hormones, which not only confer on the man’s or woman’s body those specific sexual characters which we admire but at the same time impart the special tone and fibre and polarity of masculinity or femininity to the psychic disposition. Yet, even before Brown-Séquard’s first epochmaking suggestion had set physiologists to search for internal secretions, the insight of certain physicians on the medico-psychological side was independently leading towards the same dynamic conception. In the middle of the last century Anstie, an acute London physician, more or less vaguely realised the transformations of sexual energy into nervous disease and into artistic energy. James Hinton, whose genius rendered him the precursor of many modern ideas, had definitely grasped the dynamic nature of sexual activity, and daringly proposed to utilise it, not only as a solution of the difficulties of the personal life but for the revolutionary transformation of morality.[1] It was the wish to
- ↑ “The man who separated the thought of chastity from Service and made it revolve round Self,” wrote Hinton half a century ago in his unpublished MSS., “betrayed the human race.” “The rule of Self,” he wrote again, “has two forms: Self-indulgence and Self-virtue; and Nature has two weapons against it: pain and pleasure. . . . A restraint must always be put away when another’s need can be served by putting it away; for so is restored to us the force by which Life is made. . . . How curious it seems! the true evil things are our good things. Our thoughts of duty and goodness and chastity, those are the things that need to be altered and put aside; these are the barriers to true goodness. . . . I foresee the positive denial of all positive morals, the removal of all restrictions. I feel I do not know what ‘license,’ as we should term it, may not truly belong to the perfect state of Man. When there is no self surely there is no
