wider term involving affection (affectio) in general, not necessarily impairment of vital tissue; when that was involved there was nosos, disease.  We have to recognize the distinction even if we reject the terminology.

A word may be said as to the connection between sexual inversion and degeneration.  In France especially, since the days of Morel, the stigmata of degeneration are much spoken of.  Sexual inversion is frequently regarded as one of them:  i.e., as an episodic syndrome of a hereditary disease, taking its place beside other psychic stigmata, such as kleptomania and pyromania.  Krafft-Ebing long so regarded inversion; it is the view of Magnan, one of the earliest investigators of homosexuality;[239] and it was adopted by Moebius.  Strictly speaking, the invert is degenerate; he has fallen away from the genus.  So is a color-blind person.  But Morel’s conception of degenerescence has unfortunately been coarsened and vulgarized.[240] As it now stands, we gain little or no information by being told that a person is a “degenerate.”  It is only, as Naecke constantly argued, when we find a complexus of well-marked abnormalities that we are fairly justified in asserting that we have to deal with a condition of degeneration.  Inversion is sometimes found in such a condition.  I have, indeed, already tried to suggest that a condition of diffused minor abnormality may be regarded as a basis of congenital inversion.  In other words, inversion is bound up with a modification of the secondary sexual characters.  But these anomalies and modifications are not invariable,[241] and are not usually of a serious character; inversion is rare in the profoundly degenerate.  It is undesirable to call these modifications “stigmata of degeneration,” a term which threatens to disappear from scientific terminology, to become a mere term of literary and journalistic abuse.  So much may be said concerning a conception or a phrase of which far too much has been made in popular literature.  At the best it remains vague and unfitted for scientific use.  It is now widely recognized that we gain little by describing inversion as a degeneration.  Naecke, who attached significance to the stigmata of degeneration when numerous, was especially active in pointing out that inverts are not degenerate, and frequently returned to this point.  Loewenfeld, Freud, Hirschfeld, Bloch, Rohleder all reject the conception of sexual inversion as a degeneracy.

Moll is still unable to abandon altogether the position that since inversion involves a disharmony between psychic disposition and physical conformation we must regard it as morbid, but he recognizes (like Krafft-Ebing) that it is properly viewed as being on the level of a deformity, that is, an abnormality, comparable to physical hermaphroditism. (A.  Moll, “Sexuelle Zwischenstufen,” Zeitschrift fuer aerztliche Fortbildung, No. 24, 1904.) Naecke repeatedly emphasized the view