sychology and
sociology. This has already been done more than once, but usually in
erudite treatises which only look upon one side of the question; or,
on the other hand, in a superficial and often frivolous manner.

To ensure happiness, humanity should desire to reproduce itself in a
manner which elevates progressively all the physical and mental
faculties of man, with regard to health and bodily strength, as much
as to sentiment, intelligence, will, creative imagination, love of
work, joy of living, and the sentiment of social solidarity. Every
attempt made to solve the sexual question should, therefore, be
directed toward the future and toward the happiness of our
descendants.

It requires much disinterestedness to attempt seriously any sexual
reform. But, as the human subject is by nature extremely weak, as his
views are limited, especially in the matter which concerns us, it is
absolutely necessary, if we would avoid Utopia, to adapt the
fundamental aim of sexual union to happiness and joy, even to the
natural weakness of man.

The fundamental difficulty of the problem lies in the necessity for
such an adaptation, and this difficulty requires us to make a clean
sweep of prejudices, traditions and prudery. It is this which we wish
to attempt.

Considered from an exalted point of view, sexual life is beautiful as
well as good. What there is in it which is shameful and infamous is
the obscenity and ignominy caused by the coarse passions of egoism and
folly, allied with ignorance, erotic curiosity and mystic
superstition, often combined with social narcotic intoxication and
cerebral anomalies.

We shall divide our subject into nineteen chapters. Chapters I to VII
deal with the natural history and psychology of sexual life; Chapter
VIII with its pathology, and Chapters IX to XVIII with its social
role, that is to say, its connection with the different domains of
human social life.

CHAPTER I

THE REPRODUCTION OF LIVING BEINGS

_History of the Germ:--Cell-division--Parthenogenesis--
Conjugation--Mneme--Embryological Development--Difference of
the Sexes--Castration--Hermaphrodism--Heredity--Blastophthoria._

A general law of organic life decrees that every living individual is
gradually transformed in the course of a cycle which is called
individual life, and which terminates with death, that is by the
destruction of the greater part of the organism. It then becomes inert
matter, and the germ