Plato, are credited with yielding to an instinct which was healthy in
their times because society accepted it. The inefficiency of this
distinction in a treatise of analytical science ought to be indicated.
The bare fact that ancient Greece tolerated, and that modern Europe
refuses to tolerate sexual inversion, can have nothing to do with the
etiology, the pathology, the psychological definition of the phenomenon
in its essence. What has to be faced is that a certain type of passion
flourished under the light of day and bore good fruits for society in
Hellas; that the same type of passion flourishes in the shade and is the
source of misery and shame in Europe. The passion has not altered; but
the way of regarding it morally and legally is changed. A scientific
investigator ought not to take changes of public opinion into account
when he is analysing a psychological peculiarity.

This point on which I am insisting--namely, that it is illogical to
treat sexual inversion among the modern European races as a malady, when
you refer its prevalence among Oriental peoples and the ancient Hellenes
to custom--is so important that I shall illustrate it by a passage from
one of Dr. W. R. Huggard's Essays.[20] "It may be said that the
difference between the delusion of the overpowering impulse in the
Fijian and in the insane Englishman is that, in the savage, the mental
characters are due to education and surroundings; while, in the lunatic
they are due to disease. In a twofold manner, however, would this
explanation fail. On the one hand, even if in the Fijian there were
disease, the question of insanity could not arise in regard to a matter
considered by his society to be one of indifference. It would be absurd
to talk of homicidal mania, of nymphomania, and of kleptomania, as forms
of insanity, where murder, promiscuous intercourse, and stealing are not
condemned. On the other hand, the assumption that insanity is always due
to disease is not merely an unproved, but an improbable supposition.
There must, of course, be some defect of organism; but there is every
reason to think that, in many cases, the defect is of the nature of a
congenital lack of balance between structures themselves healthy; and
that many cases of insanity might properly be regarded as a kind of
'throwback' to a type of organisation now common among the lower races
of mankind." Substitute any term to indicate sexual inversion for
"nymphomania" in this paragraph