The omission of such considerations at this stage is intentional. It may
safely be said that in no other field of human activity is so vast an
amount of strenuous didactic morality founded on so slender a basis of
facts. In most other departments of life we at least make a pretence of
learning before we presume to teach; in the field of sex we content
ourselves with the smallest and vaguest minimum of information, often
ostentatiously second-hand, usually unreliable. I wish to emphasize the
fact that before we can safely talk either of curing or preventing these
manifestations we must know a great deal more than we know at present
regarding their distribution, etiology, and symptomatology; and we must
exercise the same coolness and caution as--if our work is to be
fruitful--we require in any other field of serious study. We must approach
these facts as physicians, it is true, but also as psychologists,
primarily concerned to find out the workings of such manifestations in
fairly healthy and normal people. If we found a divorce-court judge
writing a treatise on marriage we should smile. But it is equally absurd
for the physician, so long as his knowledge is confined to disease, to
write regarding sex at large; valuable as the facts he brings forward may
be, he can never be in a position to generalize concerning them. And to
me, at all events, it seems that we have had more than enough pictures of
gross sexual perversity, whether furnished by the asylum or the brothel.
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