[227] The love of relations may be tinctured by all degrees of sexual love, some of which are so faint and vague that they cannot be considered unnatural or abnormal; it is misleading to term them incestuous. The Russian novelist, Artzibascheff, in his Sanine described a brother's affection for his sister as thus touched with a perception of her sexual charm (I refer to the French translation), and the book has consequently been much abused as "incestuous," though the attitude described is very pale and conventional compared to the romantic passion sung in Shelley's Laon and Cythna, or the tragic 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 "Œdipus Complex" explanation of inversion (Jahrbuch für 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 Homosexualität, 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, Näcke, 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 über 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 Näcke (Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, vol. xv, Heft 5, 1913), who supposed that there may be an anatomical "homosexual center" in the brain; i.e., a feminine libido-center in the inverted man, and a masculine libido-center in the inverted woman. He expressed a hope that in the future the brains of inverted persons would be more carefully investigated.
[233] I do not present this view as more than a picture which helps us to realize the actual phenomena which we witness in homosexuality, although I may add that so able a teratologist as Dr. J. W. Ballantyne considers that "it seems a very possible theory."
[234] This explanation of homosexuality has already been tentatively put forth. Thus, Iwan Bloch (Sexual Life of Our Time, ch. xix, Appendix) vaguely suggests a new theory of homosexuality as dependent on chemical influences. Hirschfeld also believes (Die Homosexualität, ch. xx) that the study of the internal secretions is the path to the deepest foundations of inversion.
[235] A. E. Garrod, "The Thymus Gland in its Clinical Aspects," British Medical Journal, Oct. 3, 1914
[236] "The pure female and the pure male are produced by all the internal secretions," Blair Bell, "The Internal Secretions," British Medical Journal, Nov. 15, 1913.