excitement, or when already under the influence of such excitement, inflict on women more or less severe injuries with a knife or other murderous instrument. The actual intention to kill is present only in very rare cases. The lust-murder is, as a rule, only a murder as a sequel of a sexual act committed by force, the murder being done from fear of discovery, etc.; thus the murder has not in these cases anything directly to do with the sexual act. In other cases we have what appears to be a lust-murder in which death has resulted, contrary to the wish of the offender, from a sadistic bodily injury. Killing from a purely sexual motive is a very rare occurrence, of which, however, some very widely known cases are on record—like those of Andreas Bickel, Menesclou, Alton, Gruyo, Verzeni,[612] and “Jack the Ripper,” the Whitechapel murderer. [Regarding the Whitechapel murders, see E. C. Spitza, “The Whitechapel Murders: their Medico-Legal and Historical Aspects,” published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, December, 1888. Great attention and alarm was aroused in Paris in the years 1818-1819 by a girl-stabber (piqueur). In numerous caricatures, popular songs, and vaudevilles these assaults were “celebrated,” of which a very rare pamphlet, “La Piqure à la Mode” (Paris, 1819), gives evidence. Cf. J. Grand-Carteret in “Les Images Galantes” (1907, No. 7). Much alarm was caused in July, 1902, by the crimes of a new “Jack the Ripper” in New York, and by the horrible child-murders committed in Berlin by an obviously insane sadist, not yet arrested. In a single day he ripped up the abdomens of several small children with a pair of scissors.] Many “murder epidemics” (manie homicide), such as the murders recently committed in Sweden by Nordlund, who, though indubitably[575] insane, was executed for them, are certainly connected with sexuality. The two following cases from German experience relate to typical “girl-stabbers”:

Ludwigshafen am Rhein, March 26, 1901.—After the manner of the Whitechapel murderer, an unknown criminal had for several weeks made the parts of the town lying in the direction of the suburb of Mundenheim unsafe. Not less than eleven girls were seriously injured after nightfall by stabs in the abdomen. To-night the police succeeded in arresting the criminal, who is a drover, Wilhelm Damian by name, twenty-eight years of age. Five years ago he was suspected of having committed a lust-murder on a servant-girl; he was arrested at this time, but was discharged owing to the lack of sufficient proof. Now the suspicion is aroused that Damian is responsible also for the lust-murder committed two years ago near Mundenheim on a little girl seven years of age, because the circumstances of that case suggested that the murderer was a butcher by occupation, and this applies to Damian.

Kiel, November 29, 1901.—It is not yet possible to arrest the stabber who, during the last week, has been active in the poorest quarter of the town. At first he limited himself to the northern districts, and there wounded only women and girls; but in the last day or two he appeared, not only in the central parts of the town, but also in the southern quarter, where, the day before yesterday, in the evening, he wounded a girl by two stabs, one in the neck and one in the hip. Since then a man has been stabbed, apparently by this same evil-doer, but was not seriously hurt. This happened in one of the busiest streets of the town, so that the escape of the criminal is very remarkable.

Other peculiar sadistic injuries sometimes occur. Thus, in the year 1902 a printer, twenty-two years of age, was condemned by the criminal court of Breslau, because in thirteen cases he had thrown oil of vitriol at young ladies! Here also we have probably to do with a sadistic tendency. In the end of October, 1906, in Berlin, a case came under notice in which a young girl took another girl to the dentist (!) and (after previous anæsthetization) had two teeth drawn unnecessarily; but whether this case was or was not of a sadistic nature remains undetermined. But we certainly have to do with sadism in those cases in which men or women inflict slight injuries on their love-partner for the purpose of sucking blood, which gives them sexual gratification (sexual vampirism). Many murders by poison (women murderers commonly prefer the use of poison to that of any other instrument) also arise from sadistic tendencies. At any rate, the majority of professional female prisoners, such as Jegado, Brinvilliers, Ursinus, Gottfried (the celebrated poisoner of Bremen), and others, were unquestionably women given to sexual excesses or sexually very excitable, so that here voluptuousness[576] and the lust for murder appear to have an intimate causal connexion.

The following remarkable case of sadistic deprivation of freedom is reported by Kiernan (“A Remarkable Case of Fetishism,” published in The Alienist and Neurologist, 1906, p. 462):

“Two citizens of good position, of Wladikaukas, in Russia, had repeatedly carried off girls of good family, and had treated them in an extraordinary way. On account of senile dementia they were acquitted of criminality, and were sent to an asylum. The last victim was a young heiress, who was kept prisoner by them for an entire year. Two masked elderly men fell upon her by night, gagged her, put a bandage over her eyes, and drove away with her in a carriage. When the bandage was taken off, she was in a well-furnished drawing-room. The two old men, without saying a word, gave her a scanty dress of feathers, and shut her up in a great gilded cage, which stood in the drawing-room. One of them—she never saw the other again—came in silence to visit her every morning, looked at her through the bars of the cage, often threw her lumps of sugar, and every morning brought her a can of hot water, which he emptied into a vessel inside the cage, saying, ‘Take a bath, little bird.’ These were the only words which she heard. After a year had passed, the man let her out of the cage, put a bandage over her eyes, and drove her in a carriage to a place near her house. No similar case is known to me in medical literature. Everything was conducted Platonically; there was no coitus, no exhibitionism or masturbation, either before or after looking at this peculiar bird. Certainly there must have been some kind of abortive sexual gratification, of a sadistic character, and with the limitation that only young girls of good family, dressed as birds and kept in a cage, could excite libido. But why must they have the appearance of a bird? Possibly in the subconsciousness the idea of the bird as a lascivious animal played a certain part. But why did one only come and see the ‘bird’ every day? That they must be young girls is natural in the case of old men: extremes meet; but that they must be of good family suggests a sadistic element, and still more is this suggested by the imprisonment.”

2. Offences against Property committed from Sadistic Motives.—To this class belong all sadistic injuries not of the person, but of property. For example, pouring vitriol over the clothing, of which the following case (Vossische Zeitung, No. 574, December 7, 1905) is an example:

At the present time an unknown man is making the south-eastern districts of Berlin unsafe by the use of oil of vitriol. This dangerous criminal pours the liquid upon women’s clothing, selecting by preference light-coloured fabrics. Yesterday evening he almost completely ruined the new light-coloured dress of a young lady who was passing along the Hermannstrasse. The offender, who apparently derives pleasure from injuring women’s clothing, is of middle height, about twenty-five years of age, has fair hair, and wears a fashionable overcoat.

To the same category belongs arson from sexual motives, which was formerly [613] attributed to a “passion for fire” (pyromania); but when sexual motives play a part, it is unquestionably of a purely sadistic nature.[614]

Of the same character is sexual kleptomania—theft from sexual motives. Lichtenberg was familiar with this, for he says “the sexual impulse very frequently leads to thefts,” and he alludes to the proposal which has been made in England to castrate thieves.[615]

The organic causation of the kleptomania so often seen at the present day in large shops is very frequently of a sexual nature, dependent upon puberty, the climacteric, menstrual anomalies, etc. Cases of this character have been reported by Worbe, Gönner, Schmidtlein, Unzer, Häussler, Lombroso, and Ferrero. The suspicion of sexual sadistic grounds for kleptomania may always be justifiably entertained when rich ladies repeatedly steal articles of small value of which they have no need.

A typical case of sexual kleptomania is reported by H. Zingerle (“Contributions to the Psychological Genesis of Sexual Perversities,” published in the Annual for Psychiatry and Neurology, 1900):

A woman, twenty-one years of age, who from childhood had been psychopathic, had from her school-days onwards had a definite desire to appropriate certain objects, especially such as were made of brown leather (brown shoes), umbrellas, money. Only the act of stealing gave her any gratification, not the keeping of the stolen objects, which she usually destroyed or gave away. During the act of theft she had a well-developed sense of voluptuousness, accompanied by a discharge of secretion from the genital organs. She performed these thefts as the result of an irresistible impulse, and after them she felt remorse. She preferred large objects such as were difficult to hide, and it was precisely when there were great hindrances to be overcome and dangers to be run, and when in the pursuit of her aim she was subjected to emotional disturbances, that the accompanying voluptuous sensations were most prominent. The psychopathic basis of this condition is unquestionable.

In addition to these two categories of sadism, which for the most part depend upon morbid conditions, we meet also with a symbolic form of sadism, where this manifests itself rather in idea than in reality, and where the person thus affected luxuriates[578] in all possible fantasies of the infliction of pain and of abasement.[616] This mitigated sadism is certainly to some extent connected with physiological sadism. Thus the so-called verbal sadism is nothing more than an increase in, an emphatic instance of, the physiological voluptuous sighing and crying in coitu, whose influence in verbal sadism is increased, and exercises a stronger stimulus, by the accentuation of the animal, the brutal, the coarse, and the obscene. Verbal sadism is not a peculiar refinement of modern debauchees, but a phenomenon belonging to folk-lore and ethnology, an extraordinarily widely diffused mode of expression of the primitive sadistic instinct of the genus homo. In the popular speech of all countries we find that abusive terms and curses are intermingled with extraordinary frequency with sexual matters and ideas. The naïveté of this sexual depravity and cursing, with its thousandfold variations, shows its origin from the purely instinctive sources of the popular soul, as the celebrated brothers Grimm recognized when they devoted a careful, critical investigation in their well-known dictionary to the obscene verbal treasury of the Germans. A rich material for the study of the sources of verbal sadism is offered by the vocabularia erotica of Hesychios; also by the collections of local and provincial riddles and proverbs.[617] A typically developed verbal sadism is found among the Hindus, especially the women. The Indian erotist Vātsyāyana rightly deduces it from the various sounds which are uttered in normal coitus. In European brothels the verbal sadists and verbal masochists are well-known phenomena—men who find sexual enjoyment in the expression of the coarsest, commonest, obscene words, curses, and abusive language; in some cases by doing this themselves (verbal sadism), in other cases by listening to it when done by others (verbal masochism). Such verbal sadists, also, are the individuals described by A. Eulenburg (“Sexual Neuropathy,” p. 104) as “verbal exhibitionists,” people who gladly indulge in lascivious conversation in the presence of women, or who whisper obscene words in women’s ears. Many men visit[579] prostitutes, not for the purpose of having sexual intercourse with them, but merely for the opportunity of such lecherous conversation. The following case, complicated by bisexual or masochistic features, is characteristic of this:

A leading merchant of middle age visits a cocotte from time to time, and puts on the girl’s silken clothing, whilst she must put on man’s dress; they then go out walking arm-in-arm in dark, unfrequented streets, and converse meanwhile in an extremely obscene, indecent manner; this alone suffices him for sexual gratification. During the whole time he does not touch the girl.

This sexual depravity and obscene language can also be conducted by correspondence. Thus we have a kind of “epistolary sadism” and “epistolary masochism.” The former, especially, is frequently employed in the circles of the “masseuses” and “strict governesses,” in relation to their masochistic clientèle, whilst the answers belong to the second category.

A remarkable symbolic form of sadism or masochism is represented by inunction and lathering, for the purpose of sexual gratification. Lathering with soap more especially is a phenomenon with which those who have to do with brothels are especially familiar. Either the man finds sexual pleasure in lathering the prostitute or he experiences gratification in the passive attitude when she lathers him. Some time ago, in a trial in which a man belonging to one of our leading mercantile houses was accused, I referred in my evidence to analogous occurrences in brothels and among prostitutes. This testimony was disputed by another physician, who stated that this “lathering” for the purpose of inducing sexual excitement was “unknown” to him. It is, however, a well-known phenomenon whose existence has been confirmed to me by colleagues in Berlin, and more especially in Hamburg. According as it is active or passive, it is respectively sadistic or masochistic. Whether, in such cases, a defilement of the woman’s person is effected, as in a case reported by von Krafft-Ebing, in which a man blackened his mistress with charcoal, is indifferent. The larval sadism consists in the act of manipulation, in the inunction or lathering.

As a last form of symbolic sadism may be mentioned blasphemy based on sexual motives, the so-called “satanism,” which played a great part more especially in the middle ages, and as the “black mass” constituted a peculiar cult, in which the Christian Mass was profaned by sexual practices, and was insulted to the uttermost. According to Schwaeblé, these obscene masses are still celebrated at the present day in two places in Paris. He[580] gives a detailed description of such a black mass which was celebrated in a house in the Rue de Vaugirard.[618]

Passive algolagnia, masochism, the desire to endure pain and degradation and abasement of every kind, for the purpose of inducing sexual excitement, is perhaps to-day more widely diffused even than its converse.[619] The cause of this, which is to be found in the conventionality of our time, is a matter to which I have previously more than once alluded (vide supra, pp. 322-324, 467-469). This view is supported also by the remarkable fact that, above all, lawyers, leading State officials, and judges, constitute a disproportionately large contingent of masochists—that is to say, persons whose professional life gives them a certain unusual exercise of power, and whose profession imposes on them a strict official demeanour. Precisely these conditions, perhaps, arouse masochistic tendencies to activity, as a kind of liberation from conventional pressure and the professional mask.

The connexion between love, voluptuousness, and the suffering of pain, has already been discussed. In masochism there also comes into play the important element of abasement, a complete self-surrender of body and soul, self-sacrifice. The union of these perceptions and their voluptuous tinge has been beautifully described by Alfred de Musset:[620]

“My passion for my mistress had become extremely unruly, and my whole life had assumed a kind of monastic savagery. I will give only one example of this: She had given me her miniature likeness in a medallion. I wear it on my heart—many men do this. But one day in the shop of a second-hand dealer I found an iron scourge on the end of which was a small plate covered with little spines. I had the medallion fastened on to the plate and wore it in this way. The spines, which at every movement pierced the skin of my breast, produced in me the most peculiar ecstasy, so that I sometimes pressed my hand on the place in order to drive them deeper. I am well aware that this was folly; but love makes us commit many such follies.”

In masochism physical pain plays an important part. The “mistresses” have at their disposal an extensive instrumentarium for producing such pain, for masochists often have the[581] most peculiar ideas regarding the mode in which their pain should be caused. Probably unique in their kind are the two following authentic cases, which my colleague, Dr. D——, in Hamburg, was so good as to report to me:

1. A rich Hamburg merchant, known among the prostitutes by the name of “Nail William,” had sexual intercourse only with certain prostitutes, who had to allow their nails to grow quite long and pointed. They had to scratch him on the scrotal raphe and on the penis until the blood flowed in streams. One day he consulted a physician on account of extensive œdema of the scrotum and the penis.

2. Another man had his scrotum sewn to the sofa-cushion with thick sail-maker’s needles. He sat for a while in this “fettered” condition, after which the strings were cut!

All possible cutting and stabbing instruments and burning substances are used for the gratification of the masochist’s lascivious love of pain; they have themselves scratched, bitten, pinched, burned, their hair torn out; they are trodden upon, whipped with switches or ox-whips; they have themselves “put to the question” in every possible way in special “torture chambers” or “punishment rooms.” Such a genuine torture chamber, in the house of a Hamburg prostitute, was recently described by the public prosecutor, Dr. Ertel, in Hamburg.[621] Of the dwelling of this prostitute the following account is given in the testimony of the examining judge:

To the side of the flat towards the bath-room is the door of entrance to the so-called “black room.”

The walls of this room, lighted by one window only, were covered with a coal-black material of the nature of calico, and the plaster of the ceiling was similarly covered; to the middle of the ceiling, proceeding from the centre of a black rosette, was attached a pulley, consisting of the usual rollers and blocks, made in this instance of metal, and furnished with a strong twisted cord.

In the dark corner between the window and the wall there stood a peculiar scaffold, made of roughly hewn planks, consisting of two similar parts placed side by side; the back of this scaffold was placed against the wall beside the window.

The purpose of this scaffold was not immediately apparent. Seen sideways, the form of this wooden structure was somewhat like that of a heavy, coarsely-made armchair; the upper parts of the arms were about the height of a man’s shoulders. To the framework along the upper edge there were attached five fairly strong iron rings, which were screwed into the wood. The framework ran on rollers, so that it could be moved about.

[582]

On the wall was hung on a nail a leather girdle with buckles; there was also a rope about the thickness of the finger, ending in a loop; there were also two dog-collars, part of a sword-stick, leather reins, and fetters for wrists and ankles, the former being heavy iron handcuffs.

The window in the wall separating the “black room” from the bathroom, the glass of which was frosted, was covered with special hangings. The inner side of the door of the room was also hung with black.

In respect to this “black room” A. testified:

“Z. insisted that one room should be entirely draped with black, as the ‘hall of judgment.’ He sent me pulleys from Cologne, by which he was to be drawn up and hanged.[622] This excited him, his face got quite blue, and it made him ‘ready’ for intercourse. I was afraid that it might kill him, and I only allowed him to have it done once.

“To the wooden framework in the ‘black room,’ Z. was securely fastened, so that he had the illusion that he was on the scaffold.”

In all large towns widely diffused masochistic prostitution subserves the desires of male masochists, and frequently also those of female masochists. These priestesses of Venus flagellatrix hide themselves commonly under the cloak of a “masseuse”[623] an “educationalist,” or “governess,” adding to this professional title the expressive adjective “severe” or “energetic.” “Wanda” is also a favourite pseudonym, which corresponds to the masochistic nickname of “Severin” (the principal character of Sacher-Masoch’s “Venus im Pelz”).

These women, the “mistresses,” treat their masochistic clients as “slaves” or “dogs,” and maintain this fiction not only in personal association, but also in correspondence—masochists are all passionate correspondents. The relationship also of the “lady” to her “page” is a favourite one (the so-called “pagism”). The nature of the relationship is clearly shown in the following original letter of such a masochist:

“Berlin,
“June 7, 1902.

“Gracious Lady,—

“First of all I must sincerely ask your pardon for daring, most honoured lady, to write to you. I saw recently a lady with a glorious figure and magnificent hips enter your house, and I suspect that you are this lady. If you, gracious lady, desire a servant and a slave, who will blindly obey all your commands, and upon your order, as a slave, without any will but your own, will perform the basest and[583] dirtiest services, I should be happy if you would be so gracious as to make me that slave, if I might visit you from time to time in order to serve you, my strict mistress and commander. If at any time I should fail to obey you absolutely, you can treat me most cruelly and chastise me most severely.

“Will you, gracious lady, deign to answer me, your basest servant, and to make use of the enclosed envelope to tell me if you, this evening, will go for a walk, and how, and where, in what café you may chance to spend the evening, and if you will be my strict mistress, and if I may venture to be your slave. Perhaps, most honoured lady, you could be at the Oranienburger Tor at eight o’clock precisely on Friday evening, with a rose in your hand. Full of subjection and abasement, obedient to your strict commands, and slavishly kissing your feet and hands, I am your most abject servant and your basest slave.”

Such a slave luxuriates voluptuously in the lowest services, in the most loathsome abasements, such as are indicated sufficiently in the names “coprolagnia” and “urolagnia.” I have in my possession a series of letters by masochists full of such things, described with the utmost particularity, some even in a poetic form (!), which I cannot print on account of their loathsome contents. A sufficient idea of the slavery of the masochist is given in the above-mentioned report of the public prosecutor, Dr. Ertel, in which a “mistress” states:

“When I took my meals he lay either under the table, or in a corner of the room; I threw him bones, and gave him the remains of my own food. He often barked, and usually had a dog-collar round his neck, with a chain attached to it. He had given himself the name of Nero, so this is what I called him. When anyone wished to come near me without permission, he bit him in the leg; this was the first step in a slave’s duty. He swept out my room, boiled potatoes, roasted meat for me, and did other work of the house. He also wanted to be my horse; I had to ride on him; he carried me in this way from one room to the other.[624] When he disobeyed me in any way, I had to use the whip. He related to me that formerly he had corresponded with a music-hall comedian who played woman’s parts, and subsequently had associated with him, but he got weary of this, and disappeared for a long time to get free from the man. He told me also that he was accustomed to make appointments in the Schaarhof (a street in Hamburg in which the prostitutes visited by the lowest classes of the population live). On Sunday evenings these women have many visitors, when the workmen have got their week’s money.

[584]

“Often I had to shut him up in a wardrobe, with a chain round his neck, fastened to the wall of the wardrobe, so short that he could hardly move; the door of the wardrobe was shut upon him.

“In my flat I had to give him a slave’s dress to wear, in order that he might feel himself to be fully a slave. I took away all his money, all the keys of his house, of his office, and of his safe, and returned them to him only after a night and two days. Z. only does this occasionally, when he is utterly beside himself; often he is quite reasonable. He does not associate with any decent people; the society in which he feels happiest is that of whores and other obscure persons; he has himself said this to me. Even the people who make use of him avoid him in the street.

“He would also learn to dress hair, and how to paint the face, if I ordered him. Painted faces stimulate him.

“Once he said to me that I might have another slave; this I did. First of all I had to bind Z. hand and foot, and to wrap up his head in cotton-wool, in order to give the new slave the idea that he had been very badly treated, and had been sent to the hospital. When, later, the new slave came, and I explained everything to him as Z. had told me to, and led him in to see Z., the new man was very much surprised to see Z. tied up in this way, became frightened, and soon went home.”

“I made the acquaintance of Z. in No. 8, Schwiegerstrasse. He has three or four times had intercourse with me. He had himself whipped by me. Z. once asked me to fetch a man, which I did. This man got into bed with me, and satisfied himself manually, without having intercourse with me. Z. on this occasion lay under the bed: he wished to do so; I believe he had arranged this in order to obtain sexual excitement in this way. Z. and the other man did not see one another.

“When the other man had gone away, Z. did the most disgusting things.

“When Z. had himself whipped, he first had his hands fastened with iron handcuffs.”

It would be quite erroneous to assume that in the case of these masochistic “slaves,” whose human worth has been lowered to the depths, who seem completely to discard their humanity and to sink below the level of animals, that we always have to do with effeminate, degenerated weaklings. No; much more frequently they are healthy, powerful men, of an imposing appearance and distinguished demeanour, who find pleasure in playing such tragic rôles, and who obviously obtain sexual gratification by this complete reversal of their nature. The “slave” just described was “by nature tall and stately. His features were energetic and sympathetic, and he had a large beard. His eyes were clear and bright. In actions and appearance he was a thoroughly masculine being.”[625] In Berlin there exist masochists in high official positions, in appearance and in profession true manly[585] natures—“supermen”—who only become “slaves” in relation to their “mistresses.” According to Sacher-Masoch, Germans and Russians especially are inclined to masochism; but, as a matter of fact, this tendency is also widely diffused in France and England. Zola describes such a type in “Nana.”

The slave type is not always completely developed; more commonly masochism manifests itself in a less marked degree. There are many and various shades: sometimes there is only a spiritual abasement, exhibited in apparently trifling procedures and practices (symbolic masochism). A few authentic cases will serve to illustrate this—they sound incredible, but are in fact true:

1. A handsome and fine-looking officer, married to a beautiful wife, continually associates with an elderly, robust washerwoman, with whom he also has sexual intercourse. Since he refuses to leave this woman, his wife has separated from him.

2. A State official of high position, fifty years of age, visits a prostitute from time to time, and puts on her clothing, with corset and stockings, while she wears man’s clothing. Then for two hours they play cards. At eleven o’clock he lays himself, still clothed, in her bed, whilst she must lie down naked upon the bed covering. Nothing else happens. He does not make the least attempt to touch her; and after a time he goes away, first paying her fifty marks.

3. An active Minister of State (!), now deceased, used often to visit a cocotte, who had to sit upon him, and then in corpus totum ei minxit. This was sufficient to give him sexual gratification (urolagnia).

4. An engineer meets a prostitute (who has been previously instructed what to do) in the street, and asks her if he may go home with her for twenty marks (shillings). Having reached the home of the girl, he suddenly declares with tears that he has only five marks with him. The prostitute overwhelms him with abuse, takes the five marks from him, and then carefully searches his clothing, until somewhere or other she finds a hundred-mark piece! The moment of the discovery of this piece of money is precisely the moment when the man has the sexual orgasm. In answer to his prayers and whining, to his pitiful request that she shall at least give him back half the money, he only receives scornful abuse. Finally, she presses one mark into his hand, and gives him his congé. This procedure is repeated regularly every fortnight—an expensive amusement for a man who is by no means wealthy. But he is unable to give up this peculiar passion, which for him is the only way of obtaining sexual gratification.

5. A man of the upper classes, thirty years of age, frequents only prostitutes with artificial teeth. They must take these teeth out, and he puts them in his mouth and sucks them. He then stretches himself upon the covering of the bed, and the prostitute must lay one of her dirty chemises upon his face, whilst he at the same time holds one of her shoes in each hand. This is for him the critical moment. To[586] the girl herself during the whole procedure he does not direct a single glance; for him there exist only the teeth, the chemise, and the shoes. Thus we have to do with a case of masochism with mental fetishistic associations. The previously described medieval “cure by disgust” (the exhibition of a dirty chemise) would in this man have had the opposite effect to that intended.

Masochism is much commoner in men than in women, because the latter have more command over their sexual impulse, and are not so readily subordinated and enslaved thereby as are men. The physiological masochism of woman is of a more spiritual nature. Still, in women who are very excitable sexually a similar “sexual obedience” may appear to that which we encounter in men. Shakespeare, in the “Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” when he makes Helena feel herself to be Demetrius’ little dog, gives her definite masochistic characteristics.

Masochistically inclined, also, are women of good position who play the part of prostitutes, either in brothels or in the streets, such as have recently been described by d’Estoc in “Paris-Eros”; we may regard the celebrated Messalina as their prototype. Similarly disposed are women of good position who have enduring sexual relationships with men of the lower classes, such as workmen, coachmen, etc., and who even seek sexual enjoyment with any casual member of the rabble they may meet in the streets—a practice of which Lombroso has collected examples. Passive algolagnia also occurs in women, as is proved by the following letter of a typical masochist:

“Berlin,
“November 9, 1902.

“Honoured Lady,—

“I allow myself to make the polite inquiry whether you will consent to visit me once a week, in my dwelling in the Kurfurstendamm, after your reception hour. I have a peculiar wish from time to time to be chastised in the most severe and energetic manner, until the blood flows. I am twenty-eight years of age, and widowed, and have a very large and luxuriant figure. For the flagellation I would pay fifty marks (shillings). If you accede to my wish, I beg you to describe how you intend to carry out the chastisement. On what part of the body will you whip me? In what way should this be clothed, if clothed at all? What instrument will you use for the whipping? In what position should I receive the whipping? How many blows should I receive the first time?

“After the sixth blow my voluptuous sensations increase to such a degree that my whole body trembles with sensuality. Are you yourself inclined to sensuality, and do you carry out this chastisement from purely voluptuous motives?”

We cannot determine whether in this case homosexuality plays any part. In my “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis” (vol. ii., p. 183), I have printed a letter of another unquestionably heterosexual masochist woman to an “energetic” man.

APPENDIX [626]
A CONTRIBUTION TO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION (HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN ALGOLAGNISTIC REVOLUTIONIST).

The author of the following sketch, the Russian anarchist N. K., was arrested in Warsaw in the early months of 1906. Like all those who at this time were considered to be members of the revolutionary party, the intention of the authorities was to shoot him immediately, without any elaborate inquiry, after a drum-head court-martial.

His demeanour during the shooting of his companions, who preceded him to death, and also during the court-martial, showed that his psychical individuality was so profoundly abnormal that the Colonel in command of the firing-party suspected him to be a psychopath, and on his own authority postponed his execution pending further examination in the citadel. While imprisoned K. wrote his reminiscences, which are here given word for word and without comment:

I.

My parents were opposite elements: my father, strong, coarse, brutal, egotistic, material to excess; my mother, suffering, delicate, sensitive, ethereal. From such a cross, a masochistic character must necessarily be produced. My father brought me up with storms, chastisements, and fear; my mother counteracted all this with caresses, kisses, and tears.... I trembled with secret anxiety and exulted inwardly at the same moment when my father stretched me across his knees. As soon as the punishment was over, he immediately proceeded to box someone’s ears—anyone’s, a footman’s, a maid’s, anyone’s. I ran with a smarting posterior to my mother. By her first my injuries were inspected, then I was cried over, embraced, kissed, and finally laughed at and with. This scene repeated itself at irregular intervals. To these years belong my first memory of the masochistic principle of life. This was based upon the following observations:

[588]

All my companions, boys and girls alike, endeavoured to play tricks on one another; to tell tales of one another to their parents, tales true and false; in every way to cause suffering, in order then, by redoubled love, to make all right again. On the other hand, I noticed that no child loved another unless it was tormented by that other. Those who did not torment one another were mutually indifferent.

This mutual tormenting and being tormented must therefore, in the nature of things, produce a certain charm, gives rise to a pleasure. This pleasure consisted in increasing, mentally realizing, sympathizing with, the pain of another. This is not sadism—generally speaking, sadism does not exist—it is only refined masochism; for we prepare pains in order to sympathize with them—that is, in order that we may free ourselves.

I especially enjoyed teasing girls, destroying their toys, tearing their dolls to pieces, dirtying their clothing, etc. When, thereupon, they wept bitterly, I fought against their tears, until finally they were consoled. Then I went close to them, embraced them, caressed them, kissed them, and cried with sympathy. What pain and what pleasure did I experience when they pushed me away, struck me, and spat in my face! I bought them once more finer toys, and was so happy when their tears gave place to laughter!

How often I told false tales of other children to their parents, in order to be able to sympathize with the mental pain of an undeserved chastisement! But I was no exception in this, because most of my playmates were the same. I remember how a girl of eleven calumniated a boy of twelve: she declared that he had put his hand on her private parts when she was out walking! The happy, poor lad was frightfully beaten at school and at home. All the children baited him, despised him, and avoided him like the plague.... He became quite afraid of his fellows.

What did I live through at that time?

Moody and spiteful, he lay under a tree; the girl who had told this false tale about him softly drew near, stood by him, and with a pleading voice called his name. Furiously he jumped to his feet, and wished to run away; but she seized his hand, fell upon her knees, and begged for his forgiveness. It was useless for him to abuse her, to strike her, and to tread upon her toes. She threw her arms round him, cried as if her heart was broken, and spoke tenderly to him for so long a time, until at last he sat down beside her, and allowed himself to be caressed. Thus they sat together for a long time, and wept and laughed and wept. Suddenly she seized his hand and pressed it violently between her thighs....

This contact formed the last link of a long logical chain....

These were the facts which first made me feel instinctively how, like every fundamental thing—everything which is of a primeval character: primeval force, primeval matter, primeval impulse, etc.—all represent the union of two extremes; the primeval impulse “love” can also be the coalescence of two opposites. These two opposites in this case are pleasure and pain; as in the case of electricity we have the union of the two opposites, positive and negative electricity; in the case of magnetism, we have the union of positive and negative magnetism; in the case of the atom, the positive and negative ion; in the case of sex, man and woman, etc.

[589]

II.

My years of school and University life were spent at St. Petersburg. Tempestuously I threw myself upon simple physical “love” (!), upon the orgies, upon all the varieties, of physical love. Bodily-sexual masochism, with all its artificial sensual charms, was a cup which I drained to the dregs; but I was never able to explain to myself why humanity was satisfied with so crude a definition of the idea of “masochism.” Sexual masochism is indeed one of the most obvious facts of life. But the same is true also of sexual love; and yet we do not maintain that love is only sexual impulse.

I passed beyond this physical masochism; it was for me a necessary phase of development. The spiritual element within me began to sway my existence. At this time I learned to love a girl of a wonderful character. She loved me to a similar degree of insanity.

Had I been a beggar or a tramp, she would have followed me through the streets. She would have accompanied me to forced labour in Kara, Kamtchatka, or Saghalien. For me she would also have mounted the scaffold; to save me she would even have become a prostitute. It was a blessedness to love her and to be loved by her.

How can we wonder that in conformity with this interminable love accompanying sorrows should also extend into infinity, and ultimately lead to a catastrophe?

Every night we slept together, although for months at a time we did not have sexual intercourse; we embraced one another so closely and slept so gently!...

To separate from one another only for a few hours was a torment. If I went out alone, I must tell her the precise moment at which she might expect me to return. If I remained away a quarter of an hour longer, Mascha at once pictured to herself that I had been run over by a tram, that I had fallen down in an epileptic fit, that I had suddenly become insane and jumped into the Neva, or that some other disaster had befallen to me. Thus she stood continually at the window, in order to see what was passing in the street. If anyone came up to our floor, she ran quickly to see who it was. If it was not I, then she felt horrible anxiety. When at length I came, she stood waiting for me in the doorway, laughing and crying at the same time. Then there followed embraces and kisses as if I had returned from a journey to the North Pole; but also reproaches, such as, “You do not love me at all; if you did you would not torture me so! You know how anxious I always am about you when you are away!”

Gradually I began to understand this condition, as an inevitable consequence of the masochistic principle of love.

This martyrdom of the soul, which lovers prepare for themselves in the unceasing dread of losing one another, or of losing one another’s love, is intimately connected with the very nature of love. Without anxiety of this kind, love would be unthinkable. He who loves must continually torment himself with this anxiety; and the stronger the love, the greater is this torment. When the torment is increased by the other’s participation in it, the mutual love is also increased thereby.

This necessity we also felt, and we resolved to procreate an illegitimate child.

[590]

What this step meant to us—members of leading families—can readily be understood; but we proudly resolved to defy society at large, in order to consecrate our love by the sorrows which this would entail.

III.

As soon as Mascha became pregnant, I felt an irresistible impulse to increase our mutual torments! To increase them!! To increase them!!! For our love did not appear to me sufficiently great, nor yet sufficiently worthy, nor yet sufficiently holy, for us to crystallize ourselves in a new living being.

This idea racked me continually. In vain I sought to convince myself that our love was a million times greater than the love of ordinary mortals, that it was unique!... Again and again my conscience said to me: “How can you use for yourself the measuring rule of ordinary men, even if they are the leaders of men? You are the conscious masochist! Your ideals must be suited to this fact! Is it anything so much out of the common to have an illegitimate child? You must increase your sorrows! Increase them!!”

(He proceeds to describe how in every possible way he tormented his beloved.)

At length, in consequence of my continued vexation, Mascha became as nervous as I was myself.... Now she really began to take everything perversely.

“Leave me in peace! It is your fault! You are driving me quite out of my mind!!”

On account of the most trifling matters we became furious with rage, mutually making one another more wretched and more bitter. Ten, twenty times a day, we stood facing one another, leaning forwards, shaking with wrath, our mouths gaping with anger, our eyes sparkling, our fingers widely separated, like tigers ready to spring; many times she struck me in the face or spat at me!

“Oh, you wretch! How I hate you!!! I should like—I should like——!”

Then we said to one another calmly and quietly that we did not suit one another; that we had been deceived; that everything was now at an end; we begged one another for forgiveness, and separated.

Soon came the pangs of conscience, the question, “Who is to blame?” Now the pains began: “What have I done? It is impossible that it can be so; I will beg her forgiveness upon my knees. She must be mine again—must be, must be!”

“Oh, love, love! How interminable is your pain!”

Now I began with nervous haste to say to myself, “Where will she be? With Katja? Up! Go to her and ask her!”

“Has Mascha been here?”

“Yes—she has just gone away!”

“Did she not say where she was going?”

“No!... Have you quarrelled once more?”

“H’m!... A little, but it was my fault!... I must find her!... Good-bye!”

At the house of A, B, C, and D she was not to be found. Is it possible that in her pain——? No, no! Not that! Not that!!

[591]

This pulsed in my temples, whilst I ran up and down the stairs!

Six o’clock! now she will go out walking on the Newsky-Prospekt!!...

At last I reach the Newsky-Prospekt! I rush up and down looking for her! Is that she? No! Or there? It is not she! That must be she? No—yes—no—yes, yes!... It is she.... Now walk a little more slowly.... Now she sees me.... She turns as if to pass by on the other side.... She changes her mind and stays on this side....

“Have you been out walking long?”...

Mascha lies in my arms. We cry and laugh—cry and laugh.... Never, never, never again!!... Forgive, forgive!!... We embrace one another, press one another, kiss one another, as if we could be absorbed into one another.... We abuse one another, pull one another’s hair, and playfully box one another’s ears.... Then we rub our cheeks together, and give one another the maddest pet names....

Oh, paradise of love! Why did I quarrel with my fate which imposed upon me such unheard-of torments?... Nothing else could have brought me such blessedness as this!!

Oh, fate! More, more, still more martyrdom!... In this way let my love grow!

IV.

Our life together became continually more intolerable, and yet we could not bear to be away from one another a single hour. A terrible fate chained us together, and threw us into the maelstrom of this furious impulse, irresistible in its elemental force. To tear ourselves apart was rendered impossible by the fetters that chained us together.

Continually more frightful, continually more insane, became our scenes, and the love-eruptions which broke out from time to time.

(After mutual spiritual torments, becoming ever worse and worse, K. begs his beloved to procure abortion!)

She wept quietly, then kissed me and went out....

The key grated in the lock....

“Mascha! Mascha! For God’s sake! Mascha! What are you going to do?...”

I shook the door like a madman.... It would not give way.... I tore open the window.... “Help! Help!”... The door was burst open.... Break open Mascha’s door!... It was quickly forced.... She lies there.... Dead.... Poison....

V.

Finally—after weeks—I was once more somewhat calmer, and was able to think a little. I had so utterly lost all power that I was only able to get from my bed to the sofa, or back again, with assistance. They had been afraid that I should not get over it at all.... Week after week to endure the most shattering, superhuman sorrows, to oscillate between death and madness!...

But superhuman love had also been mine! The statue of Saïs had been unveiled to me!... I had quaffed the cup of love to the[592] last dregs!... But he only will have had this experience who has first drunk to the dregs the draught of sorrow!...

Oh, short-sighted world, which will call the murder of Mascha “sadism”!... Had not her pains cut twice as deeply into my own heart? Has not my soul been convulsed by her torment?... I wished only to torture myself!... Am I to blame that it was only possible to do so through her martyrdom?... Has not she shared also all my superearthly blisses?... He who has experienced this does not regret—even if he must pay double the price in sorrows!!

Is not that “masochism”?

Have you who wished to pass judgment on me learned that? No! Who will set up to be a judge of a case of which he knows nothing?

Oh, crude psychology, which teaches that out of an inhuman impulse—out of cruelty—we commit “crimes” on those nearest to us! Only from a purely human impulse—from “love”—do we do to the nearest to us what you call “crimes,” in order that he may share that unnamable happiness which we ourselves feel. Thus the influences which move us are purely ethical.

Do you believe that we only are masochists? Or do you believe that those only are masochists who have themselves trodden on by a prostitute, have had their ears boxed, have been whipped, befouled, and have let the prostitute spit in their faces?

Oh, idiots! I say to you all love is masochistic, and all which leads to it is associated with it, or results from it, bears the imprint “pleasure and pain.”

Nature never fails. Who, then, believes that it was caprice, chance, or irony, on Nature’s part, when she associated love with so much torment?

Who does not think of all the tragedies of unhappy love, with its murders and suicides, all its physical and spiritual martyrdom, which every day brings to us?

Who does not think of the tragedy of sexual love which is offered to us in the hospitals? all the hundreds of thousands who have to pay for the licentiousness which results from sexual lust—all the tabetics, syphilitics, general paralytics, etc.?

Who does not remember the torments which the sexually perverse have brought on themselves and on humanity? All the lust-murders! And all the punitive measures? The lust-murders which we commit—to prevent lust-murders!...

Who does not think of the torments of pregnancy? its risks of life and death?

Are all these mistakes of Nature? No! No!! The accompaniment of pleasure by pain must have some definite purpose. This purpose is: That pleasure, without its opposite, pain, would not be perceptible, would be unthinkable, would be inconceivable—just as cold could not be apparent to our consciousness without heat, or light without darkness. Thus pleasure, in the absence of pain, would not be perceived as pleasure. Therefore, by increase of pain, pleasure becomes of greater value, for the greater the contrast the more readily do we perceive it.

“Masochism is thus a natural law.”

The more fully it is developed in any individual, the higher, the more superhuman is that person.

[593]

VI.

Through the recognition of the masochistic natural law, I passed into a peculiar condition. Individual love and sorrow no longer made any particular impression on me. I began to observe masochism in the life and work of Nature, in the history of humanity, in social life, and in civilization.

Is not the great developmental principle of Nature based upon this—that the existence and progress of the species is dependent upon pressure exercised on it by its environment? The more difficult the conditions of existence, the harder the pressure of the environment, the more suffering the species has to bear, the stronger must be the reaction against these, the more strongly will the powers and capacities of that species become active, and by this the species will be elevated to a higher level.

“Thus suffering is the driving force of Nature. Nature is therefore masochistic!”

Within the species itself the same law holds. Within the “human” species have not those varieties developed to the highest which have had to overcome the hardest environment? Those who by nature have been troubled with the greatest difficulties in providing for their food-supply? Those who have suffered most?

Is not the existence of the living being dependent upon the “struggle for existence,” upon the mutual hostility of the species, striving for one another’s annihilation?

It is a characteristic trait of human nature that all religions are based upon the same fundamental principle: “Only by suffering canst thou become happy!”

Is not this true masochism, when humanity, by means of modern science, has also been robbed of the hope of a beyond, of the hope for eternity and blessedness, and is offered nothing in its place? Look at universal history!

Was not the birth of that great idea associated with frightful sufferings, with the influence of fire and sword, blood and death? Has not humanity crucified its greatest benefactors? Has it not rewarded them with the gallows, the torture-chamber, the wheel, the stake, the prison, and the asylum?

And all out of love for humanity!

All the persecutions of Christians and Jews, the inquisitions and burnings of heretics, witch-trials, the religious sorrows of all times—all were outflows of the love for humanity. Their aim was to safeguard mankind from the robbery of its happiness by heresy!

The love of humanity begat our Neros, our Torquemadas, our Ivans the Terrible, and Schdanows!

Why did these men torture other men?... In order themselves to realize in imagination the others’ torments, to sympathize with them, to feel with them. In order in their own spirit to endure these martyrdoms; that is to say, to torture themselves with the representation of the pain of another.... “Thus in its motives sadism is nothing else than masochism.”

The love of humanity erected the cross of Christ, lighted the faggots with which Huss and Bruno wore burned, tortured Thomas Münzer,[594] stabbed Marat, decapitated Hebert, and built the gallows of Arad, St. Petersburg, Chicago, etc.!

The love of humanity built the Bastille, the Tower of London, the Spielberg, Blackwell’s Island, and the Schlüsselburg, built the torture-chambers of the Inquisition, constructed the medieval penal system, and those of Montjuich, Alcalla del Valle, Borissoglebsk, and many others.

Remarkable! That precisely your “love of humanity” was the most cruel tormentor, the most inexorable executioner, the most bloodthirsty butcher of men, and the greatest of all criminals.

Do you not see in all this the wise rule of the masochistic principle? That it was only persecution which diffused these ideas? All the progress which man makes in civilization must be paid for by means of enormous sacrifice. The superhuman sorrows of millions of slaves created the civilization of antiquity—the Phœnician, the Babylonian, the Persian, the Assyrian, the Greek, and the Roman! (With regard to this often disputed fact, see Mommsen: “In comparison with the sufferings of the slaves of antiquity, all the sufferings of modern negro slaves are simply a drop in the ocean!”)

Indian civilization is the product of the most horrible suppression and plunder of the lower castes by the higher. The soil of the Southern States of America was cultivated through being manured with the sweat, blood, and bones of negro slaves.

The soil of Europe, again, was made fertile by the sufferings of slaves and serfs, and so on!

Amid the most horrible birth-pangs, amid the slave rebellions, peasant wars, and revolutions, in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, mankind was enabled to throw off the shell of the feudal system. Therewith capitalism was born. This newest form of civilization, once more, is based upon horrible plundering, oppression, and misery of millions and millions of proletarians.

What a devastation of humanity results from the acquirements of civilization in respect of engineering and the practical arts!... Every invention and discovery demands its victims!...

How often have chemists been destroyed by an explosion in the creation of new compounds, or killed by the development of poisonous vapours!

Count the engineers who have been sacrificed to their profession, or bacteriologists who have been killed through infection in the study of zymotic diseases!

Count all the victims of professional diseases, of tuberculosis, phosphorus necrosis, lead poisoning, mercurial poisoning, etc.!... Count all those who have fallen from scaffoldings, all the sailors who have been drowned, all the railway employees who have been run over, all the factory hands who have been torn to pieces by machinery, all those who have been destroyed in mines by explosions, etc.!

Think of the hunger and misery of the widows and children of these victims of industry and science, of the loss of work and other social injuries resulting from capitalism!

The rebellion of the victims of this system, again, gives rise to the class war, with new tortures, new sufferings!... In order ultimately, by the creation of a new social system in the future, to free mankind from these sufferings!... People believe it! But that is[595] nonsense! The sufferings will only assume a new form, and will increase!!

Do you, then, believe that all the miseries of mankind at the present time have been the result only of chance, not of foresight?

Oh, no! These sufferings were only the stimulus which drove mankind forward to new construction, to greater progress, in order to avoid suffering!... Progress brought new suffering, and so on.

“Thus suffering is the civilizing factor of mankind! To free mankind from suffering would mean to rob mankind of civilization.”

Can we represent to ourselves a life of complete satisfaction?

No! Without suffering, the needs would be wanting which alone provide the stimulus to progress!... Without suffering, we should also be without enjoyment. For everything reaches our consciousness only by means of its opposite.

“To free us from torment means to rob us of pleasure.... But then we should no longer have any interest in life!”

“Civilization is a union, a hermaphrodite structure, of pleasure and pain—that is, masochism!!... The progress of mankind is only possible by means of the masochistic principle.”

Oh, cruel-sweet philosophy of Golgotha!! Eternally shalt thou remain the Moira and Kismet of humanity!!!

VII.

“Always the more, always the better of your kind shall perish, for it shall always be worse for you. So only—so only—does man grow upwards” (Nietzsche, “Zarathustra,” ii., p. 126).

Magnificent Nietzsche!

Now first do I grasp your “superman”!... Now I share your hatred of the every day and the average!

Away with the philistine cowardice which says, “Above all, do not go too far!... Do everything with moderation and for a definite end!... Never go too far, and never fall into extremes!”...

No!... Go forward with courage into the extreme!... Only slothfulness, comfortableness, and cowardice are afraid of a Turkish bath, with the subsequent cold douche!

But how the body softens under this laisser faire et laisser passer, how it loses its power of resistance, accumulates substances which are superfluous, and therefore harmful! In the same way that part of humanity which follows this device will perish from the philistine disease named “moderation”!

Let mankind get into its Turkish bath—and then get under the cold douche! Thus it will be steeled, rejuvenated, and invigorated! Thus it will be freed from superfluous matters!

“Let things be made continually worse and harder for mankind, then the reaction will step in and drive them forward!”

According to this device I acted henceforward. To increase pain, in order that pleasure might become greater!

An immeasurable love for humanity took possession of me now that I had at length attained the point of view which so perfectly harmonized with my individuality.... I myself became equivalent to humanity; I felt the heart-beat of millions in myself. Their contradictory[596] feelings were united in my own person. I felt equally capitalist and proletarian; equally orthodox Christian and Catholic, Jew and atheist; equally man and woman.

All the sorrows and joys in humanity I felt in myself, and I plunged myself in them to the depths.

I wished to experience them all in my own spirit.... I studied universal history, but with what perception!... I did not confine myself to facts, but I turned to the persons of those who were acting; I represented to myself all the misery of the crowd and the thought of the crowd.

What intolerable pain all these provided for me! How I began to love glorious humanity which suffered all that!

Now the moment had come! Now was the time quickly to plunge into the extreme of life!... To plunge into all the sorrows of the millions, and to increase them tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold! To drink the voluptuous sensation which all experience in the paroxysm of frenzy, and thus to become thoroughly man!!

VIII.

From now onwards I threw myself with enthusiasm into the arms of the most extreme section of the anarchist movement. I gave up the whole of my property to the support of newspapers, to the publication of pamphlets, to the support of agitators, and so on. But, at the same time, I remained in touch with the “upper ten thousand.” I travelled through the principal countries of Europe and America, everywhere forming associations, everywhere developing amid the receptive element of the movement my most radical tendencies—in most cases with good result.

(He now describes in detail his propagandist destructive activity, especially in Spain.)

IX.

Meanwhile, in my home in Eastern Europe the revolutionary tendency was continually gaining force; anarchism also became more influential. I felt that there was the proper field for my further activity.

Henceforward I lived partly in Paris and partly in Genf and Zürich, in order from these places to guide the movement in my direction.

Among my own countrymen I soon found adherents to whom nothing seemed too fantastic, nothing too radical.

Soon we were in possession of a small printing-office, with the aid of which we issued leaflets, pamphlets, and newspapers.

These generally contained the same ideas: the working classes should not bother themselves with political demands, such as “universal suffrage,” “individual liberty,” and the like. For, even if all these were to be gained, social oppression and exploitation would remain unaltered: these are what they feel most deeply, and from these evils all the others result. The working classes should rather aim at the “social revolution,” they should undertake the “expropriation of the expropriators.[597]”

In the newspapers and pamphlets we proved in a scientific manner the justice of all forms of individual expropriation—robbery with violence, theft, extortion, etc.; we conducted an attack on property; we demanded the destruction of wealth, whether in private hands or in the hands of the State, in order that its possession might be more easily gained.

When the war between Japan and Russia broke out, we all felt that the time for increased activity had now arrived—most of us moved to Poland, Lithuania, or Bessarabia. A few only remained in Switzerland, in order to keep a grip upon the organization in these parts.

X.

For me there now began a period of frightful sufferings.... With frenzied haste, I seized all the possible news from the seat of war; greedily I consulted the reports of great battles lasting for entire weeks; I read of the dreadful storming of Port Arthur. All the horrible details passed plainly before my eyes.

All the frightful tortures of the masses I represented in my imagination. I saw how they stood in battle day after day; how they had lost consciousness in consequence of hunger and thirst and fatigue, and so went on fighting as mere automata. Ultimately they even forgot to take nourishment, to drink, and to rest—they actually did not any longer understand that they could free themselves from their torture of hunger and thirst, could save their lives, by eating and drinking—so they went on in a frenzy until they fell.

I was no longer capable of doing anything else than, with a swimming head, with temples pulsating with fever, studying war reports. Day and night these pictures were before me. Oh, if I could only stand with them in this hell!... How I loved them, these people who were capable of such grand actions!... I wished to call out to them: “Be embraced, O millions! Receive the kiss of the whole world!”... Yes, these are the true civilized nations!... To what progress must these horrible sufferings give rise? What a future for mankind! What joys to come!

XI.

Meanwhile the whole of my property had been used up in the revolutionary movement. The little money that was still available, that we were still able to scrape together here and there, was necessarily used for party purposes. I therefore suffered the most horrible poverty—now in Warsaw, now in Lodz, Bialystok, Kiew, or Odessa. ... Most of our adherents were among the poor Jewish quarters of these towns.

My earnings consisted of occasional work and occasional theft. When there was nothing doing in either of these ways, I moved on with a few of my own kind from one of our supporters to another.... These people divided with us the little they had.

It was a voluptuous joy to me, finally, to plunge into the uttermost depths of misery which it is possible to reach.

It was an enormous victory to be able to live in such surroundings.[598] What glorious torments I suffered, until I had overcome the disgust and loathing which the whole environment produced in me! Everywhere we were amidst horrible dirt.

Notwithstanding all the dirt and misery in which I saw these people wallowing—or, precisely, because of these things—I began to love them as hitherto I had loved no others.... When they told me of the frightful persecutions which their people had endured as no other had done, then I experienced an unnamable yearning to be one of them; then I wondered at the enormous power with which, notwithstanding all persecutions, amidst the most frightful misery which I saw around me, yet they were able to be the most ardent revolutionists.

XII.

Everywhere now the revolution was in flood. We developed a feverish activity in all our centres.... At first we had no very great influence, but our emissaries were actively at work everywhere, in order to convert our movement from a political one to a social one, or at least to an economic one.

For this purpose we had provided a secret printing-press in Warsaw, where we prepared the necessary leaflets. They were written by a student, who was a genius in this speciality. No one understood as well as he how to appeal to the instincts of the crowd. The moving power of his style was incomparable.... He put the facts side by side, illuminated them from the side that seemed to him most suitable, and then drew his conclusions, which, in their simple convincing logic, seemed irresistible. Then he turned to inflame fanaticism, reminded us how, then and there, and there, and there, so many victims had been sacrificed to the same idea; how, there and elsewhere, on the barricades men had died for it, and had rather rotted in prison than abandon their just demands. In this way he always succeeded in moving the crowd.

It was very efficacious, also, to remind the people of all the little tricks which had been played upon them by the manufacturers and by the authorities; he drew their attention to the fact how they, who had created everything, were actually not recognized as human beings, far less as human beings with equal rights.... These proofs most readily infuriated the proletarians to frenzy, and in some places, as in Lagonsk, Tiflis, and Baku, we succeeded in turning the movement in the economic direction. It was a great advantage that we had associates everywhere, and we were quickly notified when the rain was likely to begin, so that we could speedily move to another place.

In Tiflis the affair did not go as I wished; here the people were only too practical.... They began neither to strike, nor to demolish, nor to attack the soldiers.... No.... They simply said: “So much wages do we want; then we shall work only for such a time; and no commodity must rise in price.... Every one who will not take part with us we shall shoot.”... All the inhabitants joined them.... After a short time all this came to nothing.

Baku was more pleasing to me.... Here the petroleum-borers made their demands, and as these were not agreed to within two days, they set fire to 140 wells.... Then, to my great regret, the proprietors[599] agreed to everything which had been demanded. I had been so inhumanly glad to see my life-ideal fulfilled. It seemed as if the situation was going to be such as I had often imagined....

A long time already had the religious and racial hatred between the Armenians and the Tartars been inflamed to the uttermost. In the whole of the Caucasus there was a bubbling as if in a witch’s cauldron.... Naturally, I remained in Baku, in order to be ready for what I hoped would happen there.

The whole population was at the uttermost point of tension; everything seemed painfully uncertain; would the dance begin or not?... I felt that it would only be necessary to throw a grain of sand into machine, and in an instant it would lead to an avalanche.... I was possessed by a frightful excitement; this mental tension was intolerable.... From minute to minute the horrible anxiety of the undetermined increased in me, and the hellish desire still burned within me; I longed that it might start at this very minute, so that, at last, my nerve-destroying tension might be relieved.

Then I became possessed with a demoniacal idea: one only needed to give the slightest little push at the right place, and the storm would break.

Inwardly I shuddered at the idea of the horrible consequences; and yet something within me drove me forward with an irresistible force—finally, to close the switch, and to allow the current to pass which must give rise to the explosion.... “It is only a kind of benevolent midwifery,” something seemed to whisper in my ear. “It must happen, in any case!... The sooner the storm breaks, the better!”

Thus I was subjected to a conflict of perceptions, which made me quite irresponsible. I was hurled to and fro by momentary feelings like a football. A single word from the other side would have produced in me such a suggestion that I should have blindly done anything I might have been asked to do.

My state resembled that of those people of whom Blanqui says: “Paris at any moment contains 50,000 men who are ready at a wave of the hand to shed blood for any cause.” It is indifferent to them, he might have added, if it is for the cause of freedom or for the cause of reaction.

This “destroy-everything mood,” which had so long been to me a psychological riddle, I was now able to study in my own person, as the result of an intensified masochistic predisposition.... At the foundation of the whole hermaphroditic state, there lay nothing else than the love of humanity.... An everyday humanity offers us no new sensations.... We are only able to love when it is out of the ordinary.... For this reason, we strive to see mankind in pain and poverty—in order that we may love men more ardently; to love them for that reason, because their misery provides for us intense pain.

For days I wandered about, fighting within myself a frightful spiritual battle.... I felt that the only alternatives were either to bring about a catastrophe or suicide. To wait any longer was beyond my powers. A chance must decide....

A kind of trance state had taken possession of my organism.... I knew nothing rightly: I did not know if everything around me was[600] reality or only a dream!... Yes, I even doubted my own existence!... At no moment did I know where I was, how I had come there, what I had just been doing, what I really was.... I remember only that suddenly I was walking in the street in deep conversation with a man entirely unknown to me.... Our conversation turned round the question, What was going to happen?... Both of us were reserved, both on the watch; each seemed to have the feeling—“He is seeing through me; I must not betray myself!... Perhaps I shall be able to get something out of him!”... Thus, we spoke with the most extreme caution about that which each of us read in the soul of the other....

The passers-by stared at us; possibly we had been speaking rather too loudly. It appeared to me that someone was following us in order to listen to our conversation; we stopped, in order that this person might be compelled to walk past us. It was an impudent lad, in the years between boyhood and manhood; he stopped also, with his hands in his trousers pockets, a few paces distant, and listened to us with interest.... My companion was as much taken aback as I was myself, and we both began to stammer. At the moment a crowd of gapers had collected around us, hoping to hear something of interest. We both became continually more confused; my head began to swim, and I began to say something. It must have been nonsense that I spoke, for my companion looked at me, half astonished and half alarmed, and several persons in the crowd began to titter. This made me suddenly lose my head more even than before, and I began to get angry. Suddenly I shouted out to my companion: “That will have the most frightful results; they have cut off the Tartar’s feet and hands, and now the Tartars will massacre the whole town!”... All those around me began to talk to one another at once. “Cut off feet and hands!”... I had turned the switch and the current had passed....

I do not know how I got home.... My landlady rushed to me with the news: “The Tartars are going to burn the town to ashes, and to murder all the Armenians. Some of them have had their feet and hands cut off; their noses have been slit, their eyes cut out; boiling oil has been poured into their ears.... The people are all running away, or barricading themselves in their houses!”

XIII.

I did not see the beginning of the drama, for immediately after my return home I fell into a death-like slumber, which lasted more than fifty hours. No one could have kept about after such a spiritual storm.... When I awoke, I was so weak that only with labour could I move a few paces; my whole body trembled unceasingly.... I had absolutely no other desire but for repose.... After I had somewhat recovered, I went to sleep again until the next morning.

Now I once more felt comparatively strong, although my arms and legs still trembled. My hostess—a German woman, long ago deserted in this town—gave me an account of the atrocities perpetrated by the Tartars. As I went out, the town seemed to be dead. In the streets there still lay numerous horrible, mutilated corpses; the shops were[601] closed; here and there houses were demolished. As far as I could learn, in Tiflis the Tartars had done even worse.... Here in Baku they had fired the boring-wells of the Armenians; from these the fire had spread to the rest, so that the entire petroleum industry was ruined, and 10,000 men were out of work.

All this, however, made no impression on me. A frightful relaxation and apathy had taken possession of me; I felt neither pain, nor pleasure, nor sympathy. It was the reaction following the previous hypertension of the nerves.

I cared no longer to stay here, and I resolved to return to Kiew, and later to Warsaw or to Lodz.

XIV.

After a short stay in Rostow, on the Don, I reached Kiew, and was received by the group with much joy. They had believed that I had fallen in the massacre at Baku or Tiflis.

Our successes in Tiflis and Baku in the economic province, by means of the economic terror, were now utilized at every opportunity; they only regretted that, owing to the racial conflict, everything had been once more destroyed.

During my absence there had been many changes here. In Odessa, Kiew, Warsaw, Lodz, and Bialystok, successful “expropriations” had been effected. These “new tactics” had not only been strikingly successful in almost every case, but they had also attracted towards us the sympathies of those who had hitherto not taken in much earnest our influence upon the revolution.

These “expropriations” were carried out in various ways. For example, by one of our associates, who was an official in the postal service, we were kept informed when, anywhere in the neighbourhood of the town, the post-office coach was to pass an isolated place, carrying anything of considerable value. We then attacked it and plundered it.

Or we sent out spies to learn when, in any great person’s house, or in any bank, large sums of money would be on hand, and at what time the fewest employees would be there. Armed to the teeth, we crowded in, and demanded the surrender of the money, leaving in its place a receipt with the dreaded imprint of our organization. It also happened—as in Odessa—that a bomb was exploded in a business locality. Every one ran up to see what had happened. Meanwhile, one of our bands entered the place of business from behind and plundered the safe.

What a quantity of intelligence, energy, perseverance, and knowledge had to be employed, to render such enterprises possible! How we had to watch for weeks, to form plans and reject them; how our arrangements must be altered at the last moment, or the enterprise entirely abandoned! Of this every one and no one can form an idea for himself.

Here, at any rate, I do not propose to give a detailed description of these affairs, because my sketches do not aim at giving a description of the revolution, or of those who participated in it, but simply and solely to represent the motives of my own activity: Therefore I describe[602] my own environment, only in so far as it is necessary to do so for the understanding of these motives.

These “expropriations” were, moreover, not an anarchist speciality, for they were also undertaken by the other terrorist parties.

He, however, who believes that the revolutionaries employed this money for their personal needs is grossly deceived. After, as before, they remained in their miserable holes, eating rotten herrings and going barefoot, in order not to destroy their union with the workmen, and not to lose the latter’s confidence. The money was used solely for revolutionary purposes—for providing weapons and printing-presses; for the erection of laboratories for making bombs; for the expenses of the journeys of smugglers and propagandists; for bribery; and for the support of those who had been arrested, and of their families—also the families of those who had been killed or wounded.

XV.

Soon after my return from Baku, I was transferred to Warsaw, in order to take part in the May-day celebrations of 1905—these May-day celebrations taking place according to the calendar of non-Russian countries.

The war, the unceasing extensive strikes and disturbances, had resulted everywhere in giving rise to horrible misery, which was further increased by the political crisis and by the arrest of all branches of industry.

All the misery of which I had always dreamed I now saw unceasingly around me. It might be believed that at length my desires would have obtained satisfaction! But this was not so. In the same degree as that with which the poverty around me increased did my sensibility, too, become blunted; I became accustomed to its appearance; I regarded it as an everyday occurrence, as something easily comprehensible.

Somewhat more did I love and honour humanity on account of this misery; but not to the extent of something beyond force, something “superhuman,” which would have been necessary for my complete satisfaction. Perhaps in Baku I should have experienced this superhuman feeling, had it not been that at the decisive moment my body gave way under the strain. Was that, perhaps, prearranged by Nature? Has Nature imposed these limits upon an individual, in order to prevent him from raising himself above the human standard?

Can it be that the state into which I fell at Baku resembled a “syncope of the soul,” which ensued when my psychical state began to verge upon the superhuman, in consequence of the torments around me, just as bodily syncope renders us unconscious when physical pain exceeds the limits of human capacity?

These questions now began to occupy me. I could only attain certainty by means of experiment; and I must obtain certainty, even if the half of humanity had to be sacrificed, as one sacrifices a rabbit in an experiment.

Impatiently I awaited the first of May.... Perhaps that day would bring me a solution of the riddle!... The workmen were still undecided: should they demonstrate or not?... I began to[603] urge them in favour of the demonstration; my reason is easy to understand....

It was unquestionably one of the largest demonstrations that Warsaw had ever witnessed. In the narrow streets there was packed an innumerable crowd. Suddenly from all sides the soldiers charged the demonstration.... A frightful panic—such as I have never before seen—seized the crowd. Resistance was not to be thought of—it was a sauve qui peut!

In mad fear of death, every one began to scream, and to seek refuge in the houses.... At the doors of the houses there ensued a frightful pressure. Many were thrown to the ground; these were trodden to pulp. On the ground-floor the windows were broken in, and people crawled through them into the houses. Meanwhile, the Cossacks were raging up and down, cutting people down with their sabres. There were deafening screams of fear, and with these and with the groans of the wounded there mingled the bestial “Süiy” of the Cossacks, so as to produce a nerve-lacerating concert of hell. And around one could see the unnaturally dilated pupils, the widely opened eyes, and the faces distracted with anxiety, of those who were seeking safety in flight.

The same excitement had seized on me also; with a wildly beating heart, and an unbearably distressing feeling of contracture in the loins, which produced in my entire organism a kind of “anxious ecstasy,” I began to hope.... But it would not come....

XVI.

In Odessa, which was exhausted by unceasing fights and strikes, the strength of the reaction began to make itself felt, and there were fears of a “pogrom” (an attack on the Jews). The forces of the reaction in these pogroms always made use of the Lumpenproletariat (the blackguardly element of the mob).

Since the most trustworthy of our Odessa associates were Jews, and thus had no influence with the Lumpenproletariat, they urged me to go to Odessa, and, as a non-Hebrew, to use my influence to prevent the pogrom. It was not possible for me to refuse, although in secret I rejoiced at the prospect of the pogrom.

In Kiew, where I had some business, I met by chance an acquaintance belonging to my more prosperous past. This man knew nothing of my revolutionary activities. He, for his part, was an arch anti-Semite. In consequence of the disturbances, his business had been completely ruined. He described the whole revolution as the work of the Jews, and also abused the Government, which, in his opinion, was to blame for the weakness which it exhibited in dealing with the revolutionary forces.

“But,” he continued, with a wink, “if the Government does nothing, we shall know how to help ourselves a little!” I pretended to be entirely of his opinion, and he told me in confidence that there already existed in Odessa a secret committee, which was to take the matter in hand. He also was a member. A large sum of money had already been collected, in order to pay certain persons who were to arrange the entire “Hetze.” If I wished, I could be his guest, and he would make me a member of the committee. I agreed.

[604]

The next day I was actually enrolled in the committee. Who the members really were I did not learn. One characteristic was common to them all—a frightful indolence.... Everything was ready. They would arrange for patriotic demonstrations, and would then throw proclamations amongst the people, to tell them that the Jews had sworn an oath to combine with the Japanese for the destruction of Holy Russia; that the revolution had been begun by the Jews in order that the Little Father’s army must meet enemies on both sides at once. Thus, for all the present misery the Jews only were to blame, etc.... Everything had been arranged already, and was in the hands of people who were prepared to undertake the whole affair. The only thing now wanting was the proclamation.

My acquaintances now began to praise my genius as an author, and they all pressed me to begin immediately to compose the required leaflet. The proposal suited me; I do not need to say why. With zeal I threw myself upon the task, and the proclamation was a masterpiece of demagogic art, and a crowning example of the “appeal to the beast in man,” as it is ordinarily called.

The diffusion of this “document of civilization,” as it is called by the revolutionists, took place in connexion with the planned demonstration. The day passed without an outbreak, although the imminence of the storm could, as one may say, be felt in the air. Not until the evening were a few Jews beaten here and there.

On the second day our people arranged for a second demonstration. From the other side they endeavoured to form a counter-demonstration, and the two came in conflict. The Black Hundreds (drawn from the Lumpenproletariat), who fought in the name of “patriotism,” dispersed the counter-demonstrators, and began to demolish and to plunder in the Jewish quarter of the town.

The breaking of the panes of glass, and the destruction of the goods in the shop-windows and of the furniture in the houses, seemed to inflame the crowd more and more; they must have experienced a sort of voluptuous sensation in connexion with these activities. Finally, they found some Jews who had hidden themselves. A horrible yell was now raised. The Jews were dragged out into the street; they were struck with everything available—with cudgels, hatchets, and knives—until they were completely unrecognizable. The crowd found more and more of them. Most of them threw themselves on their knees and begged for life; it was most horrible to see them, beaten till their features were no longer distinguishable, still pleading for mercy. Now the mob really began to smell blood, and to display its whole true human nature. Each began to murder according to his own individual fancy. Here a man cut the breast from a nursing mother; there they tore the clothes from some girls, and flogged them naked through the streets. In another place they dragged a Jewess, naked, from her house into the street, tied her hand and foot, and fastened her by the hair to the axle of a cab; then they drove off at a gallop until she was battered to death. Behind the cab there ran street-arabs, striking at her body.... But to what purpose is it to describe these scenes, at which one’s heart is convulsed in one’s body with sorrow, and simultaneously one wishes to exult with joy and triumph?

Here I saw once more, in their proper environment, the 50,000 of[605] whom Blanqui speaks. A wave of the hand would have sufficed—although 99 per cent, of them unquestionably felt no hostility towards the Jews—to produce in all of them the most infernal anti-Semitic excesses. If the police would allow it, as they allow the pogrom, another wave of the hand would direct the mob with no less ease to make an attack on another human variety—for example, on the capitalists.

What psychological factor drove them on?... Was it simply a tendency to cruelty?... No!... A love of cruelty considered by itself, without a nobler motive, is inhuman, inharmonious to human nature, and man cannot escape his own nature. There must therefore be other motives at the basis of such actions, motives of a nature more humanly comprehensible.

But look at all those slaughterers! Regard their physiognomy! Not a trace of cruelty—only suffering, unheard-of suffering, is reflected on these faces!... The fear of death and the pain of their victims prepares for themselves incredible torment!... Do you not believe that these people will return to their houses, and will suffer intense mental pain?... They will continually see, in imagination, the last beseeching glance of their victim, full of complaint and reproach, directed upon them!... What hatred, what contempt, will they feel for the animal which has awakened within them! They will feel a longing to spit in their own faces, to strike themselves, to strangle themselves!... Before every one whom they meet they will lower their eyes: “He knows that I have murdered people, amid the most cruel tortures, against whom there was no hatred in my heart—murdered only for this reason: because I had within me the instinctive demand for spiritual torment; because by the situation in which I suddenly found myself one pole of my hermaphrodite nature was suddenly discharged!”

“They are masochists, only they do not know it.”

Self-contempt suddenly seized me amidst this Satanic orgy of suffering on the part of such unconscious, instinctive masochists. The remembrance that all these persons were being led onwards by a blind animal impulse, and that to-morrow they would fall on their knees before their God and pray to Him for pardon, filled me with disgust. I began to hate this stupid mass. I wanted to see them grovel in the dust themselves, and howl for mercy.

For this purpose it was only necessary to organize the Selbstschutz (a union for the prevention of persecution of the Jews). In order to effect this, I tried to get into the Jewish quarter. I succeeded in doing so by means of some side passages. Hardly had I reached this quarter, when I came across masses of these “Self-Protectors.” Finally, I found among them some acquaintances, and I joined them.

A heated contest now began to rage.... As the Black Hundreds were now so energetically attacked, all their heroism was speedily at an end: they took to flight. At this moment the soldiers appeared—not, as one might have imagined, to attack the Black Hundreds, but to attack the “Self-Protectors.”

My arm, which was stretched out in front of me, was traversed longitudinally by a rifle-bullet in a peculiar manner. I sank to the ground at first, but soon recovered sufficiently to get up and run away.

[606]

That inexpressible sense of complete satisfaction by means of suffering, for which I was continually searching—which, so to say, I felt to slumber within me—once more appeared in actual experience. I always had the impression that there was something wanting, that it was necessary to awaken something within me which hitherto had existed in my consciousness only in a dormant state.... At the same time, a voice whispered to me that I was demanding something superhuman; that the attainment of such a thing must logically overwhelm my purely human powers, and that it would involve my annihilation.

Day and night these thoughts tormented me: “You must gain this experience—even if it involves your destruction!... But what if, at the last moment—as at Baku—a further incapacity, a ‘spiritual syncope,’ ensues?”

One thing I knew—“When you reach it, it will only be by yourself; all others will break to pieces before you!”

XVII.

I no longer had any interest in the development of revolutionary affairs, since for my own purposes they were no longer serviceable.

The new questions which now arose—as, for example, the propaganda among the Lumpenproletariat—left me cold.... In the pogrom we had seen what an unawakened force—reputed as revolutionary, but in reality masochistic—was slumbering in the Lumpenproletariat. That this force could also be used in the service of reaction was ascribed to the fact that all these thieves, criminals, and prostitutes, came into contact only with the working classes. But since they earn from the latter nothing but contempt, their sensibility was turned against the working classes.

This unfortunate state of affairs it was proposed to counteract by going among the criminals, just as in earlier years they had gone among the working people. An endeavour was made to organize the Lumpenproletariat, in order to win their sympathies.

The movement was in part successful, although it brought with it much corruption. Thus it happened that the criminals endeavoured to turn the matter to their own advantage, and began to pursue their profession in the name of anarchism. For example, in Warsaw they visited the house of an enormously rich Jewish banker, whose father had recently died, and, under the mask of anarchism, demanded from him 10,000 roubles, with the threat that if he did not give the money, they would dig up the corpse of his father and bury it in unconsecrated ground. When we remember there is nothing more horrible for an orthodox Jew than to rest in unconsecrated soil, we shall understand that the banker gave the money; but this occurrence aroused a great sensation, and people began to identify anarchists with common criminals.

Now the anarchists had to endure the persecution, not only of the Government, but also that of other revolutionary parties and of the Lumpenproletariat—the latter for this reason: because they did not wish their names to be associated with actions which were undertaken for personal advantage, and not for revolutionary aims.

[607]

This campaign against the anarchists from three different sides must soon bring about disaster.

During this time I was perpetually puzzling over the problem: “Will the idea you have dreamed of be realized within you?... Will it lead to your destruction?... Or will it overwhelm your powers, and lead once more to spiritual syncope?”

By means of an experiment, the matter could be determined!... Supposing one were to distribute broadcast plague bacilli!... If entire towns were to suffer from this disease!... If the fear of death was to seize the whole crowd of those who, in their cowardice at every strike, every demonstration, every fight at the barricades, had hidden behind the stove or crept under the bed!... If this fear of death were to increase to a general panic, affecting entire towns, entire countries, as happened in the middle ages!... If the people, in their despair, should look for the disseminators of the trouble, and should proceed to hew one another to pieces!... Would my relief come then?... Will there be an answer for me?

I shudder to think of the suffering which this would entail for me! I feel that I am not equal to this!... I suffer, on the other hand, inexpressibly, because I have no answer, no recognition, no satisfaction!... I will—and I cannot. To endure longer this hermaphroditic state—this is death or lunacy!... What to do?... How to free oneself from this horrible dilemma?

Oh, why am I not like others?... Why cannot I simply accept that which is?... Why do I torment myself to climb the mountain, in order to stand before a bottomless abyss?... Before an abyss whose secret depths will be manifest to me only if I hurl myself into it!...

What to do?... What to do?... Shall I, or shall I not?... I will!... I must!...

As I was about to do it, I was arrested! Chance or foresight?

Oh, fate, fate! That is too much of suffering!... Oh, mankind, mankind, what have you done?... A single one wished to see. A single one wished to tear a veil from the image—and you have hindered it!... Eternally you will have darkness around you!... But why will you not allow me to see the light?

Is it thus that you thank me, who have loved humanity as no other has loved!

Yes; that is once over again the cruel, the pitiless philosophy of Golgotha—

“He who will love—must suffer!”

CHAPTER XXII
SEXUAL FETICHISM

“With respect to the evolution of physiological love, it is probable that its germ is always to be sought and to be found in an individual fetichistic charm which a person of one sex exercises upon a person of the other sex.”—R. von Krafft-Ebing.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXII

Physiological foundation of sexual fetichism — Definition — “Partial attraction” — Theory of fetichism — Psychological process by which it originates — Idealization and accentuation in love — The ideal isolation of certain parts — “Lesser” and “greater” fetichism — The most frequent forms of sexual fetichism — Racial fetichism — Peculiar inclinations towards exotic individuals — Hair fetichism — Various forms of this — The “plait-cutters” — Trial of a plait-cutter — Hair fetichism in women — Baldness fetichism — Fetichism for other parts of the body — Breast fetichism — Genital fetichism — The phallus cult — Cunnilinctus and fellatio — A case of genital fetichism — A hermaphrodite fetichist — Hand fetichism — Buttock fetichism — Smell fetichism — Red hair and the odour of the body — A passage from d Annunzio’s “Lust” — Axillary-odour fetichism — The odour of the entire body as a fetich — Influence of specific genital odours — Skatological fetiches — “Skatology” in folk-lore — The “muse latrinal” — The “renifleurs” and “épongeurs” — Sexual perfumes — Influence of flowers and scents — Sexual taste fetichism — Priapistic means of enjoyment — Examples — Fetichism for horsewomen — For bodily defects — For old men — Voice fetichism — Object fetichism — Shoe fetichism, or “retifism” — Explanation of these — Peculiarities of shoe fetichism — Corset, stocking, and handkerchief fetichism — Fabric and costume fetichism.

CHAPTER XXII

Like algolagnia, sexual fetichism rests upon a physiological basis, and is merely a more or less abnormal increase of fetichistic ideas and perceptions, which are rooted in the very nature of the sexual attraction.

By fetichism (derived from the Portuguese feitico Italian fetisso—magic, charm) we understand the limitation of love, its transference from the entire personality to a portion of this personality, or, it may be, to some lifeless physical object related to the personality.[627] This fascinating “portion” of the beloved personality, or the “object” associated with this personality, is the sexual “fetich.” Within physiological limits, the part concerned exercises a particular attraction, and is especially exciting, but in the ideas of the lover it remains associated with the entire personality to which it belongs. Fetichism first becomes abnormal, or pathological, when the partial representation becomes completely divorced from the general representation of the personality, so that, for example, a plait of hair or a pocket-handkerchief is loved alone and by itself, disconnected from the person to whom it belongs.

The development of love can always be referred to fetichistic ideas, for when we examine critically the first general impression which the beloved makes upon the lover, we always find that there are certain parts or functions which have made the greatest impression, and have exercised a greater erotic influence than other portions. To the former of these, therefore, the imagination and the sensibility more especially cleave. In my “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis” (vol. ii., p. 311), I defined sexual fetiches as peculiar symbols of the essence of the beloved personality, with which the idea of the entire type is most readily associated. M. Hirschfeld later enunciated the same views.

As sexual fetiches we may have: (1) Portions of the body; (2) functions and emanations of the body; and (3) objects which have any kind of relation to the body.

Under (1) we may enumerate the hand, the foot, the nose, the ears, the eyes, the hair of the head, the hair of the beard,[612] the throat and the back of the neck, the breasts, the hips, the genital organs, the buttocks, the calves. All these parts may constitute sexual fetiches.

The same is true of all the influences enumerated under (2)—viz., gait, movement, voice, glance, odour, complexion.

Under (3) we may enumerate the clothing as a whole (as costume) and in its individual parts, upper-clothing and underclothing, hat, eyeglasses, way of dressing the hair, necktie, bodice, corset, chemise, petticoat, stockings, shoes or boots, apron, handkerchief, clothing materials (fur, satin, silk), the colour of clothing (mourning, parti-coloured blouses, white clothing, uniform), fashion (cul de Paris, décolleté and retroussé, tricot); indeed, clothing fetichism goes so far that a particular shape of the heel of the shoe, a particular mode of ornamentation of some particular part of the clothing, and, finally, any striking part of the clothing, may become a sexual fetich.

This fetichistic influence is further increased by a peculiar characteristic of human love. This is its tendency towards idealization, beautification, and enlargement of those parts which especially affect the senses. This beautification and idealization extends from the body to the clothing, and to articles in general, used by the beloved person, but normally remains associated with the entire personality. It is first by means of the enlargement and accentuation of a distinct part that this becomes separated from the general idea, and thus its removal and conversion into a “fetich” is prepared for. In the chapter on clothing we drew attention to this general anthropological phenomenon of the enlargement and accentuation of many parts by means of such measures as painting, articles of clothing, exposure, way of doing the hair, etc.

Inasmuch as now, by the ideal and actual accentuation of the part under consideration, it is projected as a more independent structure, and separates itself from the personality as a whole, it is involuntarily isolated in idea by the fetichist, and becomes generalized to constitute an independent stimulus, which may now, temporarily or permanently, completely take the place of the personality as a whole.

This physiological process embraces both the “lesser” and the “greater” fetichism of Binet.

The lesser fetichism consists in this: that the lover, without going so far as to lose sight completely of the entire person of his beloved, still directs his attention to individual special charms, or is in general first attracted to the beloved woman by means[613] of quite distinct qualities, such as the shape and smallness of the hand, the colour and sparkling of the eyes, the abundance and softness of the hair, the complexion, a distinct odour, a melodious voice, etc. In the “lesser” fetichism the partial representation plays, indeed, a very prominent part in the general picture, but does not entirely obliterate this picture.

In the “greater” fetichism, on the other hand, a particular portion, or function, or quality, or an article of clothing, or an object of customary use belonging to the beloved person, is isolated from this latter, and in a sense becomes transformed into the latter, and assumes wholly and completely the character of a being capable by itself of exercising a sexually exciting influence. This is genuine sexual fetichism.

Binet and von Schrenck-Notzing have referred the genesis of fetichism, as a rule, to some chance occurrence during childhood—to a fetichistic impression which chanced to coincide with sexual excitement, and thus obtained a permanently sexual coloration. The time of puberty and the first sexual relationships are especially dangerous for the formation of such associations of ideas. Von Schrenck-Notzing rightly draws attention to the fact that this perverse associative connexion, as a reaction to powerful external impressions, does not occur only, as Binet assumes, in predisposed individuals, but is also quite peculiarly characteristic of the childish mental life at the time when the brain is undergoing growth, as well as of the less-developed intellectual powers of savage races, among whom at the present time, in quite other provinces than the sexual, fetichism is cultivated in the most excessive manner; thus, fetichism is often manifested by persons with perfectly normal brains. Such chance occurrences for the origination of sexual fetichism occur in games, in reading, in solitary and mutual masturbation. Nearly always, in connexion with the genesis of fetichism, we can prove that there has been some such actual predisposing cause.

In numerous cases of the “greater” fetichism, especially in the category of the hair fetichists (“plait-cutters”), shoe fetichists, and handkerchief fetichists, there is also associated a more or less severe psychopathic constitution, on the foundation of which the fetichistic impulse has developed as a kind of “coercive idea” (obsession). These are the cases which have the greatest forensic importance, and which gain publicity.

We shall now proceed to give a brief account of the most important forms of sexual fetichism, and those most frequently encountered.

First of all, parts, functions, and qualities of the body may constitute sexual fetiches; the possibilities in this respect, extending from head to foot, have been enumerated above. Moreover, odd as it may sound, the entire human being may also become a sexual fetich, not as a whole personality—that would be normal love—but as a national or racial individual. In such a case we have the so-called “racial fetichism.” The European newspapers are full of interesting reports of the peculiar attractive force exercised by exotic individuals, female or male, such as negroes, Arabs, Abyssinians, Moors, Indians, Japanese, etc., upon European men and women respectively. Whenever members of such races come to stay in any European capital, we hear of remarkable love affairs between white girls and these strangers, of romantic abductions, and other mad adventures. The novelty, peculiarity, piquancy of the strange races has the effect of a fetich. The size, the figure, the physiognomy, tint of skin, smell, tattooing, adornment, costume, speech, dance, and song, of these savage men exercise a fascinating influence. White men have from very early times had a peculiar weakness for negroes and for mulatto women and girls. As early as the eighteenth century there existed in Paris negro brothels; and somewhat later, after Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, negroes and negresses came in large numbers to Paris, and were utilized for the gratification of the lusts of both sexes.

Notwithstanding the deeply-rooted racial hatred, even in America racial fetichism gives rise to numerous connexions of this kind. The “coloured girl” exercises a powerful attractive force upon the American man; and even the proud American woman manifests, with an especial frequency in Chicago, a certain preference for the male negro.[628] But much greater is the alluring force exercised by the white upon the negro. More especially among civilized negroes does the white woman play the part of a fetich. This is the explanation of the frequent rape, or attempted rape, of white girls on the part of negroes—one of the principal causes of the Southern lynchings.

Among the parts of the body which act as fetiches, we have especially to mention the hair of woman’s head. “Hair fetichism” is widely diffused, both in the physiological “lesser” form and in the pathological “greater” form. The abundance and the colour of the hair have an equal influence in normal love also as a “fetich.” Hair, “of sweetest flesh, the tenderest, Sweetest growth,” as Eduard Grisebach terms it in his “Neue[615] Tanhäuser,” has a profound sexual significance; with primitive man, also, it probably played the same rôle of a sexually stimulating “veil” which was later played by tattooing and clothing. The hair of the head, and special modes of arranging that hair, play an important part in sexual selection among the savage races. The odour of the hair also has a sexually stimulating influence, and remains persistent in the imagination. The softness also of the hair, the waving, curling movement of woman’s loosened hair, and the rustling of the hair, excite the imagination. But most important of all is the colour of the hair; and in this respect blonde or reddish-blonde hair unquestionably takes the first rank as a sexual fetich. Blonde hair exercised such an influence in the days of the Roman Empire. The demi-monde of all times has utilized this form of hair fetichism, felt by men, for its own purposes, either by dyeing the hair a fair colour, or by the wearing of fair-haired wigs. There exist, also, fetichistic impulses towards brown, black, and red hair respectively. Jon Lehmann tells (Breslauer Zeitung, August 24, 1906) of a great libertine who was happy with any or all pretty girls, as long as they had not red hair and were not the daughters of clergymen. Innumerable times had he made this assertion. Many years later Lehmann found him as the happy husband of—a red-haired clergyman’s daughter! “C’est l’amour qui a fait cela,” he answered laconically to the astonished question why he had been so unfaithful to the principles of his youth.

Hair fetichism manifests itself in various ways. Many people are, properly speaking, rather smell fetichists than hair fetichists; they content themselves simply with smelling the hair, and this constitutes their only, or their principal, sexual gratification. Other hair fetichists obtain sexual enjoyment by looking at the hair, or by passing the fingers through it. The following case, reported by Archenholtz (“England and Italy,” vol. i., p. 448; Leipzig, 1785), is typical:

“I was acquainted with an Englishman who was an honourable man; but he had a very peculiar taste, which, as he frequently assured me, was deeply rooted in his soul. His greatest pleasure, which alone could intoxicate his senses, was to comb the hair of a beautiful woman. He kept a very handsome mistress for this purpose only. Love and woman did not, in the ordinary sense, come under consideration; he had nothing to do except with her hair. In the hours that suited him, she must take down her hair and let him pass his hands through it. This operation produced in him the most intense degree of physical voluptuousness.”

The most remarkable class of hair-fetichists are the so-called “plait-cutters.” The transition to this morbid state depends upon the custom, widely diffused in earlier times, of cutting off and preserving locks of hair as erotic fetiches. This sexual reliquary cult flourished especially in the eighteenth century, during the period of “sentiment.” Friedrich S. Krauss reports (“Anthropophyteia,” vol. i., p. 163) that among the Southern Slavs young men and women gave one another tufts of pubic hair as sexual fetiches. The “wig-collectors” also belong to the category of harmless hair fetichists. More serious are the genuine “plait-cutters”—persons who are accustomed to cut plaits of hair from the heads of girls, who are happy in the possession of these plaits, and who obtain sexual gratification simply by looking at and touching them. These plait-cutters are almost unquestionably pathological individuals, who act under the influence of coercive impulses. Recently, in Berlin, two such cases attracted public attention. The judicial proceedings connected with the former of these cases elicited such interesting details regarding the development, psychology, and activity of plait fetichism that it is worth preserving, and is therefore given here at length, quoted from a report in the Berliner Tageblatt, No. 118, of March 6, 1906.

Perversities before the Law Courts.

The plait-cutter whose arrest attracted so much attention appeared yesterday in the Assessor’s Court, under the presidency of the judicial assessor Förster. The accused, Robert S., was a student of the Technical High School at Charlottenburg. The accused was prosecuted and defended by counsel. He was born at Valparaiso in the year 1883. The accusation was that, between the months of November and January last, he had, in sixteen cases, in the public streets, cut plaits of hair from the heads of young girls, taking also the ribbons with which their hair was tied; this charge was one of theft. In twelve cases also he was accused of bodily maltreatment and actual injury. Two medical experts were present to advise the court. During the inquiry the public was excluded from the court, but the representatives of the Press were admitted.

The accused replied to the inquiries of the President, that he had come to Germany in the year 1888, and that he had been at school in Thorn, Bergedorf, and Hamburg. In Hamburg he had passed his final examination, and had received a good report on leaving. He had always had a special fondness for mathematics; he had studied for one term at Munich. He had always worked very hard. He admitted that in sixteen cases he had cut plaits of hair from the heads of girls in the streets of Berlin. In his rooms thirty-one plaits had been found.—President: Had you such tendencies in earlier[617] years?—Accused: Yes; at the age of sixteen years I secretly, one evening, cut some hair from the head of my sister, thirteen years of age, and kept it. I have always had a desire for beautiful long hair; finally, this desire became so strong that I was unable to resist it any longer. The first time that I cut some hair from the head of a girl was the day of the entrance of the Crown Princess. I do not know why I suddenly was unable to resist the impulse. It became more powerful after I returned from a journey to South America, which I made as a voluntary machinist. The voyage lasted five months. I had worked very hard while on board. During the whole voyage I was in a gloomy mood, and when I returned the impulse became continually greater.—President: In what way did the impulse affect you?—Accused: I frequently ran after little girls without being able to gratify the desire to possess their hair. Then I succeeded, amid the crowd at the entrance festivities Unter den Linden, to cut some loose hair from the head of a girl with a pair of scissors, without the girl becoming aware of it.—President: What did you do with the hair?—Accused: Nothing at all.—President: What did you think about while you where doing it?—Accused: Nothing. I simply put the hair into my pocket.—President: And afterwards?—Accused: Several times Unter den Linden I cut loose hair from girls’ heads.—President: When did you begin to cut off entire plaits?—Accused: In November, at the entrance of the King of Spain. Then, in the “Opernplatz,” I cut a plait from the head of a child; the girl did not notice it, and I remained quiet. The plait was fastened with ribbon.—President: What did you do with the plait?—Accused: I took it home, combed it, and put it in a box on my writing-table, on which was the inscription “Mementoes.” I afterwards frequently took the hair out and kissed it. Often I laid it on my pillow and rested my head on it.—President: Were you not fully aware that you were doing something wrong, and that you were interfering profoundly with the rights of another individual?—Accused: I did not think about it.—President: If the proceedings were now to come to an end, and if you were discharged, would you do the same thing again?—Accused: I do not think that I should do it again, now that I have experienced what the consequences are.—President: Can you give security that in the future your will will be stronger than the impulse?—Accused: I cannot give any guarantee.—President: Have you never read in the papers that the citizens of Berlin were very much agitated by this cutting off of girls’ hair?—Accused: I have read nothing of the kind.—President: When were you arrested?—Accused: On January 27. From a girl whose hair was plaited in two plaits I cut one plait; when she came near me again, I wanted to cut off the other plait, and then I was arrested.—President: Is it true that you put a ribbon round each plait of hair, and marked it with the date you had cut it off?—Accused: To some extent I did so.—President: Have you ever had sexual relations with woman?—Accused: No, never. I have only had a strong impulse to gain possession of beautiful long hair.—President: Would not long beautiful men’s hair have satisfied you as well?—Accused: Yes.—Counsel for the Defence: Did you not have this morbid impulse in quite early youth? You told me that you remembered the hair of many girls from the time that you were at school in Thorn. At that time you were eight years old. You said[618] to me that you had thought no more about the persons to whom the hair belonged, but only, and all the more, about their hair.—Accused: That is correct. It is indifferent to me whether the person to whom the hair belonged is young and beautiful or old and ugly: my only interest is in the hair.—President: Have you the same interest in white hair?—Accused: My attraction is only to fair hair.—In reply to a further question on the part of the President, the accused declared that he had been a very active member of the academic gymnastic club, and that he belonged to a students’ purity alliance.—Counsel for the Defence: The accused has stated that, while he is at work, it often happens that suddenly plaits of hair seem to appear before his eyes. He often has reveries in which it seems to him that in all countries women and girls with beautiful hair are at his disposal, and that he is able to rob them of their hair. Among his colleagues the accused has always felt himself to be thrust into the background. He had the feeling that he was destined for great things, and that his comrades would not recognize this. The accused, whose father is dead, had received assistance for his studies; his brother is an officer at sea; one of his sisters is mentally disordered.—Of the witnesses who had been summoned to attend, three only were examined. Captain von W., whose daughter, when walking in the Leipzigerstrasse, had been robbed of part of her hair by the accused, gave evidence that the affair had had very disagreeable consequences to his daughter. Since that time the child had suffered from a terrible feeling of anxiety; she had experienced a nervous shock, and frequently cried out anxiously in the middle of the night, because she was dreaming of the plait-cutter.—The next witness, Frau Gall, an old acquaintance of the family of the accused, described his character as exceptionally good. All who knew him had been astonished to hear of his actions; no one who knew him had ever observed this passion for hair. Recently he had obviously been overstrained mentally, and very distrait; generally speaking, he was not high-spirited and happy, like other young fellows. According to further evidence given by this witness, regarding the family history, it appeared that the accused was affected with congenital taint.—Undergraduate Schmeding, President of “the Alliance for the Maintenance of Chastity,” had become intimately acquainted with the accused, in consequence of their holding similar views. He described him as having a good character, but as dreamy, melancholy, and reserved, and unfamiliar with harmless cheerfulness and joy.—Dr. Hoffmann, one of the medical advisers to the court, said: We have in this case to do with a peculiar mode of activity of the sexual impulse. Although such an impulse does not completely abrogate responsibility, still, in this case, normal responsibility is greatly limited from early youth onwards. The accused has an imaginative belief that he is not sufficiently esteemed; he believes that he could make himself invisible; he believes that he could build a great castle, and furnish the rooms of this castle with innumerable plaits of hair. Moreover, he is hereditarily tainted with insanity, and bodily examination shows that he has numerous stigmata of degeneration. § 51 of the Criminal Code should apply to this case. Since the accused can hardly be supposed to have the power of controlling his impulse, it would appear necessary that he should be treated in a lunatic asylum.—Dr. Leppmann, the other medical adviser, said: The case before us[619] is one of extreme rarity. The accused suffers from severe congenital taint, and exhibits a number of stigmata of degeneration. At the time his offences were committed the accused was certainly emotionally disturbed, and at the present time is still ill. Von Krafft-Ebing reports only a few such cases, and the same is true of Dr. Moll. The accused was incapable of free voluntary determination; he is still unhealthy, and must be treated as a sick man.—Counsel for the Prosecution: If the accused had been in possession of normal mental health, it would have been necessary to punish him with exceptional severity, for such offences as his profoundly endangered public security; it would not be right for any gaps to exist in our Criminal Code which made the punishment of such an offence impossible. We may dispute in detail under which paragraph the offence comes, but there can be no question but that it is a punishable offence. The medical experts had, however, shown that the accused was not fully sane, and he must be dealt with from this standpoint.

The President summed up as follows: The public sense of justice naturally demands severe punishment for such an offence. The accused, however, is not criminally responsible. In view of the evidence given by the medical experts, the accused must be discharged, on the understanding that his family will immediately take steps to have him confined in an asylum. It was possible that this decision would not satisfy every one, but in view of the evidence before the court, no other course was possible.

This case appears to have had a suggestive influence, for shortly afterwards a cashier, Alfred L., was arrested, who had cut plaits of hair from the heads of two young girls. In his home were found, in addition, seventeen plaits of hair, which he had bought, among these the queue of a Chinese! Already when a schoolboy L. had been affected with this morbid impulse.

There exist also homosexual or pseudo-homosexual hair fetichists, especially among women, to whom the hair of another woman’s head becomes a fetich. Remarkable is the following passage in Gabriele d’Annunzio’s romance “Lust” (pp. 210-212; Berlin, 1902):

“‘Do you remember,’ asked Donna Francesca (of her friend Donna Maria), ‘at school, how we all wished to comb your hair? how we used to fight about it every day? Imagine, Andreas, that blood used actually to flow! Ah, I shall never forget the scenes between Carlotta Fiordelise and Gabriella Vanni. It was maniacal! To comb the hair of Maria Bandinelli was the one ardent desire of all the girls, great and small alike. The infection spread through the whole school. There followed prohibitions, warnings, severe punishment; we were even threatened with having our own hair cut off. Do you remember, Maria? All our heads were bewitched by the black snake which hung from your head to your heels. What passionate tears every evening! And when Gabriella Vanni, from jealousy, made that treacherous cut with a pair of scissors! Gabriella had really lost her wits. Do you remember?...’[620]”

“Andreas remarked that none of his lady friends had had such a growth of hair, so thick, so dark a forest, in which she could conceal herself. The history of all these young girls, in love with a plait of hair, filled with passion and jealousy, who burned to lay comb and hands upon this living treasure, seemed to him a most stimulating and poetic episode of cloistral life.”

There exists also a negative hair fetichism. Hirschfeld reports the case of a prostitute who was a well-developed fetichist for baldness. Among many races, removal of the hair is a means of sexual stimulation.

Nose, lips, mouth (cf. Belot’s novel, “La Bouche de Madame X.”), and ears, can all become the objects of sexual fetichism, though in most cases only of the lesser fetichism; the eyes also, which as fetichistic charms play an important part, and are effective especially through their colour. It is uncertain if, in this relationship, clear blue eyes or sparkling black eyes have the greater importance. The female breast is a natural physiological fetich for the male sex. But over and above this there exists a remarkable variety of breast fetichists, who employ the isolated breast, separated from the body, for the binding of books. According to Witkowski (“Tetoniana,” p. 35; Paris, 1898), certain bibliomaniacs and erotomaniacs have books bound with women’s skin taken from the region of the breast, so that the nipple forms a characteristic swelling on the cover! A further account of these human skin fetichists is given by Dr. Picard in the Gazette Médicale de Paris, July 19, 1906.

Von Krafft-Ebing contests the existence of a special “genital fetichism”; but the universal diffusion of the phallus-cult contradicts his opinion; the phallus-cult is unquestionably connected with fetichistic ideas, which are embodied in the symbols of the lingam and the yoni. According to Weininger,[629] woman, speaking generally, is only a phallus fetichist; man exists for her only as a sexual organ.

“I think people have been unwilling to see—or they have been unwilling to say; they have hardly formed accurate idea for themselves—what the copulatory organ of a man is for a woman, as wife, even as virgin; what it psychologically signifies; how it dominates to the uttermost the entire life of woman, although she herself may be completely unconscious of the fact. I do not mean at all that woman regards the male penis as beautiful, or even pretty. She regards it as man regards the Gorgon’s head, as the bird regards the snake—it exercises upon her a hypnotizing, magical, fascinating influence.”

Goethe lays stress on the beauty which the male penis has in woman’s eyes, when, in the paralipomena to the first part of “Faust” (Weimar edition, vol. xiv., p. 307), he makes Satan say in his address to women:

Georg Hirth also (“Ways to Love,” pp. 566, 567) speaks of an instinctive belief on the part of woman in the “beauty and the paradisaical force of the phallus,” and he regrets “the unnatural depreciation and mendacious concealment of this portion of the male body” by the conventional morality discovered by the world of men.

The wide diffusion of the genital fetichistic tendencies in man and woman is clearly manifested by the extremely frequent occurrence of isolated adoration of the genital organs in the practices of cunnilinctus and fellatio, which in numerous individuals completely replace normal coitus.

Very rare is a case, which came under my own observation, of isolated penis-foreskin fetichism in a heterosexual man. He is thirty years of age, and a student of natural science, in whom at the age of four years the first manifestation of sexual excitement occurred; later, towards the age of puberty, sexual excitement became always associated with the mental representation of a male penis, and more especially of the foreskin of that organ, whilst he felt antipathy to the idea of actual sexual intercourse with men, and felt attracted to women. Still, from time to time the imaginative representation of the membrum virile takes possession of his mind as a sort of coercive idea, and when this happens the patient masturbates, at the same time often making sketches of a penis.

A singular case of exclusively genital fetichism is reported by P. Garnier (“Les Fetichistes,” pp. 170-174; Paris, 1896).

This case was that of a man, forty-eight years of age, who in normal sexual intercourse was almost completely impotent, and who could obtain sexual gratification only by the observation of the genital organs of human beings and animals, and who, as in the case just mentioned, was sexually excited by making sketches of genital organs. This person exhibited obvious symptoms of nervous disorder.

We might regard it as hardly possible that cases should exist in which the fetichism related to genital organs of a dubious character—“hermaphrodite fetichism”; and yet a veritable case of such hermaphrodite fetichism has come under my own observation.

The case is that of an officer, who is always searching for hermaphroditic formations of the genital organs. He is pretty well known in this respect among the prostitutes of Berlin, who make use of his inclination for their own advantage, by a demonstration to him of reputed hermaphrodites. He has had the good fortune to discover several real hermaphrodites; but notwithstanding all his endeavours, his affection has never been returned.

The hand, especially a woman’s hand, is not simply an object for cheiromancy, but is also the occasion of a sexual fetichism by which the hand is spiritualized. The beautiful, finely-formed hand is a powerful love-charm. Binet reports the case of a young man in whom sexual excitement was exclusively produced by a woman’s hand, and he was always on the look-out for opportunities of touching the beautiful hands of women. Isolated foot fetichism is rarer; it is generally associated with the very common shoe fetichism (vide infra). The buttocks, the kallipygian charms of women, have always been a sexual fetich for men. Among flagellants this may become isolated as a fetich, and completely divorced from the personality as a whole. For such individuals, in sexual relationships, only the posteriora exist.

Among the bodily functions which are capable of acting as fetiches, the smell, the emanation of the body, unquestionably takes the first place. Smell fetichism is a very frequent phenomenon. Regarding the intimate relationships between the sense of smell and the vita sexualis, and regarding the existence of certain specific sexual odours, I have already recorded the most important facts in the first chapter of the present work (pp. 15-18). As sexual odours, the emanation from the hair of the head, the emanation from the armpits, the smell of the genital region, and the general emanation from the skin, come under consideration.[630]

The fetichism for red hair is frequently no more than an apparent hair fetichism; much more often it is really a smell fetichism, because since early times red-haired individuals have been supposed to emit an emanation having a powerful sexually exciting influence. In the Romance countries, France and Italy, this belief is universally diffused. I quote another passage from d’ Annunzio’s “Lust” (p. 66):

“‘Have you noticed the armpits of Madame Chlysoloras?’ The Duke of Beffi indicated the dancer, upon whose alabaster forehead a firebrand of red hair was shining, like that which we see in the priestesses of Alma Tadema. Her bodice was fastened on the shoulders by very narrow straps, and in the armpits one could see two luxuriant tufts of red hair.

“Bomminaco begins to speak at large regarding the peculiar odour which is diffused by red-haired women.”

Binet tells of a student of medicine who one day, when sitting on a bench reading, suddenly had an erection of the penis, and on looking round he saw sitting on the same bench a red-haired woman, whom he had not before consciously observed, from whom a powerful odour emanated.

The odour of the armpits also appears in France to find fetichistic lovers. The French cocotte commonly assumes during coitus a position in which the man has his nose in one of her armpits, and sometimes spontaneously offers this position. At the unrestrained dances in the Parisian winter season, more especially at the very free bal des quat’z arts, held in the spring, we frequently see the men sniffing at the armpits of the girls.

It is unquestionable that the odour of the body at large may in certain circumstances act as a sexual fetich. Many peculiar love relationships prove this fact. From very early times among the common people the odour of sweat has been regarded as a powerful aphrodisiac. I may allude to the case, reported by von Krafft-Ebing, of King Henry III., who dried his face with the chemise of Maria of Cleves, dripping with sweat, and thereby was inspired with a passionate love for her. I may refer also to the case of a peasant who, when dancing, was accustomed to dry the face of his partner with his handkerchief, which he had carried in his own armpit, and thus produced in her voluptuous excitement. An Indian king, when choosing his beloved, did so simply by smelling the clothing moistened by their perspiration, and selected the woman whose clothing was most agreeable to his sense of smell.[631] Oscar A. H. Schmitz informed me that an English traveller in India related to him that in India lovers sometimes changed underclothing. Each wears the shirt impregnated with the perspiration of the other. The love of Princess Chimay for the gipsy Rigó is stated to have been a typical “smell-love” of this kind. It is said that the odour of[624] negresses and mulattresses has an especially powerful exciting influence upon Frenchmen, of which the poet Baudelaire is mentioned as an example; this writer declared that smell was the third and highest degree of voluptuousness. Recently Peter Altenberg, in “Prodromos,” has described the sexual importance of the odour of the body at large. Such typical smell fetichists, luxuriating in the general emanation of the feminine body, are mentioned by Macé, the chief of the Parisian police. He describes very vividly how, in the larger shops, such men move about among the feminine customers, in order to intoxicate themselves with the odours proceeding from them.

In opposition to these general bodily odours, the specific genital odours play in the human species a subordinate part; they are for the most part perceived as unpleasant. Falck [632] is of opinion that this antipathy only becomes apparent after sexual intercourse, whilst before such intercourse the odour of the genital organs has a slight erotic stimulating influence. Many cases of cunnilinctus and fellatio are certainly referable to olfactory impressions. The following case is plainly indicative of the sexual influence of genital odours:

An Italian woman loved, after sexual intercourse, to retain on her hands the odour of the genital secretions, and on such occasions, although usually a scrupulously clean person, she avoided washing her hands. She was especially fond of mingling this odour with that of cigarette smoke. She was entirely free from stigmata of degeneration; on the contrary, she was an extremely robust, well-developed person.

One of the most remarkable and monstrous phenomena in the domain of sexual perversities is that by which the processes and products of the ultimate stages of metabolism become associated with libido sexualis, become true sexual fetiches, and can more especially give rise to a formal speciality of smell fetichism. The position of the orifices of the alimentary canal and of the urinary apparatus in the immediate neighbourhood of the genital organs gives rise to a certain associative conjunction between the functions of these parts, and this association is rendered more intimate by various circumstances (cf. my “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. ii., pp. 224, 225). In addition, the idealizing influence of libido sexualis plays a part here; the identification of the desired individual with the lover’s own ego leads the disagreeable and disgusting character of those processes and parts to disappear, and ultimately brings[625] about a comparison between the real æsthetic charm of the beloved person and the coarsely material processes in question, which takes the form of a sensually stimulating contrast. There is not in this case any quite unusual association of ideas on the part of a completely degenerate individual; we have rather to do with a general anthropological and ethnological phenomenon. I was myself the first to give an elaborate proof of this fact (“Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. ii., pp. 223-240); and I illuminated more especially the remarkable rôle of the so-called “skatology”—that is, the sexual influence of the ultimate products of human metabolism, and of the processes associated therewith—in folk-lore, in mythology, in superstition, and in the literature of all nations and times. In this way do we first arrive at an understanding of the possibility of an erotic influence exercised by defæcation and micturition, which is so often observed at the present day; above all, in the so-called “muse latrinale”—in the widely diffused practice of scribbling obscene inscriptions on the walls of public lavatories [633]—which finds expression also in sexual “copralagnia and urolagnia.”

Compare, in this connexion, S. Soukhanoff, “Contribution à l’Étude des Perversions Sexuelles,” published in Annales Médico-Psycologiques, January and February, 1901—a case of urolagnia and copralagnia in a habitual masturbator, twenty-seven years of age. A remarkable case of sexual excitement produced by the odour of newly made hay, in a lawyer, twenty-five years of age, is reported by Amrain (“Anthropophyteia,” vol. iv., p. 237). This person took off all his clothes, and rolled as if intoxicated in the hay, until ejaculation occurred. He called his impulse a “vis major.”

It is clear that masochistic and sadistic elements play an important part in many cases of urolagnia and copralagnia. But there are pure forms of smell fetichism in this category, as we see in the case of those persons who become sexually excited in consequence of the smell of the urine and fæces of the beloved person; or, speaking generally, by the smell of those excrements, the person from whom they are derived being a matter of indifference. These are the renifleurs and épongeurs of the French observers, who haunt public lavatories in order to obtain sexual excitement from the smell of the excrements of persons of the opposite sex. There even exist individuals who have the acts[626] of defæcation and micturition performed by others on to their own bodies; in this case the masochistic element is associated with the element of smell fetichism.

A greater rôle than that of the natural sexual odours is at the present day played by artificial perfumes, which, as a fact, are frequently employed as sexual fetiches. Their origin, and the cause of their use, has been already explained (p. 17). From early times prostitution and the demi-monde have made the most extensive use of these artificial scents for the sexual allurement of men. Men are, in general, more sensitive to sexual stimulation by means of perfumes than women are. These perfumes are partly derived from plants; in fact, the simple odour of certain flowers produces sexual excitement—a fact well known to many peasant girls.[634] Other sexually stimulating scents are derived from the animal kingdom, such as musk, civet, and ambergris. A French firm of perfumers advertises a perfume—“charme secret”—the local employment of which is clearly suggested in the advertisement. But in most cases only a portion of the clothing or underclothing is perfumed. There exist typical perfume fetichists, who can, as a rule, be sexually excited only by means of some definite perfume, in the absence of which they are impotent.

In comparison with smell, taste plays a very minor part. Still, a primevally old popular custom, the use of “priapistic flavouring agents,” rests upon fetichistic ideas of this kind. Cunnilinctus and fellatio are perhaps also committed with the desire to taste the genital organs; just as the same must be the case with those not very rare practices in which flavouring agents or beverages are brought into contact with the genital organs, are impregnated, as it were, with their essence, and then swallowed. To this belongs also the following original case:

A man obtains sexual gratification only in this way: by introducing a cigar, small end first, into the female genital passage, leaving it there a long time, and then smoking it, with the end thus impregnated in his mouth.

There exist many other forms of fetichism. It is impossible to enumerate all these varieties. I shall, for example, refer only to the not uncommon fetichism of women for athletes and[627] acrobats, or for singers and actors; and to that of men for dancers, and especially for horsewomen, whose appearance has quite a fascinating influence on many men, more particularly when they are actually on horseback.

Analogous to the previously described hermaphrodite fetichism is fetichism for other bodily defects, as for obese, lame, and hunchbacked persons.

Von Krafft-Ebing reported the case of a man who loved only girls with a limp, which I can parallel by an observation of my own. A merchant, thirty-two years of age (with slight stigmata of degeneration—Darwinian pointed ears, slight asymmetry of the skull—but in other respects with a very powerful build of body, and having performed his year’s service in the cavalry), who since ten years of age has been addicted to excessive masturbation, is potent only in intercourse with a girl who limps. He cannot state when this perversion first manifested itself in him. In any case, it has developed into a typical fetichism.

To this category belong, also, the abnormal love towards elderly individuals, heterosexual “gerontophilia,” and the fetichistic influence of certain peculiarities of character. Thus, it is an old experience that a Don Juanesque, bold, and self-assertive appearance on the part of men, and even depravity and sexual lawlessness, exercise a fascinating influence upon many women. This is, as it were, homologous to the previously described influence of prostitutes and fast women upon men.

A peculiar fetich is constituted also by the human voice. A sympathetic voice has often been the cause of a violent love passion. Singers, both men and women, know something of this powerful fetichistic charm of the voice.

Finally, sexual fetichism can extend to objects in relationship with the beloved person, or with any human individual (“object fetichism”), and this is very readily accounted for by the personification and spiritualization of these objects of human use, and especially of clothing, which appears to be a part of the personality itself, and so quite naturally becomes a sexual fetich. (See the detailed description given on p. 140 et seq.)

Among the various forms of clothing fetichism, by far the commonest is shoe fetichism, or “retifism.” After the Marquis de Sade, who in his writings described the most important sexual perversions, active algolagnia has been termed “sadism”; and after Sacher-Masoch, passive algolagnia has been termed “masochism.” I consider, therefore, that with the same and even greater justification, as I have already suggested in my[628] work on Rétif de la Bretonne,[635] foot and shoe fetichism may be denoted by the term “retifism,” for it is this sexual perversion which manifests itself most markedly in Rétif’s life (1734-1806), and in him, also, this perversion found its first literary interpreter and apostle, in exactly the same manner as sadism was made known in wider circles by de Sade and masochism by Sacher-Masoch. Rétif first described typical foot fetichism and shoe fetichism, and also wrote the first history of this subject. In him this tendency appeared at the early age of ten years, as he relates (vol. i., pp. 90-93) in his celebrated autobiography—a work greatly admired by Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, and other heroes of our classical literature. In this place, also, he gives a very good explanation of the genesis of foot fetichism and shoe fetichism:

“This fondness for beautiful feet, which in me is so strong that it unfailingly arouses my most powerful lust, and leads me to ignore any ugliness in other respects—does it arise from any physical or emotional predisposition? In all those who have this peculiarity it is very strong. Is it connected with any preference for an easy gait, for a gracious, voluptuous, dancing movement? The peculiar attraction which the foot-covering exercises is only the reflex of the preference for beautiful feet, which stimulate even an animal. Thus a man comes to prize the covering almost as much as the thing itself. The passion which, since childhood, I have felt for such beautiful foot-coverings was an acquired inclination, which, however, rested on a natural preference. But the love for a small foot has a physical basis, which finds expression in the Latin proverb, ‘Parvus pes, barathrum grande.’”

Rétif was a typical shoe fetichist. He trembled with desire on viewing a woman’s shoe; he blushed when he saw it, as if it were the girl herself. As a true fetichist, he collected the slippers and shoes of his mistresses; he kissed them, and smelled them, and sometimes masturbated into them. Especially fascinating to him were the high heels of women’s shoes, a sight of which sufficed to produce in him intense sexual excitement.

Shoe-fetichism existed in ancient times, and long ago it was assumed that there was a relationship between the foot and the vita sexualis. References to this matter will be found in my earlier work, “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. ii., pp. 323-325. In modern shoe-fetichism masochistic ideas (ideas of being trodden on, of placing the beloved’s foot on the back of the neck) or sadistic ideas (ideas of treading upon the beloved’s feet, etc.) played a part; also there were associated[629] sensations of smell proceeding from the leather; the colour of the shoes is likewise of importance. The “foot-wooers”—thus are the shoe fetichists named in the speech of prostitutes—have the most varied inclinations in respect of different shapes and fashions of shoes. One loves ladies’ boots, another riding-boots, a third dancing-shoes, a fourth slippers, a fifth actually loves coarse wooden peasants’ shoes. Also, in respect of ornamentation, colour, heels, etc., fancies vary. In one case known to me, a clergyman was purely a heel fetichist. Hirschfeld records (“The Nature of Love,” p. 148) the case of a man who was sexually excited only by means of the ankle-wrinkles in boots; also the case of a woman who was fascinated by the dusty boots of men, etc.[636]

Of other articles of clothing, the corset, petticoat, chemise, apron, and, more especially, stockings and handkerchiefs, form objects of sexual fetichism. Félicien Rops appears to have been at once a corset fetichist and a stocking fetichist, for he frequently draws feminine figures naked, except in respect of their wearing corset and stockings. There are many men who are able to complete intercourse with a woman only when she keeps on her stockings or shoes. Others are excited only by the articles of clothing; for instance, they represent in imagination corset shops, in order, by looking at the corsets, to produce orgasm and ejaculation; or they collect or steal [637] feminine underclothing, especially handkerchiefs, in order to obtain sexual excitement from smelling or looking at these, or to masturbate with them. Finally, there exist fetichists for particular materials, such as fur (loved especially by masochists), satin, silk, or even entire costumes, such as a woman’s riding-dress, tights, mourning, etc. D’Estoc describes, under the name “la course des araignées” (“the spider race”), the appearance of twenty women in a brothel, who were clothed only in long black gloves reaching to the shoulders and long black stockings. In the Berlin newspapers there recently appeared an account of the fetichism of a prince for long “gants de suède” on slender women’s arms. Unique in its kind would appear to be the case of the spectacle fetichist, of which Hirschfeld gives an account (op. cit., pp. 145, 146).

CHAPTER XXIII
ACTS OF FORNICATION WITH CHILDREN, INCEST, ACTS OF FORNICATION WITH CORPSES AND ANIMALS (BESTIALITY), EXHIBITIONISM, AND OTHER SEXUAL PERVERSITIES.
APPENDIX: THE TREATMENT OF SEXUAL PERVERSITIES.

“But what a source of devastation is a public or private teacher of youth, when his heart is impure!... What a tragic example of misleading is he who, himself in a position imposing upon him the duty of leading others towards virtue, is animated by the most detestable of all passions.”—Johann Peter Frank.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXIII

Acts of fornication on the part of adults with children — “Pædophilia erotica” — Superstitious motives — Shunammitism — As a popular custom — Opportunity as a cause of pædophilia — Its frequency among menservants and schoolmasters — Acts of fornication with children less than six years of age — Examples — With children between the ages of six and fourteen years — Alluring influence of fruits verts upon debauchees — Causes — The mania for defloration — Other causal factors of acts of fornication with children — Examples.

Early appearance of the sexual impulse in children — Causes — In the country — The demi-vierge type — Early puberty in girls — Examples of sexual intercourse between children — Child prostitution — Parisian flower-girls — Match-selling girls and “music pupils” of Berlin — Blackmail — Causes of child prostitution.

Incest — Causes — Incest in France — Sexual relationship with a third individual on the part of two persons closely related to one another.

Acts of fornication with animals (zoophilia, bestiality) — Genuine zoophilia — A remarkable case thereof — Causes of bestiality — Its frequency in the country — Report of cases — Bestiality on the part of a woman — Reputed seduction of human beings by animals.

Acts of fornication with corpses (necrophilia) — Motives — Symbolic necrophilia — Love of statues — Influence of museums on uncultured individuals — Sexual intercourse with statues — Pygmalionism — Acts of fornication with objects resembling the human body — “Dames et hommes de voyage” — Exhibitionism — Morbid foundation of this — Other motives — Masturbation as a cause — A remarkable case of exhibitionism — “Frotteurs” — Example — Voyeurs — Secret sexual clubs — “Essayeurs” — “Stercoraires platoniques” — Pædication — Opium, hashish, and ether employed for sexual purposes — Use of these drugs in Paris — Sexual fantasies of the opium smoker.

Appendix: The Treatment of Sexual Perversions. — Importance of psychological factors in the treatment of sexual perversions — Management of the primary trouble — Psycho-therapeutics and suggestive therapeutics — Verbal suggestions — Confidence in the knowledge of the physician — Sexual perversions as diseases of the will — Need for the education of the will — Suggestion in the waking state — Suggestion by means of letters — By means of hypnosis — Special prescriptions.

CHAPTER XXIII

One of the most tragic, but unfortunately one of the most frequent, of occurrences is premature sexual intercourse on the part of children—partly resulting from acts of fornication by adults with children, partly resulting from premature awakening of the sexual impulse in children, and premature sexual activity on their part. These two varieties of premature sexual intercourse in children must be sharply distinguished each from the other.

The alleged increase of sexual offences in which children are concerned is by von Krafft-Ebing wrongly associated with the more widely diffused nervousness of recent generations. As a matter of fact, such offences have occurred at all times and among all peoples, with no less frequency than at the present day. “Erotic pædophilia” is a very widely diffused phenomenon. It arises from superstitious [638] grounds; as, for example, from the belief which prevails in many countries that venereal and other diseases are cured by copulation with an intact child. The primeval belief that intercourse with immature girls prolonged life, that an emanation from them rejuvenated old men (the so-called “Shunammitism”[639]), led in former times, and leads even at the present day, to acts of fornication with children. Less commonly do timidity and impotence on the part of adult men, rendering intercourse with adult women difficult or impossible, give rise to the seduction or rape of defenceless and unsuspicious children. The act of fornication with children as a popular custom is a symptom of a primitive degree of civilization, and is therefore met with, even at the present day, among savage nations, a matter regarding which Ploss-Bartels gives detailed accounts.

Passing to consider the cause of acts of fornication with children at the present day, and the means by which such acts are effected, unquestionably opportunity plays an important part in their production. All those persons who by their occupation are brought into prolonged diurnal and nocturnal association with children, and are frequently alone with them, such as menservants,[634] nursemaids, governesses, housekeepers, schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, the directors and other officials of orphan asylums, etc., constitute a disproportionately large contingent of those who commit offences under § 176³ and § 182 of the Criminal Code. This does not arise from exceptional criminality on the part of these persons as compared with those belonging to other professions, but simply and solely from the fact that they are continually alone with children, and that any sexual excitement which may arise is thus directed towards these, because no adult is there. Sometimes a morbid neuropathic or psychopathic constitution plays a part; but more commonly we have to do simply with lasciviousness and sensuality, which avails itself of the opportunity thus offered.

Rétif de la Bretonne warned parents regarding menservants and nursemaids as seducers of children. These persons are apt to execute unchaste acts with children in the very first years of life; in order to gratify their own voluptuousness, they play with the genital organs of these poor innocents, and thus prematurely awaken sexual sensibility, and often give rise to premature onanistic habits. These acts of impropriety carried on with small children—which must be sharply distinguished from those with older children, the cases being classified as relating in the first place to children under six years of age, and in the second place to children between the ages of six and fourteen years—are far commoner than is usually imagined, and perhaps even more dangerous in respect of the bodily and mental development of the child, than the second variety of unchaste acts, with older children. In most cases it is persons of the female sex who misuse small children in this way, and often this arises from the fear of impregnation resulting from intercourse with an adult man. Generally we have to do with a lascivious disposition, as, for example, in the following cases, which came under my own observation:

In one of these cases a woman seduced a boy four years of age to the performance of systematic improper acts; in the other case, a boy of five years of age was taken (horribile dictu) by his own mother into her bed, and taught to perform coitus with her, in so far as this was possible, and also to perform manipulations with her genital organs. The little boy repeated this practice with his sister, three years of age, and, being caught in the act, he confessed the whole history.

A boy aged four played freely with his own genital organs, and also made peculiar coitus-like movements in bed, and in contact with his mother. When the latter, greatly alarmed, asked him how he had learned to do this, he explained that a young woman twenty years of age, living in the house, had performed these manipulations with him.

Magnan also reports (“Lectures on Mental Disorders,” Nos. 2 and 3, p. 41) the case of a lady, twenty-nine years of age, who performed sexual acts with her nephew, aged five.

These cases rarely attain publicity, because they usually remain undiscovered. Fornicatory acts with children, such as are frequently alluded to in the newspapers, chiefly concern children between the ages of six and fourteen years. In these cases the offences are most often committed by schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, or by private tutors and governesses. We further often find other women undertaking such acts, displaying a sexual activity which they have no opportunity of satisfying in intercourse with full-grown men. In the third place, debauchees and exhausted roués seek new and piquant excitement by intercourse with such fruits verts. Of such Laurent writes:[640]

“They have used and misused woman; they have explored all the stages of natural and unnatural love; they have visited Lesbos and Paphos; and they have experienced every possible sexual artificiality. Their sexual desires have become torpid, their manliness is on the decline, and sexual death approaches. But the more exhausted they are, the less willing are they patiently to acquiesce in their loss. It is with them as with inebriates who are full to the throat and still continue to drink. One day they notice a little girl in the street and feel stimulated by her youthful charms. Thus their love begins.”

The blameless, the natural, and the pure, in the essence of the child and of the intact virgin, has a stimulating influence upon such perverted individuals: it acts as a contrast to their own sexual shamelessness and artificiality. The contrast, in fact, has the effect of a most powerful stimulus. Nor can we fail to recognize the existence in such cases also of a sadistic element in the performance of coitus with a defenceless child, and in the sanguinary act of defloration of an immature individual. In the eighties there flourished in England such a “mania for defloration,” the scandalous details of which were illustrated in a lurid light by the revelations of the Pall Mall Gazette.[641] With regard to this sadistic element in acts of fornication with children, we must take into account the possibility that in the corporal punishment of children by the teacher may have originated the awakening of the latter’s sexual activities,[642] and that in this we may find the[636] cause of the beginning of sexual relationships between teacher and pupil.

Other not infrequent causes of the sexual misuse of children are to be found in alcoholic intoxication and in senile dementia. Tramps, also, who have for a long time been deprived of the opportunity of intercourse with women, are apt to gratify their long-repressed libido on the body of the first child they meet. Child labour in factories also offers opportunities for fornicatory acts with children.

A few especially striking instances of acts of fornication with children are appended:

1. The son of a greengrocer, A., twenty years of age, living in the Keibelstrasse, had for a long time immoral intercourse with the eight-year-old daughter of the milkman W., in the same street. He had not only violated her, but had committed other injuries. The young fellow continued his immoral conduct after he had become infected with venereal disease, and therefore naturally infected the girl. She became so ill that she had to be confined to bed, and the doctor who was called in diagnosed venereal infection. Notwithstanding this, the little girl continued to lie about the matter, and only after a whipping did she admit having had intercourse with A. The latter, a man with a crippled foot, as soon as he saw that his misconduct had been discovered, concealed himself in an outhouse, and was only arrested by the police after a prolonged search. He is now in prison.

2. The model and friend of a painter, during the absence of the latter from home, seduced his son, twelve years of age, after preliminary repeated masturbation, to coitus and cunnilinctus.

3. A celebrated actress, now in advanced age, in the case of a boy who sought a situation in her house, gave rise by various manipulations to an erection of the penis, and seduced him to coitus; she invited him repeatedly to visit her, and continued this scandalous practice with him for eight years.

4. The governess Friederike B. was accused of improper conduct and seduction of the little boy Szepsan, and was condemned to six months’ rigorous imprisonment. In April, 1900, Szepsan disappeared through her connivance; she had him confined under false names in various cloisters. The accused denied all blame, and declared that she was the benefactress of Szepsan, whom she intended to bring up as a priest. The evidence, however, sufficed for her conviction.

5. A very scandalous affair is reported by Le Matin. Some time ago the Parisian police arrested a young fellow on account of an offence against certain civil and natural laws. The accused thereupon denounced an old Count W., and others of his friends, and also Baron A., who daily waited the coming out of the boys from certain Parisian schools, and then took them in his automobile to his own house or to that of Count W. The police, having received information, kept under observation the sons of certain distinguished families attending the school in question, and ascertained that the statements were true. The Count and his friends carried off the boys, among whom were three sons of an engineer, the eldest thirteen years of age, to the Avenue MacMahon or the Avenue Friedland. A., who is engaged to[637] a young lady belonging to the Parisian aristocracy, was arrested; Count W. has escaped. The examination of their dwelling disclosed all kinds of compromising materials.

In view of the wide diffusion of acts of fornication with children, we must always keep one point clearly before our minds, on account of the great forensic importance of the matter. That is the question whether the initiative to the improper act proceeded in the first place from the child, in consequence of a premature awakening of the sexual impulse. [See, for example, Emil Schultze-Malkowsky, “The Sexual Impulse in Childhood,” in the periodical Sex and Society, 1907, No. 7, pp. 370-373. He reports five sexual scenes dating from the year 1864, the heroine of which was a little girl seven years of age!]

In a certain proportion only of such cases have we to do with a degenerative, morbid, inherited state; in many instances this sexual perversity occurs in children who in other respects are perfectly healthy,[643] and is evoked by seduction, bad education, and chance causes, such as intestinal worms, etc. This is to be observed also in children of savage races, among whom this phenomenon of sexual prematurity is perhaps more frequent, in part owing to climatic conditions. In the country the observation of sexual acts on the part of animals, frequently occurring under their very eyes, makes children early acquainted with the fact of sexual intercourse. In large towns prostitution and overcrowded dwellings, in ways to which we have already alluded in detail, give rise in many cases to a very early initiation of children into a knowledge of the facts of sexual life.

Apart from the question of child prostitution, to which we shall allude presently, we can observe such early mature types of children also in every class of the population of large towns. Among the circles of the middle classes, and among the “upper ten thousand,” we have the type of the demi-vierge, which recently Hans von Kahlenberg has so admirably described in his “Nixchen.” In the female sex this early sexual maturity is much more clearly manifest. In an essay entitled “The Zoo as an Educator,” in the weekly newspaper Der Roland von Berlin (No. 27, July 5, 1906), we find a striking description of such a type:

“We find definite types of early-ripe girls, which we must regard as a peculiar acquirement of the twentieth century. We distinguish without difficulty the simple, hot-blooded, sensual variety from the thoroughly developed perverse types. A short-legged, buxom type is the most[638] predominant. Such girls seem extraordinarily energetic, and appear also to excel in mental powers their pale-cheeked and half-alive male companions. Their dress is extremely conspicuous, and they wear highly ornamented hats. Whilst, when we look at them from behind, their whole figure suggests the age of fifteen or seventeen years, the front view suggests that they are at least eight years older. They prefer to lace very tightly, in order to display their rounded hips, and to make their already strongly developed breasts all the more imposing. But this development displays their mental and physical corruption, especially when undeveloped shoulders and thin arms show beyond question that they are really of a very tender age. The sharply-cut features, with the sparkling black eyes, which at once fascinate us, plainly indicate the lines which the passions are about to engrave on their features; we discern, also, that by the age of thirty they will already be old women.”

Sexual intercourse on the part of children with one another, or with grown persons in cases in which the invitation has proceeded from the child, are by no means rare occurrences. The following remarkable cases may illustrate this:

1. Some years ago a schoolboy, K. J., thirteen years of age, was accused in Berlin of several acts of sexual intercourse with girls of from six to eight years. The guilt of the accused was fully proved. He was sent to a reformatory.

2. A young man made the acquaintance of a girl sixteen years of age. Although greatly impassioned, he did not dare to touch the girl, because he was deceived by her sweet and blameless demeanour, and did not wish to be her first seducer. Soon afterwards he learned that this angel had had sexual intercourse for several years with a married man forty years of age!

3. Legroux showed in 1890, at the weekly meeting of the physicians of the Hospital St. Louis, a boy, eleven years of age, who, after three months’ sexual intercourse with a syphilitic girl aged seven years, had been infected in the ordinary manner, per vias naturales (reference in Unna’s Monatsheft für Dermatologie, 1890, vol. x., p. 335).

4. In Paris, in December, 1906 (according to the Vossische Zeitung of December 15, 1906, No. 558), a band of youthful street and shop thieves, ten in number, of ages varying from eleven to fourteen years, were arrested. Their leaders were a boy of twelve and a girl of thirteen years, the latter, Eliza Cailles by name, known generally by the nickname of “Beautiful Aliette.” This Aliette, a strikingly pretty little person, in a long dress of extremely fashionable cut, with a wonderful hat and most elegant gloves, ruled her band with the most exemplary self-confidence. They were all smart fellows; they were all of them her lovers, and with these ten husbands she was the happiest of wives.

Acts of fornication with children also explain the melancholy phenomenon of the existence of a widely diffused child prostitution in all large towns of the old and new world, regarding which, in the previously mentioned works on prostitution in these[639] towns, detailed accounts will be found.[644] The little flower-girls of Paris, the Berlin match-sellers and wax-candle-sellers or “music pupils”—all these provide a large contingent to child prostitution. To a great extent they are associated with equally youthful criminals and souteneurs, and avail themselves for blackmailing purposes of the existence of § 176³ and § 186 of the Criminal Code. Among them there are even individuals given to peculiar sexual “specialities,” who gratify perverse lusts in various artificial ways. Social misery, bad example, and seduction are, indeed, often to be blamed as causes of this early sexual depravity, but it is precisely in respect of child prostitution that Lombroso’s doctrine of the born prostitute has considerable justification.

In exceptional cases only does incest—sexual intercourse between those nearly related by blood, either in the same generation, as between brother and sister, or in the ascending and descending line—depend upon pathological causes. The origin of the dread and horror inspired by incest remains “a moot question of historical research.”[645] Within historical times and among savage peoples incestuous intercourse was permitted and widely diffused. Without doubt, racial hygienic experience regarding the pernicious effects of this extreme form of incest gave rise to the recognition of the fact that incest must be forbidden. At the present day incest occurs almost exclusively as the result of chance associations—as, for example, in alcoholic intoxication, in consequence of close domestic intimacy in small dwellings, in the absence of other opportunity for sexual intercourse. In such circumstances not infrequently among the lower classes of the population we observe, as a favouring factor, a complete absence of any conception of the immorality of incest.

Remarkable is the tendency to incestuous unions in certain epochs—as, for example, in the period of the French Rococo, when it was introduced by suggestion on a large scale, and manifested itself with alarming frequency. Numerous credible historical examples of this I have recorded in my “Recent Researches concerning the Marquis de Sade” (pp. 165-168). Mirabeau, and especially Rétif de la Bretonne (see my work on Rétif, pp. 381-382), luxuriated in horribly blasphemous incestuous[640] ideas.[646] According to Theodor Mundt, who speaks of these tendencies in his sketches of “Paris during the Second Empire” (vol. i., pp. 141, 142; Berlin, 1867), it appears that the French nature is not repelled to the same degree as the German by the idea of sexual union between those nearly related by blood. Eugene Sue relates, in his “Mysteries of Paris,” that among the lowest strata of the population fathers often have intercourse with their own daughters.

But such things also happen in Germany. In August, 1907, a manual labourer, forty-seven years of age, was condemned to three years’ imprisonment because he had had incestuous intercourse with his daughter, now twenty-seven years of age, during the previous fifteen years (!), and had continued this incestuous relationship after he had himself remarried. The girl had been for several years living in intimate sexual relationship with her father, who watched jealously to prevent his daughter having anything to do with another man. Among many Indian tribes of Central America incest is said to be always practised when the eldest daughter accompanies the father for a few days into the mountains, in order to prepare his maize bread for him.

Relations somewhat analogous are those in which parent and child have sexual intercourse with the same person—when, for example, mother and daughter have the same lover. Other peculiar combinations are possible, and are actually observed. Unique, however, would appear to be the case reported by d’Estoc (“Paris-Eros,” p. 209), in which a young man had sexual intercourse with a woman, with her two daughters, and also utilized the father of this family as a passive pæderast! In a manuscript novel, which I once saw, a man was made the lover of both husband and wife.

One of the most remarkable of sexual aberrations, in the reality of which, as Mirabeau [647] remarked, it is hardly possible to believe, is fornication with animals—zoophilia and bestiality.[648]

We will first describe zoophilia, a sexual inclination towards animals without actual sexual intercourse. Genuine zoophilia, or “animal fetichism,” as a perversion monopolizing the human being’s circle of sexual ideas, is very rare. Until recently, only a single case has been published—that recorded by Dr. Hanc in 1887, in the Wiener Medizinische Blâtter, and quoted also by von Krafft-Ebing. But I myself, in the year 1905, observed a second case of genuine zoophilia, and have recorded it elsewhere.[649] This extraordinarily rare case may as well be once more detailed here:

The person concerned was a farmer, forty-two years of age, of a large and imposing appearance, a healthy aspect, and normal conformation. His family history did not show any points of importance throwing light on the peculiar development of his vita sexualis. In the family several unhappy marriages had occurred. The patient’s parents had also lived in such an inharmonious marriage. His mother had a masterful manner; he felt no love for her. He knew nothing of any sexual abnormalities in his family. He lays especial stress upon the fact that when an infant he was brought up on the bottle, and that in this way he missed the first unconscious natural sexual stimulations which, according to the theory propounded by S. Freud, proceed from the suckling at the maternal breast. To this he mainly ascribes his lack of sexual sensibility towards the female sex. When he was a boy twelve years of age, the patient experienced sexual excitement for the first time when riding on a fine horse. Since that time his sexual sensibility as a whole has been closely connected with the idea of fine horses, in this way, that merely to look at them produced libidinous excitement, so that for years, once a week, while riding, he had an ejaculation, accompanied by intense voluptuous sensations. It is, however, remarkable that he never had any erotic dreams connected with horses. As already stated, his sexual sensibility regarding the human female, and also the human male, is non-existent. His views regarding women are Schopenhauerian. The few attempts he had made at intimate intercourse with women—in most cases these were puellæ publicæ—were repulsive to him; he had[642] on these occasions no erection at all, or only a very slight one. The vita sexualis of the patient is, speaking generally, by no means an active one. He does not experience nocturnal pollutions, and is completely satisfied sexually by the weekly ejaculations and libidinous excitement which occurs when riding on horseback. For several years the patient has suffered from frequent insomnia, the cause of which he considered to be material troubles combined with gloomy thoughts about his abnormal sexual condition. Bromides, veronal, and other hypnotic drugs, are of little use to him, for habituation soon sets in; on the other hand, cold foot-baths have a better effect. The patient, who, as he himself says, has a strong antipathy to normal sexual intercourse, which he regards as a “bestial act,” believes that he might perhaps attain a normal sexual condition if he could meet with a wife who would be sympathetic, and would be in harmony with him mentally and physically. He is, however, in this respect extremely sceptical, since he is well aware of the rarity of that complete harmony which is the indispensable prerequisite of a happy marriage. The patient exhibited no symptoms whatever of “degeneration.” The genital organs were normal, and nervous sleeplessness in a man forty-two years of age, dependent upon material cares and emotional depression, cannot be regarded as a symptom of degeneration, when we reflect how frequently in persons who are otherwise quite healthy such nervous insomnia may make its appearance, as a result of the struggle for life, at or near the age of forty years.

True zoophilia is a typical sexual perversion, and appears to occur principally in men. The use of animals (dogs) for purely onanistic purposes, in the way of licking the female genital organs, cannot be included in this connexion. In French novels and moral studies of recent times such types of zoophilous women are, indeed, described; thus, for example, in Octave Mirbeau’s “Badereise eines Neurasthenikers” (1902) we find a description of Princess Karagnine as such a perverse woman, endowed with a peculiar “passion for animals,” especially for stallions, who caresses them with obvious signs of sexual excitement. And in the de Goncourts’ “Diary” I find the following remark:

“Every time I visit the Zoological Gardens, I am struck by the number of bizarre, remarkably eccentric, exotic, indefinable women we meet here, to whom the contact with the animal world of this place appears to constitute an adventure of physical love” (Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, “Leaves from a Diary,” 1851 to 1895).

R. Schwaeblé also gives an interesting account of the zoophilous tendencies of Frenchwomen (“Les Détraquées de Paris,” pp. 203-212).

Unquestionably, modern zoological gardens offer even more than country life opportunities to women of zoophilous instincts, and can in this respect become dangerous. I remember from my own schooldays in Hanover remarkable scenes in the much-visited[643] zoological gardens of that town—scenes which at that time we naturally did not really understand, but on which the above remarks and observations throw a clear light.

Thus we shall no longer be surprised by the following extremely remarkable case of zoophilia in the female sex:

Kleptomania in a Girl aged Thirteen.—A girl thirteen years of age, who is incurably affected with kleptomania, and who at the same time has a morbid inclination towards horses, is the most recent phenomenon in the province of decadence. The unfortunate child is the daughter, Frida, of a married couple living in the Höchstestrasse. She had committed a number of thefts of vehicles, which might have been attributed only to skilled professional thieves. The morbid tendency compels the child to take the horse by the bridle and lead it away. She does not appear to have any tendency to sell the animal, or to steal anything from the carriage. Her love for horses led her in earlier years to unusual acts. Thus she took the horse of a dairyman in the Elbingerstrasse out of its stall, mounted it, and rode away. The child has been under medical treatment for a long time on account of her extremely unusual tendency, and we understand that the medical evidence shows that she cannot be held legally responsible for the offences she has committed (Berliner Tageblatt, No. 352, July 14, 1906).

Passing now to consider definite acts of fornication with [644]animals (Sodomie—see note [648] to p. 640, bestiality),[650] there is hardly any animal which has not been in some way and at some time utilized for the gratification of human lust; but naturally in most cases the animals always available were employed, such as dogs, cats, sheep, goats, hens, geese, ducks, horses. Martin Schurig, as early as 1730, in his “Gynæcologia” (pp. 380-387), recorded a large number of cases of bestial aberrations in which, in addition to the animals above mentioned, apes, bears, and even fishes were employed. In antiquity snakes were often the objects of unnatural lust on the part of women, playing the part of the modern lap-dog. Bestiality is very widely diffused.[651] Countries especially celebrated for the frequency of this practice are China and Italy; in the former country geese, in the latter goats, are preferred for sexual malpractices. In India, and also among the Southern Slavs, horses and donkeys play the principal part as objects of bestial love.[652]

Acts of fornication with animals are due to various causes; in exceptional cases only can they be referred to morbid predisposition. In the lower classes of the population, and among many races—as, for example, among the Southern Slavs and among the Persians—the superstitious belief that venereal disease can be cured by intercourse with animals occasionally gives rise to bestiality. More frequently the lack of opportunity for normal gratification of the sexual impulse is the cause of bestiality; and it is naturally of more frequent occurrence in the country, for the reason that there human beings live in closer association with animals than they do in the town. The herdsman alone with his herd in a solitary place, the groom who in the stable suddenly finds himself in a state of sexual excitement, the peasant whose wife is perhaps ailing—all these indulge in bestiality simply from opportunity. Friedrich S. Krauss learned from a trustworthy authority that in the Austrian cavalry Slavonic soldiers frequently gratified their sexual impulse upon mares. When they are caught doing this, they excuse themselves by saying that they are too poor to pay a woman. Commonly these fellows escape punishment. In brothels, also, bestial practices are common; in some cases debauchees themselves take part in these practices, in others prostitutes make a display of bestial intercourse. Frequently, also, sadistic impulses, similar to those which find expression in the torturing or slaughtering of animals during coitus, play a part in bestial intercourse.

An eyewitness describes such a brothel scene, which took place in the Via San Pietro all’ Orto at Milan. An old roué played the principal part in this; he had become so depraved that he had sexual intercourse with a duck, the throat of which was cut during the bestial act!

Some forty years ago, in the Karntnerstrasse in Vienna, a prostitute was found in her room, murdered, and her chambermate and professional companion was condemned to imprisonment as guilty of the murder. After some years, however, the real murderer was discovered, and he was detected by the fact that he was only able to have an erection of the penis when he killed a hen. He was known among the prostitutes as “the hen-man.”

Another case of sadistic bestiality was recently reported by the veterinary surgeon Grundmann, at Marienburg in Saxony (the reference will be found in the Berliner Tierärztliche Wochenschrift for September 14, 1906):

A man, thirty-eight years of age, of bad reputation, one night found his way into a byre in order to gratify his sexual desires by intercourse with a cow. First he introduced his penis into the vagina of a heifer nine months old; then he tried the same thing on a cow, which threw him off, and he fell to the ground. In a rage at this, he seized a pitchfork and forcibly thrust one of the prongs, first into the anus of the heifer, and then into that of the cow. The cow died speedily, whilst the heifer had to be slaughtered next day. In the cow, in addition to a laceration of the rectum about 1¹⁄₂ inches in length, there was found laceration of the capsules of the right and left kidneys, perforation of the mesentery, of the colon, of the liver, and of the diaphragm, also a laceration 1¹⁄₂ inches long and equally deep in the right lung. These extensive injuries showed that the pitchfork must have been thrust in repeatedly. The appearances in the body of the slaughtered heifer were similar to those found in the cow. The accused was condemned to imprisonment for two years and three months, part of this term being for the offence against morality and part for the injury to property.

The following extremely rare case of bestiality on the part of a woman was seen by Krauss (op. cit., p. 281):

“If I can venture to credit the reports I have so frequently heard (and it is difficult to believe that they are pure inventions), among the Southern Slavs intercourse between women and horses or asses is comparatively common. How they go to work in this matter I do not know from personal observation. I did, however, once see a Chrowot woman of ideal beauty, who stood at night completely naked in front of a lighted lamp, and in this position had intercourse with a tom cat. She experienced so intense an orgasm that she did not notice me, although I watched the scene barely two paces from the window.”

The part played by lap-dogs in the case of many ladies has been previously mentioned.

Formerly the question was quite seriously discussed, whether a human being could be seduced or violated by an animal, and Hufeland relates a fantastic story of copulation between a dog and a sleeping little girl, which I have criticized in another work;[653] but there are, as a matter of fact, no proofs of such an occurrence, or of its possibility. In brothels, certainly, dogs are from time to time trained to have intercourse with prostitutes.[654]

Much rarer than acts of fornication with animals are similar acts with corpses, the so-called “necrophilia.” In the works of de Sade, we find references to the algolagnistic factor of this rare sexual aberration, to the sadistic or masochistic element in necrophilia, inasmuch as in the case of the dead individual we have to do with a completely helpless and defenceless being, who is totally unable to resist the act; sadism is also manifested in the not uncommon mutilation of the corpses;[655] and the sadistic impulse further obtains gratification from the idea of decomposition, from the smell, the cold, and the horror. In the case of necrophilia opportunity also plays a part. Soldiers and monks who are occupied in watching the dead, and who chance to be seized with sexual excitement, have gratified themselves with female corpses.

Sexual acts with corpses are, indeed, not so rare as was formerly assumed, but they belong to the class of sexual aberrations regarding which we have but few authentic observations, most of[647] these derived from French authors. Remarkable is the following recent case, which occurred in April, 1901:[656]

The following hardly credible case of necrophilia is reported from Schonau: In the cemetery of that place Frau Maschke, thirty years of age, was buried in the morning, but the grave was not completely filled in. In the evening an inhabitant visited the grave of a relative, which was close to that of Frau Maschke, and she noticed with alarm that the top of the coffin in which the corpse of Frau Maschke was lying was moving up and down. The discoverer of this alarming occurrence hastened to the sexton, and reported the fact. The sexton hurried to the cemetery with several workmen, and there, to their horror, they surprised an inmate of the poorhouse named Wokatsch as he was in the act of violating the woman’s corpse. The bestial criminal was at once arrested. Soon afterwards a judicial investigation took place, for which purpose the corpse was removed from the grave and taken to the mortuary in order to determine how far the criminal had actually proceeded in his attempt on the body.

In folk-lore, mythology, and belles-lettres, necrophilia plays a large part, a matter to which I have referred at greater length in another work (“Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. ii., pp. 288-296). The idea of intercourse with a dead body, and also that of intercourse with an insensible human being, somewhat frequently gives rise to peculiar forms of sexual aberration. First of all in this connexion we have to consider symbolic necrophilia, in which the person concerned contents himself with the simple appearance of death. A prostitute or some other woman must clothe herself in a shroud, lie in a coffin, or on the “bed of death,” or in a room draped as a “chamber of death,” and during the whole time must pretend to be dead, whilst the necrophilist satisfies himself sexually by various acts. Cases of such a nature are reported by de Sade, Neri, Taxil, Tarnowsky, etc.

Closely allied to these necrophilist tendencies is the remarkable “Venus statuaria,” the love for and sexual intercourse with statues and other representations of the human person. Here also, apart from certain aesthetic motives,[657] which may predominate in the case of statues of exceptional artistic perfection, we have to do, for the most part, with the same motives that give rise to[648] necrophilia—sadistic, masochistic, and fetichistic. In the case of individuals who are sexually extremely excitable, a walk through a museum containing many statues may suffice to give rise to libido. Of this we have examples. Generally, however, we have to do with immature, youthful, and, above all, uncultured individuals, who are devoid of all æsthetic sensibility, and have grown up also in a state of prudery and horror of the nude. It is of similar persons that the Catholic moral theologian Bouvier speaks, when, in his “Manuel des Confesseurs” (Verviers, 1876), he discusses the case of masturbation before a statue of the Holy Virgin. We have previously given examples of the fact that direct sexual intercourse with a statue occurs as part of a religious fetichism and phallus cult (p. 101). In such cases the statue is taken for the divinity, but in a profane statue-love it is taken for the living human being, as in the celebrated case of the gardener who attempted coitus with the statue of the Venus of Milo. The idea of the life of the statue is even more distinctly manifest in the so-called “pygmalionism,” an imitation of the ancient legend of Pygmalion and Galatea, and a utilization of this legend for erotic ends. Naked living women, in such cases, stand as “statues” upon suitable pedestals, and are watched by the pygmalionist, whereupon they gradually come to life. The whole scene induces sexual enjoyment in the pygmalionist, who is generally an old, outworn debauchee. Canler has described such practices as going on in Parisian brothels, on one occasion three prostitutes appearing respectively as the goddesses Venus, Minerva, and Juno.[658]

In this connexion we may refer to fornicatory acts effected with artificial imitations of the human body, or of individual parts of that body. There exist true Vaucansons in this province of pornographic technology, clever mechanics who, from rubber and other plastic materials, prepare entire male or female bodies, which, as hommes or dames de voyage, subserve fornicatory purposes. More especially are the genital organs represented in a manner true to nature. Even the secretion of Bartholin’s glands is imitated, by means of a “pneumatic tube” filled with oil. Similarly, by means of fluid and suitable apparatus, the ejaculation of the semen is imitated. Such artificial human beings are actually offered for sale in the catalogue of certain manufacturers of “Parisian rubber articles.” A more precise account of these[649] “fornicatory dolls” is given by Schwaeblé (“Les Détraquées de Paris,” pp. 247-263). The most astonishing thing in this department is an erotic romance (“La Femme Endormie,” by Madame B.; Paris, 1899), the love heroine of which is such an artificial doll, which, as the author in the introduction tells us, can be employed for all possible sexual artificialities, without, like a living woman, resisting them in any way. The book is an incredibly intricate and detailed exposition of this idea.

A comparatively common sexual aberration is “exhibitionism,” first described by Lasègue,[659] the exposure of the genital organs, or other naked parts of the body, or the performance of sexual acts in public places, either in order, by the public exposure, to produce sexual excitement, or else as a result of the blind yielding to sexual impulse, regardless of the fact of publicity. In these cases we have almost always to do with a morbid phenomenon, dependent upon epileptic or other mental disorders. Thus, Seiffer, among eighty-six exhibitionists, found eighteen epileptics, seventeen dements, thirteen “degenerates,” eight neurasthenics, eight alcoholics, eleven “habitual” exhibitionists, and in ten cases various other morbid conditions. Of the eighty-six cases, eleven concerned persons of the female sex.[660] Recently, Burgl, in a careful and critical work upon exhibitionism,[661] has suggested the terms “exhibition” and “exhibitionism,” the former to be employed to denote an isolated act of exhibition, the latter to denote the repeated or customary act of exposure of the genital organs coram publico. This distinction is important, because exhibition occurs in mentally healthy persons, as well as in those suffering from mental disorder; exhibitionism, on the other hand, is, if we except extremely rare instances in debauchees not suffering from mental disorder, met with only in insane or mentally defective individuals.

In the case of these latter we have always to do with the actions of weak-minded persons; or with impulsive actions in persons in a state of epileptic or alcoholic confusion; or, finally, with coercive ideas in neurasthenic or hysterical persons, in paranoia, in general paralysis of the insane, or in some other form of insanity. But cases of exhibition or exhibitionism may sometimes occur from other motives in more or less healthy persons. Among the Slavonic[650] peoples, exposure of the genital organs or of the buttocks is frequently an expression of contempt towards some one, or also an act of superstition (Krauss). Exhibitionism as a popular custom occurred at medieval festivals, and also in connexion with the “obscene gestures” of the ancients.[662] By habituation in early childhood the tendency to exhibitionism can be favoured, we learn from the case reported by von Schrenck-Notzing,[663] in which the person concerned had as a boy taken part in childish games in which the children passed by one another with bared genital organs. In his monograph upon the anomalies of the sexual impulse, which abounds in fine touches, Hoche (op. cit., p. 488) very rightly refers to the manner in which the exhibitionist tendency is favoured by habitual masturbation. Through the practice of masturbation the sense of shame in respect to one’s own body is certainly destroyed, and thus, in the case of an onanist, when some unusual impulse impells him, for example, to expose his genital organs in the presence of a person of the other sex, certain powerful inhibitory impulses are lacking, which, in non-onanists, would immediately overcome this impulse.

Of the two following cases of exhibitionism, that of a homosexual officer, twenty-five years of age, is certainly the most remarkable. In youth this patient had also masturbated to great excess, and he gives the following report of his exhibitionist tendencies:

“As a boy seven to ten years of age (that is, before I began to masturbate), it was a pleasure to me to go barefoot, and to show myself to others in this way. This impulse suddenly disappeared. But at about the age of fifteen or sixteen years (the time when I began to masturbate) this impulse reappeared, and has continued down to the present time. Inasmuch as time and opportunity were generally wanting, I could only satisfy these desires in my own home, when I went home on furlough. Since in the neighbourhood of my home I was very well known, I endeavoured by taking extremely long walks, or by little journeys to neighbouring parts, to reach places where I might hope to remain unrecognized. I was accustomed on these occasions to wear a shooting jacket and knickerbockers; the knickerbockers were wide and loose, and of as thin cloth as possible, so that I could easily roll them up in order that my thighs might be bare (for if the thighs remained covered the whole affair would have given me no pleasure). Further, on these occasions I was accustomed to wear no ordinary underclothing, but only a nightshirt. As soon as I reached the desired place, and had hidden the jacket, stockings, and[651] shoes in a suitable place, the nightshirt was arranged as a blouse. Usually I had beforehand tried the arrangement of the dress at home. Often I went up to people who were engaged in field labours (I was especially fond of haymakers), and begged them to allow me to help them, which they were usually willing enough to do. I then took off my coat and bared my feet, and then, although there seemed no apparent reason for that, I took off my knickerbockers, until ultimately I was in the costume above described. I must, however, as already said, be seen; common people or workmen had usually to suffice me; but when people of education (for example, visitors at health resorts) saw me, this was what I greatly preferred. When once one gentleman said to another, ‘Look at his beautiful legs! what lovely legs he has!’ and I heard this by chance, I was extremely happy. I was then eighteen years of age, but even now I look back upon that incident with great pleasure. I also loved to show myself entirely naked; in such cases I always remained quite close to a pond or a stream, in order, if necessary, to be able to make the excuse that I had just been bathing. Frequently, however, I lay down close to a railway in a suitable place quite naked in an artistic posture, and enjoyed the pleasure of seeing the trains go by.

“I commonly did this only in warm, fine weather; but I also did it sometimes in snowy weather. When going about like this in very little clothing, or entirely naked, I had extremely agreeable sensations. The affair usually ended in my masturbating until ejaculation occurred; after which I returned, as it were, to reality. Otherwise I believe I should never have been able to bring myself to resume my normal clothing. For in this state I was almost insensitive to hunger, thirst, fatigue, heat, etc.; it was, in fact, a trance-like, extremely happy state.

“The desire to be photographed naked came later. I should have been extremely delighted to play the part of a naked model. I tried with great energy in various places (Vienna, Leipzig, and Hamburg) to get such a photograph as I wanted; but I was always turned away with a shrug of the shoulders or a shake of the head. Finally I succeeded in Erfurt, at a small photographer’s, in having my wish fulfilled.” (The patient sent a copy of this photograph.)

As the description clearly shows, we have here to do with exhibitionism upon an epileptic or neurasthenic basis. The patient describes the “confusional state,” out of which he awakens to “reality,” very vividly. An objection, however, to the idea of epilepsy is to be found in his very complete memory of these transactions.

Without doubt, in the following case, reported by von Schrenck-Notzing (op. cit., p. 96), we have to do with a case of neurasthenic exhibitionism:

The patient, a portrait-painter thirty-one years of age, was accused in the law-courts of repeated acts of exhibitionism. The imagination and sensuality of the accused have been abnormally excitable since earliest youth. For the last twenty years he has masturbated to excess[652] almost every day, with imaginative representation, when masturbating, of male and female genital organs. In coitus he obtained no gratification. He preferred to expose his own genital organs to persons of the female sex, in the belief that he would in this way produce in them sexual excitement. This exhibitionism is a central point in his sexual life, and has acquired the character of a coercive impulse. He is profoundly neurasthenic, and exhibits extensive changes of character, loss of energy, lachrymosity, ideas of suicide, etc. Exhibits signs of mental weakness. Exhibitionism is to him a complete equivalent to ordinary sexual enjoyment, and is performed owing to an organic compulsion. Ethically, his personality is weakened. The accused was discharged on account of greatly diminished criminal responsibility.

As a sub-variety of exhibitionists, we must refer to the so-called “frotteurs,” individuals who rub their genital organs, either bared or covered, against persons of the opposite sex, and thus obtain sexual gratification. In their case also we almost always have to do with morbid conditions. The following case (Vossische Zeitung, No. 258, June 6, 1906) was recently observed in Berlin:

The architect, Eduard P., was accused of offences committed in the opera-house of Berlin. In February and March, 1906, he had repeatedly soiled ladies’ clothing in a disgusting manner. At a time when the ladies had their whole attention directed to the stage, the offender, standing or sitting behind them, contaminated their clothing, and disappeared in the next interval. The whole mode of procedure suggested the activity of a man with an abnormal morbid predisposition, who in this place yielded to certain perverse impulses. Several complaints having been made, some detectives were dispersed through the audience, until finally the accused was caught in the act. During the second act of a performance of “Lohengrin,” the detective Brumme observed the accused pressing up from behind against a lady, and, in the semi-obscurity of the performance, acting in the manner already mentioned. P. was arrested, and admitted that he had repeatedly acted in this way. Before the judge the accused also confessed that he had done the same thing on other occasions. How he had been led to do it he could not say. Each time after committing the offence he had suffered very bitter remorse.

The accused was acquitted of the criminal charge on the ground of mental disorder.

The psychical element of exhibitionism also plays a part in the practice of the so-called “voyeurs”[664] and “voyeuses,” that numerous group of male and female individuals who are sexually[653] excited by regarding the sexual acts of other persons (active voyeurs), or who allow themselves to be watched by others when themselves performing sexual acts (passive voyeurs). In many brothels, apertures in the wall or other arrangements have been made for these voyeurs or gagas, through which they watch sexual scenes. In fashionable dressmakers’ shops, men are also said to watch ladies trying on dresses—at least, so I have been informed by a Parisian. Recently women also have been more and more inclined to see such spectacles, so that Schwaeblé devotes a special chapter to the voyeuses in his book on the perverse women of Paris. Messalina compelled her court ladies to prostitute themselves in her presence. Not infrequently male and female voyeurs unite to form societies and secret sexual clubs, in which all the sexual acts are performed in public.

Thus, in the end of September, 1906, in Graz, a “Secret Society for Immoral Purposes” was discovered by the police. At the head of this club was a merchant, thirty years of age, B——, jun. A number of other persons of good position belonged to this sexual club. They met in the great restaurant “Zum Königstiger.” Under the title of “An Assembly of Beauty,” festivals were held in the magnificent garden of this restaurant, which were concluded as orgies behind closed doors. The beautiful gardens of the Schlossberg were also the scene of many meetings of the club.[665]

A remarkable category of voyeurs is constituted by the so-called “stercoraires platoniques,”[666] individuals who obtain sexual enjoyment by observing the acts of defæcation and micturition performed by persons of the other sex, and seek opportunities for such observations in brothels or public lavatories. In the closet of one of the Berlin railway-stations such a stercoraire recently made a small artificial opening in the wall, through which he was able to watch other persons when engaged in the act of defæcation!

Here also we may refer to heterosexual pædication, to coitus analis, which, according to the reports of French authors (Tardieu, Martineau, and Taxil), appears to be especially common in France, but which is by no means rare also in other countries. It becomes comprehensible only in view of the fact that the anus may itself be an erogenic zone. Details regarding this matter are given by Freud.[667] Krauss, also, in the second volume of his “Anthropophyteia” (p. 392 et seq.), has given numerous examples of[654] pædication. Among others, he reports two cases related to him by the ethnologist Friedrich Müller, in which men had coitus with their wives only per anum.

Finally, we must refer to a practice which appears to be confined to France, the customary use of opium, hashish, and ether, for the purpose of inducing sexual excitement, regarding which Schwaeblé (op. cit., pp. 19-36) and d’Estoc (op. cit., pp. 151-158) give very interesting reports. There exist in Paris special opium-houses, hashish-houses, and ether-houses, some for men and some for women. Three opium-houses are to be found, for example, in the Avenue Hoche, the Avenue Jéna, and the Rue Lauriston; there is an ether-restaurant in Neuilly; one for opium, hashish, and ether in the Rue de Rivoli. All these means of enjoyment evoke after a time sexual ideas and fantasies of an extremely peculiar character, associated with actual voluptuous sensations. Opium gives rise to “ardent, brilliant pictures of an excessively stimulated imagination,”[668] frequently of a perverse character; hashish has a similar but even stronger influence; and ether gives rise to a more powerful stimulation of the sexual organs, to a “vibration of the flesh and of the soul.” The interior of these unwholesome places of exotic enjoyment, in which frequently homosexual acts also occur, is vividly described by both the above-named French authors.[669]

APPENDIX
THE TREATMENT OF SEXUAL PERVERSIONS

In the treatment of sexual perversions and anomalies, always a matter of great difficulty, knowledge of mankind, tact, and the finer understanding of the physician for the psychological peculiarities of each individual case, must play a greater part than any definite method of medical treatment. An exact understanding of the true nature of the sexually abnormal personality is the indispensable preliminary to our exercising a favourable influence upon morbid impulses and practices. Unquestionably, the physician must in the first place treat all actual diseases underlying the sexual abnormalities, by means of the physical and pharmacological therapeutical methods open to us in such abundance. Bodily and mental repose is here often the first need we have to satisfy; and for this purpose a change of environment, climatic cures, and such drugs as bromide and camphor may be very useful. But the principal matter must remain psychical, suggestive treatment. The mere discussion of the matter with the physician, the possibility at length of confiding in one capable of taking a thoroughly objective, calm, comprehensive view of the matter, one who by his profession is instructed in all secrets of the human spiritual and impulsive life, and who is aware of all the bodily necessities—this by itself suffices to restore to these unhappy beings, who are tortured by the evil demon of their unhappy impulse, who are often in a state of spiritual despair and hypochondria, to restore to them an inward confidence and a healing repose. This is the great triumph of medical research in this hitherto tabooed, and yet so enormously important, department, which only crass ignorance or evil-minded hypocrisy could designate as “improper” or “unworthy.” We have passed beyond the fruitless and dangerous method of “moral preaching,” to attain a scientific understanding of sexual anomalies; we have exposed the roots of these anomalies, lying deep in the physical and psychical nature of humanity, and we have recognized their connexion with so many other phenomena of the civilization of our time. When I speak of a “treatment” of the common, widely diffused sexual anomalies, it appears to me that that standpoint is the best which regards them as pure diseases of the will, which have been diffused in all times, but have never been more distinctly manifest, and never have possessed more importance, than they do at the present day, when will,[656] energy, has become the most important weapon in the ever more violent struggle for existence. As Napoleon III. said, it is not to the apathetic man, but to the energetic man, that the future belongs, to the man with the will of iron. But nothing paralyzes the will so much as the dominance of blind and, above all, of abnormal, impulses. Unquestionably they conceal within themselves, when frequently gratified, feelings rather of pain than of pleasure, and become the unconquerable source of hypochondria and self-contempt. The stronger the impulse becomes, the longer the habit has lasted of yielding to that impulse, the greater is the loss of will from which the individual suffers. The first and most important task of the physician is, therefore, to weaken the impulse by means of strengthening the will. He must consistently and methodically educate the will, in order to assist the patient to obtain the victory over his impulse. As Goethe says in his “Epimenides”:

The best way to attain this is to employ personal influence by means of suggestion. We must recommend frequent conversations on the part of the patient with the physician, which can be powerfully supplemented by epistolary communications on the part of the physician, of which an excellent example will be found in the “Psychotherapeutic Letters” by H. Oppenheim (Berlin, 1906).[670] Hypnosis is also of value, although it does not appear to do any more in these cases than is effected by suggestion in the waking state.[671]

It is not so easy to transform a Hamlet into a man of action. We must impose tasks upon the will, tasks both mental and physical; we must regulate the mode of life; we must give to the individuality special prescriptions adapted to the particular case, and we must call to our assistance, whenever advisable, the friends and associates of our patient. The great enemy of[657] the will, alcohol, must be absolutely prohibited; on the other hand, the taste for finer enjoyment and also for easy sports and pastimes must be stimulated.[672] The vita sexualis needs repose in every case, and, above all, masturbation must be energetically resisted. If we succeed in diminishing the intensity of the impulse, and in increasing the power of the will, we have already done much. In isolated cases, we must also always make the attempt to conduct the libido and its activity very gradually into normal channels, perhaps with the assistance of suggestive ideas in coitu, for which, above all, the assistance of the sexual partner is indispensable. Only an experienced physician can here hit the mark.

CHAPTER XXIV
OFFENCES AGAINST MORALITY FROM THE FORENSIC STANDPOINT.

“In view of the peculiar character of sexually perverse acts, or rather in view of the widely diffused interest in sexual questions and of the hypocrisy which seems inseparable from their consideration, it is easily comprehensible how to these acts there is commonly ascribed a forensic importance greater than that which properly attaches to them. And it is precisely this hypocrisy with which all questions connected with sexuality are treated on the public platform, which hinders a natural mode of regarding them, and renders so difficult an unprejudiced judgment regarding all the relevant facts.”—J. Salgó.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXIV

Importance of sexual perversions to the State and to society — Exaggerated views regarding their injurious influence — One-sided condemnation of them from the forensic-psychiatric standpoint — Their wide diffusion among healthy individuals — Protection against real injury to public and private interests from sexual offences — Their frequency among diseased persons — The idea of degeneration — Congenital taint and the stigmata of degeneration — Significance of these stigmata — Social causes of degeneration — Significance of tattooing — § 51 of the Criminal Code — The idea of “diminished responsibility” — Characterization of sexual emotions — Other factors lessening responsibility (menstruation, etc.) — Points of view in the punishment of acts of fornication with persons under age — Value of the evidence of children in the law-courts — The age of consent — The condemnation and punishment of sexual offences.

CHAPTER XXIV

It is the evident duty of the State to protect society from certain manifestations of the sexual impulse, occurring publicly in the form of “offences against morality,” and whenever these manifestations interfere with the persons and the rights of citizens. The sexual impulse has been compared with a powerful stream, which, when confined to its natural bed, is a never-ending source of blessing to the surrounding country; but which, as soon as with elemental force it overflows its banks and gives rise to widespread floods, is the cause of unspeakable misery among the entire population.[673] This comparison would be just if the facts were as stated. But, as I have already pointed out, as a whole, sexual perversions have played a far smaller part in the decadence of fallen nations than has hitherto been assumed. The biological and economical history of civilization has taught us to recognize numerous other influences, which, in such a process of national decay, play at least as great a part as sexual “degeneration,” and in many cases a much greater part than this. Frequently, indeed, sexual perversions and unnatural modes of gratification of the sexual impulse are in the first place a consequence of economic and social abnormalities, and are intimately connected with the so-called social problem. The above-named stream, to pursue the image, only trickles over its banks here and there, without giving rise to any widespread and devastating flood. And so long as these destructive tendencies are wanting, the State has no right to take measures against sexual perversions, or at most can justly do so only by dealing with their social causes. In view of the extensive diffusion of sexual anomalies among persons who in other respects are perfectly healthy, we must ask ourselves whether the importance of these anomalies, in respect of the offences against morality to which in certain circumstances they[662] may give rise, has not been overestimated. This idea has recently been put forward by J. Salgó, in his valuable monograph, “The Forensic Importance of Sexual Perversities” (Halle, 1907). I am more especially pleased to find that this author shares the view which I have myself advocated for years, that sexual perversities in the majority of cases are not indications of “degeneration,” as has been assumed both by psychiatrists and neurologists, especially under the influence of the doctrine of Möbius, who pushed this idea much too far. Moreover, the late Jolly, in his lectures to practising physicians upon sexual aberrations, expressly maintained the justice of my view of sexual anomalies as an anthropological phenomenon. With regard to the nature of sexual perversions, psychiatric science will have greatly to modify its general views, in order to attain an objective consideration of their significance.

“Psychiatry,” says Salgó (op. cit., pp. 37, 38), “must not follow the decoy-call of the law (which has wandered into a blind alley), by endeavouring to cover with the mantle of specialist science the serious legal errors in the matter of perverse sexuality. The incontestable domain of psychiatric experience in forensic questions is already sufficiently large, and it needs no artificial extension. But it is an artificial extension to indicate as morbid all the aberrations of sexual activity, or any single one of such aberrations, in the absence of indubitable or demonstrable symptoms of physical disturbance, and in the absence of a clearly recognizable and abnormal course—simply because they contravene the existing criminal law.”

The blind alley of psychiatry is the prison and the asylum. Because psychiatry is principally concerned with those sexual perversities which have criminal or psychiatric importance, with the abnormalities and the crimes of the sexually perverse, psychiatric science failed to recognize the extraordinarily wide diffusion of sexual perversions among persons who are mentally and physically healthy. Among the healthy, homosexuality, sadism, masochism, fetichism, etc., may make their appearance in more or less severe forms; just as other “vicious habits” may occur in the healthy, just as passionate tobacco-smoking, or intoxication with any sport, may become an ineradicable habit, or at least a habit extremely difficult to eradicate. Neither jurisprudence nor psychiatry can be spared the accusation of having misled “public opinion,” this terrible monster so often hostile to civilization, in respect of sexual perversities, regarding whose nature recent scientific research, and above all, anthropological research, has diffused a light. I am acquainted with a number of persons whose bodily and mental health is excellent, persons who are,[663] indeed, imposing in respect of their primeval German racial force, who have assured me that they suffer from the most severe sexual perversions! Recall the description given on p. 584 of a masochistic “slave” of the most extreme type. I do not go so far as Salgó, who demands for sexual anomalies, in so far as they are not criminal, the same “right of existence” (p. 7) as for the normal sexual impulse; but I do assert that sexual anomalies exist in individuals who are in other respects perfectly healthy, and that they do not always injure the personal health or the bodily and moral well-being of another, as is the case with sexual perversions arising upon a morbid foundation and attaining forensic importance. Above all, I must sharply condemn the fashion of glorifying sexual perversities, which have been regarded as a peculiar privilege of the highest mental development, and as corresponding to an especial refinement of sensibility. This assertion may be refuted by reference to the fact, often mentioned before, that the most incredible and most artificial sexual malpractices occur among savage races, who in this respect could give points to our modern decadents and epicurean æsthetes. In any case, sexual perversions in themselves have neither a moral nor a forensic importance, and must be regarded as more or less biological variations of the normal impulse.

Where, on the other hand, the public or individual interest is injured by these perversions, the State has unquestionably the right of intervention and the right of prevention. In every case in which we have to do with the production of a public nuisance, with the bodily or mental injury of other human beings, with the employment of force, with the misuse of the lessened or absent responsibility of children, of unconscious persons, of those asleep, and of those mentally disordered, society must intervene in its own interest, and must take suitable measures to protect itself against such offences. Now, it is certain—and to have established this is an honour to psychiatric science—that it is precisely these latter sexual offences which in the great majority of cases are committed by diseased persons and by those who are more or less irresponsible. Therefore, we are thoroughly justified in demanding that in every such criminal case, the bodily and mental condition of the accused should be subjected to a medical examination. A typical mental disorder, such as imbecility, epilepsy, alcoholic insanity, general paralysis of the insane, paranoia, etc., will be detected without difficulty, and thereby responsibility will at once be excluded. More difficult are the transitional stages between health and disease, the so-called[664] “borderland cases,” the cases of “psychopathically deficient responsibility” and of “disequilibrium.” In forensic medicine two ideas play a very great part in this connexion, that of “degeneration” and that of “diminished responsibility.”

Every sexually perverse person must be examined for signs of severe hereditary taint, as well as for the so-called “stigmata of degeneration.” If we can prove that in his family there have been several instances of severe mental disorder, of alcoholism, syphilis, diabetes, and other diseases leading to degeneration, the suspicion that there is a psychopathic foundation for the sexual offence is justified. But we must insist that congenital taint does not make itself felt in every case, and cannot, therefore, always be made responsible as a causal influence in the production of a sexual perversion.[674]

The so-called “stigmata of degeneration” have importance only when they are very markedly developed, and when several of them are simultaneously present. We distinguish physical and mental stigmata degenerationis. To the former belong disturbances and inhibitions of development, malformations, such as asymmetry of the skull, narrowness of the palate, hare-lip, cleft palate, anomalies of the teeth and the hair, difficulties of speech, tic convulsif, abnormal and morbid states of the genital organs and genital functions, and more especially malformations of the ear, such as Morel’s ear (the complete or partial absence of the helix or antihelix), the Darwinian pointed ear, etc.[675]

The mental degenerative phenomena comprise all that are known as “bizarre or abnormal” characters; those who possess such characters are termed “eccentrics” and “originals,” or are known as persons “psychopathically below par” (J. L. A. Koch), as “disequilibrated” (Eschle), as “superior degenerates” (Magnan). These phenomena comprise peculiar disturbances of the harmony of the spiritual life, characterized by lack[665] of balance between emotion and intellect, as well as by an abnormal irritability and undue reaction to stimulation. We may find complete absence of ethical perception, so-called “moral insanity,” of which E. Kraepelin and his school have proved that it may arise secondarily as a sequel to certain mental disorders. Striking in these unbalanced persons is the disharmony of the entire conduct of life, the internal lack of the point d’appui, the unsteadiness, the suddenness of their actions, which often occur under the influence of coercive ideas and abnormal impulses, the abnormally early appearance and the extraordinary intensity of the sexual impulse, the tendency to cruelty (O. Rosenbach). In judging the personality of the degenerate as a whole, we must always take into account the entire course of life, to which only too often the remark of Stifter applies: “In his life we saw only beginnings without continuations, and continuations without beginnings.”

On the other hand, we must not forget that many of the bodily stigmata of degeneration occur also in healthy persons, and that the existence of such stigmata in mentally disordered persons and in criminals may also be referred to social causes, to bad conditions of life and deficient nutriment, to alcoholism, syphilis, or rickets. For this reason P. Näcke [676] rightly insists that many of the so-called stigmata of degeneration are socially produced, and will therefore disappear with the employment of a purposive social hygiene; he gives as an example the rachitic bandy legs of English factory labourers. Therefore, for the proof of degeneration, we must lay more stress upon mental stigmata, upon abnormality of the spiritual personality, abnormality of its intellectual and emotional character, and from this proceed to infer the irresistible character of a morbid impulsive manifestation.

In addition to the study of the stigmata of degeneration, the study of tattooing is of forensic importance in the consideration of the sexual offences; the character and the date of the tattooing give sometimes interesting information regarding the nature of the personality.

Thus Lombroso [677] reports the case of an offender against morality, fifty years of age, with prominent ears and scanty growth of hair. This man ravished a girl of fifteen, whose mother was his mistress. At the early age of fifteen he had had the most obscene pictures tattooed upon his body; and upon inquiry he stated that he had begun to masturbate at the age of thirteen years, and had begun to have[666] intercourse with women at the age of fifteen years. He denied the accusation of rape, and maintained that he had enjoyed the girl without using force. His tattooing, however, gave evidence of his capacity to commit sexual crime. The pictures served as a certain and important proof of this.

This appeared even more clearly in the case of the ravisher Francesco Spiteri, published by Dr. F. Santangelo in 1892, whose utterly immoral and sexually perverse mode of life was most wonderfully displayed and recorded by means of the tattooings by which his entire body was covered. It will suffice here to allude to the drawing of a fish and of seven points upon his membrum. This indicated that his penis (Italian, pesce = fish) since his youth had pædicated seven boys (= seven points)!

In the case of sexual offences we have to consider, in addition to the question of degeneration, that of diminished or entirely absent responsibility. In cases of unmistakable mental disorder, responsibility does not exist, nor in epileptic confusional states, nor in profound alcoholic intoxication.[678] Between complete irresponsibility and complete responsibility there are numerous transitional stages, which are all classified under the idea of diminished responsibility. This fact is not recognized by § 51 of the Criminal Code, which runs as follows:

“A punishable offence has not been committed when the accused at the time the action was performed was in a state of unconsciousness, or in a state or morbid disturbance of mental activity, by means of which his freedom of will was excluded.”

In this we find the idea of “morbid disturbance of mental activity,” which is definitely wider than the idea of mental disease, in so far as it embraces transient mental disorders in persons who are not suffering from definite mental disease; but it does not take into consideration the even more important notion of diminished responsibility, which is applicable to all the above described borderland states and transitional conditions lying between mental health and mental disease. Häussler (op. cit., p. 39) as long as eighty years ago demanded the recognition of the idea of diminished responsibility—that is, of a condition “in which responsibility for the action was diminished by an imperfectly developed intelligence, without the disturbance of intellectual activity being sufficiently great completely to abolish free voluntary determination” (Aschaffenburg). Since that time, by[667] the address given on September 16, 1887, to the Association of German Alienists at Frankfort on “diminished responsibility,” Jolly opened a discussion upon this question. In this discussion the majority of German psychiatrists recommended the legislative recognition of such an idea, among these Wollenberg, Hoche, Cramer, Kirn, Aschaffenburg, von Schrenck-Notzing, etc.[679]

In connexion with diminished responsibility we must distinguish between individuals and actions. Among the individuals recognized above as persons “psychopathically below par,” responsibility may be diminished permanently and for a number of different actions; but in other cases healthy normal individuals may exhibit diminished responsibility in respect of isolated actions, when, for example, an excessively strong emotion, or a state of acute intoxication, has for a certain time and in relation to a particular action abrogated responsibility. In this connexion, in addition to acute alcoholic intoxication, certain sexual processes have especially to be considered. Häussler recognized the influence of the sexual impulse upon responsibility, and considered that certain actions performed under the influence of that impulse were performed without complete responsibility, and he declared that the voluptuary was a person whose mental health was imperfect.[680] Forel [681] also regarded the “slaves of the sexual impulse” as mentally abnormal, as individuals whose responsibility was diminished. I consider it indisputable that sexual emotions, especially when they arise suddenly, diminish responsibility, and limit, to some extent at least, the freedom of voluntary determination. Regarding certain processes of the vita sexualis, such as the epoch of puberty in both sexes, regarding menstruation, pregnancy, and the climacteric in women, this fact has been already generally recognized. It ought, however, to be admitted regarding the sexual impulse in general, more especially when the whole character of the action proves that it has been the consequence of a suddenly arising powerful emotion. Von Krafft-Ebing also is of this opinion.[682] It is, moreover, in most cases possible to determine whether the offence was caused only by a powerful sexual emotion, by means of which the intelligence and the freedom of the will of a person, in other respects normally responsible,[668] were temporarily limited or completely arrested; or whether other motives intervened, so that the action must be regarded as the result of conscious choice.

In conclusion, another point must be considered, which is related to the question of sexual offences committed with children, and which possesses forensic importance. This is the circumstance that in many such cases there is no question of the “seduction” of children, but that, on the contrary, the incitation first proceeded from the children themselves. In the previous chapter we discussed the early appearance of sexual activity in children. Moreover, in such cases we could distinguish between a nobler and a grosser, more sensual love.

As an example of the former, I may allude to the ardent, affectionate love of a girl of twelve for a thoroughly honourable man of forty years of age, who certainly had no idea of sexual intimacy with the child, and who was unable to free himself from her passionate caresses. We often observe such intimate inclinations on the part of young girls towards mature men, and we must be careful in such cases to avoid immediately thinking of pædophilic unchastity.

In another case a mother complained that her daughter, seven years of age, was in continual pursuit of a boy of fourteen, and could not be cured of the affection.

Maria Lischnewska reports (“Mutterschutz,” 1905, p. 155) the case of a boy, not yet six years of age, who drew up the nightgown of his foster-mother, and endeavoured to have intercourse with her.

The sexual offences committed by clergymen and tutors upon the girls taught by them are apt to be seen in a different light when we subject the youthful accuser to a strict cross-examination, and, in addition, to a physical examination, whereby in many cases we bring to light the fact that, long before the recent offence, they have been accustomed of their own free will to have sexual relations with other men. Casper long ago drew attention to these circumstances. Very often from the pupil herself proceed actual advances of the worst kind, which have proved ruinous to many a young teacher whose morals were previously above reproach.

Finally, there is an important point which must not be forgotten: the untrustworthy character of childish evidence, a matter which has recently been discussed by the specialist Adolf Baginsky.[683] This writer, whose knowledge of childish psychology is so profound, remarks:

“The evidence given by children in the law-courts appears to those who are really familiar with the child mind to be absolutely worthless and utterly devoid of importance, and this is the more the case the more frequently the child repeats its statement, and the more firmly it sticks to its evidence.”

He alludes to the law of Sweden, according to which the child is not competent to give evidence in a law-court before the completion of its fifteenth year.

All these circumstances must be considered in relation to the question of the so-called “age of consent.” M. Hirschfeld justly remarks that the natural age of consent is equivalent to that at which a child is competent to make a choice (“The Nature of Love,” p. 284). I consider that the decision of the Italian Criminal Code is the best; by this Code the age of consent for both sexes is placed at the conclusion of the sixteenth year.

The majority of crimes committed from purely sexual motives belong to the crimes of passion, in the sense of Ferris, and indeed to crimes committed under the coercion of the most powerful of organic impulses. I doubt whether the existing punishments are the most suitable for the purpose for which they are designed. In any case, gentleness is here above all demanded, and we should invoke the saying, “Judge not, that ye be not judged!” Indeed, an evangelical minister [684] speaks truly when he says:

“The enormous majority of men and women, who constitute themselves the judges of offences against morality, whilst they themselves take every opportunity of infringing the moral laws they profess to uphold—lie day after day, throughout their whole life—their position is built upon hypocrisy and lies.”

It very rarely happens that a judge who condemns a thief or a murderer has himself been guilty of this crime, but without doubt it frequently happens that a judge condemns other men on account of sexual offences which he has himself committed. In the case of sexual crimes we almost always have to do with individuals to whom more good could be done by medical influence than by imprisonment; we must entrust the physician with the duty of protecting society against such offenders. “In this province, physicians will become the judges of the future,” says M. Hirschfeld most justly.[685] Until this end is attained, let us[670] remind German judges of an anecdote which I found in an old French encyclopædia:[686]

“A courtesan in Madrid killed her lover, on account of his unfaithfulness; she was condemned and brought before the king, from whom she hid nothing. The king said to her: ‘Thou hast loved too much to be a reasonable being.’”

CHAPTER XXV
THE QUESTION OF SEXUAL ABSTINENCE (DIE ENTHALTSAMKEITSFRAGE)

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXV

Great variation in the views held regarding sexual abstinence — Five groups — The apostles of absolute asceticism — Criticism of their views — View of duplex sexual morality — Its refutation — The unfounded doubt in the possibility of abstinence — Recommendation of relative temporary abstinence from the medical and moral standpoint — Relative abstinence as an ideal of civilization — Recognition of this ideal among the ancient Israelites — Wise prescriptions and utterances in the Bible and the Talmud — Misrepresentation of this idea by the notion of absolute asceticism — Reaction against the latter — Rules regarding the frequency of intercourse — Self-command as a principle of enjoyment — Abstinence before the first sexual intercourse — Sexual maturity and physical maturity — Sexual tension of the third decade of life — Erb’s experiences regarding the harmful consequences of abstinence — Lowenfeld’s reports — Comparison with the dangers of extra-conjugal sexual intercourse — Value of abstinence later in life — Influence upon intellectual activity — Higher civilizing value of the idea of abstinence.

CHAPTER XXV

There is no disputed question in respect of which the divergent views are so sharply opposed as they are regarding the importance, the value, and the consequences of sexual abstinence.

[The question has been recently discussed by O. Schreiber, in a paper entitled “Sexual Abstinence,” published in Medizinische Blätter, 1907, Nos. 25-27.]

1. The apostles of absolute asceticism during the whole of life (Tolstoi, Weininger, Norbert Grabowsky, Kurnig, etc.).

2. The medical advocates of relative temporary continence, until it becomes possible to enjoy permanent hygienic intercourse, free from all objections.

3. The advocates of “duplex sexual morality,” who demand from woman sexual abstinence until she marries, but who regard this as impossible in the case of man.

4. The “Vera”[687] enthusiasts, who on moral grounds demand abstinence for both sexes until marriage.

5. Those who doubt the possibility of abstinence of any kind for either sex, whether absolute or relative.

Regarding those mentioned under the first heading, who demand absolute, life-long sexual abstinence, it is hardly necessary to say a word. It is nonsense, a pious superstition, a Utopia contrary alike to nature and to civilization, born of the belief in the “sinfulness” of sexual intercourse.

The normal sexual impulse is a natural phenomenon; it is pure and thoroughly ethical; and it is only in an insane confusion and in a morally reprehensible falsification of his own nature that man has come to regard it as a “sin,” as an “evil.” Man has a natural, inborn right to the gratification of the sexual impulse. Absolute asceticism must be rejected as a thoroughly immoral doctrine.

The same is true of the duplex sexual morality, alluded to[674] under the third heading, by which that is justified to man which is denied to woman. This “morality” (lucus a non lucendo) presupposes for man a natural impulse, and demands for him a right to gratify it, whilst the existence of such an impulse and of such a right is denied to woman. We have shown that this view is an inevitable consequence of coercive marriage morality.[688]

The standpoint of the sceptics alluded to under § 5 is one which denies the possibility of any abstinence, even merely temporary abstinence; but this view is equally to be rejected. Man is a natural being; his sexual impulse is a natural instinct, and as such one whose existence is justified; but at the same time man is a civilized being. Civilization is an elevation, an ennoblement, a transfiguration of nature, whose unduly powerful impulses and powers must be tamed and harmonized by civilization. The right to sexual gratification is therefore opposed by the duty to set bounds to the sexual impulse, to conduct it into such paths that no harm can result from its exercise, either to the individual or to society; and in order that, like all other impulses, it may subserve the purposes of the evolution of civilization. To this end, however, a relative abstinence is of great importance (this is a matter which has not hitherto been sufficiently recognized); but this course it is only possible to follow when, at the same time, we emphatically affirm the rightness of sexuality, and when it is our desire to utilize it as a civilizing factor of the first rank. The “individualization” of the sexual impulse has been described in detail in an earlier chapter of this work, to which I may refer the reader. If we fail to recognize the value of temporary abstinence, and the importance of the storing up of sexual energy which is thereby effected, and the transformation of this energy into other energies of a spiritual nature, such an individualization becomes impossible.

Alike the medical advocates (§ 2) and the moral advocates (§ 4) of a relative temporary abstinence for both sexes have, from their respective standpoints, made a just demand. This is, in fact, in both cases an “ideal standpoint,” to use the phrase of F. A. Lange; but it is also an ideal most desirable to set before youth, and more especially before our German[675] youth. We cannot repeat too often, or insist with too much emphasis, what an endless blessing results from the endeavour towards, and from the realization of, temporary sexual abstinence, more especially in the years of preparation for life, but also in the years of independent creative work.

The importance of relative sexual abstinence was first recognized by the ancient Israelites. Numerous wise prescriptions and utterances prove this. Julius Preuss, the most celebrated student of ancient Jewish medicine, has recently, in an interesting study of “Sexual Matters in the Bible and the Talmud” (Allgemeine Medizinische Central-Zeitung, 1906, No. 30 et seq.), collected the following facts bearing on the matter:

“Chastity was a self-evident demand for the unmarried. It is true that, in view of the early occurrence of puberty, they married very young—at the age of eighteen or twenty; and Rabbi Huna is of opinion that anyone who at the age of twenty is still unmarried passes his days in sin or—which he regards as even worse—in sinful thoughts. There are three whom God praises every day: an unmarried man who lives in a large town and does not sin; a poor man who finds an object of value and returns it to the owner, and a rich man who gives his tithe secretly. Once when this doctrine was read out in the presence of Rabbi Safra, who as a young man lived in a large town, his face lighted up with joy. But Raba said to him: ‘It is not meant such a one as thou art, but such a one as Rabbi Chanina and Rabbi Oschaja, who live in the street of the prostitutes, and make shoes for them, to whom, therefore, the prostitutes come, and look upon them, but who, notwithstanding this, do not raise their eyes to look upon the prostitutes.’”

After marriage also they endeavoured by valuable prescriptions to enforce the great civilizing idea of temporary sexual abstinence. Thus, intercourse during menstruation was strictly forbidden, and was regarded as a deadly sin; the same was the case as regards intercourse when there was any other hæmorrhage from the genital organs; but in this case the abstinence must last even longer. It is remarkable that the Catholic theologians allowed sexual intercourse without limit when such morbid hæmorrhage was present, and allowed it also, with certain restrictions, during menstruation. Further, among the ancient Hebrews intercourse was forbidden during the week of mourning for parents or brothers or sisters; it was forbidden also during the festival of atonement. Guests in an inn when travelling were also forbidden sexual intercourse, doubtless on grounds of decency. Intercourse was likewise forbidden in times of famine, in order to spare the bodily forces.

According to an ancient Israelitish popular saying, sexual intercourse is one of eight things which are beautiful when enjoyed in strict moderation, but harmful when enjoyed very freely. The others are walking, possessions, work, wine, sleep, warm water (for bathing and for drinking), and venesection.

Rabbi Jochanan said: “Man possesses a little limb: he who satisfies it hungers; he who allows it to hunger is satisfied.”

Rabbi Ilai said: “When man observes that his evil impulse is more powerful than he is himself, let him go to a place where people do not know him, let him put on dark clothes, let him wear a dark turban, and let him do that which his heart desires; but let him not publicly profane the name of God.” This can only mean that in general he only controls the desire who has already tasted the fruit—that is to say, that abstinence is the safest means against lust; but he who, notwithstanding this, finds that the impulse threatens to become too violent, still has the duty to fight against it, and in any case not to yield immediately.

This ancient notion of relative asceticism was, unfortunately, falsified and thrust into the background by the Utopian and contra-natural idea of absolute asceticism; its great value was completely obscured by the inevitable reaction against the principle of absolute chastity. This reaction led actually to the formation of rules regarding the frequency of intercourse, such as that attributed to Luther—“Twice a week does harm neither to her nor to me”; although it is precisely in this department of life that no rules can be given, and that the greatest individual variations occur, so that “twice a week” may for many constitute by far too much, and can only be regarded as permissible to robust constitutions. Daily indulgence in sexual intercourse, continued for a long period of time, would be deleterious even to a Hercules, and in all circumstances would be harmful to both parties. Nature herself, by exhibiting a certain periodicity in sexual excitement (which periodicity is admittedly far more distinct in women than it is in men, who can “always” love), has facilitated temporary abstinence. This is, in fact, a natural demand even of the most extreme ethical materialism; for, as Friedrich Albert Lange [689] rightly points out, “even though the individual sensual pleasure, as with Aristippos or Lamettrie, is raised to a principle, self-control still remains a requirement of philosophy, if only in order to assure the permanence of the[677] capacity for enjoyment.” So also the poet of the “New Tanhäuser” sings:

The question of abstinence is an entirely different one, according as it relates to the time before or after the first experience of sexual intercourse. Experience shows that in the former case abstinence is far easier than it is when the forbidden fruit has once been tasted. If, with the author of this book, relative asceticism is regarded as the most desirable ideal, we shall endeavour in youth to realize that ideal for as long a time as possible, without any interruption by sexual intercourse; whereas in the later period of the fully-developed sexual life we shall practise sexual abstinence only from time to time.

With regard to the former point, it would be the greatest good fortune for every man if he could remain sexually abstinent until the complete maturity of body and mind—that is, until the age of twenty-five.[690] But this is in most cases an impossibility. Yet it is possible for every healthy man—and it is an imperative demand of individual and social hygiene—to abstain completely from sexual intercourse at least until the age of twenty. That is possible without any harm resulting, and it is carried out by innumerable persons of both sexes. It is, indeed, a fact that[678] in civilized countries the physical and mental maturity of girls and boys by no means coincides with their sexual maturity, but, on the contrary, occurs from three to five years later. First between the ages of twenty and twenty-two does man attain complete development.[691] If the sexual impulse is not artificially awakened and stimulated during these years of adolescence, it may remain very moderate, without masturbation and without pollutions, and can be easily controlled. Relations with the other sex have not yet become necessary for the development of the individual personality. The human being has still enough to do in isolation. First with the commencement of the third decade of life do the conditions alter, and sexual tension becomes so great as to demand the adequate and natural discharge given by the normal sexual act. If this is impossible, pollutions form the natural, or masturbation forms the unnatural, outlet; and when abstinence is continued for a long time after attaining this age, the vital freshness and the spiritual and emotional condition are more or less impaired. To have emphasized this fact, in opposition to those authors [692] who declared that total sexual abstinence is absolutely harmless to mature men, was the great service of Wilhelm Erb,[693] the celebrated, widely experienced Heidelberg neurologist.

“It is a well-known fact,” he writes, “that healthy young men with a powerful sexual impulse suffer not a little from abstinence, that from time to time they are ‘as if possessed’ by the impulse, that erotic ideas press in upon them from all sides, disturb their work and their nocturnal repose, and imperiously demand relief. I always remember the remark of a friend of my youth, a young artist, who, when speaking of these things, was accustomed to say with intense meaning: ‘Wer nie die kummervollen Nächte in seinem Bette weinend sass....’ And the same man could not sufficiently extol the relaxing, disburdening, and positively refreshing influence of an occasional gratification; and the same thing has been said to me innumerable times by earnest and thoroughly moderate men.”

Women also gave him similar assurances.[694] In numerous cases Erb observed physical and mental harm to result from[679] abstinence—sometimes in healthy individuals, but more especially in the neuropathic.

Important also are the investigations of L. Löwenfeld [695] regarding the influence of abstinence. He found that in men under the age of twenty-four any troubles worth mentioning as a result of sexual abstinence were comparatively rare, as compared with the case of men between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-six years, the years of complete manly power and sexual capacity; and he found that whereas in healthy persons these disturbances were indeed of a trifling character (general excitability, sexual hyperæsthesia, hypochondriacal ideas, disinclination for work, slight attacks of giddiness), in neuropathic persons, on the contrary, there would occur coercive ideas, melancholy, feelings of anxiety, and even hallucinations. Females, according to Löwenfeld, bear abstinence—even absolute abstinence—much better than men, but in them also hysterical and neurasthenic conditions may develop as a result of sexual abstinence.

All these harmful consequences of abstinence are, however, neither in man nor in woman, of such a nature that, where an opportunity for sexual intercourse at once hygienic and free from ethical objections is wanting, the gratification of the sexual impulse need be advised by the physician as a “therapeutic measure.” No; Erb himself insists that, on the contrary, the dangers threatened by venereal diseases altogether outweigh the comparatively rare and trifling injuries to health resulting from abstinence. “Extra-conjugal” sexual intercourse involves the dangers of syphilitic or gonorrhœal infection, or of illegitimate pregnancy, which latter to-day must, unfortunately, be regarded as a kind of severe disease. In contrast with these evils, any harmful consequences of abstinence fade away to nothing.

Later in life, when the possibility of a permanent pure love exists, the value of temporary abstinence is to be found especially in the spiritual sphere. Precisely for the “erotocrat,” as Georg Hirth terms one endowed with a powerful and healthy sexual impulse, is this temporary abstinence of a certain importance, because the stored-up quantum of sexual tension re-enforces the inward spiritual productivity. A number of men, at once endowed with strong sexual needs and with a noble mental capacity, have assured me that, in consequence of abstinence, they have temporarily experienced a peculiar deepening and concentration of their[680] mental capacity, by means of which they were undeniably enabled to increase their mental output. This point in the hygiene of intellectual activity, which seems not to have been unknown to Goethe, has been as yet too little studied.

In any case, it is definitely established that from the standpoint of civilization the idea of sexual abstinence is justified, if for this reason alone: because in it we find a great means for increasing and strengthening of the will; but, in the second place, because in it we have a valuable protection against the dangers of wild love; and, finally, because sexual abstinence emphasizes the fact that life contains other things worth striving for besides matters of sex, that the content of life is far from being exhausted by the sexual, even though the sexual impulse, in addition to the impulse of self-preservation, will always remain the most powerful of all vital activities.

CHAPTER XXVI
SEXUAL EDUCATION

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXVI

Science and practice have hitherto, for the most part, ignored the sexual — The danger of blind chance in the sexual province — Necessity for the enlightenment of the coming generation — Sexual education as a part of general pedagogy — The right to the knowledge of one’s own body — Sexual enlightenment of young people — The dispute regarding the when and the how — Distinction between the youth of the country and the youth of the town — Points of association — A passage from Gutzkow’s autobiography — Disastrous sources of early sexual enlightenment — Character of the pedagogic enlightenment — Importance of this — Suggestions regarding the methods of sexual enlightenment (Sigmund, Lischnewska, F. W. Förster) — My own views — Education of the character and of the will — Principal rules of sexual pedagogy — Education to manhood.

CHAPTER XXVI

The manner in which up to the present day humanity has, properly speaking, completely ignored the fact of sexuality is at once remarkable and difficult to understand. Until recently people went so far as to regard scientific research into sexual matters by adult persons as improper! The mystical idea of the sinfulness, of the radically evil character, of the sexual, was a dogma which even natural science appeared to admit. Our attitude towards the sexual was as if it were at once Sphinx and Gorgon’s head, as if it were the veiled statue of Sais. We stood helpless, in the face of this mysterious and malignant power, against the blind hazard of chance which plays so momentous a part, more especially in sexual affairs. As everywhere in life, so here also, the dominion of chance could be overcome only by means of knowledge. The solution of the sexual problem demands, in the first place, openness, clearness, learning in the department of the sexual, knowledge of cause and effect, and the transmission of this knowledge to the next generation, so that this latter may without harm become wise. Sexual education is an important chapter in general pedagogy.[696]

Regarding animals, plants, and stones the youthful human being of to-day acquires the most exact information, but we have hitherto refused him the right to understand his own body, and to acquire a knowledge of certain important vital functions of that body. There can be no doubt about the fact that the modern human being, who has learned to so large an extent to regard himself as a social being, has a sacred natural right to this knowledge.

Celebrated pedagogues of a hundred years ago, such as Rousseau, Salzmann, Basedow, Jean Paul, etc., expressed themselves in favour of the early sexual enlightenment of youth, and gave the most valuable advice regarding the methods to be employed;[697] but their views remained for the most part devoid of practical effect, and it is only in recent years, in connexion with the[684] question of the protection of motherhood, with the campaign against prostitution, and with the attempt to suppress venereal diseases, that interest in this matter has been reawakened; and there now exists in this department an extensive literature, belonging chiefly to the last few years, proceeding from the pens of physicians, pedagogues, hygienists, and advocates of woman’s rights.[698] It is, in truth, the burning question of our time, the solution of which is here attempted. Correct sexual education forms the foundation for the ennoblement and resanation of our entire sexual life. Only knowledge and will can here effect a cure. Thus, sexual pedagogy naturally falls into two parts—sexual enlightenment and the education of the will.

The need for sexual enlightenment is now recognized by all far-seeing social hygienists and pedagogues. The only difference of opinion concerns the when and the how. Some plead for enlightenment as early as possible, in the first years of school life; others wish to defer enlightenment until puberty, or even later. I am of opinion that the circumstances in this respect are entirely different, according as we have to do with[685] small towns and the open country, where more careful watching of children is possible, and where the dangers of premature sexual development and of seduction are not so great, or as we have to do with large towns, where, in my view, the children cannot be enlightened too early, since town life brings the children of all classes, and social misery brings more especially the children of the lowest classes of the population, so early into contact with sexual matters that a purposive enlightenment becomes absolutely indispensable. Children living in large towns should, from ten years onwards, be gradually and carefully made acquainted with the principal facts of the sexual life. We find here more points of association than is usually imagined. Gutzkow, in his admirable autobiography, “From the Days of My Boyhood” (Frankfort-a.-M., 1852, pp. 263, 264), has beautifully described this:

“The first appearances of love in the heart of the child occur as secretly as the fall of the dew upon flowers. Playing and jesting, innocence gropes its way through the darkness. Words, perceptions, ideas, which to the adult appear to be full of dangerous barbs, the child grasps with careless security, and takes the duplex sexual life of humanity to be a primeval fact which came into the world with man as a matter of course, and one which requires no explanation. Born from the mother’s womb, to the child the mother is the secure bridge by which it is conducted past all the riddles of womanhood. The child imitates the love of the father for the mother, plays the game of the family, plays father and mother, plays at being himself, a child. From the rustling autumn leaves, from abandoned bundles of straw, huts and nests are built, and for half an hour at a time a completely blameless boy can lie down besides his girl playmate, quietly, and as if magnetized by the intimation of love. Danger is in truth not far distant from such a practice of childish naïveté; it lurks in the background, and seeks only an opportunity to lead astray. But a child never understands the significance of the severe punishment which it so often receives for its imitative imaginary family life. The amatory life of the adult first breaks upon the imagination of the child and upon his quiet play like the opening of a door into a house. People take so little care of what they do before the innocent; they exhibit passionate affection for one another; they caress when the children are by. The child sees, ponders, and listens. Certain hieroglyphics alarm it; tales are laughed at—tales which suddenly throw a strange and wonderful light upon quite familiar human beings. The boy will notice that his elder sister has a joy or a sorrow, the nature of which he cannot completely grasp. He sees an elder brother filled with the joy of life, with the lust of youth, with the love of adventure, and no attempt is made to conceal these passions from the child.... Such and similar experiences succeed one another without cessation, and tales which the child hears are[686] listened to with eagerness. The red threads of love and of the charm of beautiful women are not to be grasped by the hand of a child, and yet they have upon the child a certain secret influence.”

The child hears and sees much that is erotic, even immoral, but does not stop to think about it, does not understand it. After a while its ignorance becomes a puzzle; soon lascivious thoughts arise. Maria Lischnewska describes very vividly this psychological process in the soul of the child, in part according to her observations as a teacher. She justly criticizes the “stork stories,” to which the child listens without believing them, in order subsequently to be enlightened in an extremely disagreeable manner by older ill-conditioned comrades.[699]

These children, ten or twelve years of age, often learn about sexual matters from the lowest side, without obtaining a true knowledge. They frequently acquire the most astounding verbal treasury of lewd expressions, and even sing obscene songs, of which Maria Lischnewska gives a remarkable example on the part of a girl twelve years of age.

No, there can be no question that the child at school, from the tenth year onwards, should, without fear of disastrous consequences, be enlightened regarding sexual matters by parents and teachers, in order to avoid the dangers which we have just described. But this instruction must be divested of any individual relationship, of any personal character, and must be communicated in thoroughly general terms, as natural scientific knowledge, as a medical doctrine, belonging to the province of philosophical and pathological science. In this way will be avoided any undesirable accessory effect related to subjective perceptions. When Matthisson esteems youth as happy on this account, because the book of possibilities is not yet open to its gaze, this certainly does not hold as regards sexual enlightenment. Here, to a certain degree, this book of possibilities must be disclosed, if we do not wish all the poetry and all the ideal view of life to be utterly destroyed by contact with rude reality. Precisely in this case do we understand the wonderful remark of Goethe, that we receive the veil of poetry from the hand of truth. This first renders possible a truly earnest and profound conception of sexual relationships; this creates a consciousness of responsibility which cannot be awakened sufficiently early.[687] The true danger is, as Freud [700] also points out, the intermixture of “lasciviousness and prudery” with which humanity is accustomed to regard the sexual problem, just because people have not learned sufficiently to understand the connexion between cause and effect in this department of human activity.

Various methods have been recommended for sexual enlightenment. I shall discuss more particularly the suggestions of the Austrian Realschul professor, Sigmund, of the Volkschul teacher, Maria Lischnewska, and of the University professor, F. W. Förster.

Sigmund (quoted by Ullmann, op. cit., p. 7) considers that in the Volkschüler (primary schools), in the case of children up to the age of eleven years, there should be no systematic explanation of sexual matters, and that this should be begun first in the Gymnasium (higher school). His scheme of instruction is as follows:

1. The enlightenment of the pupils at the Gymnasium is to be effected in five stages (Classes I., II., V., VI., VII.)

2. The enlightenment in the lower classes is limited to the processes of sexual reproduction. In the first class, the origin and birth of the mammalian young and the origin of insects’ eggs are explained. In the second class, the origin and birth of reptiles’ and birds’ eggs, the fertilization of the eggs of fishes and batrachians, the ova of the sea-urchin, and those of the jellyfish, are described. The act of sexual intercourse will not be alluded to in the first two classes—that is, it will not be mentioned to children before the age of thirteen years.

3. The completion of the idea of “sexual life” is effected by means of botanical and zoological instruction in the upper school in a synthetic manner, wherein no important detail is omitted, but the copulatory act is kept in the background.

4. All sexual matters expressly concerning human beings, and all the pathological relations of the sexual life, should be left to the hygienic instruction, which is given during one hour weekly to the seventh class as a part of general instruction in somatology.

5. The natural history taught to the sixth class will embrace zoology only; the natural system will be considered in an ascending series (excluding human somatology, which in a logical manner is deferred until the study of zoology is completed, and it will thus be dealt with in the seventh class, as a preparation to the instruction in hygiene).

6. In conferences with parents, the parents can be kept informed regarding the nature of the instruction which is being given to their children, and can at the same time be led to work in unison with the school in this matter.

Maria Lischnewska advises beginning already in the third class of primary schools—that is, when the child is only eight years old—to give instruction in the elements of natural science, more especially utilizing, as the first means of sexual enlightenment, the examples of vegetable fertilization, as well as the reproduction of fishes and birds. Even to the question “Whence do little children come?” an answer should be given, more or less in the following terms:

“The child lies in the body of the mother: when she breathes, then the child breathes; when she eats and drinks, the child also obtains his food. It lies there warm and safe. Gradually it becomes larger and begins to move. It has to lie somewhat curled up, because there is so little room for it. But the mother feels that it is alive; she is full of joy, and makes ready the child’s clothing and its bed. Finally it is fully grown. The mother’s body opens, and the child comes to the light. Then the mother takes it into her arms with joy and nourishes it with her milk.” Then the teacher would pause, and continue after a while: “Now, would you like to see the child?” Then there would naturally be a many-voiced “Yes, yes!” and the teacher would show to the class a picture such as our anatomical atlases exhibit now in beautiful form. The abdominal walls of the mother are turned back, and the child is seen slumbering. Then the teacher would say: “Thus you also slept within the body of your mother. You belong to her as to no other human being in the whole world. For this reason you should always love and honour her.”

Thus is the child’s urgent demand for knowledge satisfied. He is freed from all prying into nooks and corners. He experiences a feeling of honourable respect towards the primary source of life.

In the fourth school year further examples of the reproduction of plants, fishes, and birds should be given; in the fifth and sixth years the first demonstration of the process of sexual union among the mammals, with some account of embryology; and the process of birth should also be described. Then there should follow (at about the age of thirteen or fourteen) enlightenment regarding the development of the sexual life and regarding venereal diseases—information, that is to say, concerning hygiene and concerning the protection of one’s own body. Physicians such as Oker Blom and Dr. Agnes Hacker definitely demand that elucidation regarding this latter point should not be deferred until the time of puberty.

F. W. Förster proposes to postpone the whole process of enlightenment until the twelfth or thirteenth year; and if at an earlier age a child expresses any natural doubt regarding the[689] stork fables, the following answer should be given (op. cit., p. 606):

“Where small children come from is a matter which you cannot yet understand. We grown-up persons even understand very little about it. I promise you that I will explain to you what we know of the matter on your twelfth birthday, but only if you promise me something in return. Do you know that there are boys and girls so bumptious that they behave as if they already knew all about it, because they have somewhere picked up a word or two without really understanding it? Promise me that you will never listen when such as these begin to talk about the matter; for you may be certain that the true secrets are matters of which they are ignorant, for this reason—they would not speak about it. He who really knows holds it as a sacred matter; he is silent about it, and does not call it out at the street comers.”

Förster strongly advises against associating sexual enlightenment with a knowledge of the reproductive process in plants and animals, for this reason: that if this is done “the human being is brought too near to the vegetable and animal life,” and the “sacred thought” of the elevation of humanity above the animal is obscured. He then gives very beautiful examples and modes of instruction for such sexual enlightenment of children twelve years of age.

I myself am of opinion that, without in any way making light of the difference between man and animal, the earlier elucidation at about the age of ten years should be associated with the general instruction in natural history regarding the reproductive process of animals and plants; and then very gradually, up to the age of fourteen, all important points in this department can be explained, including, finally, an account of the venereal diseases. It is obvious that after this time, more especially in the dangerous years of puberty, systematic enlightenment must be continued. That which is good and useful in this department of knowledge cannot be too often repeated.

But all enlightenment will be useless unless hand in hand with it there proceeds a process of education of the character and the will. Our school youth thinks and dreams too much, and does too little. Up to the present time it has been believed that it is sufficient to teach children, and to continue to teach them, to care for their health, to see that they have good food and sound sleep, without also taking into consideration the necessity for awakening the individuality and the energy slumbering in each one of them. The “gymnasium” must concern itself with the gymnastics, not only of the body, but also of the mind, and must[690] thus restore that harmony between body and mind which appears to have been quite lost at the present day. Bodily education by games and sports is only one of the means for this purpose. The principal aim is to strengthen the character, to induce the habit of self-command and self-denial by a profound and intimate grasp of sexual problems. Nowhere does fantastic dreaming take revenge more thoroughly than in sexual relationships, for which reason also the so-called “only children” are especially endangered;[701] nowhere do clear knowledge, objective acquirements, and a firm will celebrate finer triumphs over blind impulses than they do here. The principal rule of sexual pedagogy runs as follows: Avoid the first opportunity and the first contact; keep the child and the young man and the young woman at a distance from all the stimulating pleasures and enjoyments of the adult. The production of manliness, as it has recently been described by Mosso,[702] Güssfeldt,[703] Georg Sticker,[704] and Ludwig Gurlitt,[705] has the greatest importance, more especially as regards the sexual life. This has been insisted on, above all, by Hans Wegener [706] and F. W. Förster (op. cit.). Moral statistics have incontrovertibly proved that progress in civilization and morals does not depend upon punishment or upon prophylactic measures against errors and excesses of passion, but only upon the subjective improvement and strengthening of the single individual. Guizot declared: “C’est de l’état intérieur de l’homme que dépend l’état visible de la société.” Drobisch,[707] in his “Moral Statistics,” has established this fact yet more firmly. Energy is the magic word for all vital activities of the present day, both spiritual[691] and physical. Discipline, work, abstinence, bodily hygiene, are the means for educating the character, and these also play the principal part in sexual pedagogy.[708]

CHAPTER XXVII
NEO-MALTHUSIANISM, THE PREVENTION OF CONCEPTION, ARTIFICIAL STERILITY AND ARTIFICIAL ABORTION

“Formerly the use of such devices was regarded as immoral and punishable, and was actually punished; it was condemned as an interference with the Divine plan. But such views and measures are extreme. Here, as everywhere, human foresight and methodical interference are permissible.”—Gustav Schmoller.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXVII

Importance of the problem of population — Malthus and hie doctrine — Its fallacies — Temporary validity — “Moral restraint” — Neo-malthusianism — The foundation of the Malthusian League — Great antiquity of malthusian practices — Disharmony of the family instinct — The mica operation of the Australian indigens — Artificial abortion among primitive races — Methods of preventing pregnancy in ancient times — In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — Relative justification of the use of preventive measures — Views of recent physicians on this subject — Summary of the principal methods of preventing conception — Limitation of coitus to particular times — Advice of Soranos and Capellmann — Feskstitow’s “conception-curve” — Influence of particular seasons of the year — Prolongation of the period of lactation — Buttenstedt’s “Happiness in Marriage” and Funcke’s “New Revelation” — Criticism of these fantasies — Divergences from the normal method of coitus — Passive demeanour of the woman — Coitus interruptus — Exaggerated views of its injurious influence — Coitus interruptus and anxiety-neurosis — Trifling effect in healthy individuals — Repeated interruptions of coitus — Mechanical means of preventing conception — Compression — Muscular action — Mensinga’s “occlusive pessary” — Holweg’s “obturator” — The condom — Chemico-physical preventive measures — Douches — The “Lady’s Friend” — Antiseptic powders and security sponges — Combination of chemical and mechanical means — The “Venus apparatus” — The duplex occlusive pessary — Inflammatory affections after the use of chemical preventive measures — Herpes progenitalis — Artificial sterility — Operative methods of inducing it — Vaporization and castration — The “ovariées” — Wide diffusion of artificial abortion — Critical remarks regarding the punishment of abortion in Germany — The right of the unborn child — Rape and abortion — The methods of expelling the ovum — Internal means — Mechanical means — Danger and consequences of both — Social means for limiting abortion.

CHAPTER XXVII

Whereas in former times opinions on social questions were determined principally by economic considerations, to-day we are to a great extent influenced also by the aims and endeavours of individual and social hygiene; for this reason the so-called problem of population has come to occupy the consciousness of civilized mankind to a far greater extent than before it has passed from the stage of theory into that of practice. Serious critical political economists, such as, for example, B. G. Schmoller,[709] have recognized this. The increasing understanding of the conditions of social life, knowledge of the connexion between economic conditions and the number and quality of the population, must of itself lead to the discussion of the question whether the regulation of the number of children born is not one of the principal duties of modern civilization. The Englishman Robert Malthus was the first who, stimulated by an idea of Benjamin Franklin, in the year 1798, in his “Essay on the Principles of Population,” discussed this serious, and even alarming, question of the natural consequences of unrestricted sexual intercourse, and answered it in an extremely pessimistic sense. For, according to him, whereas human beings tend to increase in number according to a geometrical progression—that is, in the ratio 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and so on—the means of subsistence increase only in arithmetical progression—that is, in the ratio of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on. Hence it follows that the numbers of the population can be kept within bounds, so as to remain proportional to the nutritive possibilities, only by means of decimating influences, such as vice, poverty, disease, the entire “struggle for existence,” by preventive measures, and by the so-called “moral restraint” in and before marriage. Although this celebrated theory, which filled with alarm, not only all those already living in Europe, but also all those who wished to produce new life, has to-day been generally recognized as false,[710] since it failed to take into account[696] technical advances in the preparation of the soil [711] and other ways in which it will become possible to increase the means of subsistence; and he equally ignored the possibility of a better division of property. None the less does his theory remain apposite in respect of many of the social relationships of more recent times; the doctrine has, in fact, temporary validity for certain periods of civilization, such as our own. Malthus recommended, as the principal means of preventing over-population, abstinence from sexual intercourse (moral restraint) before marriage, and the postponement of marriage; thus he was an apostle of the “relative asceticism” recommended in the twenty-fifth chapter of the present work.

In England this early view found utterance among the political economists and sociologists, such as Chalmers, Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Say, Thornton, etc. It was also actively discussed in wide circles of the population, so that as early as the year 1825 the “disciples of Malthus” were a typical phenomenon of English life.

A further development of malthusianism in the practical direction was represented by the so-called “neo-malthusianism”—that is, an actual diffusion of instruction in the means for the prevention of pregnancy and for the limitation of the number of children. Such a procedure was first publicly recommended by Francis Place, in the year 1822; but no widespread teaching of practical malthusianism occurred till a considerably later date, notably after the foundation of the Malthusian League, on July 17, 1877. The principal advocates of neo-malthusianism in England were John Stuart Mill, Charles Drysdale, Charles Bradlaugh, and Mrs. Besant.

Malthusian practice is, however, much older than the theory. Metchnikoff [712] declares the endeavour to diminish the number of children to be a very widely diffused “disharmony of the family instinct,” which in itself is much more recent, and is much less widely diffused in the animal kingdom than the sexual instinct. Animals, at any rate, know nothing of the prevention of conception; that is a “privilege” of the human species. By primitive races such preventive measures are very widely employed. Among these measures one of the best known is the “mica” operation of the Australian natives—the slitting up of the urethra of the male along the lower surface of the penis, so that the semen[697] flows out just in front of the scrotum, and is ejaculated outside the vagina.[713] Regarding the wide diffusion of artificial abortion among savage races, Ploss-Bartels gives detailed reports. The pursuit of material enjoyments, characteristic of civilized peoples, is not here (as recent authors have erroneously assumed) the determining influence; we have, in fact, to do with a widely diffused disharmony of the family instinct,[714] for which in certain definite conditions some justification must be admitted. The period for the unconditional rejection of malthusianism by pietists and absolute moralists has passed away definitely. Not only physicians, but also professional political economists, recognize the relative justification and admissibility of the use of preventive measures in certain circumstances for the limitation of the procreation of children. It has rightly been pointed out [715] that in every marriage a time must eventually arrive when preventive measures in sexual intercourse are employed, and necessarily must be employed, because, in respect of the state of health of the wife, and also in view of economic conditions, their use is urgently demanded. These relationships have been discussed with great insight by A. Hegar,[716] and he has proved the justification of practical neo-malthusianism in every ordinary marriage, as well as for the population at large. By means of a “regulation of reproduction,” an immoderate increase of the population is prevented; by diminishing the quantity we improve the quality of the offspring. Late marriages, long pauses between the separate deliveries, and the greatest possible sexual abstinence, subserve this purpose.

Like Hegar, the Munich hygienist Max Gruber [717] also recognizes the necessity for setting bounds to the number of children to be brought into the world, since the capacity of the human species to increase is far greater than its power to increase the means of subsistence. He describes very vividly the physical and moral misery of the parents and the children when the latter are too numerous; he also shows that from the birth of the fourth child onwards the inborn force and health of the children diminish more and more. Naturally, also, diseases affecting the parents, and the pressing danger of the inheritance of these diseases, renders necessary the use of sexual preventive measures, or else of moral restraint. Gruber enunciates the thoroughly neo-malthusian proposition:

“The procreation of children must be kept within bounds, if mankind wishes to free itself from the cruel condition by which, in irrational nature, the balance is maintained—death in the mass side by side with procreation in the mass!”

L. Löwenfeld [718] also sees in the recommendation of such measures for the prevention of pregnancy “nothing either improper or immoral”; he sees in these measures “means for diminishing the poverty of the lower classes, and for abolishing, to a great extent, the high infantile mortality of these classes, although neo-malthusianism is in no way a panacea for all the social evils of our time”; and he writes very strongly against the condemnation of preventive measures by a “perverse medical zealotry”; in fact, he assigns to preventive measures an immense hygienic importance. Many other physicians also, such as Mensinga [719] (the discoverer of the occlusive pessary, the first medical man in Germany to assert with energy the justification of employing means for the prevention of pregnancy, and the first to establish with precision the indications for the use of these measures, especially in relation to the disadvantageous consequences to women’s health of bearing a large number of children), Fürbringer,[720] Spener,[721] and others, have drawn attention to the[699] eminent hygienic and social importance of measures for the prevention of pregnancy; whereas, on the other hand, in France, in view of the alarming decline in the population of that country, scientific medicine has adopted a more hostile attitude; no longer, however, so bitterly hostile as in the work (now somewhat out of date, but nevertheless containing interesting details) of Bergeret.[722] A layman also, Hans Ferdy (A. Meyerhof),[723] has published a number of interesting works on practical neo-malthusianism.

We shall now proceed to give a brief account of the means commonly employed for the prevention of pregnancy.

l. The Restriction of Intercourse to Particular Periods.—It is clear that by means of relative asceticism, and by restriction of the number of individual acts of sexual intercourse, the possibilities of fertilization can be limited to a considerable extent. Thus, Capellmann, in a work published in 1883, entitled “Facultative Sterility, without Offence to Moral Laws,” recommended abstinence from intercourse for fourteen days after the cessation of menstruation and for three or four days before the commencement of the flow, in the belief that fertilization occurs principally during the days immediately before and after menstruation. Capellmann thus revived the prescription of Soranos, a gynecologist of the days of antiquity. According to the researches of the physiologist Victor Hensen, it is true that the greatest number of fertilizations take place during the first few days after the menstrual period; but conception may also occur on any other day of the menstrual cycle, although the probability of conception at other periods than those named is a diminishing one. Feskstitow has based upon statistical data an interesting “conception curve,” according to which the frequency of fertilization on the last day of menstruation, on the first, ninth, eleventh, and twenty-third days after the end of the flow, varies respectively according to the ratios 48, 62, 13, 9, 1; between these points the course of the curve is almost straight. On the twenty-third day after menstruation the probability of conception is thus one-sixty-second of the maximum. Thus, though the probability of fertilization following intercourse on the twenty-third day after the cessation of the flow is much less than the probability of fertilization[700] as a result of intercourse shortly after menstruation, still, the possibility of conception in the former case cannot be absolutely excluded.

It has also been recommended that in certain seasons of the year, to which a peculiar influence upon fertility has been ascribed, more especially the months of May and June, abstinence from intercourse should be observed. But this is naturally quite untrustworthy, since the same mother can conceive in all months of the year, as is sufficiently proved by the ordinary variations in the birthdays of children.

Somewhat more trustworthy, but still not absolutely to be depended upon, is the practice, after the birth of a child, of artificially prolonging the period of lactation, since it is well known that during lactation the menstrual periods often fail to occur, and that fertilization is exceptional. Upon the recognition of this causal sequence, notwithstanding the fact that it does not possess any absolute validity, there has recently been founded a very remarkable method of practical malthusianism, which the two discoverers, Karl Buttenstedt [724] and Richard E. Funcke,[725] have announced to their astonished contemporaries as a “new revelation,” and as the realization of “happiness in marriage.” These remarkable apostles have combined another observation with the one mentioned above of the relative infertility of women during lactation, the new observation being that sometimes by the mammary glands of women who are not pregnant, and even by those of virgins, milk is secreted, especially during menstruation. This fact was known to earlier gynecologists, as, for example, to Dietrich Wilhelm Busch.[726]

Buttenstedt, to whom the “priority” of the new doctrine of happiness unquestionably belongs, an advocate of the extremely optimistic theory of the possibility of an everlasting life for humanity and of the cessation of death (!), also conceived the idea of evoking lactation artificially in all women by means of the sucking of their breasts by men! In this way he believed that artificial sterility and amenorrhœa might be produced.

Naturally, also, woman’s milk is regarded as an elixir of life for old men, a true panacea for the elongation of life ad infinitum; and this “happy marriage” in itself is to be a means by which all the possible ills of degenerate humanity are to be cured. In this pæan he is joined by Funcke, who regards woman’s milk as “the best, most natural, and most valuable drug,” and on p. 70 of his book preaches to girls and women the “new categorical imperative” (sic).

“Thou shalt not leave thy vital force unutilized; thou shalt not menstruate unless thou hast the firm will and desire to become pregnant; thou shalt allow thy vital force in the form of milk to flow from thy breasts for the benefit and enjoyment of other human beings.”

Buttenstedt, who possesses some historical knowledge, wishes also to make the breasts of men lactiferous (p. 24), so that the sexes can exchange their “blood through the breasts,” thus become more and more alike one another, and ultimately become urnings!

This beautiful lactation idyll or, more correctly, mammalian idyll, will not bear the test of scientific criticism. In the first place, the effect of the proposed manipulations is exceedingly dubious, and would only produce the desired result in exceptional cases; in the second place, such an artificial lactation, continued for a long period, would be extremely harmful, just as an excessive protraction of lactation after normal delivery is known to be deleterious; and in the third place, last, not least, the reputed anticonceptional effect would, in the majority of cases, fail to occur. At any rate, there appears to be no reason why pregnancy should not ensue, since the condition of the genital organs would apparently permit this, and would certainly differ from that which obtains in women who give suck in a normal manner after giving birth to a child.

2. Divergences from the Normal Mode of Coitus.—Attempts have been made to prevent fertilization by means of various modifications of the sexual act. Thus, starting from the old belief that active participation in the sexual act on the part of the woman, as well as libido and the sexual orgasm on her part, are indispensable prerequisites of the occurrence of impregnation, a more passive demeanour of the woman has been recommended—a distraction of the mind and the senses from the sexual act, after the manner of the cong-fou of the Chinese, who frequently employ this trick during intercourse. This opinion is deceptive, for, in the absence of all activity and orgasm on the part of the[702] woman, in the most diverse conditions possible, conception may ensue.[727] Thus, in this case also we have to do with a quite untrustworthy method.

Trustworthy, on the other hand, and therefore extremely widely diffused, is the so-called coitus interruptus—interrupted intercourse, in which the penis is withdrawn from the vagina shortly before the ejaculation of the semen (so-called “withdrawal,” “Zuruckziehen,” “Sichinachtnehmen,” “fraudieren,” “congressus reservatus, onanismus conjugalis”). The views regarding the harmfulness of this method, by which pregnancy can certainly be prevented, have in recent years undergone considerable change, in so far as the disadvantages are to-day considered less serious than they formerly were. More especially, Dr. Alfred Damm, in his work “Neura,” overestimated the harmful effects of coitus interruptus, inasmuch as he attributed to it the entire degeneration of a race. These extreme views, supported by no facts whatever, of the degeneration fanatic Damm are briefly described in a little book by E. Peters, “The Sexual Life and Nervous Energy” (Cologne, 1906).[728]

It cannot be denied—and has, in fact, been maintained by other physicians such as Gaillard Thomas, Goodell, Valenta, Bergeret, Mantegazza, Payer, Mensinga, Beard, Hirt, Eulenburg, Freud, von Tschich, Gattel, and others—that the “ineffective” excitement occurring during coitus interruptus, the absence of the natural discharge of sexual tension, the voluntary postponement of ejaculation, the strain put upon the will during the sexual act, may have a transient harmful influence upon the nervous system; but, according to recent researches, it is only in those who are already neuropathic that permanent troubles result, in the form of “anxiety-neurosis” (which, as Freud [729] has proved, is actually dependent upon coitus interruptus), or in the form of other neurasthenic and hysterical troubles, and also sometimes of local irritative conditions. The harmful influence of frustrated sexual excitement is shown also by the frequency of nervous troubles during the period of engagement, which, as a witty colleague of mine remarked, must be regarded as a single, long-drawn-out coitus interruptus. But it has not been proved that[703] in healthy individuals coitus interruptus, even when the practice is continued for a long time, gives rise to serious and permanent injuries to health. According to the experience of Fürbringer, Oppenheim, von Krafft-Ebing, Rohleder, Spener, and, above all, of L. Löwenfeld, who has instituted exceptionally exact researches into the matter, such consequences are quite exceptional. This is also true of the disorders which coitus interruptus is reputed to cause in women.

Another method for the prevention of pregnancy, which, according to Barrucco, is practised especially in Italy, is the prolongation of sexual enjoyment by means of repeated interruptions of the act, followed by renewed erections. This, naturally, is extremely harmful. Fürbringer, however, reports the case of certain frigid men who were able to extend the act of conjugal intercourse for long periods, without any disastrous effect upon their health. One of these men was able to find time during the act for smoking and reading!

3. Mechanical Means for the Prevention of Conception.—According to Kisch, in Transylvania and in France a method is in use according to which, during the sexual act, the woman, at the commencement of ejaculation in the male, presses her finger forcibly upon the root of his penis just in front of the prostate gland. In this way the passage through the urethra is temporarily occluded, and ejaculation of the semen is prevented: it regurgitates into the bladder, and is subsequently evacuated with the urine. Unquestionably this manipulation would be likely to prove exceedingly injurious to health.

In Italy and in New Guinea many women expel the semen from the vagina, as soon as coitus is completed, by means of muscular action, by vigorous movements of the perineum.

A mechanical apparatus for the prevention of conception which is unquestionably carefully thought out is the so-called occlusive pessary of Dr. Mensinga—a hemisphere of rubber surrounded by a steel ring, introduced into the vagina before coitus, and even left in situ for prolonged periods, so that the os uteri is occluded. When accurately applied, it does, in fact, definitely prevent fertilization. Various considerations, however, render its use undesirable: (1) the difficulty of the introduction, which most women are unable to master; (2) liability to displacement of the pessary during the act; (3) the occurrence of irritative conditions of various kinds (discharges, diseases of the uterine annexa, etc.), if, as often happens, the pessary is allowed to remain in the vagina for a long time. Recently a pessary has been[704] constructed of waterproof cambric, which is said not to produce any such irritative reaction. Moreover, Mensinga himself, and Earlet, have made other improvements upon the occlusive pessary. Easier to introduce is Gall’s “balloon occlusive pessary.” In this instrument, by means of a compressible rubber ball and tubing, air is blown into the interior of a thin-walled rubber ring which surrounds a soft elastic rubber disc. A dangerous article, and one to be avoided, is Hollweg’s “obturator.” The ideal mechanical means for the prevention of pregnancy is, once more, the condom, regarding the application and qualities of which we have already said all that is necessary (vide supra, pp. 378, 379). Simple in its mode of application, it is, when of good quality, certain in its effect, and is relatively the most harmless of all preventive measures. When it is used, coitus runs a perfectly normal course, with the sole exception of the sensation during ejaculation. We must reject as harmful the use of the so-called “stimulant condom,” which bears a ring of spines or points, in order to increase libido in the woman.

4. Chemical Physical Preventive Measures.—To these belong, above all, douching of the vagina immediately after sexual intercourse, for which purpose cold water, solutions of alum (1 per cent.), copper sulphate (¹⁄₂ to 1 per cent.), sulphate of quinine (1 : 400), etc., may be used. The douching must be effected when the woman is in the recumbent posture, and the vaginal tube must be introduced deeply. This method, however, is very untrustworthy.[730]

The same is true of attempts to destroy the spermatozoa by the insufflation of chemically active powders; or by the insertion of antiseptic “security sponges,” which Rohleder has rightly named “insecurity sponges”; untrustworthy also is the combination of these with mechanical apparatus.

The number of articles belonging to this category is legion. I need mention a few only: “Security ovals,” containing boric acid, quinine, or citric acid; “little vaginal plugs”; “salus ovula”; Kamp’s anticonceptional cotton-wool plugs; Hüter’s vaginal insufflator “for the malthusian”; Noffke’s tampon-speculum; “spermathanaton”;[731] Weissl’s preservative (a combination of speculum and rubber disc[705] with a steel spring and a cotton-wool plug impregnated with a drug); the “Venus apparatus” (a double rubber ball, the smaller ball filled with “Venus powder” (sic) being introduced within the vagina, whilst the woman herself, at the moment of ejaculation, presses the larger ball lying near to her thighs, whereupon the powder is expelled from the smaller ball into the vagina); the “duplex occlusive pessary” (an occlusive pessary with double walls, perforated with round apertures, containing in its interior boric acid tablets for the purpose of killing the spermatozoa).

It may be that now and again, by some of the means just mentioned, conception may be prevented. But on the whole they are very uncertain; and, on the other hand, it is doubtful if the chemical substances introduced in this way are harmless. It is possible that many peculiar inflammatory conditions of the male and female genital organs may be referred to their use. For example, Blumreich [732] reports the case of a man who, after coitus in which a means of this kind had been used, had an extremely obstinate inflammatory eruption upon the penis.

I take this opportunity of pointing out that the so-called herpes progenitalis, a peculiar vesicular eruption of the genital organs, occurring chiefly in males, which alarms a great many patients, because they regard it as the result of syphilitic infection, is, in the great majority of cases, a perfectly harmless affection caused by some transient irritation.[733]

Besides the above-mentioned methods for the prevention of pregnancy, we have also to consider two radical means of practical malthusianism which belong to the purely medical province, and can only be employed when life and death are involved, when pregnancy and parturition would entail upon the woman severe illness or certain death. These two means are the operative induction of artificial sterility and artificial abortion.

Artificial sterility can be produced by various measures, as by the intentionally effected malposition of the uterus, such as is practised among the indigens of the Malay Archipelago; by section of the Fallopian tubes, as recommended by Kehrer; by the so-called castratio uterina by means of vaporization (the application of superheated steam by the method of Pincus, whereby menstruation is suspended and the uterine cavity is obliterated); and finally by castration proper, the extirpation[706] of the ovaries[734] (oöphorectomy, spaying, Battey’s operation), which was carried out in ancient times by quite savage races, in order to prevent reproduction.[735] In France, theoretically anti-malthusian, but practically through and through malthusian, in the country from which the song originates—

—it appears, according to recent descriptions,[736] that oöphorectomy is greatly prized by distinguished ladies as a means for the prevention of pregnancy. It is said that there even exist “specialists” for the production of these child-hating “ovariées,” men who undertake this operation at a high fee. In Germany, happily, this radical measure for the prevention of conception is not employed in healthy persons; the operation is performed only in women who are seriously ill, and strictly for therapeutic purposes.

The preventive measures previously mentioned, if we except coitus interruptus and the condom, are all very untrustworthy, as we learn from the extreme frequency of deliberate, artificial abortion in all countries, and among all classes of the population.[737] Artificial abortion is, as is well known, a criminal offence, punishable by a long term of imprisonment for all those concerned, the pregnant woman herself and her accomplices. In the Orient and among savage races, however, abortion is not punishable. Among the civilized nations of Europe artificial abortion is punished; in Germany the mere attempt at abortion is punishable, even though only an imaginary pregnancy is present. That the State must take steps to prevent abortion, as an immoral and unnatural action, is obvious, and this is necessary above all because intentional abortion in so many cases endangers the life and health of women. But in order that such punishment should be reasonable,[707] it is essential that society should work to this end, that the social conditions upon which the frequency of the practice depends should be abolished; society should abandon the artificial defamation of illegitimate motherhood, and should in every possible way work for the improvement of the possibilities of motherhood—should found homes for mothers and for pregnant women, should provide for the insurance of mothers, etc. It is a remarkable contradiction, to which Gisela von Streitberg [738] draws attention, that illegitimate pregnancy is regarded as sinful and shameful: simultaneously the life of the child about to be born is regarded as sacred; whilst this same child, as soon as it is born, is once more regarded as infamous. In fact, to the illegitimate child, in the social morality of our time, which is at once ridiculous and profoundly perverted, there inevitably attaches something despicable and dishonourable. It is right that those who make the procuring of abortion a professional occupation should be severely punished; but, on the other hand, it is doubtful whether it is right to punish mothers, and more particularly the mothers of illegitimate infants, against whom the Criminal Code is especially directed, for artificially inducing abortion. It is, in fact, open to question whether the punishment is even legal. It is well known that according to § 1 of the Civil Code the rights of a human being are said to begin only with the completion of birth,[739] and it is certainly open to question whether the as yet undeveloped human fœtus has any personal rights at all. Without doubt we have to do with a being which has not yet begun to exist, but which is only in process of becoming. Thus, juristically, and from the standpoint of the philosophy of law, the foundation for the punishment for abortion is a very unstable one. Consider, for example, impregnation resulting from rape. Should not the woman concerned have the right to employ any and all means available to her to destroy at the very outset the child thus forced upon her?

The means for the induction of abortion [740] prior to the twenty-eighth or thirtieth week of pregnancy are very various, and may be considered under the two categories of internal and mechanical means respectively. Infallible internal abortifacients[708] do not exist; and almost all abortifacients are dangerous owing to their toxic effects. Those most commonly employed are ergot, ethereal oil of savin (Juniperus sabina), varieties of thuja, yew (Taxus baccata), turpentine, oleum succini, tansy, rue, camphor, cantharides, aloes, phosphorus, etc. Mechanically, abortion may be effected by blows, by violent movements (for example, during coitus), massage, perforation of the membranes, hot injections, steam, manipulations with the finger at the os uteri, the introduction of sounds and other objects through the os uteri, venesection, application of the electric current, etc. With all these practices there is involved great danger of injury, poisoning, infection, rupture and perforation of the uterus, the entry of air into the uterine veins, scalding of the internal genital organs, etc. It is, therefore, not to be wondered at that death so frequently ensues, and that almost always severe illnesses result from the use of these abortifacients.

The State would in this way best put a stop to artificial abortion if, in addition to the above-mentioned removal of the disgrace attached to illegitimate motherhood, it diffused widely among all classes of society a knowledge of the permissible means for the prevention of pregnancy.

The fact that neo-malthusian methods are chiefly employed in large towns, indicates their dependence upon economical considerations, and upon the struggle for existence, which is especially severe in large towns. Hope for the future rests upon the removal of moral and legal coercion in marriage, in which Gutzkow (“Säkularbilder,” i. 174, 175) saw the principal causes of social and sexual misery; and upon the rational regulation of methods for the prevention of pregnancy, which must be regarded as in no way identical with the hostility to “fruitfulness” in the sense of Weininger. On the contrary, the yearning for children, and the joy in their possession, will then, for the first time, obtain their natural satisfaction.

CHAPTER XXVIII
SEXUAL HYGIENE

“Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horse, cattle, and dogs, before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage, he rarely, or never, takes such care. Yet he might by selection do something, not only for the bodily constitution and frame of his offspring, but for their intellectual and moral qualities.”—Charles Darwin.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXVIII

Sexual hygiene as social hygiene — Its foundation by Darwin — Recent works — “Reproductive hygiene” — Degeneration and regeneration (hereditary taint and hereditary enfranchisement) — Possibility of the disappearance of morbid tendencies — “Eugenics” (Galton) — Love’s choice and sexual selection — Principles — Darwin’s prescriptions regarding sexual selection — Prohibition of marriage — Inheritance of morbid tendencies and morbid constitutions — Danger of alcoholism for the offspring — Families of drinkers — Direct influence of alcohol upon the germ-plasm — Observations on this subject — Syphilis as a cause of racial degeneration — Syphilis and the duration of life — Degenerative effects of tuberculosis — Direct infection — Inheritance of the tubercular habit of body — Mental disorders, diatheses, and malignant tumours — Nervous disorders — Inheritable atrophy of the female mammary glands — Recent works on this subject — Effect of excessive youth or excessive age of the married pair — Influence of blood-relationship — Significance of breeding in-and-in in relation to the evolution of the race — The dangers of too close blood-relationship — Importance of spiritual qualities in relation to love’s choice — The breeding of talent — Importance of this in relation to the woman’s question — In relation to the improvement of the race — Greater resisting powers possessed by women towards degenerative influences — A quotation from Carl Vogt — Unfavourable influence of coercive marriage morality and of mammonism — Importance of racial hygiene and of the sexual sense of responsibility.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Sexual hygiene in individual relationships has already been discussed in previous chapters, and more especially in those upon the prophylaxis and suppression of venereal diseases, upon the question of sexual abstinence, upon sexual education, and upon the use of methods for the prevention of pregnancy. Here we merely propose to deal shortly with the social relationships of the hygiene of the sexual life. After Darwin, more particularly in his work on the “Descent of Man,” had published fundamental observations regarding the social importance of sexual hygiene, other writers, influenced by recent anthropological and ethnological research, occupied themselves with these problems, more especially Hegar,[741] A. Ploetz,[742] and R. Kossmann;[743] the subjects considered by these writers have been aptly comprised under the name “reproductive hygiene,” which constitutes a part of general racial biology.

Unfortunately, racial biology, as Max Gruber [744] justly remarks, has formed exaggerated estimates of the ideas of “degeneration” and “hereditary taint”; and, on the other hand, the complementary ideas of “regeneration” and “hereditary enfranchisement” have been unduly neglected. And yet it is certain that these latter influences are continually in active operation in the direction of the resanation and invigoration of the race: that the introduction of new and healthy blood is competent to bring about reanimation and regeneration, even in degenerate families. Gruber says with justice (“Hygiene of the Sexual Life,” p. 55, 1905):

“Completely normal, and entirely free from hereditary taint, no single human being can be; and, on the other hand, experience teaches us, that just as morbid tendencies make their appearance in certain families, so also they may disappear from these families. Many of these tendencies can be rendered ineffective by a suitably chosen mode of life for the individual; and by means of repeated crossing with stems which are free from these particular taints, the morbid tendency can be led to disappear, unless the degenerative impulse is too powerful.”

The recognition of this fact does not in the least diminish the great importance of purposive choice in love and marriage; nor does it diminish the sense of sexual responsibility in relation to the great fact of heredity. But the recognition of the fortunate fact of hereditary enfranchisement supports, on the other hand, all our endeavours in the direction of rational “eugenics” (Galton),[745] in accordance with which we must, as Nietzsche says, not merely reproduce, but produce in an upward direction (“nicht bloss fort-, sondern auch hinaufpflanzen sollen”).

The central problem of reproductive hygiene is that of love’s choice, of sexual selection. It is a most difficult task, one which is rarely fulfilled to the utmost, for the right man to find the right woman, so that their individualities may in every respect correspond to and complement one another. In most cases it is necessary to be contented with relative harmony, and with sufficient health on both sides. The laws of a refined, differentiated marriage choice have not yet been discovered. Havelock Ellis [746] has instituted exhaustive researches on this subject, without, however, attaining any positive result. He was only able to establish the general proposition, that in love’s choice identity of race and of individual characters (homogamy), and at the same time unlikeness in the secondary sexual characters (heterogamy), are to be preferred. In other respects, however, very various and complicated influences are determinative in sexual selection. Havelock Ellis also detected a natural disinclination towards love between blood-relatives, which, however, he regards as merely due to the customary life in close association from childhood onwards.

Darwin propounded the principle for sexual selection, that both sexes should avoid marriage when in any pronounced degree they were defective, either physically or mentally. Upon this idea rests the old and widely diffused custom of killing or exposure of sickly children, as well as the more recent prohibitions of marriage in certain States of the American Union—for example, Michigan, in which the marriage (also sexual union for procreative purposes?) is forbidden on the part of those[713] mentally diseased and of those who are infected with tubercle or syphilis.[747]

The most important fundamental principle, however, of rational reproductive hygiene is, without doubt, that only healthy individuals should pair, or, at any rate, those only whose abnormalities or diseases, if any, would not injure their offspring, physically or mentally. Not in disease itself, but in the inheritance of disease, lies the great danger for the deterioration of the family and the race. It is for this reason that the study of the inheritance of morbid predispositions and morbid constitutions is of such enormous importance in racial biology.

With regard to illnesses to which attention must especially be paid in connexion with sexual selection, we have here, in the first place, to consider the “three scourges” of humanity: alcoholism, syphilis, and tuberculosis.

Apart from the fact that alcoholism leads in the drinker himself to nervous weakness, to mental disturbances of all kinds (delirium tremens, imbecility, mania, peripheral neuritis, etc.), it also exercises a very serious influence upon the offspring, who are, unfortunately, in many cases very numerous,[748] as the study of “drinker families” shows (cf. Jörger, “The Family Zero,” published in the Archives for Racial Biology, 1905, vol. ii., pp. 494-559). Only a very small fraction of the offspring of such families are physically and mentally normal (about 7 to 17 %); the majority display a rapidly progressive degeneration, which manifests itself physically more especially by the tendency to tuberculosis and epilepsy, and mentally by the tendency to drunkenness, crime, and imbecility. Alcohol is a direct poison to the germ cells, so much so that, according to the degree of drunkenness, it is almost possible to estimate beforehand the degree of hereditary taint. Moreover, an otherwise healthy[714] father, in a single severe acute alcoholic intoxication, may procreate a child either quite incompetent to live, or weakly, or completely degenerate. On the other hand, it has been observed that a person given to chronic alcoholism is competent, during a temporary diminution in his consumption of alcohol, to procreate a comparatively vigorous child. From this it follows that marriage, or sexual union in general for reproductive purposes, with a man or woman addicted to alcohol, and no less the act of procreation in a state of intoxication, are absolutely to be condemned.

The danger of alcoholism to the offspring is illustrated by the experience that about one-eighth of the surviving children of drunken parents become affected with epilepsy, and that more than one-half of idiotic children are born of drunken parents (Kraepelin, “The Psychiatric Duties of the State,” p. 3; Jena, 1900).

In an earlier chapter (pp. 361-363) attention was drawn to the fact that syphilis rivals alcohol in its potency as a cause of racial degeneration.[749] Thanks to the researches of Alfred Fournier and of Tarnowsky, the sinister influence of syphilis in this respect is now widely recognized. E. Heddaeus rightly [750] asserts that since at the present day the whole world is contaminated with congenital or acquired syphilis, the eradication of syphilis is the most important task of reproductive hygiene. The previously mentioned etiological and prophylactic-therapeutic researches, among which may be included the quite recent discovery of syphilitic antibodies in the system of those who have formerly suffered from syphilis,[751] open to us a prospect of the realization of this magnificent idea. The weakening and degeneration of the individual by acquired and inherited syphilis, is also shown by the recent researches into the influence of syphilis upon the duration of life, among which I may mention the works of A. Blaschko [752] and Hans Tilesius.[753] Regarding the disastrous influence of syphilis continued into the second and third generations, see the monograph of B. Tarnowsky, “La Famille Syphilitique et sa Descendence” [Clermont (Oise), 1904]. (See note [325] to p. 363.)

The third disease leading to degeneration is tuberculosis, which may be inherited either by direct infection of the germ, or (more frequently) by the transmission of a predisposition to the offspring. This simple predisposition, recognized by the so-called “tubercular physique” (long, thin individuals, with a flattened chest, poorly developed muscles, and a pale countenance), does not offer any absolute ground for prohibiting reproductive activity, since the health of the other party to the marriage may diminish or entirely remove the danger of inheritance. But, on the other hand, manifest tuberculosis or scrofula is a contra-indication to marriage.

The same is true of actual mental disorders, of severe diatheses, such as gout, obesity, or diabetes; and of cancer and other malignant tumours; whereas the bulk of “nervous” affections and other bodily diseases only exclude marriage in certain special circumstances.[754]

Very unfavourable to the offspring is the atrophy of the female breasts, and the consequent incapacity for lactation, a matter to which Mensinga,[755] G. von Bunge,[756] G. Hirth,[757] Emil Abderhalden,[758] A. Hegar,[759] and others, have referred, and which exercises a very unfavourable influence upon the offspring, since natural lactation cannot be adequately replaced by artificial feeding. According to Bunge, alcoholism, tuberculosis, syphilis, and mental disorders of the ancestry are the principal causes of atrophy of the mammary glands. Whether atrophy of the mammary glands is really on the increase, and whether it is hereditary, are matters demanding, as Abderhalden insists, more careful critical investigation.

Marriage at an age too youthful (below twenty on the part of the woman, below twenty-four on the part of the man) and at too advanced an age (above forty on the part of the woman, above fifty on the part of the man) is also disadvantageous to[716] the offspring, as manifested by higher mortality of the infants, by the more frequent occurrence of malformations, idiotcy, rickets, etc. Equally disadvantageous is too close relationship by blood,[760] since in this way any unfavourable tendencies are greatly strengthened. Upon a certain degree of inbreeding, or, rather, upon an approximation to inbreeding, depends the formation of every race. The “racial problem” in this sense is a kind of exaltation of the inbreeding principle, for the very idea of race implies a more or less close relationship between all the members of a definite stock. Thus the entire absence of fresh blood does not necessarily give rise to any degeneration; but it is certain that long-continued close in-and-in breeding on the part of near blood-relatives in the same family results in a progressive tendency to degeneration, because, among those who unite in marriage, the same morbid tendencies are present, and accumulate in consequence of the inbreeding. This is shown very clearly by some statistics collected by Morris (published by Gruber, op. cit., p. 32). Marriage between uncle and niece, or between aunt and nephew, and the, unfortunately, far too frequent marriages between first cousins, are therefore to be condemned.

The greatest value is to be placed, in love’s choice, upon intellectual qualities. Intelligent persons, and those full of character, are to be preferred. Precisely in relation to the breeding of talents, Nietzsche recommended (“Posthumous Works,” vol. xii., p. 188; Leipzig, 1901) polygamy for men or women of predominant intellectual capacity, so that they might have the opportunity of reproducing their kind in intercourse with several persons of the opposite sex, and in this way, since the later children of the same women are not so powerful nor of such striking capacity as the first-born, they might have the possibility of being the parents of several talented and distinguished individuals. In relation to the woman’s question, the breeding of women well endowed with talent is a matter of especial interest. Charles Darwin [761] writes:

“In order that woman should reach the same standard as man, she ought, when nearly adult, to be trained to energy and perseverance, and to have her reason and imagination exercised to the highest point; then she would probably transmit these qualities chiefly to her adult daughters. All women, however, could not be thus raised,[717] unless during many generations those who excelled in the above robust virtues were married, and produced offspring in larger numbers than other women.”

In a valuable work W. Schallmayer [762] has recently discussed the great importance of the offspring of talented persons in the improvement of the race, and has considered the details of psychical inheritance.

As in the entire animal world, so also in the human race, the feminine nature has a more conservative character, one more disinclined to variations, whether favourable or unfavourable, as contrasted with the more variable nature of the male, which is also more prone to submit to degenerative influences. For this reason, in declining races, we meet many more women free from degeneration than men. Carl Vogt, in a passage which appears to be very little known, writes on this subject in the following terms:[763]

“It is the women, my friend, who maintain the race, who for the longest time safeguard the type of the people in body and spirit, and for this reason they form the mirror at once of the future and of the past which are allotted to that people. You will no doubt have noticed how, in many races, there exists a disharmony between men and women, so that in one race the male and in another the female stands behind the other in physical beauty and in mental development. This relationship between the two sexes is precisely that from which we are able to learn the past and the future of the nation. Good and bad, advance and retrogression, are first undertaken by the man, and by him passed to the woman, whose conservative nature much more gradually yields to strange influences. But since the stages of mental culture through which a race passes are not only reflected in its bodily development, but actually depend upon this development, it is easy to understand that in a nature which is striving upwards, which we see in the process of advance towards better things, the men possess the advantage in the matter of beauty and of intellectual capacity; whereas when the race is a declining one, the advantages in these respects will lie with woman. If you find a race in which the women are beautiful, but as a rule the men are ugly and badly formed, you can with certainty conclude that this race has long since passed its culminating point in development, and has long been undergoing a process of decline.”

For racial biology it is at least equally important, if not even more important, that healthy, vigorous, and talented men[718] should reproduce their kind, rather than that in love’s choice the corresponding qualities in women should be regarded as determinative. Racial biology, if it really wishes to obtain success in the breeding of humanity, is compelled to demand the abolition of the present evil coercive marriage morality, and, according to the suggestions of Nietzsche, von Ehrenfels, and others, will not hesitate, in certain cases, to regard polygamy as desirable, if only from this standpoint—that coercive marriage is the sole cause of the domination of “mammonism” in the sexual life, to the deleterious influence of which we have before alluded.[764]

Mammonism is dangerous if for this alone, because it involves the annihilation of the sense of sexual responsibility, and in consequence of this, natural love is rejected on one side, and all considerations of a racial hygienic nature are cast away on the other. The lack of both is the cause of degeneration.

CHAPTER XXIX
THE SEXUAL LIFE IN ITS PUBLIC RELATIONSHIPS (SEXUAL QUACKERY, ADVERTISEMENTS, AND SCANDALS)

“One of the principal reasons which makes the eradication of quackery for ever impossible is to be found in the fact which finds incisive expression in the proverb ‘Die Dummen werden nicht alle.’” [“Stupidity is a hardy perennial.”]—Wilhelm Ebstein.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXIX

Greater publicity of the sexual life in the age of commerce — Three forms of this publicity — Sexual quackery — The relations of quackery to the sexual life — Recent examples — The trade in sexual nostrums and other articles of immoral use — Public puffing of sexual nostrums — Quack advertisements.

Newspaper advertisements for sexual purposes — Matrimonial advertisements — Their history — The two oldest matrimonial advertisements — Mercenary marriages and marriages for position — Nominal marriages — Immoral advertisements — Loan advertisements — Acquaintance advertisements — Friendship advertisements — Employment advertisements — Heterosexual and homosexual advertisements — Advertisements regarding correspondence — Advertisements of rooms for sexual purposes — Advertisements regarding instruction — Rendezvous and postillon d’amour advertisements — Poste restante correspondence — Private inquiries — Advertisements for the purpose of sexual perversions — Street handbills — Brothel guides.

Public scandals of a sexual character — Murders and suicides from love — Seductions, duels, procuress trials — Orgies and the life of swindlers.

CHAPTER XXIX

In this age of commerce, of telegraphs, and of the press, the rôle which the sexual life plays before the public eye is notably greater than it used to be. From very early times, indeed, sexual matters formed the principal constituent of the chronique scandaleuse, but it was not then possible to disseminate such scandals by means of daily newspapers, as it is now so easy to do. In three forms at the present day the sexual life attains publicity: in the form of an unscrupulous quackery; in the form of newspaper advertisements relating to the sexual life; and in the form of sexual scandals diffused by means of the press. We propose to refer briefly to the principal aspects of all three, and we shall find that they are, for the most part, of an unpleasant character.

According to the well-known saying that hunger and love rule the world, quackery has from its very earliest beginnings concerned itself by preference with the provinces of disorders of digestion and of sexual troubles; and especially in respect of the latter have its developments been so astounding—in fact, there appears to be nothing else which gives such instructive information regarding the possibilities of human folly, depravity, and superstition. When we regard the history of quackery and medical charlatanry of all times,[765] we discern beyond question the justice of the assertion that “quackery is identical with the diffusion of sexual vice and of fornication.” These relationships of quackery to the sexual life and to sexual crime have recently had a vivid light thrown upon them by C. Reissig [766] and C. Alexander.[767]

Reissig deals more especially with the “immoral practices of many magnetizers, lay hypnotizers, and similar individuals, who, under the pretence of giving help to the sick, seek and find opportunity for the gratification of all kinds of immoral lusts”; and he gives characteristic examples of these practices. Police reports have shown that numerous masseuses and male quacks, who commonly appear under the high-sounding names of “professor,” “director,” “hygienologist,” “magnetopath,” etc., and who profess to treat “secret diseases” or “diseases of women,” are in reality concerned with abortion mongering, the production of artificial sexual excitement, and the provision[722] of human material for the gratification of perverse lusts. Who does not know the ominous words, “Rat und Hilfe!” (“Advice and help!”)? Under the mantle of quackery the worst kinds of immorality are practised. Thus, Alexander (op. cit., p. 48) speaks of an “ear specialist” who, paving the way by gigantic advertisements in the local papers, travelled from place to place, nominally in order to relieve “defects of hearing,” but who in reality utilized his opportunities in order to make immoral attempts upon young girls (Glatz Assizes, July 10, 1896). The “magnetizer” M—— hypnotized young girls, and then violated them; another examined the genital organs when professing to treat ear troubles, and carried out improper manipulations. In an article, “Serene Highness’s Quackery,” in the Aerztliche Vereinsblatt, No. 418, August, 1900, Dr. Reissig reports that “to Her Serene Highness the Princess Maria von Rohan in Salzburg” it appears to be a sacred duty to bear witness to the joiner (!) Kuhne, in Leipzig, under date November 9, 1889, that his sexual friction baths (!) “had proved to be of inestimable value, and had had a wonderful effect,” and she felt impelled “to recommend to physicians the most careful examination and trial of this new method of cure.”

The treatment of “secret diseases,”[768] in the hands of quacks, does incredible harm; and the same is true of the uncleanly and dangerous practices of “masseuses” and of professional abortion-mongers. Closely connected with quackery is the trade in sexual nostrums and in other articles of immoral use.[769] This trade is occupied in the manufacture and public recommendation of “sexual articles” of every kind: aphrodisiacs; “protective articles”; various celebrated measures for the relief of “sexual weakness,” infertility, pollutions, lack of voluptuous sensation, etc. The artificial sterilization, not of women, but of men, by means of Roentgen rays is recommended.[770] The newspapers overflow with advertisements recommending all these articles. Beneath the aliases of “chiromancy” and “astrology,” sexual quackery also lies concealed. It allures its clients chiefly by means of newspaper advertisements.

Newspaper advertisements for sexual purposes are not more than 200 years old. Their oldest and most harmless form was that of matrimonial advertisements, the first two of which appeared on July 19, 1695, in the Collection for the Improvement of[723] Husbandry and Trade, published by Houghton, the father of English advertising.[771] These two remarkable and historical advertisements run as follows:

A gentleman, thirty years of age, who says that he has considerable property, would be glad to marry a young lady with property amounting to about £3,000. He will make a suitable settlement.

A young man, twenty-five years of age, with a good business, and whose father is prepared to give him £1,000, would be glad to make a suitable marriage. He has been brought up by his parents as a dissenter, and is a sober man.

We see that from the very outset matrimonial advertisements did not forget the punctum saliens, which I need not specify.[772] All, down to those of the present day, are alike. The only difference is that, in addition to these “money marriages,” advertisements of “nominal marriages” and also of “marriages for position” appear freely in the papers. The majority of matrimonial advertisements are inserted for mercenary or interested purposes, and really belong to the category of “immoral advertisements,” which conceal themselves under all possible titles. I give a short classification of some of the commonest immoral advertisements, and append some actual advertisements of each kind taken from leading German and Austrian newspapers.

1. Loan Advertisements.—In most cases a “young,” “smart” lady begs an older gentleman for a loan, or vice versa, a young man directs the same request to a “lady belonging to the best circles.” Frequently also it is a “lady living alone,” “a young widow,” or a “recently married woman,” who, “without the knowledge of her husband,” and “in temporary want of money,” seeks a “helper.” Almost invariably the need and the marriage are fictitious. These are in most cases the advertisements of secret prostitutes, of a similar character to the advertisements of masseuses. The following advertisement must otherwise be interpreted:

What noble-minded lady would be willing to lend, to a young, widely-travelled engineer, the sum of 12,000 marks [£600], for six months, on good security?

2. Acquaintanceship Advertisements, Friendship Advertisements, and Employment Advertisements.—These may be divided into[724] the two classes of heterosexual and homosexual advertisements. Examples of the former are the following:

A young widow, twenty-seven years of age, desires friendly intercourse with a man of position, who will assist her with word and deed.

A young stranger desires acquaintanceship (!) to relieve her of a temporary difficulty.

A merchant, a man of middle age, desires the acquaintanceship of a good-looking lady (a slender figure preferred), for the purpose of friendly intercourse.

A well-placed young lady, nearing the age of thirty, desires an honourable, trustworthy lady friend.

A cultured lady of middle age desires a ladies’ club.

A well-placed elderly gentleman desires friendly intercourse with a young man.

A young merchant, between twenty and thirty years of age, desires friendly intercourse with a young man of good family.

A young lady, a stranger to the town, desires a lady friend; apply by letter to “Lesbos” at the office of this paper.[773]

A newspaper, now defunct, which formerly appeared in Munich, characterized by homosexual “psychologico-erosophical” tendencies, entitled Der Seelenforscher (edited by August Fleischmann), appears to have laid itself open to such advertisements. In No. 11 of the second year of issue, November, 1903, I find the following distinctive advertisements:

A young vigorous (!) man, a Swiss, twenty-four years of age, well recommended, desires a situation with a gentleman living alone.

A young man, twenty years of age, of agreeable appearance, with an honourable and ideal mind, desires a position as correspondent or companion in the house of a well-to-do, even if elderly, gentleman.

A wealthy, talented uranian young man desires the patronage of a noble well-to-do urning.

A good, affectionate, and bright young man, who at the present time is in an official position, desires to find a well-to-do, kind-hearted, and lonely gentleman, to whom he could be a true life-companion, and to whom, until the end of his life, he would give true affection. He would faithfully fulfil all his duties.[774]

The numerous advertisements, also, in which young girls and women, or widows, desire “positions” as housekeepers, companions,[725] etc., in the houses of “well-to-do” gentlemen “living alone” have, as a rule, an immoral basis.

3. Advertisements regarding Correspondence.—These also form a permanent constituent of the advertisements of the daily papers, and serve in part the aims of prostitution or of assignations for sexual intercourse, but in part really aim at an exchange of more or less erotic letters, as is obviously the case in respect of the following advertisements:

Young cultured man desires a stimulating (!) correspondence with a young lady.

Young lady desires to enter into correspondence with a lady of good position, with similar ideas.

4. Advertisements of Rooms.—Among these advertisements, we find that of the “convenient room” or the room “with a separate entrance”—the “storm-free diggings” of the student. Such rooms are usually offered to men; women must seek them for themselves, as in the following advertisement:

A lady artist desires a well-furnished convenient room, with bath-room and piano, as an only tenant.

The advertisements regarding rooms to be let “during the day” mostly refer to opportunities for fornication (“houses of accommodation”).

5. Pseudo-Educational Advertisements.—Here also there is a form of advertisement which enables us without difficulty to recognize their true purpose—for example:

A young Englishwoman gives stimulating instruction.

Jeune Française, gaie (!), bien recomm. qui enseigne de méthode facile et rapide, donne des léçons.

Very frequent are announcements of sadistic or masochistic “instruction,” in which the “energy” or “imposing appearance” of the instructor or instructress is emphasized, or in which the word “discipline” is displayed in a significance which cannot be misunderstood.

6. Rendezvous and Postilion d’Amour Advertisements.—These subserve the appointment of lovers, often adulterous lovers; but also the opening up of acquaintanceship. Examples:

Veronika.

To-day unfortunately prevented, therefore 21st.

“Wireless Telegraphy.”

Best thanks for dear letter. Drive to-day. A thousand kisses.—L.

[726]

“Good Report.”

A letter will be found addressed to “Sophie G.,” post restante, Vienna, I/1, principal post-office.

M.S.A.

To-day, 4. Please bring news. Most intimate.—K. D. D.

A. 15.

Je n’oublie pas et j’espère.

Very frequent also are requests from male advertisers, addressed to ladies they have chanced to meet in the railway, electric tram, etc., asking where the latter may live. These advertisements give a description of the appearance, costume, time, and place of the first meeting, and beg the lady to give her address “in confidence,” or to come to some specified place of meeting. A very large number of letters addressed post restante are of an erotic nature, and belong to this category.

7. Private Inquiries.—Under this heading persons advertise in the newspapers that for an honorarium (usually a very high one) they will undertake to watch secretly any desired person—and almost invariably such watching relates to the sexual life and activity of the person under observation; when employed, they use all the methods of the most unscrupulous detective. These individuals play a principal part in divorce proceedings, and in conjugal quarrel based upon jealousy; they are a cancer of our time [775] which cannot be too energetically suppressed. A detective advertisement of this character is the following:

Private Inquiry.

Confidential! Enlightening! Unfailing! Truthful! Universal! Extraordinarily satisfactory conjugal inquiries; mode of life, family relationships, liaisons, peculiarities of character, occupations, present condition, past misconduct, future prospects, state of property, secret intercourse, etc., etc.

8. Advertisements relating to Sexual Perversions.—We have already referred to homosexual advertisements. An even more important part is played by sadistic and masochistic advertisements, which usually appear under the cloak of[727] “massage,” “instruction,” or of an “energetic” person. Examples:

Masoch. Who is interested in this matter? Address “Kismet,” office of this paper.

Widow of noble birth, middle-aged, energetic, desires position in the house of a gentleman of standing, as reader, or in some other capacity.

Cabinet de massage, par dame diplômée, hydrothérapie. Mme. D., 82, Rue Blanche.

Massage suédois, par dame diplômée, tous les jours de 10 à 8 heures.

Madame Martinet, leçons de maintien....

Monsieur dés. gouvernante gr. et forte, 40 a. sévère pour educ. enfant diffic. A. B. p.r. Amiens.

Energetic distinguished lady, in temporary need, wishes to receive a considerable loan, but will meet only the actual lender.

Severin is seeking his Wanda!

A young man begs 30 marks from a lady. “Sacher Masoch,” Post Office, Köpenickerstrasse.

Even fetichistic advertisements sometimes appear, such as the following, from a shoe fetichist:

A young man of means buys for his private collection elegant shoes, which have been worn by leading actresses, or by ladies of high rank.

9. Handbills.—In large towns these are distributed by persons standing at the street corners, and usually relate to restaurants with women attendants. One example will suffice:

The Restaurant of the Good-Natured Saxon Girl.

The attendants at this restaurant are young and pretty girls from Saxony; Miss Elly waits at the bar. Piano-playing and singing. Your kind patronage is requested by The Young Hostess.

“Chiromantists,” magnetopaths, and other charlatans, advertise themselves by means of street handbills. In the Latin countries, and more especially in Paris, true “brothel guides” stand at the street corners, and conduct the passers-by to improper dramatic representations, or provide for them children for fornicatory purpose, or invite them to homosexual intercourse, etc.

The third form under which the sexual life makes a public appearance is that of the great scandals and sensational occurrences with a sexual background, which are discussed by the press. I allude here, without attempting completeness, to murders and suicides arising from jealousy, from rejected love, or from love unsuccessful for some other reason—occurrences which afford sufficient proof that individual falling in love in[728] our own time is just as violent and passionate as it was formerly; further, to abduction and seduction; to divorce scandals and divorce proceedings; in general, to all law-court proceedings relating to sexual offences; to duels dependent upon erotic motives; to family tragedies upon a similar basis; to the great procuress trials; to the discovery of secret sexual clubs and of erotic orgies; to revelations from nunneries and from secular institutions; to the exploits of swindlers, who very frequently make use of sexual passion in others to assist them in their pursuit of plunder, etc. Examples of all these varieties of scandals and sensational occurrences are found day by day in the newspapers. Very frequently, on account of the very nature of sexual psychology, they exercise a suggestive influence, so that we often hear of similar occurrences at brief intervals. If we assume the existence of psychical contagion, there is no doubt that these sensational newspaper reports play a far greater part therein than the whole of the so-called erotic literature.

CHAPTER XXX
PORNOGRAPHIC LITERATURE AND ART

“Wer will das Höchste aus Wollust machen, der krönt ein Schwein in wüster Lache.” [“He who devotes his talents to the glorification of lust is like one who crowns a pig in the midst of a dismal swamp.”]—Hans Burgkmair.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXX

Distinction between pornography and eroticism — An old medical thesis concerning obscene books, dating from the year 1688 — Definition of obscenity in this thesis — Modern definition of an obscene book — Treatment of purely sexual relationships from the artistic and scientific standpoints respectively — Summary of the general tendency — Morality-fanaticism and medical authorship — The artistic treatment of sexual matters — Humorous mode of treatment — The erotic in caricature — The mystic-satanic conception of the sexual — The importance of the individuality and the age of the reader or onlooker — Danger of Bible-reading for children — A remark of John Milton upon this subject — Importance of the standard of the time, and of contemporary moral ideas, in our judgment of an erotic work — Example of the works of Nicolas Chorier and of the Marquis de Sade — Observation regarding the recent German translations of pornographic works — Comparison of obscene books with natural poisons — Recent obscene literature — Remarkable fondness of great artists and poets for the pornographic-erotic element — French celebrities as pornographists (Voltaire, Mirabeau, de Musset, Gautier, Droz, etc.) — Goethe and Schopenhauer as erotic writers — Schiller’s and Goethe’s fondness for French erotic writings — Occupation of women with pornographic literature — Obscene pictures by great painters, from Lucas Cranach to the present time — Pornographic garbage literature and garbage art — Origin of these — Dangers of hawkers’ literature — Futility of the efforts of Purity Societies — Historical examples of this — The true means to render pornography harmless.

CHAPTER XXX

What is an obscene, pornographic book or picture? In order to obtain an accurate and objective definition of this idea, we must always keep clearly before our minds the distinction between “pornography” and “eroticism.” The confusion between these two ideas explains the great conflict of opinion on the part of expert witnesses in connexion with the question whether any specified book or picture is to be regarded as “immoral” or “indecent.”

The obscene differs toto cœlo from the erotic. In my own possession is a rare work which is probably the first monograph regarding obscene books. It dates from the year 1688, and is the thesis of a Leipzig doctor.[776] At that time it was still possible to compose academic essays upon such topics. To-day this would only be possible in the legal faculty and from the criminal standpoint. In respect of the unprejudiced scientific and historical consideration of pornography, we have experienced a notable retrogression, and at the present day a certain degree of courage is needed to make these things an object of scientific study, to consider in an unprejudiced and objective manner these peculiar outgrowths of the human soul.

In the above-mentioned essay the learned writer gives, on p. 5, a definition of the obscene, which shows that he had not thoroughly differentiated it from the erotic, but confused the two ideas under the same term. In his view, obscene writings are “all such writings whose authors use distinctly improper language, and speak plainly about the sexual organs, or describe the shameless acts of voluptuous and impure human beings, in such words that chaste and tender ears would shudder to hear them.”

But such improper descriptions might occur in a work without its being possible to designate this as obscene. A book can justly be called obscene only when it has been composed simply, solely, and exclusively for the purpose of producing sexual excitement—when its contents aim at inducing in its readers a condition of coarse and brutish sensuality.

This definition clearly excludes all those literary products which, notwithstanding the existence of isolated erotic, or[732] even obscene, passages, are yet composed for purposes radically different from that above described—it excludes, for example, artistic, religious, and scientific works (the history of civilization, poetry, belles-lettres, medicine, folk-lore, etc.).

The question, namely, whether simple sexual relationships can properly be made the object of artistic or scientific representation, may be answered with an unconditional affirmative, if we presuppose a purely artistic or scientific critical representation and consideration of erotic objects; that is to say, in the work of art, or the scientific work, as the case may be, the purely sexual must completely disappear behind the higher artistic or scientific conception. This is possible only when that which is represented is completely devoid of actuality; when time and place are entirely ignored, so that the object is regarded rather from its general human aspect; and when, further, in the artistic representation of the purely sexual we find expression also, on the part of the artist, of a conception enlightening and to a degree overcoming the purely physical; or when, finally, on the part of the man of science, we recognize a critical point of view, by means of which the causal relationships of the sexual find expression.

The general tendency is determinative, not the shocking individual detail. I need not waste any more words upon the importance of medical, ethnological, psychological, and historical works upon the sexual life.[777] This fact is, fortunately, now fully recognized even by the greatest morality fanatics, and it would hardly now be possible in Germany that a law-court—as recently in Belgium [778]—should witness proceedings against a medical undertaking on account of pornographic (!) illustrations.[779]

The same is true of the artistic consideration of sexual matters. For example, how readily everything sexual lends itself to the humorous point of view! How short here is the step from the sublime to the ridiculous! In a copy which lies before me of Fr. Th. Vischers’ first work, “The Sublime and the Ridiculous” (Stuttgart, 1837), which was once in the possession of a friend of Goethe, the Driburg physician, Anton Theobald Brück, we find[733] on p. 203, in his handwriting, the apt marginal note: “Wit gilds the nickel of the obscene.” Sexual matters actually provoke humour. This fact was enunciated by Schopenhauer, and was ascribed by him to the profound earnestness which underlies the sexual (“Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,” i., 330). For this reason, as Eduard Fuchs [780] rightly insists, the majority of all erotic creations are of the nature of caricatures. The most brilliant advocate of this humorous view of sexual matters is the brilliant English artist Thomas Rowlandson, whose works, both in England and in Germany, have long been kept under lock and key.

The mystic-satanic element in the sexual also stimulates artistic representations, and in the works of Baudelaire, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Félicien Rops, Aubrey Beardsley, Toulouse Lautrec, etc., we see that the “perverse” also is thoroughly capable of erotic representation. But even pure obscenity, without any underlying idea—as, for example, we see it to-day in the obscene drawings of Carracci—may have the effect of a simple artistic product, if the taste of the onlooker is so far matured that the purely sexual can recede completely behind the artistic conception. We must, generally speaking, not fail to take into account the individuality and the age of the spectator or reader. For children and immature persons, even works that are obviously not obscene, such as artistic, religious, and scientific literature, may, in certain circumstances, be dangerous—works which adults regard and judge in the spirit of their own time, as, for example, the Bible and the writings of the Fathers of the Church. John Milton, who was certainly not lacking in piety, wrote: “The Bible often relates blasphemies in no very delicate manner; it describes the fleshly lusts of vicious men not without elegance.”[781] Books which are to be read by children cannot be chosen too carefully, for a very large proportion also of the literature which is not, properly speaking, obscene, but which deals with sexual matters, has upon the childish imagination an effect equivalent to that of true pornography upon the adult.

In passing judgment on an erotic work, we must, finally, take into consideration the standard of the epoch to which the work belongs; we must bear in mind the nature of the contemporary moral ideas. Much which to us to-day appears obscene was not[734] so in the middle ages. On the other hand, we must not excuse everything on this plea, for our forefathers were also familiar with pornographic and utterly obscene books. Works such as those of the Marquis de Sade or of Nicolas Chorier (“Gespräche der Aloysia Sigaea”) have not only an importance in the history of civilization: they also have an interest for anthropologists and medical men. They constitute remarkable documents of the nature and mode of manifestation of sexual perversities in earlier times. Moreover, all pornographic writings afford us valuable assistance in our study of the genesis of sexual perversions. But while we admit the importance of such writings—for example, those of de Sade—to learned men and bibliophiles, we cannot condemn in sufficiently strong terms the insane undertaking of translating de Sade’s books in our own day. This is simply pornology; for all those who, as medical men, psychologists, or historians of civilization, are occupied with pornographic literature, are—or, at any rate, should be—competent to read these authors in the original tongue.[782] I feel therefore that the mass of recently published German translations of the pornographic writings of John Cleland, Mirabeau, Nerciat, de Sade, of the “Antijustine” of Rétif de la Bretonne, of the “Portier des Chartreux,” of Alfred de Musset’s “Gamiani,” etc., can only be described as pornography, although I must admit that the original editions are often inaccessible to the scientific student interested in the matter, who in such cases must, faute de mieux, content himself with translations.

These obscene writings may be compared with natural poisons, which must also be carefully studied, but which can be entrusted only to those who are fully acquainted with their dangerous effects, who know how to control and counteract these effects, and who regard them as an object of natural research by means of which they will be enabled to obtain an understanding of other phenomena.

The pornographic element of literature and art [783] has an ancient[735] history. In Greece, Rome, and Egypt, but more especially in India, Japan, and China, there existed an extensive obscene literature. In Europe the French, Italian, and English obscene literature occupies the first place as regards comprehensiveness and wide diffusion. Exceptionally dangerous in their effect are French pornographic writings, because their mode of expression is so elegant, whereas the English obscene books, with the single exception of Cleland’s “Fanny Hill,” are positively deterrent, on account of the coarse phraseology employed in them. The German writings in this department are not much better than the English, and consist to a large extent of bad translations of foreign pornographic works—if we except a few older writings, which are repeatedly reissued, such as the “Denkwürdigkeiten des Herrn von H.,” by Schilling, or the “Memoiren einer Sängerin,” the first part of which is ascribed to the celebrated Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient. Speaking generally, it is a remarkable phenomenon (and one which is in flat contradiction to the assertion so frequently made that pornography and true art cannot possibly be associated) that so many spirits of the first rank, great artists either in literature or plastic art, have enriched pornography themselves by works of their own, or, failing this, have at least been notorious lovers of pornography. This fact was clearly manifested at the time of the Italian renascence, but it can be traced down to the present day. Men like Voltaire (“La Pucelle d’Orléans”), Mirabeau (“L’Éducation de Laure,” “Ma Conversion,” etc.), Alfred de Musset (“Gamiani”), Guy de Maupassant (“Les Cousines de la Colonelle”), Théophile Gautier (“Lettre à la Présidente”), and Gustave Droz (“Un Été à la Campagne”), have written indubitably pornographic books. But the heroes of our own German literature have not been free from such tendencies. Goethe not only wrote the “Tagebuch,” but composed other (still completely unknown) erotica, which, by command of the Grand Duchess Sophie, were sealed and hidden away.[784] Schopenhauer,[785][736] who said to Frauenstädt that a philosopher must be active, “not only with his head, but also with his genital organs,” was a lover of pornography, even of a skatological character, and was fond of telling “bawdy stories which will not bear repetition”—for example, he would enumerate the different kinds of kissing, describe the varieties of the sexual impulse, etc.[786] Schiller and Goethe enjoyed reading Diderot’s “The Nun” (“La Religieuse”) and his “Bijoux Indiscrets,” Rétif’s “Monsieur Nicolas,” and the “Liaisons Dangereuses” of Choderlos de Laclos, books which would nowadays be suppressed as “immoral.” Lichtenberg also was a very zealous reader, and a connoisseur, not only of erotic, but also of pornographic literature. In his letters he alludes to reading such pornographic works as Cleland’s “Woman of Pleasure” (“Letters,” edition Leitzmann and Schüddekopf, vol. ii., p. 187) and “Lyndamine,” etc. Talented women of that period also read pornographic works. Pauline Wiesel, the beloved of Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, greatly admired Mirabeau’s obscene writings, as we learn from a letter of Friedrich Gentz, in which the latter decries them as “cold libertinage,” and recommends to his friend similar products of Voltaire, Crébillon, and Grécourt.[787]

These facts do not excuse pornography, but they refute the assertion that pornography and true artistic perception are incompatible. As Schopenhauer truly says, many contrasts can exist side by side in the same human being. This is even more clearly manifest in pictorial art. Anyone who turns over the leaves of Eduard Fuchs’ book upon the erotic element in caricature will learn that the greatest painters have occasionally painted deliberately improper, obscene pictures. I need mention only the names of Lucas Cranach, Annibale Carracci, H. S. Beham, Rembrandt, G. Aldegrever, Adrian van Ostade, Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, Vivan-Denon, Gillray, Lawrence, Rowlandson, Heinrich Ramberg, Wilhelm von Kaulbach, Schadow, Otto Greiner, Willette, Kubin, Julius Pascin,[788] Beardsley, etc.[789]

Side by side with these higher pornographic works there exists also a lower kind—obscene garbage writings and pornographic[737] pictures of the worst possible kind, such as picture postcards, “act-photographs,” etc., in which all possible sexual perversities are represented, either in printed matter or by pictures (masturbation, poses lubriques, representations of nude portions of the body, copralagnistic and urolagnistic acts, bestiality, sadism, masochism, pæderasty, incest, fornicatory acts with children, orgies, obscene paraphrases of proverbs, rape, etc.). Kemmer (op. cit., pp. 31-45) gives a detailed account of the sale of these obscenities, and of the way in which they are advertised in catalogues, etc. They are manufactured in France, Germany, Belgium, and Spain (especially in Barcelona). The dangerous character of these articles is indisputable; they have a suggestive influence, and stimulate those who look at them to imitative acts. They may thus directly give rise to sexual perversities.[790] But they are not so dangerous as the true hawkers’ literature[791] and popular garbage writings about “secret sins.” These inflame the imagination, and thus lead to crime and sexual infamies. This is an old experience. In the year 1901, at the trial of the boy murderers Thärigen and Kroft (Vossische Zeitung, No. 161, April 5, 1901), the two murderers confessed that they had been incited to the commission of crime by backstairs romances, and by tales of Indians and robbers. The same cause was alleged, in December, 1906, in Kottbus, by a boy fourteen years of age, who was accused of murder.

How are we to counteract the moral harm done by such literature? I consider all the efforts of societies for the suppression of immorality to be illusory and two-edged, for they always fail to attain their end; and in addition, unfortunately—a matter of which there is no doubt—they endanger the freedom of art and science.[792] All measures calculated to keep away from children[738] and immature persons books which might serve to give rise to sexual stimulation are worthy of support; and it must be remembered that for children and immature persons scientific books, religious writings—as, for example, the unexpurgated Bible—and also illustrated comic papers, etc., may be dangerous. But, for the most part, all prohibitions, and the whole campaign against immorality, serve only to favour pornography. The stricter the measures taken against it, the wider becomes its diffusion. This is a very old experience, an incontrovertible fact. Tacitus (“Ann.,” XIV., c. 50) rightly explained this peculiar phenomenon: “Libros exuri jussit, conquisitos lectitatosque, donec cum periculo parabantur: mox licentia habendi oblivionem attulit” (“He issued a decree that the books were to be burned; but as long as it was dangerous to publish them they were in great request, and were eagerly read: whereas as soon as people were permitted to possess them they passed into oblivion”). The pornographic books which during the last five hundred years have been burned by the public executioner, which have been confiscated, and which have been repeatedly destroyed to the last copy, the obscene engravings of which the plates have been destroyed—have all these disappeared from the surface of the earth, have all these confiscations and condemnations [793] of livres défendus been of any use whatever? No. All the pornographic writings, confiscated and destroyed a thousand times over, reappear again and again; indeed, they become more numerous the more the attempt is made to suppress them. The campaign against them has always been a campaign against a hydra, a labour of the Danaïdes,[739] which has no object, and only entails the disadvantage that, in the general zeal to put an end to immoral literature, scientific and artistic interests are most seriously endangered. Happily, this campaign is to-day less vigorous than it was of yore. In proportion to the population, immoral literature in Germany was before 1870 far more widely diffused than it is at the present day. During the sixth and seventh decades of the nineteenth century it flourished more luxuriantly; even during the time of the war of liberation numerous original obscene books were printed in Germany. To-day the interest in social, scientific, technical, and philosophic questions, and in sport, has become so great, and the interest in sexual questions has become so much more profound, that an overgrowth of pornography is no longer to be feared. From these facts we recognize at once the only way, and the right way, which we must follow in order to paralyze the evil influences of pornography. This is to take a proper care for genuine popular culture, to increase educational opportunities, and to reduce the price of books. A single undertaking such as that of A. Reimann, who, in his Deutsche Bücherei, publishes for threepence a volume a collection of choice literature, containing not only the best fiction, but also popularly written scientific works from the pens of leading men of science and essayists—such an enterprise is far more effective in the suppression of garbage literature than all the Unions for the Promotion of Morality.

Supplementary Note to Chapter XXX.—In connexion with the questions discussed in this chapter, the reader may profitably consult the recently published book of Willy Schindler (written, however, from an unduly subjective standpoint), “The Erotic Element in Literature and Art” (Berlin, 1907).

[English readers interested in the question of the dangers of pornographic literature and art in relation to that “liberty of unlicensed printing” which is so essential to the welfare of the modern social democratic State, should read the thoughtful and luminous discussion of the topic by H. G. Wells, in one of the later chapters of his admirable “Mankind in the Making.”—Translator.]

CHAPTER XXXI
LOVE IN POLITE (BELLETRISTIC) LITERATURE

“The question arises whether it is not absolutely necessary that art should represent this erotic element forbidden by the culture of our time, because it corresponds to a profound subjective human need, to a yearning for the completion of man’s imperfect existence.”—Konrad Lange.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXXI

Love the nucleus of belletristic literature — Necessity for the erotic element in polite literature — Remarks of the æsthetic Konrad Lange on this subject — Sexual topics in belles-lettres are principally problem-literature — As a mirror of the times — Description of puberty in our poems — The demi-vierge type — The “Vera” books — Misogyny and ascetic romances, and rejoinders — The “intimacy” and free love in literature — Irregular sexual intercourse in literature — Marriage in literature — Novels of divorce — The emancipated woman in belletristic literature — Novels dealing with “fallen woman” — Precursors and imitations of the “Diary of a Lost Woman” — Belletristic descriptions of brothel life, and of the life of prostitution — Alcoholism and syphilis in literature — Sexual perversities in belletristic literature — Larocque’s “Voluptueuses,” etc. — Homosexuality and bisexuality in belles-lettres — Masochism and sadism — Psychological love romances — More earnest and more profound grasp of sexual questions displayed in modern belletristic literature.

CHAPTER XXXI

It is a familiar fact that from the very earliest uprising of belletristic literature its nucleus has always been the passion of love. There are, indeed, very few recent romances or dramas in which love does not play a part. It is a fable to say that sexual matters have to-day for the first time been freely discussed in belletristic literature, to assert that the predominance of erotic literature (which is to be distinguished from pornographic literature by its artistic intention and form) is especially characteristic of modern civilization. A glance at the catalogue of the library of the poet and bibliophile Eduard Grisebach,[794] which contains the erotic literature of the world, teaches us that such literature has existed at all times and among all civilized nations. The erotic in belles-lettres has not merely a permissive existence, but by necessity forms a part of it—a fact very justly recognized by the æsthetic Konrad Lange.[795] Who that knows human nature can doubt the fact? Lange remarks:

“Art which represents the nude, because an opportunity exists for it to delight in the representation of the flesh, because it regards humanity as the crown of creation, and because it admires the purposive anatomical structure of the human body—such an art is within its own rights, and does what it may and must.

“If we regard the representation of the nude in painting and sculpture as not repulsive, although it does not suit us in ordinary life to go naked, so also in the poesy of the erotic we must sometimes allow a form to which in ordinary life a justification is refused. Indeed, the question arises whether it is not absolutely essential that art should represent the erotic, although this is forbidden by the civilization of our time; for this corresponds to a profound subjective human need, a yearning for the completion of man’s imperfect existence.

“Next to hunger and thirst, love is the strongest human emotion; next to death, its enjoyment is the most important human experience. It is not to be wondered at that art is especially fond of depicting it. Art which wishes to represent life in general cannot leave unconsidered an instinct which plays so important a part in the life of the majority of human beings, and from which such a number of conflicts proceed. With regard to the degree and the kind of representation, the decision depends not upon moral, but exclusively upon æsthetic, considerations. The task of the poet is no more than this: to describe transgressions[744] of the moral code in such a manner that they appear to arise by an inner necessity out of the whole course of activity, out of the characters, out of the objective relationships. Then the immoral content comes to the help of the illusion.”

It is naturally impossible, within the narrow compass of this work, to give an exhaustive account of the sexual element in modern belletristic literature. I shall only refer to a few well-known phenomena which all exhibit a common feature. Love and sexual topics in belles-lettres are principally problem literature. The earnest and profound social perception with which sexual problems are to-day considered and explained is reflected also in the literature of our time. The adult will long ago in these matters have risen above the level of shallow story-telling and schoolgirl morality, and demands an earnest and honest representation of sexual problems. Frey [796] justly observes that it is a general and a healthy tendency of the time, not a tendency to perverse lust, which impels the choice of erotic material. In the economically determined forced labour of persons of average ability, in the monotony and the poverty of adventure of our civilized life, it is only by eroticism that into many a life any individual colouring is brought.

In the following brief sketch of the sexual problems treated in recent belletristic literature, I hope to give some idea of the very numerous and interesting topics which the various phenomena of the sexual life now offer to the poet.

The very first sexual activities of the child have been subjected to poetic treatment, as in Frank Wedekind’s drama, “Frühlingserwachen” (“The Awakening of Spring”); and the sexual note of the time of puberty is treated in Bonnetain’s celebrated onanistic novel, “Charlot s’Amuse,” in Walter Bloem’s novel, “Der krasse Fuchs,” in Max von Münchhausen’s “Eckhart von Jeperen,” and very strikingly in the novel “Lothar oder Untergang einer Kindheit” (“Lothar, or the Ruin of Childhood”), by Oscar A. H. Schmitz. In connexion with the consideration of the time of puberty in belletristic literature, the following works may also be mentioned: “Unterm Rad,” by Hermann Hesse; “Freund Hein,” by Emil Strauss; “Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless,” by Robert Musil; “Was zur Sonne Will,” by Hans Hart; “Eine Gymnasiastentragödie,” a drama in four acts, by Robert Sandeks. Consult also Gustav Zieler’s review of “Frühlingserwachen,” published in Das Literarische Echo of August 15, 1907.

The type of girl who ripens to a premature sexuality, and who, though physically still intact, is spiritually corrupt, has been made widely known by Marcel Prévost’s “Demivierge.” A companion novel to this is “Nixchen,” by Hans von Kahlenberg. Nobler types of girls playing with this vice are described by Clara Eysell-Kilburger in “Dilettanten des Lasters.”

Diametrically opposed to these are the “Vera” characters, so called after the book by Vera, “Eine für Viele. Aus dem Tagebuche eines Mädchens” (“One for Many. From the Diary of a Girl”), which demands from the man before marriage the same purity and chastity that man himself demands from his future wife. Svava, in Björnsen’s drama “Der Handschuh,” is a similar type. Regarding this problem an entire literature has sprung into being, which associated itself with Vera’s above-mentioned book, such as “Eine für sich Selbst” (“One for Herself”), by “Auch Jemand” (“Somebody Else”); “Einer für Viele” (“One Man for Many”); “Eine für Vera. Aus dem Tagebuche einer jungen Frau” (“One for Vera. From the Diary of a Young Wife”)—these in favour of Vera’s demand—and Christine Thaler’s “Eine Mutter für Viele” (“One Mother for Many”); by Verus, “Einer für Viele” (“One Man for Many”), and “Kranke Seelen. Von einem Arzte” (“Morbid Souls. By a Physician”)—these in opposition to Vera’s demand—for masculine abstinence from sexual intercourse before marriage.[797]

Next we may mention certain novels glorifying misogyny, such as Strindberg’s “Beichte eines Toren” (“Confessions of a Fool”) and “Vergangenheit eines Toren” (“The Past of a Fool”); and Tolstoi’s “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in which absolute asceticism is demanded. These ideas, which in Weininger found a pseudo-scientific apologist, have been contested in an interesting autobiography in the form of a romance, “Das Weib vom Manne erschaffen: Bekenntnisse einer Frau” (“Woman created from Man: Confessions of a Woman”), translated from the Norwegian by Tyra Bentsen. Zola’s magnificent hymn in favour of fruitfulness in “Fécondité” is also a refutation of this extreme ascetic-malthusian standpoint.

The “intimacy” and “free love” are to-day the subject of innumerable romances and novels. Tovote discusses the problem[746] in “Im Liebesrausch” (“In the Intoxication of Love”), and in other novels, more superficially from the grossly sensual side; the ideal free love, ending indeed in marriage, is described in Peter Nansen’s “Maria.”[798] Similarly, Frenssen, in “Hilligenlei,” deals with the preconjugal sexual intercourse so common in country districts, and he reproves in powerful words the repression of natural impulses by conventional morality.[799]

In “Martin Birks Jugend,” Hjalmar Söderberg has described the great difficulties of ideal-minded young men who are not in a position to marry, and who are repelled by the idea of intercourse with common prostitutes.

In contrast to this, Camille Lemonnier, in “Die Liebe im Menschen,” describes the great danger of an overgrowth of the sexual; and Arthur Schnitzler, in his admirable “Reigen,” describes the utter misery of irregular sexual intercourse, of true “wild love,” and displays vividly before our eyes the results of sexual promiscuity.

The social contempt and the other disastrous consequences which to-day follow free love, in the form of illegitimate motherhood, have been described in dramas, such as Sudermann’s “Heimat” and Gerhart Hauptmann’s “Rose Bernd,” and in romances such as Gabriele Reuter’s “Aus guter Familie,” Johann[747] Bojer’s “Eine Pilgerfahrt,” and Ernst Eberhardt’s “Das Kind.” The manifold conflicts resulting from free love and illegitimate motherhood are also described by Marcelle Tinayre in “La Rebelle.”

In belles-lettres we also find numerous accounts of the burning question of our day—that of coercive marriage. Above all, Ibsen, in “Ghosts,” “A Doll’s House,” “The Lady from the Sea,” “Hedda Gabler,” and “Little Eyolf,” has exposed the manifold injuries resulting from modern conventional marriage, and has propounded the ideal of a new marriage, based upon a deeply subjective conception of love and upon life’s work in common. The influence of Ibsen is further shown in numerous dramas and romances dealing with the marriage problem. Of these, it will suffice to mention a few of the most successful, such as “Die Sklavin,” by Ludwig Fulda; “Fanny Roth: eine Jungfrauengeschichte,” by Grete Meisel-Hess; and “Was siehst du aber den Splitter,” by Karl Larsen.

The important question of differences in class and social position in married life is considered by Ernst von Wildenbruch in his drama, “Die Haubenlerche.”

The classical novels of adultery are, and will remain, Erneste Feydeau’s delightful “Fanny,” and Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.” In French literature in general, in dramas as well as romances, adultery is a favourite motive.[800]

Isolated but especially characteristic phenomena of the sexual life have also found expression in poetry. Thus Ernst von Wolzogen, in “Das Dritte Geschlect,” describes the various types of emancipated women; the same question forms the theme of “Die Neue Eva,” by Maria Janitschek. Anna Mahr, also, in Gerhart Hauptmann’s “Einsame Menschen,” is such a type. In all of these the conflict between woman and personality is described; and this is done with exceptional force and clearness in “Das Neue Weib,” by M. Janitschek.[801]

The contrast to the woman who wishes to become a personality is to be found in the woman who has never possessed a personality, or who has lost it, the woman who has become only a chattel, an object of enjoyment for man—the prostitute. I[748] alluded before (p. 315) to the fact that Margarete Böhme, in her sensational “Diary of a Lost Woman,” was not the first to describe the life of a prostitute. Already from the sixteenth century there date such romances as, for example, the celebrated “Lozana Andaluza” of Francisco Delgado; also Defoe’s “History of Moll Flanders,” and Abbé Prévost’s “Manon Lescaut” (both belonging to the eighteenth century). Besides the “Memoirs of a Hamburg Prostitute” (vide supra, p. 315), there exist still other precursors, belonging to the nineteenth century, of the “Diary of a Lost Woman,” such as E. de Goncourt’s “Fille Elisa,” Leon Leipsiger’s “Ballhaus-Anna,” etc. The “Diary of a Lost Woman” naturally soon found imitations, such as Hedwig Hard’s “Confessions of a Fallen Woman,” the “Diary of Another Lost Woman”; and the purely pornographic “History of Josephine Mutzenbecher, a Viennese Prostitute,” Daudet’s “Sapho,” Zola’s “Nana,” Cristian Krogh’s “Albertine,” and George Moore’s “Esther Waters,” belong to the same class.[802]

Brothel life and the life of prostitution, in all their relationships to modern civilization, and in their influence upon human character, are described by Frank Wedekind in “Die Büchse der Pandora” (“Pandora’s Box”) and in his “Hidalla”; and with exceptional vividness by Oscar Metenier, in his romance cycle, extending to seven volumes, “Tartufes et Satyres.”

The rôle of alcohol and of syphilis in the sexual life have also been discussed in belletristic literature. In Gerhart Hauptmann’s “Vor Sonnenaufgang” (“Before Sunrise”), Loth abandons his beloved Helne as soon as he learns that she springs from a degenerate family of drunkards. The disastrous consequences of syphilis are described by Ibsen in “Ghosts,” and recently most vividly by Brieux in “Les Avariés.”[803]

Extraordinarily comprehensive, especially in France, is the belletristic literature of sexual perversities. After the manner of the “Rougon-Macquart” series by Zola, Jean Larocque has written a romance cycle of eleven volumes, under the general title of “Les Voluptueuses” (the separate titles are: “Isey,” “Viviane,” “Odile,” “Fausta,” “Daphne,” “Phœbe,” “Fusette,” “La Naïade,” “Louvette,” “Lucine,” and “Hémine”; in the last volume we find even a discussion of copralagnistic details!). Some volumes of this series—for example, “Phœbe”—have even been translated into English.[749] The works also of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Guy de Maupassant, offer a rich material for the study of psychopathia sexualis. In this connexion I may also mention the poetic collections “La Légende des Sexes,” by Edmond Haraucourt; “Rimes de Joie,” by Théodore Hannon; and also the “Chants de Maldoror.” Octave Mirbeau also, in his “Journal d’une Femme de Chambre,” provides us with a review of the entire register of sexual perversities.[804] He, and also the talented Rachilde (who in her romances “Monsieur Venus,” “Les Hors Nature,” and “Madame Adonis,” considers the question of homosexuality), never fail to exhibit the artistic spirit in their descriptions of these delicate topics—and, indeed, l’art pour l’art doctrine seems to have been created especially in relation to this department of thought.

Homosexuality and bisexuality have been considered in such a large number of works that it is quite impossible to mention them all here. A fairly complete bibliography of these will be found in the volumes of the Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages.[805] I can allude here only to a few especially well-known and artistically important homosexual romances and poems. Jouy, in his admirable “Galerie des Femmes” (Paris, 1799), devotes to the “Lesbiennes” a special chapter; Théophile Gautier, in “Mademoiselle de Maupin,” discusses the interesting problem of bisexuality; Zola, in “Nana,” represents the Lesbian relationship; Paul Verlaine in 1867 published tribadistic poetry under the title of “Les Amis.”[806] Since that time Englishmen, Germans, Belgians, and Italians have published belletristic descriptions of homosexual relationships. I may allude to Oscar Wilde’s “Dorian Grey,” Georges Eekhoud’s “Escal-Vigor,” Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” Prime-Stevenson’s “Irenæus,” Louis d’Herdy’s “L’Homme-Sirene,” F. G. Pernauhm’s “Ercole Tomei,” “Die Infamen,” and “Der junge Kurt”; also the sensational “Idylle Sapphique” of the demi-mondaine Liane de Pougy, the epic “Ganymedes” of C. W. Geissler, and the drama “Jasminblüte” of Dilsner.

Masochism found its introduction to belles-lettres by the writer from whom the very name is derived, L. von Sacher-Masoch, more especially in “Vermächtnis Kains.” Of his novels, the[750] best known is “Venus im Pelz”; others are “Galizischen Geschichten,” “Messalinen Wiens,” “Die schwarze Zarin,” and “Wiener Hofgeschichten.” He still remains the only writer who has treated this peculiar perversity in an artistic manner. The more recent masochistic and sadistic novels belong to the worst kind of hawker’s literature. Lou Andreas-Salomé only, in “Eine Ausschweifung,” has artistically described the spiritual masochism of a woman with the fine psychological characterization peculiar to her work.

Quite recently there has actually appeared a masochistic monthly magazine, entitled Geissel und Rute: Archiv für Erziehung [sic!] Erwachsener (Whip and Rod: Archives for the Education [sic!] of Adults), edited by C. vom Stein, Buda-Pesth. The first number appeared on February 1, 1907. It contains masochistic stories, correspondence, historical sketches, and advertisements.

Sadistic love is the theme of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome,” and of the “Diaboliques” of Barbey d’Aurevilly. The satanic element is dealt with in Huysmans’ “La Bas,” and in various novels by St. Przybyszewski. Herbert Eulenburg’s drama “Ritter Blaubart” also represents a sadistic type.

In conclusion, I may allude to some authors who represent to us the whole psychology of modern love, and, above all, the depths of the love of reflection, its spiritual refinement, all the manifold moods, illusions, and dreams of the modern eros. J. P. Jakobsen’s “Niels Lyhne,” Hans Jäger’s “Christiania-Bohême,” Oskar Mysing’s “Grosse Leidenschaft,” Heinrich Mann’s “Jagd nach Liebe,” Gabriele d’Annunzio’s “Il Piacere,” “Trionfo della Morte,” and “Fuoco,” represent aspects of love. With the profoundest art, Lou Andreas-Salomé, in her stories—which in this respect I regard as among the most valuable products of modern literature—“Ruth,” “Fenitschka,” “Ma,” and “Menschenkinder,” represents the finer spiritual relationships between man and woman. This writer appears to possess the most intimate knowledge of the soul of the modern woman. Elisabeth Dauthendey, also (“Vom neuen Weibe und seiner Liebe”), Gabriele Reuter (“Liselotte von Reckling,” “Ellen von der Weiden”), and Rosa Mayreder (“Idole”), give most powerful descriptions of complicated feminine characters.[807] An important and interesting topic is discussed by Yvette Guilbert in “Les Demivieilles”—the psychology of the woman beginning to grow[751] old, who cannot yet renounce love and yet is forced to do so by rude reality.

The writings to which I have referred in this chapter—the number of which could easily be increased tenfold without exhausting the abundance of recent belletristic literature occupied in the discussion of the sexual problem—should suffice to give some idea of how great is the interest in the important problems of the sexual life, how detailed and complicated the problems of that life have become under the influence of modern civilization, and with what earnestness they are treated in the belles-lettres of the day. The light and frivolous mood of Wieland and Clauren is no longer found to-day. In its place we have grandiose moral description, a more dramatic treatment of sexual problems, an unsparing exposure of the gloomier aspects of amatory life, and a psychological penetration into all the activities of the loving soul. Regarded as a whole, love in modern belletristic literature is treated from far worthier and higher standpoints than formerly. There is no ground whatever for regarding the widespread discussion of sexual problems in modern literature as a stigma of degeneration. In this respect our literature is merely a mirror of our time; and its tendencies indicate very clearly the emergence of a new, earnest, and more profound conception of the sexual relations between man and woman.

CHAPTER XXXII
THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF THE SEXUAL LIFE

“Stress has been laid upon the harm which can be done by the publication of works dealing with sexual problems. Undoubtedly the pornographic interest of the laity, and also of men of science, does play a part here! But the benefits which the unreserved scientific elucidation of the sexual problem is able to diffuse throughout the widest circles of the population are so extensive that this consideration of any possible harm that may ensue becomes infinitesimal in comparison.”—A. von Schrenck-Notzing.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXXII

Indispensable need for the scientific investigation of sexual problems — Insignificance and ludicrous character of the objections made to such investigation — The diffusion of sexual perversities was just as extensive before their scientific study was first undertaken — de Sade’s system of psychopathia sexualis — Recent additions to the scientific literature of the subject — Works upon homosexuality — Upon erotic symbolism — General investigations regarding the sexual impulse — General works upon the sexual problem — Periodical literature relating to the sexual life.

CHAPTER XXXII

Truth is always a good thing, even truth regarding the sexual life. Neither prudery nor moral hypocrisy can controvert this proposition. He who recognizes the immense importance of sexuality in relationship to civilization at large—he who, like the author of the present work, has been occupied for many years in the study of the subject from the points of view of medicine, anthropology, ethnology, literature, and the history of civilization—is not only entitled, but will also consider it his duty, to publish his investigations, to make publicly known his views and his opinions, and to take a definite and clear position in relation to the burning questions of the day in this province of thought.

Such men as Ploss-Bartels, who, in their celebrated and purely scientific work, “Woman in Natural History and Folklore,” could not avoid collecting numerous piquant and even obscene details, and who, for example, have described in a special chapter the various postures assumed during sexual intercourse; such a man as von Krafft-Ebing, whose “Psychopathia Sexualis”[808] contains a number of detailed autobiographies and clinical histories of sexually perverse individuals—such men as these have been blamed because their books have been diffused in numerous editions, extending to many thousands of copies, and because these books have been read more by laymen than by medical men. Apart from the fact that in earlier times much more dangerous books—such, for example, as the works of Virey, Flittner, G. F. Most, and Rozier, characterized by a lascivious style, or such a book as the dictionary “Eros”—obtained the widest possible circulation; apart, also from the fact that even in works conceived and executed in a strictly scientific spirit—such as the numerous monographs of Martin Schurig, or the work of Frenzel (belonging to the nineteenth century) concerning impotence (see, for example, Frenzel, op. cit., pp. 155, 156, 161)—obscene passages and incredibly depraved stories occur; and apart, finally, from the incredible mass of pornographic writings, in comparison with which the scientific literature of the sexual life is almost infinitesimally small—putting on one side all these considerations, it is merely necessary to refer to the established fact that all possible sexual perversities[756] were known to exist before the publication of von Krafft-Ebing’s “Psychopathia Sexualis,” and that they made their appearance spontaneously at all times and in all places. In the eighteenth century the Marquis de Sade, in his romance “The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom,” was able to found a system of psychopathia sexualis which not only contained all the perverse types described by von Krafft-Ebing, but was even more varied in its contents, and exhibited yet more numerous categories of sexual anomalies than the book of the Viennese alienist.[809] This work is a document of enormous importance to civilization,[810] because it provides a complete refutation to the fable of modern degeneration, and because it gives us a proof that quite shortly before the powerful upheaval of the French nation and the heroic campaigns of the Napoleonic epoch, in this nation there were diffused the most frightful perversities, regarding the reality of which there can, according to recent experience, be no doubt whatever.

Scientific authorship—even popular scientific works [811]—dealing with the province of the sexual life cannot therefore be made responsible, in any respect, for the diffusion of sexual perversities. The founder of modern sexual science, A. von Schrenck-Notzing,[812] insisted on this fact; and recently it has been once more emphasized by S. Freud, who has probably gone further than any other writer in biologico-physiological derivation of sexual perversions.

Havelock Ellis’s “Analysis of the Sexual Impulse” (vol. iii. of this writer’s “Studies in the Psychology of Sex,” published[757] by the F. A. Davis Co., Philadelphia)—a book in which we find an admirable analysis of the development and variations of the sexual impulse, including an account of sadism and masochism, enriched by numerous examples—has recently appeared in a German translation (Würzburg, 1903). The translator, Dr. H. Kurella, in his preface to this work, says (pp. ix, x), in my opinion with perfect justice:

“Daily experience among my patients suffering from nervous diseases—patients who were for the most part women and girls—has shown me how extremely important is enlightenment regarding the sexual life for women suffering from nervous disorders. For this reason, I hope the book will have the widest possible circulation among the mothers of daughters about to grow up. If they will employ in a proper manner the knowledge which they will be able to obtain from its contents, in this way an immeasurable quantity of sorrow and misery can be prevented. This use of its teaching will, by itself, suffice to compensate the author and the translator for the scruples they must always feel in giving to the world a book which is likely to be valued by some simply as providing prurient reading matter, and which by such persons will perhaps be circulated for this purpose—a fate to which every book dealing with erotic subjects is exposed, however earnest its style and tendency may be.”

The lively scientific activity which now animates the department of sexual problems is a matter for rejoicing, since it indicates the advance of knowledge in one of the most important of all vital problems. Whereas earlier none but alienists and neurologists concerned themselves with sexual questions, an interest in these questions is now very generally displayed by the circles of other medical men, of anthropologists, folk-lorists, psychologists, æsthetics, and historians of civilization. One good result of this wide diffusion of interest is, as I have already remarked (pp. 455 et seq.), that a one-sided consideration of the problems under investigation will thereby be prevented. Every earnest investigator, to whatever discipline he may personally belong, can here contribute something new, something which will advance knowledge; but most helpful, unquestionably, can the physician be who, as von Schrenck-Notzing [813] declared, is competent to consider the question in relation to various other departments—those of biology, anthropology, history, belles-lettres, psychology, and forensic medicine.

It would subserve no useful purpose to enumerate once more in this place the works of all the recent authors who have dealt[758] with the subject of the sexual life. In the text of the present book they have for the most part received sufficient mention.[814]

Of larger monographs upon homosexuality, there still remain to be mentioned those of Havelock Ellis and J. A. Symonds,[815] A. Moll,[816] J. Chevalier,[817] and Laupts.[818] In these works we find extensive reports of cases; and more especially in the two first mentioned do we find a record of all the historical and critical data of homosexuality up to the time of the first publication of the “Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages” (1899 et seq.).

A new work by Havelock Ellis [819] recently reached me, the fifth volume of the American edition of his “Studies in the Psychology of Sex,”[820] giving an account of “Erotic Symbolism” (fetichism, exhibitionism, etc.), the “Mechanism of Detumescence,” and the “Psychical Condition during Pregnancy,” with an appendix giving an analysis of the sexual development of various individuals. This book, full of interesting details, will doubtless, like the earlier volumes of his “Studies,” soon appear in a German translation.

The fundamental work of A. Marro on “Puberty in Man and Woman” also deserves especial mention. It can most usefully be consulted in the French edition, “La Puberté chez l’Homme et chez la Femme. Etudiée dans ses Rapports avec l’Anthropologie, la Psychiatrie, la Pedagogie, et la Sociologie” (Paris, 1902; 536 pp.).

Special studies on the subject of the sexual impulse have been published by Moll [821] and Féré.[822] In Moll’s work, of which hitherto the first part only has appeared, the sexual impulse is divided into two components, the “detumescence impulse”—that is, the impulse towards the evacuation of the reproductive products—and the “contrectation impulse”—that is, the impulse towards the other individual; and from these two components the various manifestations of sexuality are explained. Féré, more especially, has made an exhaustive study of the instinctive element of the sexual impulse; and, apart from this, he appears to be the most extreme advocate of the atavistic theory of sexual perversions.

An interesting study of sexual psychology, based upon the doctrine of Freud, has been published by Otto Rank.[823] The tendency of this work also is in opposition to the degeneration-phobia.

The work of the Italian psychiatrist Pasquale Penta, “I pervertimenti sessuali nell’ uomo e Vincenzo Verzeni strangolatore di donne” (“The Sexual Perversions observed in Vincenzo Verzeni, the Strangler of Women”), Naples, 1893, contains numerous interesting details. In the first chapter the author gives contributions to a history of psychopathia sexualis; the second chapter contains a detailed report of Verzeni and an account of his lust-murders; in the third chapter Penta discusses the similarities and differences between the sexual impulse in man and in the lower animals; in the fourth chapter he deals with the biological foundations of lust-murder; in the fifth chapter he reviews the different sexual perversions; in the sixth chapter he considers rape; and in the seventh and last chapter he discusses the forensic importance of rape and of sexual perversions.

The recently published work on “Sexual Biology,” by Robert Müller (Berlin, 1907), is written from the standpoint of veterinary medicine, and the sub-title of the book, “Comparative and Evolutionary Studies in the Sexual Life of Man and the Higher Mammals,” indicates the author’s intention to elucidate the general biological roots of sexual phenomena. This comparative consideration of the sexual life of man and of the higher mammals throws a new light on many matters, and enables us to understand a number of phenomena of the sexual life which have hitherto seemed obscure.

A comprehensive, general, popular work upon the sexual life is now in course of publication—“Man and Woman.” It is issued by R. Kossmann and J. Weiss, with the collaboration of a number of leading specialists (Stuttgart, 1907). A number of illustrated sections have already been issued.

Finally, two other works must be mentioned which consider the sexual life as a whole, a larger work and a smaller one. Forel’s [824] comprehensive book is distinguished from beginning to end by an original, subjective grasp of the question, and by an optimistic view of the future, as I have pointed out in my review of this book in the Deutsche Aerztezeitung. As such a subjective programme of a future solution of sexual problems, it will ever retain a value; and we can always follow with pleasure the demonstrations of the talented and sympathetic author, although the book is perhaps somewhat monotonous in character. Its merits, moreover, are counterbalanced by the almost complete neglect of the numerous recent researches in almost every department of the sexual life. More particularly the chapter upon syphilis and venereal diseases, the chapter upon homosexuality and sexual perversions, and the chapter upon marriage betray this fault. The chapter on marriage is a mere extract from Westermarck. The author is fully conscious of these defects, and freely admits them; and in spite of them the book must not be ignored, because its value really lies in its subjectivity, and because we find in it so profound a conviction of the great importance of social activity for the higher development of love. A shorter consideration of sexual problems, but one abounding in paradoxes, is to be found in a book by Leo Berg.[825]

In conclusion, I may give a brief survey of the reviews and other periodical publications which are occupied with sexual questions. A great periodical devoted to the entire province of sexual research does not exist. Such periodicals as we have deal with separate departments of the sexual life. A rather insignificant periodical, Vita Sexualis, which appeared for the first time in 1899, seems to have become extinct a few years later. An exceedingly valuable publication, especially occupied with the problems of homosexuality, bisexuality, and sexual intermediate stages, is the one edited by Magnus Hirschfeld, and entitled Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages (of this eight volumes have hitherto appeared). Purely popular and belletristic aims are subserved by the homosexual monthly magazine[761] Der Eigene (edited by Adolf Brand). Another annual, not less valuable than the one previously mentioned, is that edited by Friedrich S. Krauss, entitled Anthropophyteia. This treats more especially of folk-lorist research in sexual matters, and is a true treasure-house of new facts and observations.[826] The periodicals for the study of venereal diseases, such as the Archives of Dermatology and Syphilis, edited by F. J. Pick (hitherto eighty-two volumes), the Monthly Magazine of Practical Dermatology, edited by Unna and Tanzer (hitherto forty-four volumes), the Monthly Magazine for Diseases of the Urinary Organs and Sexual Hygiene, edited by W. Hammer, in succession to K. Ries (hitherto four volumes), and the other German and foreign dermato-urological periodicals, also contain much material regarding venereal diseases and sexual perversions. Interesting contributions to all sexual problems, as well as an extensive case-literature and bibliography, are to be found in the Archives for Criminal Anthropology and Criminology, edited by Hans Gross (hitherto twenty-seven volumes), proceeding largely from the pen of the learned and most original alienist Paul Näcke; also in the Monthly Magazine for Criminal Psychology and Criminal Law Reform, edited by Gustav Aschaffenburg; in the monthly magazine The Protection of Motherhood; a Magazine for the Reform of Sexual Ethics, edited by Helene Stöcker (vide supra, pp. 270 and 273); in the monthly magazine Sex and Society, edited by Karl Vanselow (hitherto two volumes); and in the illustrated magazine, under the same editorship, Beauty (hitherto four volumes). Finally, we have to mention certain periodicals concerned chiefly with the aims of racial hygiene, and containing valuable material—the Politico-Anthropological Review, edited by Ludwig Woltmann (hitherto five years of issue), and the Archives for Racial and Social Biology, edited by Alfred Ploetz (hitherto three years of issue).

CHAPTER XXXIII
THE OUTLOOK

“A happy man is he who in his individuality possesses an instrument upon which the world can play with all its wealth of powers. To him the sexual will be a means by which he will be enabled to grasp the innermost of life, to understand its most painful sorrows and its most intoxicating delights, to plumb its most frightful abysses and to scale its most shining summits.”—Rosa Mayreder.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXXIII

The future of human love — Indications of progress and of a happier configuration of the sexual life — Relationship of sexuality to intimate individual love — The categorical imperative of the sexual life — The association of love with the work of life — Love and personality.

CHAPTER XXXIII

Looking backwards over the long road which lies behind us, and which has conducted us past all the heights and deeps of the human amatory and sexual life, we may now endeavour to give a brief answer to the difficult question, What is the future of human love? Are we able to recognize the existence of progress towards better things? Are there any indications of a new, nobler, happier configuration of the sexual life? The answer is a confident and joyful “Yes!”

Never before throughout the history of mankind has love evoked so earnest and so profound an interest as to-day; never has it been considered from so eminently social a standpoint as now. As I remarked at the first public meeting of the Association for the Protection of Motherhood, the idea of a reform, ennoblement, and more natural configuration of the sexual life harmonizes perfectly with the general tendency of our time, which has in view a resanation of all the relationships of life. It is continually more clearly and widely recognized that in the human sexual life, as in all other departments of human activity, modifications may be effected by means of conscious endeavour in the direction of a progressive evolution; that the relationship between man and woman, alike in its individual and in its social aspects, is influenced by the changes and advances of human evolution; and that this relationship cannot be artificially confined by main force within limits which may have been suitable to it one hundred or two hundred years ago.

Our love is of this earth, afflicted with all earthly defects and sorrows. Notwithstanding this, we affirm it joyfully, in the confident hope that it can be saved from all hostile and destructive influences, and that it can be elevated above the transient and the casual, and manifest itself in its finest form as intimate, individual love. In the sphinx of the individual, the greatest riddle of all unquestionably lies in the alarming and elemental qualities of the sexual impulse. But the way to liberation is obvious and open. Let us fight courageously with all the hostile forces described in this book, which poison the amatory life of our time; let us destroy all the germs of degeneration, and let us imprint upon our sexual conscience three words—health, purity, responsibility.

One thing more. Why does love at the present day so often threaten to perish amid the general fragmentation of life? Why do the leading spirits and the greatest artists in love complain of the fragile character of all love? Because love is isolated, because it is not associated with the work of life, with the battle for freedom which every man has to fight; because love is not conceived as a union between the lovers for the common conquest of existence, as a partnership for the purposes of inward spiritual growth. Far too often the man of the future is opposed to the woman of the past, or the woman of the future to the man of the past; each is to the other a sexual being, and nothing beyond. And yet individual love is only possible when, passing beyond the aims of mere sexual gratification, and beyond the purposes of reproduction, it subserves the general objects of life, and assists in the performance of all the tasks of the civilization of our time. The most wonderful dreams of the heart cannot suffice to take the place of the positive work which life demands from love. Without free activity there is no love! That is the great saying of a great thinker. And I add to this saying, that without free activity there is no right to love. Such a right is possessed only by the personality, the poetic, striving, willing human being, be it man or be it woman. How often the man seeks love from the woman and cannot find it, and yet might have found it so easily!

In this beautiful verse of Ada Christen’s the secret of all love reveals itself. We must not seek that which is lower in the other sex, in the beloved person; we must seek the highest, her spiritual essence, her will, her developmental possibilities. Before the eyes of the modern human being, the individual love of two free personalities appears as an ideal, as is poetically expressed by Dingelstedt in the words:

INDEX OF NAMES

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

[A1]

PUBLISHED BY
Messrs. REBMAN LIMITED
129 SHAFTESBURY AVENUE LONDON, W.C.

THE SEXUAL QUESTION

A Scientific, Psychological, Hygienic and Sociological Study for the Cultured Classes. By August Forel, M.D., Ph.D., LL.D., Formerly Professor of Psychiatry at and Director of the Insane Asylum in Zürich (Switzerland). English Adaptation by C. F. Marshall, M.D., F.R.C.S., Late Assistant-Surgeon to the Hospital for Diseases of the Skin, London. Royal 8vo. With 23 Illustrations, 17 of which are printed in colours. Cloth, 550 pages, price 21s. net.

Extract from Author’s Preface to the First German Edition.

This book is the fruit of long experience and reflection. It has two fundamental ideas—the study of nature, and the study of the psychology of man in health and in disease.

To harmonize the aspirations of human nature and the data of the sociology of the different human races and the different epochs of history, with the results of natural science and the laws of mental and sexual evolution which these have revealed to us, is a task which has become more and more necessary at the present day. It is our duty to our descendants to contribute as far as is in our power to its accomplishment. In recognition of the immense progress of education which we owe to the sweat, the blood, and often to the martyrdom of our predecessors, it behoves us to prepare for our children a life more happy than ours.

Translator’s Preface.

Professor Forel is well known to English readers through the medium of English translations of his other works on Psychiatry and kindred subjects. The present work has already been translated into several European languages. Whether we agree with all Professor Forel’s conclusions or not, we must admit that he has dealt with a difficult and delicate subject in a masterly and scientific manner.

Contents: I. — The Reproduction of Living Beings — History of the Germ — Cell-Division — Parthenogenesis — Conjugation — Mneme — Embryonic Development — Differences of Sexes — Castration — Hermaphrodism — Heredity — Blastophthoria. II. — The Evolution or Descent of Living Beings. III. — Natural Conditions of Mechanism of Human Coitus — Pregnancy — Correlative Sexual Characters. IV. — The Sexual Appetite in Man and Woman — Flirtation. V. — Love and other Irradiations of the Sexual Appetite in the Human Mind — Psychic Irradiations of Love in Man: Procreative Instinct, Jealousy, Sexual Braggardism, Pornographic Spirit, Sexual Hypocrisy, Prudery and Modesty, Old Bachelors — Psychic Irradiations of Love in Woman: Old Maids, Passiveness and Desire, Abandon and[A2] Exaltation, Desire for Domination, Petticoat Government, Desire of Maternity and Maternal Love, Routine and Infatuation, Jealousy, Dissimulation, Coquetry, Prudery and Modesty — Fetichism and Anti-Fetichism — Psychological Relations of Love to Religion. VI. — Ethnology and History of the Sexual Life of Man and of Marriage — Origin of Marriage — Antiquity of Matrimonial Institutions — Criticism of the Doctrine of Promiscuity — Marriage and Celibacy — Sexual Advances and Demands of Marriage — Methods of Attraction — Liberty of Choice — Sexual Selection — Law of Resemblance — Hybrids — Prohibition of Consanguineous Marriages — Rôle of Sentiment and Calculation in Sexual Selection — Marriage by Purchase — Decadence of Marriage by Purchase — Dowry — Nuptial Ceremonies — Forms of Marriage — Duration of Marriage — History of Extra-Nuptial Sexual Intercourse. VII. — Sexual Evolution — Phylogeny and Ontogeny of Sexual Life. VIII. — Sexual Pathology — Pathology of the Sexual Organs — Venereal Disease — Sexual Psychology — Reflex Anomalies — Psychic Impotence — Sexual Paradoxy — Sexual Anæsthesia — Sexual Hyperæsthesia — Masturbation and Onanism — Perversions of the Sexual Appetite: Sadism, Masochism, Fetichism, Exhibitionism, Homosexual Love, Sexual Inversion, Pederosis, Sodomy — Sexual Anomalies in the Insane and Psychopathic — Effects of Alcohol on the Sexual Appetite — Sexual Anomalies by Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion — Sexual Perversions due to Habit. IX. — The Rôle of Suggestion in Sexual Life — Amorous Intoxication. X. — The Relations of the Sexual Question to Money and Property — Prostitution, Proxenetism and Venal Concubinage. XI. — The Influence of Environment on Sexual Life — Influence of Climate — Town and Country Life — Vagabondage — Americanism — Saloons and Alcohol — Riches and Poverty — Rank and Social Position — Individual Life — Boarding Schools. XII. — Religion and Sexual Life. XIII. — Rights in Sexual Life — Civil Law — Penal Law — A Medico-Legal Case. XIV. — Medicine and Sexual Life — Prostitution — Sexual Hygiene — Extra-Nuptial Intercourse — Medical Advice — Means of Regulating or Preventing Conception — Hygiene of Marriage — Hygiene of Pregnancy — Medical Advice as to Marriage — Medical Secrecy — Artificial Abortion — Treatment of Sexual Disorders. XV. — Sexual Morality. XVI. — The Sexual Question in Politics and in Political Economy. XVII. — The Sexual Question in Pedagogy. XVIII. — The Sexual Question in Art. XIX. — Conclusions — Utopian Ideas on the Ideal Marriage of the Future — Bibliographical Remarks.

MARRIAGE AND DISEASE

Being an Abridged Edition of “Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage and the Married State.” Edited by Prof. H. Senator and Dr. S. Kaminer. Translated from the German by J. Dulberg, M.D., J.P. (of Manchester). Demy 8vo., 452 pages. Cloth, price 10s. 6d. net.

A quarter of a century has elapsed since Francis Galton, in his “Inquiries into Human Faculty,” drew attention to the urgent need for the foundation of a science and practice of “Eugenics,” that is, the improvement of the human stock. “Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage and the Married State,” edited by Senator and Kaminer, undoubtedly occupies a very high place among recent works devoted to the elucidation of certain aspects of this important topic, and in the abridged edition an adaptation has been prepared for the enlightenment of the thinking portion of the public on pathological questions in relation to marriage and the married state, and from which all purely technical and professional matter has been excluded.

At a time when such questions as the decline of the birth-rate, the sterilization of the degenerate, the restriction of indiscriminate marriages, the voluntary limitation of families, and so forth, form subjects of daily debate and newspaper articles, it is of the greatest advantage that every man and woman who either contemplates or has embarked on matrimony should be as well acquainted, as the limits of our conventionality permit, with the medical or hygienic aspect of marriage.

[A3]

To give some idea of the scope of this absorbingly interesting work, we append the chapter headings. These apply to the unabridged as well as to the abridged edition at present under review.

I. — Introduction. II. — The Hygiene of Marriage. III. — Congenital and Inherited Diseases and Predispositions to Disease. IV. — Consanguinity and Marriage. V. — Climate, Race, and Nationality in Relation to Marriage. VI. — Sexual Hygiene. VII. — Menstruation, Pregnancy, Child-bed and Lactation. VIII. — Constitutional (Metabolic) Diseases. IX. — Diseases of the Blood. X. — Diseases of the Vascular System. XI. — Diseases of the Respiratory Organs. XII. — Diseases of the Organs of Digestion. XIII. — Diseases of the Kidneys. XIV. — Gonorrhœal Diseases. XV. — (a) Syphilis. XVI. — (b) Diseases of the Skin. XVII. — Diseases of the Organs of Locomotion. XVIII. — Diseases of the Eyes in Relation to Marriage, with special regard to Heredity. XIX. — Diseases of the Lower Uro-Genital Organs and Physical Impotence. XX. — Diseases of Women, including Sterility. XXI. — Diseases of the Nervous System. XXII. — Insanity. XXIII. — Perverse Sexual Sensations and Psychical Impotence. XXIV. — Alcoholism and Morphinism. XXV. — Occupational Injuries. XXVI. — Medico-Professional Secrecy. XXVII. — The Economic Importance of Sanitary Conditions.

Brief as is this sketch of the abridged edition, it will suffice, in conjunction with the following extracts from a few of the many highly laudatory reviews, to show how valuable the work will be to parents and guardians, family advisers, whether lawyers or clergymen, schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, as well as to those who are already married, and to those who are contemplating marriage.

THE LANCET says: “The progress of sociological investigation in modern times has caused increased attention to be paid to questions of health in relation to marriage and the propagation of the human race, and anything which helps to spread abroad an intelligent appreciation of the dangers incurred, not only by individuals who enter on the married state, but also by their offspring, from the existence of many forms of disease must be regarded as a public benefit. The present book is an attempt to make available for general consumption the gist of the larger work from which it is taken.... The material contained in the book is most valuable, and a study of it should be useful to those capable of appreciating it....”

PUBLIC HEALTH says: “It is cleanly, even when dealing with most difficult subjects, and it is a storehouse of information on points on which hygienists are expected to be well informed.”

THE SCOTTISH MEDICAL JOURNAL says: “As a guide for the general public many of the articles are well adapted to fulfil their object.”

THE DAILY DISPATCH says: “... every work that helps to enlightenment is to be welcomed so long as it comes with credentials as to its honesty and guarantees that it is not merely a device for making money out of ignorance. ‘Marriage and Disease’ has all the essential claims to consideration. Dr. Dulberg has very ably condensed the larger manual into one of 450 pages, containing 27 chapters. The volume is of absorbing interest, not only for its arguments and conclusions, but also, and perhaps mainly, for the wealth of information it contains on matrimonial and sex questions in all countries and climes.”

From the Twelfth German Edition.
PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS

With Special Reference to Antipathic Sexual Instinct. A Medico-Forensic Study by the late Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing, Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology, University of Vienna. Only authorized Translation. (This is the last edition revised by the late author himself.) This book is sold only to the Members of the Medical, Legal and Clerical Professions. Royal 8vo., with Portrait of Author, containing 583 pages. Cloth, price 21s. net.

This new translation contains much new matter and a great many new cases not referred to in former editions.

[A4]

The book will be found to be an invaluable aid to the medical practitioner in properly diagnosing certain cases which may be puzzling under ordinary circumstances; whilst in the law courts it will often assist in properly discriminating between crime and insanity or hidden neuropathic affections, thus saving the accused from miscarriage of justice and the court from committing a judicial crime.

In the Press.
THE SEXUAL LIFE OF WOMAN

A Physiological, Pathological, and Hygienic Study. By Dr. E. Heinrich Kisch, Professor at the German Faculty of the University of Prague, etc. Only authorized Translation by M. Eden Paul, M.D. Brux., M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. Super Royal 8vo., about 700 pages, with 97 Illustrations. Cloth, price about 21s. net.

The Pasteurisation and Sterilisation of Milk. By Albert E. Bell, F.I.C., F.C.S., District Analyst for Dorset, Lecturer on Chemistry at Westminster College, London. Crown 8vo., 50 pp. Price 1s. 6d. net.

In writing this little book, the author has been actuated by a desire to bring home to those interested in dairy work the vital importance of sterilising milk, and to set before them those methods by which this may be most cheaply and effectively accomplished.

The author has also endeavoured to avoid the use of such technical terms as would be likely to be unintelligible to the average reader.

“... The book will be read by the lay reader with advantage, since it points out the dangers arising from infected milk and the advantages of sterilised milk.”—Lancet.

“... The author has produced a handbook that will be found intelligible even to those having only an elementary knowledge of dairying....”—Dairy World.

Introduction to Infectious and Parasitic Diseases. Including their Cause and Manner of Transmission. By Millard Langfeld, A.B., M.B. (Johns Hopkins University), Bacteriologist to the Omaha City Board of Health, etc. Just Published. 12mo., 276 pp. With 33 Illustrations. Cloth. Price 5s. 6d. net.

A clear description of the fundamental principles of the causation and manner of transmission of Infectious Disease, written for that large and increasing number of persons who are directly or indirectly interested in this important subject. It includes chapters on Bacteriology, Animal Parasites, and Disinfectants and Disinfection. Effort has been made to avoid speculation and to adhere only to accepted doctrines. The author has carefully abstained from the use of terms and the discussion of questions unintelligible to the general reader.

Tuberculosis as a Disease of the Masses, and How to Combat It. Prize Essay by S. A. Knopf, M.D., of New York. Adapted for use in England by J. M. Barbour, M.B., M.O.H., Isle of Man. Demy 8vo., 76 pp. Paper Covers. Illustrated. Price 1s. 1d. net (inclusive of postage).

The International Congress to Combat Tuberculosis as a Disease of the Masses, which was convened at Berlin, May 24th to 27th, 1899, awarded the International Prize to this work.

“Worthy of an extensive circulation.”—British Medical Journal.

“An excellent treatise.”—Nature.

[A5]

The Hygiene of the Lung. By Prof. Dr. L. von Schrötter, Director of the Third Medical Clinic in the University of Vienna. Translated by H. W. Armit, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. This little work is intended to lay before the uninitiated reader (and also before the practitioner) the anatomical and physiological characteristics of the organs of respiration, and the best methods of protecting these organs. It deals with the more common ailments, and with the rational treatments not only of the affected parts but also of the causal agents, thus combining an elementary prophylaxis. In the most readable manner possible this little book tells a useful story of the healthy and diseased lungs, a story which the practitioner who reads it will not despise, and which he will find of great value to give to his patient to read. Crown 8vo., 136 pp. With 16 Illustrations, cloth, price 2s. net.

Lateral Curvature of the Spine and Round Shoulders. A Book for those interested in Physical Culture, Correction of Bodily Deformity, etc. By Robert W. Lovett, M.D. Boston. Demy 8vo., 188 pp. With 154 Illustrations, cloth, price 7s. 6d. net.

Hypnotism; or, Suggestion and Psychotherapy. A Study of the Psychological, Psycho-Physiological and Therapeutic Aspects of Hypnotism. By Dr. August Forel, formerly Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, Zürich. Translated from the Fifth German Edition by H. W. Armit, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. The importance of studying the functional aspects of thought and other psychical exercises is becoming more evident every year. Large Crown 8vo., 382 pp., cloth, price 7s. 6d. net.

The Effects of Tropical Light on White Men. By Major Chas. E. E. Woodruff, M.A., M.D., Surgeon, United States Army. This work had its origin in the theory of von Schmaedel, that skin pigmentation of man was evolved for the purpose of excluding the dangerous actinic or short rays of light which destroy living protoplasm. It is a step in the Conquest of the Tropics. Demy 8vo., 358 pp., cloth, price 10s. 6d. net.

Vitality, Fasting, and Nutrition. A Physiological Study of the curative power of fasting, together with a new theory of the relation of food to human vitality. By Hereward Carrington, Member of the Society for Psychical Research, London, etc. With an Introduction by A. Rabagliati, M.A., M.D., F.R.C.S. Royal 8vo., 700 pp., cloth, price 21s. net.

Food and Hygiene. A Scientific Book written in simple language. By William Tibbles, M.D., LL.D., L.R.C.P., M.R.C.S., L.S.A., Medical Officer of Health, Fellow of the Royal Institute of Public Health, etc. Large Crown 8vo., 684 pp., cloth, price 8s. net.

Agricultural Bacteriology. Including a Study of Bacteria as Relating to Agriculture, with Special Reference to the Bacteria in Soil, in the Dairy, in Food Products, in Domestic Animals, and in Sewage. By H. W. Conn, Ph.D., Professor of Biology, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn. 12mo., 412 pp. Illustrated, cloth, price 11s. net.

Bacteria in Milk and its Products. Designed for the use of Students in Dairying, and for all others concerned in the Handling of Milk, Butter, or Cheese. By H. W. Conn, Ph.D., Author of “Agricultural Bacteriology,” etc., etc. 12mo., 306 pp., with 43 Illustrations, cloth, price 6s. net.

A Dictionary of Medicine and the Allied Sciences. Comprising the Pronunciation, Derivation, and full Explanation of Medical, Pharmaceutical, Dental and Veterinary Terms; together with much collateral descriptive matter, numerous tables, etc. By Alexander Duane, M.D., Reviser of Medical Terms for Webster’s International Dictionary. Fourth Edition, with an Appendix, completely revised. Buckram, original price 14s. net, now reduced to 9s. net.

[A6]

Entomology. With Special References to its Biological and Economic Aspects. By Justus Watson Folsom, D.Sc. (Harv.), Instructor in Entomology at the University of Illinois. 300 Illustrations, 485 pp., cloth, price 14s. net. A Book for every Library.

Biographic Clinics: The Origin of the Ill-Health of De Quincey, Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, and Browning (Vol. 1.); The Origin of the Ill-Health of George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, Wagner, Parkman, Jane Welch, Carlyle, Spencer, Whittier, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, and Nietzsche (Vol. II.); and Vols. III., IV., and V.—Visual Function and Health. Essays concerning the Influence of Visual Function, Pathologic and Physiologic. By George M. Gould, M.A., M.D. Five crown 8vo. volumes (sold separately). Price per volume, bound in cloth, 4s. each net.

The Theory of Ions. A Consideration of its place in Biology and Therapeutics. By William Tibbles, M.D., LL.D., L.R.C.P., Author of “Food and Hygiene.” Just Ready. Crown 8vo., 150 pp., cloth, price 2s. 6d. net.

To be Issued in October, 1908.

The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal: Its Legends and Symbolism. Considered in their Affinity with certain Mysteries of Initiation and other Traces of a Secret Tradition in Christian Times. By Arthur Edward Waite.

Orders received by the Publishers in advance of publication, and accompanied by a remittance, will be executed until further notice at 12s. 6d. net. The Publishers reserve to themselves the right to increase the price on or before publication. (Orders may be given through any bookseller.)

The work is now passing through the press and will be issued in October, 1908. Copies will be sent to subscribers immediately on publication.

Monism? An Antidote to Prof. Haeckel’s “The Riddle of the Universe.” By S. Ph. Marcus, M.D., of Pyrmont. Translated by R. W. Felkin, M.D., etc. Crown 8vo., 144 pp., paper covers, price 1s. net; by post, 1s. 2d.

NOVELS FROM MESSRS. REBMAN’S LIST

A DAUGHTER OF BELIAL. A Sensational Novel. By Basil Tozer. 6s.

“... It has, in fact, kept us from work longer than we like.”—Times.

THE WIFE. A Story of Smart Suburban and Homely Aristocratic Life. By Horace W. C. Newte, Author of “The Master Beast.” 6s.

“It leaves an impression... and there is a good deal of clever satire and humour to be found in it.”—Times.

MORAG THE SEAL. A Fascinating West Highland Romance. By J. W. Brodie Innes. 6s.

“A weird, well-handled romance.”—Times.

THE MASTER BEAST. A.D. 1888-2020 A Peep into the Future. By Horace W. C. Newte. 3s. 6d. net.

“A veritable triumph.”—Western Morning News.

THE IRONY OF MARRIAGE. A Cynical Indictment of Modern Marriage and its “Methods.” By Basil Tozer. With an Introductory Note by Dr. C. W. Saleeby, F.R.S. Edin. 1s. net, by post 1s. 2d.

Complete Catalogue and Descriptive Circulars sent post free on request.

London: REBMAN LTD., 129 Shaftesbury Avenue, W.C.

Unhappy, about	48
Indifferent	36
Unquestionably happy	15
Virtuous	1
Virtuous and orthodox	—

Intentionally immoral	14
Dissolute and libertine	51
Altogether above suspicion	?

For	tailoresses	to	457	marks
„	sempstresses	„	486	„
„	hand buttonhole workers	„	354	„
„	machine buttonhole workers	„	700	„
„	other women factory employees	„	354	„

Waitresses and barmaids	155	instances.
Maidservants, cooks	67	„
Shop-girls	65	„
Middle-class girls	29	„
Seamstresses and embroidery workers	27	„
Chambermaids	20	„
Factory workwomen	17	„
Artistes, singers, and ballet-girls	16	„
Wife or betrothed	12	„
Tailoresses and modistes	11	„
Ironers	9	„
Book-keepers	4	„
Widows	4	„
Country girls	3	„
Mistresses	3	„
Total	442

	PAGE
INTRODUCTION	1
CHAPTER I
THE ELEMENTARY PHENOMENA OF HUMAN LOVE	7
CHAPTER II
THE SECONDARY PHENOMENA OF HUMAN LOVE (BRAIN AND SENSES)	19
CHAPTER III
THE SECONDARY PHENOMENA OF HUMAN LOVE (REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS, SEXUAL IMPULSE, SEXUAL ACT)	37
CHAPTER IV
PHYSICAL DIFFERENTIAL SEXUAL CHARACTERS	53
CHAPTER V
PSYCHICAL DIFFERENTIAL SEXUAL CHARACTERS—THE WOMAN’S QUESTION. APPENDIX: SEXUAL SENSIBILITY IN WOMEN	67
CHAPTER VI
THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT IN LOVE—RELIGION AND SEXUALITY	87
CHAPTER VII
THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT IN LOVE—THE EROTIC SENSE OF SHAME (NAKEDNESS AND CLOTHING)	125
CHAPTER VIII
THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT IN LOVE—THE INDIVIDUALIZATION OF LOVE[viii]	159
CHAPTER IX
THE ARTISTIC ELEMENT IN MODERN LOVE	177
CHAPTER X
THE SOCIAL FORMS OF THE SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP—MARRIAGE	185
CHAPTER XI
FREE LOVE	233
CHAPTER XII
SEDUCTION, THE SENSUAL LIFE, AND WILD LOVE	279
CHAPTER XIII
PROSTITUTION—APPENDIX: THE HALF-WORLD	303
CHAPTER XIV
VENEREAL DISEASES—APPENDIX: VENEREAL DISEASES IN THE HOMOSEXUAL	349
CHAPTER XV
PROPHYLAXIS, TREATMENT, AND SUPPRESSION OF VENEREAL DISEASES	371
CHAPTER XVI
STATES OF SEXUAL IRRITABILITY AND SEXUAL WEAKNESS (AUTO-EROTISM, MASTURBATION, SEXUAL HYPERÆSTHESIA AND SEXUAL ANÆSTHESIA, SEMINAL EMISSIONS, IMPOTENCE, AND SEXUAL NEURASTHENIA)	407
CHAPTER XVII
THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASPECT OF PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS—APPENDIX: SEXUAL PERVERSIONS DUE TO DISEASE	453
CHAPTER XVIII
MISOGYNY	479
CHAPTER XIX
THE RIDDLE OF HOMOSEXUALITY—APPENDIX: THEORY OF HOMOSEXUALITY[ix]	487
CHAPTER XX
PSEUDO-HOMOSEXUALITY (GREEK AND ORIENTAL PÆDERASTY, HERMAPHRODITISM, BISEXUAL VARIETIES)	537
CHAPTER XXI
ALGOLAGNIA (SADISM AND MASOCHISM)—APPENDIX: A CONTRIBUTION TO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION (HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN ALGOLAGNISTIC REVOLUTIONIST)	555
CHAPTER XXII
SEXUAL FETICHISM	609
CHAPTER XXIII
ACTS OF FORNICATION WITH CHILDREN, INCEST, ACTS OF FORNICATION WITH CORPSES (NECROPHILIA) AND ANIMALS (BESTIALITY), EXHIBITIONISM, AND OTHER SEXUAL PERVERSITIES—APPENDIX: THE TREATMENT OF SEXUAL PERVERSITIES	631
CHAPTER XXIV
OFFENCES AGAINST MORALITY FROM THE FORENSIC STANDPOINT	659
CHAPTER XXV
THE QUESTION OF SEXUAL ABSTINENCE	671
CHAPTER XXVI
SEXUAL EDUCATION	681
CHAPTER XXVII
NEO-MALTHUSIANISM, THE PREVENTION OF CONCEPTION, ARTIFICIAL STERILITY AND ARTIFICIAL ABORTION	693
CHAPTER XXVIII
SEXUAL HYGIENE	709
CHAPTER XXIX
THE SEXUAL LIFE IN ITS PUBLIC RELATIONSHIPS (SEXUAL QUACKERY, ADVERTISEMENTS, AND SCANDALS)[x]	719
CHAPTER XXX
PORNOGRAPHIC LITERATURE AND ART	729
CHAPTER XXXI
LOVE IN POLITE (BELLETRISTIC) LITERATURE	741
CHAPTER XXXII
THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF THE SEXUAL LIFE	753
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE OUTLOOK	763
INDEX OF NAMES	767
INDEX OF SUBJECTS	778

Wives who were ill owing to the husband’s fault	30
Wives who were ill not owing to the husband’s fault	30
Wives who were unhappy, and had themselves to blame for it	12