The task of social hygiene / by Havelock Ellis.

  • Ellis, Havelock, 1859-1939.
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The task of social hygiene / by Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/444 (page XI)
    PREFACE xi In whatever way it may be understood, however, social hygiene is now very much to the front of people's minds. The present volume, I wish to make clear, has not been hastily written to meet any real or supposed demand. It has slowly grown during a period of nearly twenty-five years, and it expresses an attitude which is implicit or explicit in the whole of my work. By some readers, doubtless, it will be seen to constitute an exten¬ sion in various directions of the arguments developed in the larger work on Sex in Relation to Society, which is the final volume of my Studies in the Psychology of Sex. The book I now bring forward may, however, be more properly regarded as a presentation of the wider scheme of social reform out of which the more special sex studies have developed. We are faced to-day by the need for vast and complex changes in social organization. In these changes the welfare of individuals and the welfare of communities are alike concerned. Moreover, they are matters which are not confined to the affairs of this nation or of that nation, but of the whole family of nations participating in the fraternity of modern progress. The word progress, indeed, which falls so easily <from our lips is not a word which any serious writer should use without precaution. The conception of progress is a useful conception in so far as it binds together those who are working for common ends, and stimulates that perpetual slight movement in which life consists. But there is no general progress in Nature, nor any unqualified progress ; that is to say. that there