REPRODUCTION AND SEX 583 



much but verbalistic degeneration of classics proper. But as our 

 studies of human origins and developments lead us on from pre- 

 historic Europe, and thus through historic Hellas, must we not see 

 with freshened eyes what our teachers at best too ignorantly wor- 

 shipped, and realise anew the evolutionary significance of these 

 supreme creations, of man into divine imagery? 



For our ordinary biologic studies we seek normal types. In 

 humanity we, of course, find these; yet types more or less sub- 

 normal are too frequent in contemporary civilisation: while beauty 

 and perfection are now comparatively rare; in fact, do they not 

 nowadays seem supernormal? Yet why not make experiment — as 

 of setting a competent artist to draw for us, first the Olympian 

 Sevens, and then good modern presentments of these phases of life 

 in both sexes; and even in their modem costumes too? Will he not 

 soon arrange, upon each curve of life, a series not a little recalhng 

 their Greek ideahsations ? And so too may we not stage these from 

 our own range of acquaintance ? We have indeed made a good many 

 such experiments, and not without success — in fact beyond anticipa- 

 tion. The Greeks valued such types socially, while we appreciate 

 them at best but individually. They used them as ideals, at once 

 eugenic and eupsychic ; so may not we do the like ? 



Here then we have the life-cycle of the sexes at their best clear 

 before us. Next the leading abbreviations of its phases also, and 

 these again towards advance or decline in development, for better 

 or worse, and towards action good or evil. If so, we see our way 

 more clearly, as towards disentangling the contrasts and paradoxes 

 which have ever so perplexed the sexes, as to each other, and to 

 themselves. For here we see no mere norms of development; the 

 ups and downs we see in human life are sometimes toward super- 

 norms, too often towards sub-norms; for where developments are 

 not towards advance, but relaxed or arrested, there deteriorations, 

 degenerations, or even perversions of various kinds, tend readily 

 to come in. This clearing up of our conception,s of the phases and 

 possibilities of human life, is significant for medicine, as indeed all 

 the wise old family physicians so peculiarly know — and this for mind 

 as well as body. The traditions of practical wisdom, elaborated in 

 the past by its various forms of religious teaching and guidance, 

 are also often being strikingly corroborated by the advance of 

 psychological medicine ; and they are even increasingly renewed and 

 adapted to its curative endeavours. Yet neither the physician 

 nor the priest is always fully accessible to such presentments as 

 the above: so let us turn for a moment to more general readers. 

 Older ones may remember, from some good few years back, Wein- 

 inger's Sex and Character, and as of extraordinary vogue, not only 

 in Austria and Germany, but in translations throughout the world. 

 If they recall his essential thesis they will now see it plainly out- 



