E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland
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In the previous five volumes of these Studies, I have dealt mainly withthe sexual impulse in relation to its object, leaving out of account theexternal persons and the environmental influences which yet may powerfullyaffect that impulse and its gratification. We cannot afford, however, topass unnoticed this relationship of the sexual impulse to third personsand to the community at large with all its anciently establishedtraditions. We have to consider sex in relation to society.
In so doing, it will be possible to discuss more summarily than inpreceding volumes the manifold and important problems that are presentedto us. In considering the more special questions of sexual psychology weentered a neglected field and it was necessary to expend an analytic careand precision which at many points had never been expended before on thesequestions. But when we reach the relationships of sex to society we havefor the most part no such neglect to encounter. The subject of everychapter in the present volume could easily form, and often has formed, thetopic of a volume, and the literature of many of these subjects is alreadyextremely voluminous. It must therefore be our main object here not toaccumulate details but to place each subject by turn, as clearly andsuccinctly as may be, in relation to those fundamental principles ofsexual psychology which—so far as the data at present admit—have beenset forth in the preceding volumes.
It may seem to some, indeed, that in this exposition I should haveconfined myself to the present, and not included so wide a sweep of thecourse of human history and the traditions of the race. It may especiallyseem that I have laid too great a stress on the influence of Christianityin moulding sexual ideals and establishing sexual institutions. That, I amconvinced, is an error. It is because it is so frequently made that themovements of progress among us—movements that can never at any period ofsocial history cease—are by many so seriously misunderstood. We cannotescape from our traditions. There never has been, and never can be, any"age of reason." The most ardent co-called "free-thinker," who casts asideas he imagines the authority of the Christian past, is still held by thatpast. If its traditions are not absolutely in his blood, they areingrained in the texture of all the social institutions into which he wasborn and they affect even his modes of thinking. The latest modificationsof our institutions are inevitably influenced by the past form of thoseinstitutions. We cannot realize where we are, nor whither we are moving,unless we know whence we came. We cannot understand the significance ofthe changes around us, nor face them with cheerful confidence, unless weare acquainted with the drift of the great movements that stir allcivilization in never-ending cycles.
In discussing sexual questions which are very largely matters of socialhygiene we shall thus still be preserving the psychological point of view.Such a point of view in relation to these matters is not only legitimatebut necessary. Discussions of social hygiene that are purely medical orpurely juridical or purely moral or purely the