57S LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



life the sex-evils too often correspond to the old "possession by 

 devils". All ordinary means, alike medical and moral, have been 

 tried to cast these out; though as yet disease germs are yielding 

 easily in comparison. Yet not only hysterics, but some lunatics, and 

 even many criminals, are more understood; and all these often 

 helped towards normal hfe. Yet what other advance among the 

 sciences takes such intricate unravelling as for these ? Not even the 

 relativity theory or radiology, for choice among the hardest. Yet 

 these devils, each and all in Protean dance upon and in their 

 bearers' souls, arc at length becoming known to the medical psycho- 

 logist: and though always he gets his patient late, and often too 

 late, it is no small triumph of science to be getting thus forward 

 in diagnosis, and even in treatment; often finding alleviations and 

 mitigations, even eftective cures, up to mental and moral sanity 

 and neural health. 



As naturalistic inquirers into the range of normal sex, and this at 

 its best and brightest, as from flowers and birds to human lovers 

 and their poets, we have happily had to do with little more than 

 the ordinary knowledge of its evils; yet enough to defend their 

 courageous investigators from that too frequent criticism which 

 would merely shirk facing the facts of diseased and morbid psycho- 

 logy. I^r from our first studies of sex, or sooner, we have felt how 

 deeply true, despite touch of exaggeration, is the poet's intuition, 

 long before the physician's diagnosis, that 



All thoughts, all passions, all delights. 

 Whatever thrills this mortal frame. 



All are but messengers of Love, 

 And feed his sacred flame! 



Return, however, now to our initial problem — that of finding at 

 least some clue to a fuller and better harmonised understanding of 

 woman in life. And why not conversely ?— thus primarily at her best, 

 though at times for worse as well. After many years failing to find 

 such mode of presentment, necessarily at once biological and psycho- 

 logical, and reaching throughout the range of woman's normal life 

 and experience, a clue appeared where least expected, indeed least 

 sought by scientific workers, though ever a joy to poets, and source 

 of inspiration too — in Greek Mythology. How so? F""or all the arts, 

 the world has long recognised that Greek inspiration was initiative, 

 creative, masterly, often indeed supreme; and so for Greek literature, 

 also in its ways supreme; and with the "Nine Mu.ses" as forms of 

 expression, to which none since have added a tenth. And so again 

 for the sciences, in which indeed we have often got beyond them, 

 yet largely by climbing from their shoulders, Yet their mythology.*^ 

 — they themselves ceased to take that seriously. And though our 

 mythologists, in still comparatively recent times, have been dis- 



