It may be
added, however, that while some of the English names in the list
are thus extremely doubtful, it would have been possible to add
some others who were without doubt inverts.
It has not, I think, been noted--largely because the evidence was
insufficiently clear--that among moral leaders, and persons with strong
ethical instincts, there is a tendency toward the more elevated forms of
homosexual feeling. This may be traced, not only in some of the great
moral teachers of old, but also in men and women of our own day. It is
fairly evident why this should be so. Just as the repressed love of a
woman or a man has, in normally constituted persons, frequently furnished
the motive power for an enlarged philanthropic activity, so the person
who sees his own sex also bathed in sexual glamour, brings to his work of
human service an ardor wholly unknown to the normally constituted
individual; morality to him has become one with love.[50] I am not
prepared here to insist on this point, but no one, I think, who studies
sympathetically the histories and experiences of great moral leaders can
fail in many cases to note the presence of this feeling, more or less
finely sublimated from any gross physical manifestation.
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