o-day, the social and political equality and personal
freedom of women, the differing code of honour for the sexes, the
controls and limitations to set upon love and desire. If, for example,
it is for the good of the species that a whole half of its individuals
should be specialized and subordinated to the physical sexual life, as
in certain phases of human development women have tended to be, then
certainly we must do nothing to prevent that. We have set aside the
conception of Justice as in any sense a countervailing idea to that of
the synthetic process.

And it is well to remember that for the whole of sexual conduct there is
quite conceivably no general simple rule. It is quite possible that,
as Metchnikoff maintains in his extraordinarily illuminating "Nature
of Man," we are dealing with an irresolvable tangle of disharmonies. We
have passions that do not insist upon their physiological end, desires
that may be prematurely vivid in childhood, a fantastic curiosity, old
needs of the ape but thinly overlaid by the acquisitions of the man,
emotions that jar with physical impulses, inexplicable pains and
diseases. And not only have we to remember that we are dealing with
disharmonies that may at the very best be only patched together, but
we are dealing with matters in which the element of idiosyncrasy is
essential, insisting upon an incalculable flexibility in any rule
we make, unless we are to take types and indeed whole classes of
personality and write them down as absolutely bad and fit only for
suppression and restraint. And on the mental side we are further
perplexed by the extraordinary suggestibility of human beings. In sexual
matters there seems to me--and I think I share a general ignorance
here--to be no directing instinct at all, but only an instinct to do
something generally sexual; there are almost equally powerful desires to
do right and not to act under compulsion. The specific forms of conduct
imposed upon these instincts and desires depend upon a vast confusion of
suggestions, institutions, conventions, ways of putting things. We are
dealing therefore with problems ineradicably complex, varying endlessly
in their instances, and changing as we deal with them. I am inclined to
think that the only really profitable discussion of sexual matters is
in terms of individuality, through the novel, the lyric, the
play, autobiography or biography of the frankest sort. But such
generalizations as I can make I wi