species, his sex, his nation, or
at the very least a fashion. Even the inverted lover in most cases is soon
able to create around him an atmosphere constituted by persons whose
ideals resemble his own. But it is not so with the erotic symbolist. He is
nearly always alone. He is predisposed to isolation from the outset, for
it would seem to be on a basis of excessive shyness and timidity that the
manifestations of erotic symbolism are most likely to develop. When at
length the symbolist realizes his own aspirations--which seem to him for
the most part an altogether new phenomenon in the world--and at the same
time realizes the wide degree in which they deviate from those of the rest
of mankind, his natural secretiveness is still further reinforced. He
stands alone. His most sacred ideals are for all those around him a
childish absurdity, or a disgusting obscenity, possibly a matter calling
for the intervention of the policeman. We have forgotten that all these
impulses which to us seem so unnatural--this adoration of the foot and
other despised parts of the body, this reverence for the excretory acts
and products, the acceptance of congress with animals, the solemnity of
self-exhibition--were all beliefs and practices which, to our remote
forefathers, were bound up with the highest conceptions of life and the
deepest ardors of religion.

A man cannot, however, deviate at once so widely and so spontaneously in
his impulses from the rest of the world in which he himself lives without
possessing an aboriginally abnormal temperament. At the very least he
exhibits a neuropathic sensitiveness to abnormal impressions. Not
infrequently there is more than this, the distinct stigmata of
degeneration, sometimes a certain degree of congenital feeble-mindedness
or a tendency to insanity.

Yet, regarded as a whole, and notwithstanding the frequency with which
they witness to congenital morbidity, the phenomena of erotic symbolism
can scarcely fail to be profoundly impressive to the patient and impartial
student of the human soul. They often seem absurd, sometimes disgusting,
occasionally criminal; they are always, when carried to an extreme degree,
abnormal. But of all the manifestations of sexual psychology, normal and
abnormal, they are the most specifically human. More than any others they
involve the potently plastic force of the imagination. They bring before
us the individual man, not only apart from his fellows, but in oppositi