Strictly speaking, the
invert is degenerate; he has fallen away from the genus. So is a
color-blind person. But Morel's conception of degenerescence has
unfortunately been coarsened and vulgarized.[240] As it now stands, we
gain little or no information by being told that a person is a
"degenerate." It is only, as Naecke constantly argued, when we find a
complexus of well-marked abnormalities that we are fairly justified in
asserting that we have to deal with a condition of degeneration. Inversion
is sometimes found in such a condition. I have, indeed, already tried to
suggest that a condition of diffused minor abnormality may be regarded as
a basis of congenital inversion. In other words, inversion is bound up
with a modification of the secondary sexual characters. But these
anomalies and modifications are not invariable,[241] and are not usually
of a serious character; inversion is rare in the profoundly degenerate. It
is undesirable to call these modifications "stigmata of degeneration," a
term which threatens to disappear from scientific terminology, to become a
mere term of literary and journalistic abuse.
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