It requires a very strong impetus to go against this compact social force which, on every side, constrains the individual into the paths of heterosexual love.

That impetus, in a well-bred individual who leads the normal life of his fellow-men and who feels the ordinary degree of respect for the social feeling surrounding him, can only be supplied by a fundamental--usually, it is probable, inborn--perversion of the sexual instinct, rendering the individual organically abnormal.

It is with this fundamental abnormality, usually called sexual inversion, that we shall here be concerned.

There is no evidence to show that homosexuality in Greece was a congenital perversion, although it appears that Coelius Aurelianus affirms that in the opinion of Parmenides it was hereditary.

Aristotle also, in his fragment on physical love, though treating the whole matter with indulgence, seems to have distinguished abnormal congenital homosexuality from acquired homosexual vice.