Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/575

wounds; can help him to continue his life-journey; all this often without stopping to discuss his place in the human or divine scheme—much less in crowning him an exiled King of Men.

The Puzzling
Distinction.

This brief study will-have been written to no sufficient purport, and many far more extensive studies can be read with indifferent results, if the observer does not realize that the ranks of indisputably similisexual mankind (over and above all clearly detractive or doubtful examples) present a great list of what we call superior types, including geniuses; in their moral mental and other dignity. The world owes a vast debt to men who have been homosexual. But in contrast to these, we have an equally indisputable and disconcerting array of similisexual human beings so marked out by weakness, by depravity, by vice and crime, that the aggregate in such a review chills even a discriminating tolerance.

A summary of just this confusion and contrast may be cited here from the psychological romance already referred to in this study several times, on account of its aim at serious suggestiveness—"Imre: A Memorandum": The passage is a part of the narrative of one of the two protagonists (Oswald) in the tale, as to his bewildered reflections on contrasts in uranian types:

"… We walk the world's ways as men. We hew our ways through it as men, with vigour, success, honour .. one master-instinct unsuspected by society for, it may be, our lives long! We plough the globe's roughest seas as men, we rule its States as men, we direct its finance and commerce as men, we forge its steel as men, we grapple with all its sciences as men, we triumph in all its arts as men, we fill its gravest professions as men, we fight in the bravest ranks of its armies or we plan out its fiercest and most triumphant battles as men … in all this, in so much more, we are men! Why, (in a bitter paradox!) one can say that we always have been, we always are, always will be, too much men! So super-male, so utterly unreceptive of what is not manly, so aloof from any feminine essences, that we cannot tolerate woman at all as a sexual factor!

— 557 —