SEXUAL ETHICS
SEXUAL ETHICS
BY
FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF PSYCHIATRY AT
AND DIRECTOR OF
THE INSANE ASYLUM IN ZURICH (SWITZERLAND)
BY
140 FLEET STREET
1908
Translated from the German by Ashley Dukes
By Dr. C. W. SALEEBY, F.R.S. Edin.
There is something absurd, as such,in a request for an introduction byany one to the work of one of the greatestof living thinkers, and something still moreabsurd in the fact that Professor Forelshould, at this date, need an introductionto any intelligent audience in any civilisedcountry, as it seems he does to Englishreaders; but if compliance with that requestis at all likely to increase, even by one, thenumber of his readers, it is a duty to complywith it.
Not to consider his treatises on philosophyand psychology, nor his long series of originaland important researches on the senses andlives of the social insects, Professor Forelhas already given to the world a volumeentitled Die Sexuelle Frage—this has now[6]been published in English[A]—which is by farthe best work on the sex question in anylanguage, and has actually received on theContinent something like the recognitionwhich is its due. The gist of its teachingis to be found in this little treatise on SexualEthics, and the reader who may find himselfor herself unconvinced, or even repelled, bythe brief and dogmatic theses of the followingpages, may be earnestly counselled to readthe larger work. Here, and in that, ProfessorForel deals—always from the loftiest moralstandpoint, the interests of human life atits highest—with the question which mustremain fundamental for man so long as he ismortal, and with which the statesmen of thefuture will primarily concern themselves,realising as they will, and as the “blindmouths” called statesmen to-day cannot,that there is no wealth but life, that the cultureof the racial life is the vital industry ofany people, and must so remain so long asthree times in every century the only wealth[7]of nations is reduced to dust and raised againfrom helpless infancy. Professor Forel seesthis question from the only standpoint thatis worthy of it. The sexual question is concernedwith nothing less than the life of thisworld to come. It is for this reason thatevery productive sexual union should be asacrament; it involves nothing less thanthe creation of a human life—the mosttremendous act of