in mind the broader aspects of the problem, keenly critical of accepted opinions, but judiciously cautious in the statement of conclusions.  He cleared away various ancient prejudices and superstitions which even Krafft-Ebing sometimes incautiously repeated.  He accepted the generally received doctrine that the sexually inverted usually belong to families in which various nervous and mental disorders prevail, but he pointed out at the same time that it is not in all cases possible to prove that we are concerned with individuals possessing a hereditary neurotic taint.  He also rejected any minute classification of sexual inverts, only recognizing psycho-sexual hermaphroditism and homosexuality.  At the same time he cast doubt on the existence of acquired homosexuality, in a strict sense, except in occasional cases, and he pointed out that even when a normal heterosexual impulse appears at puberty, and a homosexual impulse later, it may still be the former that was acquired and the latter that was inborn.

In America attention had been given to the phenomena at a fairly early period.  Mention may be specially made of J.G.  Kiernan and G. Frank Lydston, both of whom put forward convenient classifications of homosexual manifestations some thirty years ago.[122] More recently (1911) an American writer, under the pseudonym of Xavier Mayne, privately printed an extensive work entitled The Intersexes:  A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life, popularly written and compiled from many sources.  This book, from a subjective and scarcely scientific standpoint, claims that homosexual relationships are natural, necessary, and legitimate.[123]

In England the first attempts to deal seriously, from the modern point of view, with the problem of homosexuality came late, and were either published privately or abroad.  In 1883 John Addington Symonds privately printed his discussion of paiderastia in ancient Greece, under the title of A Problem in Greek Ethics, and in 1889-1890 he further wrote, and in 1891 privately printed, A Problem of Modern Ethics:  Being an Enquiry into the Phenomena of Sexual Inversion.  In 1886 Sir Richard Burton added to his translation of the Arabian Nights a Terminal Essay on the same subject.  In 1894 Edward Carpenter privately printed in Manchester a pamphlet entitled Homogenic Love, in which he criticised various psychiatric views of inversion at that time current, and claimed that the laws of homosexual love are the same as those of heterosexual love, urging, however, that the former possesses a special aptitude to be exalted to a higher and more spiritual level of comradeship, so fulfilling a beneficent social function.  More recently (1907) Edward Carpenter published a volume of papers on homosexuality and its problems, under the title of The Intermediate Sex, and later (1914) a more special study of the invert in early religion and in warfare, Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk.