It would be a fundamental error to try and found social solidarity solely on our phylogenetic sentiments of sympathy, or on our ideal faculty of devotion and self-sacrifice; but to try and take egoism as a basis for this solidarity is a still greater error. We must not make an antinomy of egoism and altruism, but regard them as two elements inseparable from all human society, as well as the individuals who compose it. We cannot deny that the altruist, endowed with strong sentiments of sympathy and duty, is an excellent social worker, while the pure egoist constitutes an element of decomposition for society. It is, therefore, a social duty to proceed by the sexual route to a selection which will cause the first to multiply and eliminate the second as far as possible by sterilizing his germs.
On this subject we refer the reader to the well-known work of Krafft-Ebing, "Psychopathia Sexualis,"[4] in which will be found a number of observations, the details of which we cannot enter into here. We may first of all say that with the exception of venereal diseases the genital organs by themselves only play a very small part in sexual pathology. The brain is the true domain of nearly all sexual anomalies.
In the second place, we may remark that the disorders of sexual life only rarely belong to acute affections which the physician can treat with pharmaceutical or other common remedies. They almost exclusively originate in the mental constitution, _i.e._, in the hereditary dispositions of the brain of the individual. But the pathology of mental or cerebral conditions offers an extremely vast field, capable of so much extension that no definite limit can be fixed between the normal state and morbid states, which are themselves connected by numerous transitions. A great number of acts due to mental conditions which the public and even learned theologians, jurists and physicians not initiated in psychiatry, consider as criminal, sinful, or infamous, are only the product of pathological aberrations due to hereditary dispositions. I was recently consulted by a patient of this kind, otherwise possessed of noble sentiments, who told me that a physician in Germany to whom he related his troubles, turned on him furiously and said, "These things are filthy; you are a pig; hold your tongue and get away from here!" As a matter of fact this unfortunate patient was sustaining a heroic struggle against his perverted pathological sexual appetites. Knowing little or nothing of these matters human society, with few exceptions, is of the same opinion as the ignorant doctor mentioned above. For this reason I think it necessary at least to give an outline of phenomena which, although very repulsive in themselves, throw much light on the sexual question.