Chapter 2: Containing Material Which None But Students of Psychology and Ethics Need Peruse

Abstract

The plan of these Memoirs, which are intended to describe the evolution of a somewhat abnormally constituted individual, obliges me to interpolate a section here, which might otherwise have been omitted with satisfaction to myself. When the whole interest of a life centres, not in action, but in mental development and moral experience, truth becomes imperatively necessary with regard to points of apparent insignificance.

Many of the details and experiences recounted in this chapter are repeated, near verbatim, in Symonds’s case study for Sexual Inversion, his collaboration with Havelock Ellis. See Appendices and Crozier, pp. 142–3