Page:Symonds - A Problem in Modern Ethics.djvu/101

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Literature—Polemical

89

The Human Male	$\scriptstyle {\left\{{\begin{matrix}\ \\\\\ \\\ \\\ \\\ \\\ \ \end{matrix}}\right.}$	(1)	Man or Dioning		Uraniaster, when he has acquired the tastes of the Urning.
		(2)	Urning	$\scriptstyle {\left\{{\begin{matrix}\ \\\\\ \\\ \ \end{matrix}}\right.}$	Mannling. Weibling. Zwischen-Urning. Virilised Urning.
		(3)	Uranodioning.
		(4)	Hermaphrodite.

Broadly speaking, the male includes two main species: Dioning and Urning, men with normal and men with abnormal instincts. What, then, constitutes the distinction between them? How are we justified in regarding them as radically divergent?

Ulrichs replies that the phenomenon of sexual inversion is to be explained by physiology, and particularly by the evolution of the embryo.^[1] Nature fails to

↑ The notion that human beings were originally hermaphrodite is both ancient and wide-spread. We find it in the Book of Genesis, unless, indeed, there be a confusion here between two separate theories of creation. God is said to have first made man in his own image, male and female in one body, and to have bidden them multiply. Later on he created the woman out of part of the primitive man. The myth related by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium has a curious bearing upon Ulrichs' speculations. There were originally human beings of three sexes: men, the children of the sun; women, the children of the earth; and hermaphrodites, the children of the moon. They were round, with two faces, four hands, four feet and two sets of reproductive organs apiece. In the case of the third sex, one set was male, the other female. Zeus, on account of their strength and insolence, sliced them into halves. Since that time the halves of each sort have always striven to unite with their

[p89-1] The notion that human beings were originally hermaphrodite is both ancient and wide-spread. We find it in the Book of Genesis, unless, indeed, there be a confusion here between two separate theories of creation. God is said to have first made man in his own image, male and female in one body, and to have bidden them multiply. Later on he created the woman out of part of the primitive man. The myth related by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium has a curious bearing upon Ulrichs' speculations. There were originally human beings of three sexes: men, the children of the sun; women, the children of the earth; and hermaphrodites, the children of the moon. They were round, with two faces, four hands, four feet and two sets of reproductive organs apiece. In the case of the third sex, one set was male, the other female. Zeus, on account of their strength and insolence, sliced them into halves. Since that time the halves of each sort have always striven to unite with their

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