ragic exaltation of the same passion in Ford's
great play, "_'Tis Pity She's a Whore_."

[228] Thus Numa Praetorius, a sagacious observer with, a very wide and
thorough knowledge of homosexuality, finds himself quite unable to accept
the "Oedipus Complex" explanation of inversion (_Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle
Zwischenstufen_, July, 1914, p. 362).

[229] It cannot be maintained that the frequency of inversion among the
near relatives of inverts is a chance coincidence, for it must be
remembered that few estimates of the prevalence of inversion yield a
higher proportion than 3 per cent.

[230] See also a discussion of the Freudian view by Hirschfeld, who
concludes (_Die Homosexualitaet_, p. 344) that we can only accept the
Freudian mechanism as rare, and in all cases subordinate to organic
predisposition.

[231] It has been denied by some (Meynert, Naecke, etc.) that there is any
sexual _instinct_ at all. I may as well, therefore, explain in what sense
I use the word. (See also "Analysis of the Sexual Impulse" in vol. iii of
these _Studies_.) I mean an inherited aptitude the performance of which
normally demands for its full satisfaction the presence of a person of the
opposite sex. It might be asserted that there is no such thing as an
instinct for food, that it is all imitation, etc. In a sense this is true,
but the automatic basis remains. A chicken from an incubator needs no hen
to teach it to eat. It seems to discover eating and drinking, as it were,
by chance, at first eating awkwardly and eating everything, until it
learns what will best satisfy its organic mechanism. There is no instinct
for food, it may be, but there is an instinct which is only satisfied by
food. It is the same with the "sexual instinct." The tentative and
omnivorous habits of the newly hatched chicken may be compared to the
uncertainty of the sexual instinct at puberty, while the sexual pervert is
like a chicken that should carry on into adult age an appetite for worsted
and paper. It may be added here that the question of the hereditary nature
of the sexual instinct has been exhaustively discussed and decisively
affirmed by Moll in his _Untersuchungen ueber die Libido Sexualis_, 1898.
Moll attaches importance to the inheritance of the normal aptitudes for
sexual reaction in an abnormally weak degree as a factor in the
development of sexual perversions.

[232] This view was revived in a modified form by Naecke (_Zeitschrift fuer
die gesamte Neu