Daily Inspiration Quote by Havelock Ellis

Ellis is carving out a third lane between two convenient bad habits: reducing sex to a blunt “impulse” you can explain with a single lever-pull, and treating sexuality as too indecent, too mysterious, or too politically fraught to theorize at all. The line lands with the cool impatience of a clinician watching culture argue in extremes. By pairing “crude theory” with “ignorant rejection,” he doesn’t just criticize both camps; he makes them morally symmetrical. One side is simplistic, the other proudly anti-intellectual. Either way, the result is the same: an “unjustified” confidence that blocks understanding.

The specific intent is disciplinary as much as it is cultural. Ellis is staking a claim for sexology as a legitimate science in a period when Victorian propriety was cracking, medicine was professionalizing, and Freud’s ideas were beginning to circulate. He’s telling readers: you can’t keep pretending sexuality is either a mechanical urge or an unspeakable void. If you want policy, ethics, education, even personal sanity, you need frameworks that can tolerate complexity.

The subtext is also a strategic defense against backlash. Ellis is not arguing for licentiousness; he’s arguing for method. “At the present day” signals a turning point, a modernizing moment when the old reflexes are losing their authority. The sentence works because it’s diagnostic without being lurid: it reframes sexual discourse as an epistemic problem - how we know - and quietly suggests that the real scandal is intellectual laziness masquerading as virtue.