By Dr. C. W. SALEEBY, F.R.S. Edin.
There is something absurd, as such, in a request for an introduction
by any one to the work of one of the greatest of living thinkers, and
something still more absurd in the fact that Professor Forel should,
at this date, need an introduction to any intelligent audience in any
civilised country, as it seems he does to English readers; but if
compliance with that request is at all likely to increase, even by one,
the number of his readers, it is a duty to comply with it.
Not to consider his treatises on philosophy and psychology, nor his
long series of original and important researches on the senses and
lives of the social insects, Professor Forel has already given to
the world a volume entitled _Die Sexuelle Frage_――this has now been
published in English[A]――which is by far the best work on the sex
question in any language, and has actually received on the Continent
something like the recognition which is its due. The gist of its
teaching is to be found in this little treatise on Sexual Ethics,
and the reader who may find himself or herself unconvinced, or even
repelled, by the brief and dogmatic theses of the following pages, may
be earnestly counselled to read the larger work. Here, and in that,
Professor Forel deals――always from the loftiest moral standpoint, the
interests of human life at its highest――with the question which must
remain fundamental for man so long as he is mortal, and with which the
statesmen of the future will primarily concern themselves, realising as
they will, and as the “blind mouths” called statesmen to-day cannot,
that there is no wealth but life, that the culture of the racial life
is the vital industry of any people, and must so remain so long as
three times in every century the only wealth of nations is reduced
to dust and raised again from helpless infancy. Professor Forel sees
this question from the only standpoint that is worthy of it. The sexual
question is concerned with nothing less than the life of this world to
come. It is for this reason that every productive sexual union should
be a sacrament; it involves nothing less than the creation of a human
life――the most tremendous act of which man or woman can be capable.
It is the no less than sacred cause of Eugenics or Race-Culture that
gives the sexual life its meaning and the dignity which it may rightly
claim, and it is just because the Swiss thinker sees this and never
loses sight of it that his work is so immeasurably raised above the
ordinary discussions of marriage, prostitution, venereal disease, and
the like. His claim for posterity on the ground of our debt to the past
may be amplified by the reflection that, in serving the racial life,
and in making its welfare the criterion of our sexual ethics, we are
serving human beings as real as we are ourselves, and tens or hundreds
for units whom we can serve to-day. There is always an interval――nine
months at least――and no one expects babies or politicians to associate
cause and effect over such abysses of time; but there are others who
are learning to think in generations, and Professor Forel will yet add
to their number.
[A] _The Sexual Question._ Rebman, Ltd.
In his criticisms of alcohol and the abuse of capital, Professor Forel
opposes himself to the most powerful of vested interests. Well, if
you invest your interests in any other bank than that of the laws of
life, you or your heirs will find that theirs is but a rotten concern.
The history of organic evolution is proof enough that the higher life
and the things which buttress it, “sagging but pertinacious,” will
always win through in the long run. As a direct enemy of human life,
and notably through its influence upon the sexual instinct, alcohol
is certainly doomed. If life is the only wealth, the manufacture of
_illth_ is a process too cannibal to be permitted for ever.
Professor Forel speaks of subduing the sexual instinct. I would
rather speak of transmuting it. The direct method of attack is often
futile, always necessitous of effort, but it is possible for us to
transmute our sex-energy into higher forms in our individual lives,
thus justifying the evolutionary and psychological contention that it
is the source of the higher activities of man, of moral indignation and
of the “restless energy” which has changed the surface of the earth.
As directly interfering with this transmutation, the extent of which
probably constitutes the essential difference between civilised and
savage man, alcohol is the more to be condemned.
In what Professor Forel has to say regarding prostitution and the
ideal of marriage, he will win assent from all except the profligate
and those medical men who, in hideous alliance with the _protozoon_
of syphilis and the _coccus_ of gonorrhœa, defend prostitution and
even acclaim it as the necessary complement to marriage. If there is a
stronger phrase than most damnable of lies to apply to such teaching,
here is certainly the time for its employment. On this subject of
prostitution, Professor Forel has said the last word in a masterly
chapter of _Die Sexuelle Frage_. In his praise of monogamy, he is only
echoing the stern verdict of the ages――delivered a thousand æons before
any existing religion was born or thought of, and likely to outlast
a whole wilderness of their dogmas. The essence of marriage I would
define as _common parental care of offspring_, and its survival-value
as consisting in the addition of the father’s to the mother’s care.
In the absence of parenthood, a sexual association between man and
woman is on the same plane as any other human association; it means
neither more nor less, and must be judged as they are judged. It is
when the life of the world to come is involved that new questions
arise――questions as momentous as is the difference between the
production of human life at its best and of a child rotten with
syphilis, or permanently blinded to the light as it opens its eyes for
the first time, or doomed to intelligence less than a dog’s.
I, for one, have no shadow of doubt that the ideal of sexual ethics
will some day be realised, that pre-eminently preventable――because
contagious――diseases like syphilis and gonorrhœa will be made an end
of, that prostitution will disappear with its economic cause, that
we shall make parenthood the privilege of the worthy alone, and thus
create on earth a better heaven than ever theologians dreamed of in
the sky. “There are many events in the womb of Time which will be
delivered.” Individuals are mortal, and churches, and creeds, but Life
is not. Already the gap between moss or microbe and man is no small
one, and the time to come is very nearly “unending long.” Uranium and
radium will see to that.