We have set aside the
conception of Justice as in any sense a countervailing idea to that of
the synthetic process.
And it is well to remember that for the whole of sexual conduct there is
quite conceivably no general simple rule. It is quite possible that, as
Metchnikoff maintains in his extraordinarily illuminating "Nature of
Man," we are dealing with an irresolvable tangle of disharmonies. We
have passions that do not insist upon their physiological end, desires
that may be prematurely vivid in childhood, a fantastic curiosity, old
needs of the ape but thinly overlaid by the acquisitions of the man,
emotions that jar with physical impulses, inexplicable pains and
diseases. And not only have we to remember that we are dealing with
disharmonies that may at the very best be only patched together, but we
are dealing with matters in which the element of idiosyncrasy is
essential, insisting upon an incalculable flexibility in any rule we
make, unless we are to take types and indeed whole classes of
personality and write them down as absolutely bad and fit only for
suppression and restraint.
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