A strictly ascetic life, it needs scarcely be said, is with difficulty possible for all persons, either homosexual or heterosexual.  It is, however, outside the province of the physician to recommend his inverted patients to live according to their homosexual impulses, even when those impulses seem to be natural to the person displaying them.  The most that the physician is entitled to do, it seems to me, is to present the situation clearly, and leave to the patient a decision for which he must himself accept the responsibility.  Forel goes so far as to say that he sees no reason why inverts should not build cities of their own and marry each other if they so please, since they can do no harm to normal adults, while children can be protected from them.[264] Such notions are, however, too far removed from our existing social conventions to be worth serious consideration.

The standpoint here taken up, it may be remarked, by no means denies to the invert a right to the fulfillment of his impulses.  Numa Praetorius remarks, it would seem justly, that while the invert must properly be warned against unnatural sexual license, and while those who are capable of continence do well to preserve it, to deny all right to sexual activity to the invert merely causes those inverts who are incapable of self-control to throw recklessly aside all restraints (Zeitschrift fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vol. viii, 1906, p. 726).  The invert has the right to sexual indulgence, it may be, but he has also the duty to accept the full responsibility for his own actions, and the necessity to recognize the present attitude of the society he lives in.  He cannot be advised to set himself in violent opposition to that society.

The world will not be a tolerable place for pronounced inverts until they are better understood, and that will involve a radical change in general and even medical opinion.  An inverted physician, of high character and successful in his profession, writes to me on this point:  “The first, and easiest, thing to do, it seems to me, is to convince the medical profession that we unfortunate people are not only as sane, but as moral, as our normal brothers; and that we are even more alive to the supreme necessity of self-control (necessary from every point of view) than they.  It is not license we want, but justice; it is the cruelty and prejudice of convention which we wish to abolish—­not the proper and just indignation of society with crimes against the social order.  We want to make it possible for us to satisfy our inborn instincts (which are not concerned essentially with sexual acts, so called, alone) without thereby becoming criminals.  One of us who would, under any circumstances, seduce a person of his own sex of immature age, and particularly one whose sexual complexion was unknown, deserves the severe punishment which would be meted out to a normal person who did the same to a young girl—­but