If, then, we must postulate a congenital abnormality in order to account satisfactorily for at least a large proportion of sexual inverts, wherein does that abnormality consist?  Ulrichs explained the matter by saying that in sexual inverts a male body coexists with a female soul:  anima muliebris in corpore virile inclusa.  Even writers of scientific eminence, like Magnan and Gley, have adopted this phrase in a modified form, considering that in inversion a female brain is combined with a male body or male glands.  This is, however, not an explanation.  It merely crystallizes into an epigram the superficial impression of the matter.[232]

We can probably grasp the nature of the abnormality better if we reflect on the development of the sexes and on the latent organic bisexuality in each sex.  At an early stage of development the sexes are indistinguishable, and throughout life the traces of this early community of sex remain.  The hen fowl retains in a rudimentary form the spurs which are so large and formidable in her lord, and sometimes she develops a capacity to crow, or puts on male plumage.  Among mammals the male possesses useless nipples, which occasionally even develop into breasts, and the female possesses a clitoris, which is merely a rudimentary penis, and may also develop.  The sexually inverted person does not usually possess any gross exaggeration of these signs of community with the opposite sex.  But, as we have seen, there are a considerable number of more subtle approximations to the opposite sex in inverted persons, both on the physical and the psychic side.  Putting the matter in a purely speculative shape, it may be said that at conception the organism is provided with about 50 per cent. of male germs and about 50 per cent. of female germs, and that, as development proceeds, either the male or the female germs assume the upper hand, until in the maturely developed individual only a few aborted germs of the opposite sex are left.  In the homosexual, however, and in the bisexual, we may imagine that the process has not proceeded normally, on account of some peculiarity in the number or character of either the original male germs or female germs, or both, the result being that we have a person who is organically twisted into a shape that is more fitted for the exercise of the inverted than of the normal sexual impulse, or else equally fitted for both.[233]

The conception of the latent bisexuality of all males and females cannot fail to be fairly obvious to intelligent observers of the human body.  It emerges at an early period in the history of philosophic thought, and from the first was occasionally used for the explanation of homosexuality.  Plato’s myth in the Banquet and the hermaphroditic statues of antiquity show how acute minds, working ahead of science, exercised themselves with these problems. (For a fully illustrated study of the ancient conception of hermaphroditism in sculpture see L.S.A.M. von Roemer, “Ueber