Page:Symonds - A Problem in Modern Ethics.djvu/48

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36
A Problem in Modern Ethics

argument. It is interesting, by the way, to find this writer agreeing with Ulrichs in his suggestion of a "congenital lack of balance between structures themselves healthy," and with Lombroso in his supposition of atavistic reversion to savagery. Lombroso, we shall see, ultimately identifies congenital criminality (one form of which is sexual aberration in this theory) with moral insanity; and here Dr. Huggard is, unconsciously perhaps, in agreement with him; for he defines insanity to be "any mental defect that renders a person unable (and not capable of being made able by punishment) to conform to the requirements of society"—a definition which is no less applicable to the born criminal than to the madman.

How little Dr. Moreau has weighed the importance of ancient Greece in his discussion of this topic, appears from the omission of all facts supplied by Greek literature and history in the introduction to his Essay. He dilates upon the legends recorded by the Roman Emperors, because these seem to support his theory of hereditary malady. He uses Juvenal, Tacitus, Suetonius, and the Augustan Histories to support his position, although they form part of the annals of a people among whom "pæderasty was accepted and admitted." He ignores the biographies of the Spartan kings, the institutions of Crete, the Theban Sacred Band, the dialogues of Plato, the anecdotes related about Pheidias, Sophocles, Pindar, Demosthenes, Alcibiades, and so forth. Does he perhaps do so because they cannot in any way be made to square with his theory of morbidity? The truth is that ancient Greece offers insuperable difficulties to theorists who treat