Professor Forel speaks of subduing the sexual instinct. I would rather speak of transmuting it. The direct method of attack is often futile, always necessitous of effort, but it is possible for us to transmute our sex-energy into higher forms in our individual lives, thus justifying the evolutionary and psychological contention that it is the source of the higher activities of man, of moral indignation and of the “restless energy” which has changed the surface of the earth. As directly interfering with this transmutation, the extent of which probably constitutes the essential difference between civilised and savage man, alcohol is the more to be condemned.
In what Professor Forel has to say regarding prostitution and the ideal of marriage, he will win assent from all except the profligate and those medical men who, in hideous alliance with the protozoon of syphilis and the coccus of gonorrhœa, defend prostitution and even acclaim it as the necessary complement to marriage. If there is a stronger phrase than most damnable of lies to apply to such teaching, here is certainly the time for its employment. On this subject of prostitution, Professor Forel has said the last word in a masterly chapter of Die Sexuelle Frage. In his praise of monogamy, he is only echoing the stern verdict of the ages—delivered a thousand æons before any existing religion was born or thought of, and likely to outlast a whole wilderness of their dogmas. The essence of marriage I would define as common parental care of offspring, and its survival-value as consisting in the addition of the father’s to the mother’s care. In the absence of parenthood, a sexual association between man and woman is on the same plane as any other human association; it means neither more nor less, and must be judged as they are judged. It is when the life of the world to come is involved that new questions arise—questions as momentous as is the difference between the production of human life at its best and of a child rotten with syphilis, or permanently blinded to the light as it opens its eyes for the first time, or doomed to intelligence less than a dog’s.
I, for one, have no shadow of doubt that the ideal of sexual ethics will some day be realised, that pre-eminently preventable—because contagious—diseases like syphilis and gonorrhœa will be made an end of, that prostitution will disappear with its economic cause, that we shall make parenthood the privilege of the worthy alone, and thus create on earth a better heaven than ever theologians dreamed of in the sky. “There are many events in the womb of Time which will be delivered.” Individuals are mortal, and churches, and creeds, but Life is not. Already the gap between moss or microbe and man is no small one, and the time to come is very nearly “unending long.” Uranium and radium will see to that.
C. W. SALEEBY.
SEXUAL ETHICS
The two conceptions of morality and sexual life are frequently confounded and expressed by the same term in the popular usages of speech. The word “moral” is commonly used to mean sexually pure, that is to say, continent; while the word “immoral” suggests the idea of sexual incontinence and debauch. This is a misuse of words, and rests upon a confusion of ideas, for sexuality has in itself nothing to do with morality. It points, however, to the undoubted fact that the sexual impulse, since it has other human beings as its object, easily leads to moral conflicts within the breast of the individual.
It will be convenient to discuss our subject under the two heads: I. Of ethics in general; and II. Of sexual ethics in particular.