The problem of Oscar Wilde raises an ethical question that still remains to be finally answered.  Granting that all of society should one day see him and his kind as a peculiar and specific constitutional product of an odd intermixture of internal secretions, what should be done with him and them?  It is easy to play with words like “degenerates.”  But still, we do not condemn imbeciles, idiots or defectives, or other substandard, subnormal creatures to the prisons.  For the sake of the good opinion society would maintain of itself, it sends the latter nowadays to hospitals, sanitaria, or their equivalents, where protection for itself without punishment for them may be practised.  But is confinement, or even treatment the solution?  For we have to consider what society would lose by cutting such abnormals off from itself, and them from its stimulations.  A number of artists have been built like Oscar Wilde, musicians in particular.  Without them, would there not be a great gap, a yawning absence, in the world’s culture?

Modern diagnosis and modern therapy might have done a great deal for Napoleon, Nietzsche, Julius Caesar, Florence Nightingale, Oscar Wilde.  Were they alive today, and willing to submit themselves to scientific scrutiny, the X-ray would tell us of the state of the pituitary and thymus in them, chemical examinations of the blood the condition of the thyroid and adrenals, detailed investigation of the body and mind a flood of light upon their maladies as well as their personalities.  Therapy might have relieved Napoleon of his attacks, and so, halting the creeping degeneration of his pituitary, made Waterloo impossible.  But then, would we have had the Emperor at all?  Would there have been enough of that instability that drives on the genius to his goal?  Nietzsche might have been relieved of his headaches, and Caesar of his epilepsy—­but then, would not—­with correction of the underlying streams of activity on the part of the other glands of the internal secretion to compensate—­their peculiar superiority and distinction, and the fruits of their lives as by-products, have been destroyed.  Florence Nightingale, too, might have been a softer and more human person.  But then would she have revolutionized the practice of nursing?  Oscar Wilde possibly might have been made over into a heterosexual.  But then would not the world be the poorer without “De Profundis,” let us ask?  To state the problem in the most general terms:  how much abnormality are we to tolerate (I speak, of course, of malignant abnormality, and disregard benign abnormality altogether) for the sake of the valuable that is concomitant?  How much are we to stand of that which degrades the germ-plasm while it raises the mind-plasm of the race?  The Flowers of Evil.  Destroy or modify the roots, change the seed, and the buds will bloom, if at all, not orchids, but dull brown commonplaces.

What means may be licensed for the attainment of a worthy end is perhaps the broadest aspect of the problem.  The instruments of Man’s ascent to divinity may arouse his instinctive repulsions, dislikes, and destructive passions.  The study of the internal secretions is putting and will put the most powerful apparatus for the control of the abnormal into our hands.  What are we going to do with them?