Although seduction as an applied art has been slowly developing over a period of several generations, the science of seduction has so far been largely neglected. While the value of the empirical knowledge acquired by early practitioners and transmitted to us by a great body of folk-lore should not be minimized, the trial and error methods of these precursors, both amateur and professional, are to be deplored as crude; for however refined they may have been in application, there is evidence that they were lacking in that exactness in observation which could make them valuable to science.
Only a very few though hardy pioneers have in the past, recognized the necessity for organizing man’s empirical knowledge of this vast subject on a rational basis, and it is due to their unselfish labours alone that we now have a sufficient body of observed phenomena, a sufficient accumulation of data, to make possible the beginnings of a true science of seduction. It is the purpose of this book, to co-ordinate the efforts of these for the most part anonymous and forgotten contributors, these modest, silent benefactors, and to attempt a proper classification within the subject: to adumbrate such practical methods of procedure as may in the, let us hope, near future develop into a sure technique. Owing to the limitations of space and the present confused state of the subject, it is of necessity only possible here to indicate the lines which such a development must follow. It is my desire to confine this work to a purely practical consideration of the subject, and to make it a handbook in the hope that my students and those who come after me will be the better able to add to the body of our observed knowledge of seduction and to indicate the more clearly for my shortcomings along what lines improvement is required.
