, morbid fears and compulsions,
weaken and render useless and unhappy thousands of humans who are
unconscious victims of the attempt to pit individual powers against this
great natural force. In the solution of the problem of sex, we should
bear in mind what the successful method of humanity has been in its
conquest, or rather its control of the great physical and chemical
forces of the external world. Like all other energy, that of sex is
indestructible. By adaptation, control and conscious direction, we may
transmute and sublimate it. Without irreparable injury to ourselves we
cannot attempt to eradicate it or extirpate it.

The study of atomic energy, the discovery of radioactivity, and the
recognition of potential and latent energies stored in inanimate matter,
throw a brilliant illumination upon the whole problem of sex and
the inner energies of mankind. Speaking of the discovery of radium,
Professor Soddy writes: "Tracked to earth the clew to a great secret
for which a thousand telescopes might have swept the sky forever and
in vain, lay in a scrap of matter, dowered with something of the same
inexhaustible radiance that hitherto has been the sole prerogative of
the distant stars and sun." Radium, this distinguished authority tells
us, has clothed with its own dignity the whole empire of common matter.

Much as the atomic theory, with its revelations of the vast treasure
house of radiant energy that lies all about us, offers new hope in the
material world, so the new psychology throws a new light upon human
energies and possibilities of individual expression. Social reformers,
like those scientists of a bygone era who were sweeping the skies
with their telescopes, have likewise been seeking far and wide for
the solution of our social problems in remote and wholesale panaceas,
whereas the true solution is close at hand,--in the human individual.
Buried within each human being lies concealed a vast store of energy,
which awaits release, expression and sublimation. The individual may
profitably be considered as the "atom" of society. And the solution of
the problems of society and of civilization will be brought about when
we release the energies now latent and undeveloped in the individual.
Professor Edwin Grant Conklin expresses the problem in another form;
though his analogy, it seems to me, is open to serious criticism. "The
freedom of the individual man," he writes,(1) "is to that of society as
the freedom of t