nsiders it sufficiently established that: "Not
unfrequently, under the influence of some vice of organism, generally of
heredity, the moral faculties may undergo alterations, which, if they do
not actually destroy the social relations of the individual, as happens
in cases of declared insanity, yet modify them to a remarkable degree,
and certainly demand to be taken into account, when we have to estimate
the morality of these acts" (p. 301). His conclusion, therefore, is that
the aberrations of the sexual sense, including its inversion, are
matters for the physician rather than the judge, for therapeutics rather
than punishment, and that representatives of the medical faculty ought
to sit upon the bench as advisers or assessors when persons accused of
outrages against decency come to trial. "While we blame and stigmatise
these crimes with reason, the horrified intellect seeks an explanation
and a moral excuse (nothing more) for such odious acts. It insists on
asking what can have brought a man honourably known in society,
enjoying (apparently at least) the fulness of his mental faculties, to
these base and shameful self-indulgences. We answer: Such men for the
most part are abnormal intelligences, veritable candidates for lunacy,
and, what is more, they are the subjects of hereditary maladies. But let
us cast a veil over a subject so humiliating to the honour of humanity!"
(p. 177).

As the final result of this analysis, Moreau classifies sexual inversion
with erotomania, nymphomania, satyriasis, bestiality, rape, profanation
of corpses, &c., as the symptom of a grave lesion of the procreative
sense. He seeks to save its victims from the prison by delivering them
over to the asylum. His moral sentiments are so revolted that he does
not even entertain the question whether their instincts are natural and
healthy though abnormal. Lastly, he refuses to face the aspects of this
psychological anomaly which are forced upon the student of ancient
Hellas. He does not even take into account the fact, patent to
experienced observers, that simple folk not unfrequently display no
greater disgust for the abnormalities of sexual appetite than they do
for its normal manifestations.[21]

_Die krankhaften Erscheinungen des Geschlechtssinnes. B. Tarnowsky.
Berlin, Hirschwald_, 1886.

This is avowedly an attempt to distinguish the morbid kinds of sexual
perversion from the merely vicious, and to enforce the necessity of
treating the f