It may seem to some that in attaching weight to the ancestry, the parentage, the conception, the gestation, even the first infancy, of the child we are wandering away from the sphere of the psychology of sex.  That is far from being the case.  We are, on the contrary, going to the root of sex.  All our growing knowledge tends to show that, equally with his physical nature, the child’s psychic nature is based on breed and nurture, on the quality of the stocks he belongs to, and on the care taken at the early moments when care counts for most, to preserve the fine quality of those stocks.

It must, of course, be remembered that the influences of both breed and nurture are alike influential on the fate of the individual.  The influence of nurture is so obvious that few are likely to under-rate it.  The influence of breed, however, is less obvious, and we may still meet with persons so ill informed, and perhaps so prejudiced, as to deny it altogether.  The growth of our knowledge in this matter, by showing how subtle and penetrative is the influence of heredity, cannot fail to dispel this mischievous notion.  No sound civilization is possible except in a community which in the mass is not only well-nurtured but well-bred.  And in no part of life so much as in the sexual relationships is the influence of good breeding more decisive.  An instructive illustration may be gleaned from the minute and precise history of his early life furnished to me by a highly cultured Russian gentleman.  He was brought up in childhood with his own brothers and sisters and a little girl of the same age who had been adopted from infancy, the child of a prostitute who had died soon after the infant’s birth.  The adopted child was treated as one of the family, and all the children supposed that she was a real sister.  Yet from early years she developed instincts unlike those of the children with whom she was nurtured; she lied, she was cruel, she loved to make mischief, and she developed precociously vicious sexual impulses; though carefully educated, she adopted the occupation of her mother, and at the age of twenty-two was exiled to Siberia for robbery and attempt to murder.  The child of a chance father and a prostitute mother is not fatally devoted to ruin; but such a child is ill-bred, and that fact, in some cases, may neutralize all the influences of good nurture.

When we reach the period of infancy we have already passed beyond the foundations and potentialities of the sexual life; we are in some cases witnessing its actual beginnings.  It is a well-established fact that auto-erotic manifestations may sometimes be observed even in infants of less than twelve months.  We are not now called upon to discuss the disputable point as to how far such manifestations at this age can be called normal.[18] A slight degree of menstrual and mammary activity sometimes occurs at birth.[19] It seems clear that nervous and psychic sexual activity has its first springs at this early period, and as the years go by an increasing number of individuals join the stream until at puberty practically all are carried along in the great current.