on so slender a basis of
facts. In most other departments of life we at least make a pretence of
learning before we presume to teach; in the field of sex we content
ourselves with the smallest and vaguest minimum of information, often
ostentatiously second-hand, usually unreliable. I wish to emphasize the
fact that before we can safely talk either of curing or preventing these
manifestations we must know a great deal more than we know at present
regarding their distribution, etiology, and symptomatology; and we must
exercise the same coolness and caution as--if our work is to be
fruitful--we require in any other field of serious study. We must approach
these facts as physicians, it is true, but also as psychologists,
primarily concerned to find out the workings of such manifestations in
fairly healthy and normal people. If we found a divorce-court judge
writing a treatise on marriage we should smile. But it is equally absurd
for the physician, so long as his knowledge is confined to disease, to
write regarding sex at large; valuable as the facts he brings forward may
be, he can never be in a position to generalize concerning them. And to
me, at all events, it seems that we have had more than enough pictures of
gross sexual perversity, whether furnished by the asylum or the brothel.
They are only really instructive when they are seen in their proper
perspective as the rare and ultimate extremes of a chain of phenomena
which we may more profitably study nearer home.

Yet, although we are, on every hand, surrounded by the normal
manifestations of sex, conscious or unconscious, these manifestations are
extremely difficult to observe, and, in those cases in which we are best
able to observe them, it frequently happens that we are unable to make any
use of our knowledge. Moreover, even when we have obtained our data, the
difficulties--at all events, for an English investigator--are by no means
overcome. He may take for granted that any serious and precise study of
the sexual instinct will not meet with general approval; his work will be
misunderstood; his motives will be called in question; among those for
whom he is chiefly working he will find indifference. Indeed, the pioneer
in this field may well count himself happy if he meets with nothing worse
than indifference. Hence it is that the present volume will not be
published in England, but that, availing myself of the generous sympathy
with which my work has been received i