ll innocence to human life a
portion of its alienated or unclaimed moral birthright. The aberrations
we have been discussing in this treatise are perhaps the morbid symptoms
of suppression, of hypertrophy, of ignorant misregulation, in a genuine
emotion capable of being raised to good by sympathetic treatment.

It were well to close upon this note. The half, as the Greeks said, is
more than the whole; and the time has not yet come to raise the question
whether the love of man for man shall be elevated through a hitherto
unapprehended chivalry to nobler powers, even as the barbarous love of
man for woman once was. This question at the present moment is deficient
in actuality. The world cannot be invited to entertain it.[77]

IX.

EPILOGUE.

The conclusions to which I am led by this enquiry into sexual inversion
are that its several manifestations may be classified under the
following categories: (1) Forced abstinence from intercourse with
females, or _faute de mieux;_ (2) Wantonness and curious seeking after
novel pleasure; (3) Pronounced morbidity; (4) Inborn instinctive
preference for the male and indifference to the female sex; (5) Epochs
of history when the habit has become established and endemic in whole
nations.

Under the first category we group the phenomena presented by schools,
prisons, convents, ships, garrisons in solitary stations, nomadic tribes
of marauding conquerors.[78]

To the second belong those individuals who amuse themselves with
experiments in sensual pleasure, men jaded with ordinary sexual
indulgence, and indifferent voluptuaries. It is possible that something
morbid or abnormal usually marks this class.

To the third we assign clear cases of hereditary malady, in which a want
of self-control is prominent, together with sufferers from nervous
lesion, wounds, epilepsy, senile brain-softening, in so far as these
physical disturbances are complicated with abnormal passions.[79]

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

Under the existing conditions of European Society, these four categories
exist sporadically. That is to say, the members of them are foun