Sexual ethics

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.