If then the physical element which is sometimes present in the love of which we are speaking is a difficulty and a stumbling-block, it must be allowed that it is a difficulty that Nature confronts us with, and which cannot be disposed of by mere anathema and execration. The only theory--from K. H. Ulrichs to Havelock Ellis--which has at all held its ground in this matter, is that in congenital cases of sex-inversion there is a mixture of male and female elements in the same person; so that for instance in the same embryo the emotional and nervous regions may develop along feminine lines while the outer body and functions may determine themselves as distinctly masculine, or _vice versa_. Such cross-development may take place obviously in a great variety of ways, and thus possibly explain the remarkable varieties of the Uranian temperament; but in all such cases, strange as may be the problems thus arising, these problems are of Nature’s own producing and can hardly be laid to the door of the individual who has literally to bear their cross. For such individuals expressions of feeling become natural, which to others seem out of place and uncalled for; and not only natural, but needful and inevitable. To deny to such people _all_ expression of their emotion, is probably in the end to cause it to burst forth with the greater violence; and it may be suggested that our British code of manners, by forbidding the lighter marks of affection between youths and men, acts just contrary to its own purpose, and drives intimacies down into less open and unexceptionable channels.
With regard to this physical element it must also be remembered that since the homogenic love--whether between man and man, or between woman and woman--can from the nature of the case never find expression on the physical side so freely and completely as is the case with the ordinary love, it must tend rather more than the latter to run along _emotional_ channels, and to find its vent in sympathies of social life and companionship. If one studies carefully the expression of the Greek statues (see p. 9, supra) and the lesson of the Greek literature, one sees clearly that the _ideal_ of Greek life was a very continent one: the trained male, the athlete, the man temperate and restrained, even chaste, for the sake of bettering his powers. It was round this conception that the Greeks kindled their finer emotions. And so of their love: a base and licentious indulgence was not in line with it. They may not have always kept to their ideal, but there it was. And I am inclined to think that the homogenic instinct (for the reasons given above) would in the long run tend to work itself out in this direction. And consonant with this is the fact that this passion in the past (as pointed out by J. Addington Symonds in his paper on “Dantesque and Platonic Ideals of Love”[41]) has, as a matter of fact, inspired such a vast amount of heroism and romance--only paralleled indeed by the loves of Chivalry, which of course, owing to their special character, were subject to a similar Transmutation.