positive morality for the merely negative and timid morality which has
ruled in this sphere.

Perhaps there are not many adults who realize the intense and secret
absorption of thought in the minds of many boys and some girls concerning
the problem of the physical conformation of the other sex, and the time,
patience, and intellectual energy which they are willing to expend on the
solution of this problem. This is mostly effected in secret, but not
seldom the secret impulse manifests itself with a sudden violence which in
the blind eyes of the law is reckoned as crime. A German lawyer, Dr.
Werthauer, has lately stated that if there were a due degree of
familiarity with the natural organs and functions of the opposite sex
ninety per cent. of the indecent acts of youths with girl children would
disappear, for in most cases these are not assaults but merely the
innocent, though uncontrollable, outcome of a repressed natural curiosity.
It is quite true that not a few children boldly enlist each others'
cooeperation in the settlement of the question and resolve it to their
mutual satisfaction. But even this is not altogether satisfactory, for the
end is not attained openly and wholesomely, with a due subordination of
the specifically sexual, but with a consciousness of wrong-doing and an
exclusive attentiveness to the merely physical fact which tend directly to
develop sexual excitement. When familiarity with the naked body of the
other sex is gained openly and with no consciousness of indecorum, in the
course of work and of play, in exercise or gymnastics, in running or in
bathing, from a child's earliest years, no unwholesome results accompany
the knowledge of the essential facts of physical conformation thus
naturally acquired. The prurience and prudery which have poisoned sexual
life in the past are alike rendered impossible.

Nakedness has, however, a hygienic value, as well as a spiritual
significance, far beyond its influences in allaying the natural
inquisitiveness of the young or acting as a preventative of morbid
emotion. It is an inspiration to adults who have long outgrown any
youthful curiosities. The vision of the essential and eternal human form,
the nearest thing to us in all the world, with its vigor and its beauty
and its grace, is one of the prime tonics of life. "The power of a woman's
body," said James Hinton, "is no more bodily than the power of music is a
power of atmospheric vibrations." It is more than all the beautiful and
stimulating things of the world, than flowers or stars or the sea. History
and legend and myth reveal to us the sacred and awful influence of
nakedness, for, as Stanley Hall says, nakedness has always been "a
talisman of wondrous power with gods and men." How sorely men crave for
the spectacle of the human body--even to-day after generations have
inculcated the notion that it is an indecorous and even disgusting
spectacle--is witnessed by the eagerness with which they seek after the
spectacle of even its imperfect and meretricious forms, although these
certainly possess a heady and stimulating quality which can never be found
in the pathetic simplicity of naked beauty. It was another spectacle when
the queens of ancient Madagascar at the annual Fandroon, or feast of the
bath, laid aside their royal robes and while their subjects crowded the
palace courtyard, descended the marble steps to the bath in complete
nakedness. When we make our conventions of clothing rigid we at once
spread a feast for lust and deny ourselves one of the prime tonics of
life.

"I was feeling in despair and walking despondently along a
Melbourne street," writes the Australian author of a yet
unpublished autobiography, "when three children came running out
of a lane and crossed the road in full daylight. The beauty and
texture of their legs in the open air filled me with joy, so that
I forgot all my troubles whilst looking at them. It was a bright
revelation, an unexpected glimpse of Paradise, and I have never
ceased to thank the happy combination of shape, pure blood, and
fine skin of these poverty-stricken children, for the wind seemed
to quicken their golden beauty, and I retained the rosy vision of
their natural young limbs, so much more divine than those always
under cover. Another occasion when naked young limbs made me
forget all my gloom and despondency was on my first visit to
Adelaide. I came on a naked boy leaning on the railing near the
Baths, and the beauty of his face, torso, fair young limbs and
exquisite feet filled me with joy and renewed hope. The tears
came to my eyes, and I said to myself, 'While there is beauty in
the world I will continue to struggle,'"

We must, as Boelsche declares (loc. cit.), accustom ourselves to
gaze on the naked human body exactly as we gaze at a beautiful
flower, not merely with the pity with which the doctor looks at
the body, but with joy in its strength and health and beauty. For
a flower, as Boelsche truly adds, is not merely "naked body," it
is the most sacred region of the body, the sexual organs of the
plant.

"For girls to dance naked," said Hinton, "is the only truly pure
form of dancing, and in due time it must therefore come about.
This is certain: girls will dance naked and men will be pure
enough to gaze on them." It has already been so in Greece, he
elsewhere remarks, as it is to-day in Japan (as more recently
described by Stratz). It is nearly forty years since these
prophetic words were written, but Hinton himself would probably
have been surprised at the progress which has already been made
slowly (for all true progress must be slow) towards this goal.
Even on the stage new and more natural traditions are beginning
to prevail in Europe. It is not many years since an English
actress regarded as a calumny the statement that she appeared on
the stage bare-foot, and brought an action for libel, winning
substantial damages. Such a result would scarcely be possible
to-day. The movement in which Isadora Duncan was a pioneer has
led to a partial disuse among dancers of the offensive device of
tights, and it is no longer considered indecorous to show many
parts of the body which it was formerly usual to cover.

It should, however, be added at the same time that, while
dancers, in so far as they are genuine artists, are entitled to
determine the conditions most favorable to their art, nothing
whatever is gained for the cause of a wholesome culture of
nakedness by the "living statues" and "living pictures" which
have obtained an international vogue during recent years. These
may be legitimate as variety performances, but they have nothing
whatever to do with either Nature or art. Dr. Pudor, writing as
one of the earliest apostles of the culture of nakedness, has
energetically protested against these performances
(_Sexual-Probleme_, Dec., 1908, p. 828). He rightly points out
that nakedness, to be wholesome, requires the open air, the
meadows, the sunlight, and that nakedness at night, in a music
hall, by artificial light, in the presence of spectators who are
themselves clothed, has no element of morality about it. Attempts
have here and there been quietly made to cultivate a certain
amount of mutual nakedness as between the sexes on remote country
excursions. It is significant to find a record of such an
experiment in Ungewitter's _Die Nacktheit_. In this case a party
of people, men and women, would regularly every Sunday seek
remote spots in woods or meadows where they would settle down,
picnic, and enjoy games. "They made themselves as comfortable as
possible, the men laying aside their coats, waistcoats, boots and
socks; the women their blouses, skirts, shoes and stockings.
Gradually, as the moral conception of nakedness developed in
their minds, more and more clothing fell away, until the men wore
nothing but bathing-drawers and the women only their chemises. In
this 'costume' games were carried out in common, and a regular
camp-life led. The ladies (some of whom were unmarried) would
then lie in hammocks and we men on the grass, and the intercourse
was delightful. We felt as members of one family, and behaved
accordingly. In an entirely natural and unembarrassed way we gave
ourselves up entirely to the liberating feelings aroused by this
light- and air-bath, and passed these splendid hours in joyous
singing and dancing, in wantonly childish fashion, freed from the
burden of a false civilization. It was, of course, necessary to
seek spots as remote as possible from high-roads, for fear of
being disturbed. At the same time we by no means failed in
natural modesty and consideration towards one another. Children,
who can be entirely naked, may be allowed to take part in such
meetings of adults, and will thus be brought up free from morbid
prudery" (R. Ungewitter, _Die Nacktheit_, p. 58).

No doubt it may be said that the ideal in this matter is the
possibility of permitting complete nakedness. This may be
admitted, and it is undoubtedly true that our rigid police
regulations do much to artificially foster a concealment in this
matter which is not based on any natural instinct. Dr. Shufeldt
narrates in his _Studies of the Human Form_ that once in the
course of a photographic expedition in the woods he came upon two
boys, naked except for bathing-drawers, engaged in getting water
lilies from a pond. He found them a good subject for his camera,
but they could not be induced to remove their drawers, by no
means out of either modesty or mock-modesty, but simply because
they feared they might possibly be caught and arrested. We have
to recognize that at the present day the general popular
sentiment is not yet sufficiently educated to allow of public
disregard for the convention of covering the sexual centres, and
all attempts to extend the bounds of nakedness must show a due
regard for this requirement. As concerns women, Valentin Lehr, of
Freiburg, in Breisgau, has invented a costume (figured in
Ungewitter's _Die Nacktheit_) which is suitable for either public
water-baths or air-baths, because it meets the demand of those
whose minimum requirement is that the chief sexual centres of the
body should be covered in public, while it is otherwise fairly
unobjectionable. It consists of two pieces, made of porous
material, one covering the breasts with a band over the
shoulders, and the other covering the abdomen below the navel and
drawn between the legs. This minimal costume, while neither ideal
nor aesthetic, adequately covers the sexual regions of the body,
while leaving the arms, waist, hips, and legs entirely free.

There finally remains the moral aspect of nakedness. Although this has
been emphasized by many during the past half century it is still
unfamiliar to the majority. The human body can never be a little thing.
The wise educator may see to it that boys and girls are brought up in a
natural and wholesome familiarity with each other, but a certain terror
and beauty must always attach to the spectacle of the body, a mixed
attraction and repulsion. Because it has this force it naturally calls out
the virtue of those who take part in the spectacle, and makes impossible
any soft compliance to emotion. Even if we admit that the spectacle of
nakedness is a challenge to passion it is still a challenge that calls
out the ennobling qualities of self-control. It is but a poor sort of
virtue that lies in fleeing into the desert from things that we fear may
have in them a temptation. We have to learn that it is even worse to
attempt to create a desert around us in the midst of civilization. We
cannot dispense with passions if we would; reason, as Holbach said, is the
art of choosing the right passions, and education the art of sowing and
cultivating them in human hearts. The spectacle of nakedness has its moral
value in teaching us to learn to enjoy what we do not possess, a lesson
which is an essential part of the training for any kind of fine social
life. The child has to learn to look at flowers and not pluck them; the
man has to learn to look at a woman's beauty and not desire to possess it.
The joyous conquest over that "erotic kleptomania," as Ellen Key has well
said, reveals the blossoming of a fine civilization. We fancy the conquest
is difficult, even impossibly difficult. But it is not so. This impulse,
like other human impulses, tends under natural conditions to develop
temperately and wholesomely. We artificially press a stupid and brutal
hand on it, and it is driven into the two unnatural extremes of repression
and license, one extreme as foul as the other.

To those who have been bred under bad conditions, it may indeed seem
hopeless to attempt to rise to the level of the Greeks and the other finer
tempered peoples of antiquity in realizing the moral, as well as the
pedagogic, hygienic, and aesthetic advantages[44] of admitting into life
the spectacle of the naked human body. But unless we do we hopelessly
fetter ourselves in our march along the road of civilization, we deprive
ourselves at once of a source of moral strength and of joyous inspiration.
Just as Wesley once asked why the devil should have all the best tunes, so
to-day men are beginning to ask why the human body, the most divine melody
at its finest moments that creation has yielded, should be allowed to
become the perquisite of those who lust for the obscene. And some are,
further, convinced that by enlisting it on the side of purity and strength
they are raising the most powerful of all bulwarks against the invasion of
a vicious conception of life and the consequent degradation of sex. These
are considerations which we cannot longer afford to neglect, however great
the opposition they arouse among the unthinking.

"Folk are afraid of such things rousing the passions," Edward
Carpenter remarks. "No doubt the things may act that way. But
why, we may ask, should people be afraid of rousing passions
which, after all, are the great driving forces of human life?" It
is true, the same writer continues, our conventional moral
formulae are no longer strong enough to control passion
adequately, and that we are generating steam in a boiler that is
cankered with rust. "The cure is not to cut off the passions, or
to be weakly afraid of them, but to find a new, sound, healthy
engine of general morality and common sense within which they
will work" (Edward Carpenter, _Albany Review_, Sept., 1907).

So far as I am aware, however, it was James Hinton who chiefly
sought to make clear the possibility of a positive morality on
the basis of nakedness, beauty, and sexual influence, regarded as
dynamic forces which, when suppressed, make for corruption and
when wisely used serve to inspire and ennoble life. He worked out
his thoughts on this matter in MSS., written from about 1870 to
his death two years later, which, never having been prepared for
publication, remain in a fragmentary state and have not been
published. I quote a few brief characteristic passages: "Is not,"
he wrote, "the Hindu refusal to see a woman eating strangely like
ours to see one naked? The real sensuality of the thought is
visibly identical.... Suppose, because they are delicious to eat,
pineapples were forbidden to be seen, except in pictures, and
about that there was something dubious. Suppose no one might have
sight of a pineapple unless he were rich enough to purchase one
for his particular eating, the sight and the eating being so
indissolubly joined. What lustfulness would surround them, what
constant pruriency, what stealing!... Miss ---- told us of her
Syrian adventures, and how she went into a wood-carver's shop and
he would not look at her; and how she took up a tool and worked,
till at last he looked, and they both burst out laughing. Will it
not be even so with our looking at women altogether? There will
come a _work_--and at last we shall look up and both burst out
laughing.... When men see truly what is amiss, and act with
reason and forethought in respect to the sexual relations, will
they not insist on the enjoyment of women's beauty by youths, and
from the earliest age, that the first feeling may be of beauty?
Will they not say, 'We must not allow the false purity, we must
have the true.' The false has been tried, and it is not good
enough; the power purely to enjoy beauty must be gained;
attempting to do with less is fatal. Every instructor of youth
shall say: 'This beauty of woman, God's chief work of beauty, it
is good you see it; it is a pleasure that serves good; all beauty
serves it, and above all this, for its office is to make you
pure. Come to it as you come to daily bread, or pure air, or the
cleansing bath: this is pure to you if you be pure, it will aid
you in your effort to be so. But if any of you are impure, and
make of it the feeder of impurity, then you should be ashamed and
pray; it is not for you our life can be ordered; it is for men
and not for beasts.' This must come when men open their eyes, and
act coolly and with reason and forethought, and not in mere panic
in respect to the sexual passion in its moral relations."


FOOTNOTES:

[40] Thus Athenaeus (Bk. xiii, Ch. XX) says: "In the Island of Chios it is
a beautiful sight to go to the gymnasia and the race-courses, and to see
the young men wrestling naked with the maidens who are also naked."

[41] Augustine (_De civitate Dei_, lib. ii, cap. XIII) refers to the same
point, contrasting the Romans with the Greeks who honored their actors.

[42] See "The Evolution of Modesty" in the first volume of these
_Studies_, where this question of the relationship of nakedness to modesty
is fully discussed.

[43] C.H. Stratz, _Die Koerperformen in Kunst und Leben der Japaner_,
Second edition, Ch. III; id., _Frauenkleidung_, Third edition, pp. 22, 30.

[44] I have not considered it in place here to emphasize the aesthetic
influence of familiarity with nakedness. The most aesthetic nations
(notably the Greeks and the Japanese) have been those that preserved a
certain degree of familiarity with the naked body. "In all arts,"
Maeterlinck remarks, "civilized peoples have approached or departed from
pure beauty according as they approached or departed from the habit of
nakedness." Ungewitter insists on the advantage to the artist of being
able to study the naked body in movement, and it may be worth mentioning
that Fidus (Hugo Hoeppener), the German artist of to-day who has exerted
great influence by his fresh, powerful and yet reverent delineation of the
naked human form in all its varying aspects, attributes his inspiration
and vision to the fact that, as a pupil of Diefenbach, he was accustomed
with his companions to work naked in the solitudes outside Munich which
they frequented (F. Enzensberger, "Fidus," _Deutsche Kultur_, Aug., 1906).




CHAPTER IV.

THE VALUATION OF SEXUAL LOVE.

The Conception of Sexual Love--The Attitude of Mediaeval Asceticism--St.
Bernard and St. Odo of Cluny--The Ascetic Insistence on the Proximity of
the Sexual and Excretory Centres--Love as a Sacrament of Nature--The Idea
of the Impurity of Sex in Primitive Religions Generally--Theories of the
Origin of This Idea--The Anti-Ascetic Element in the Bible and Early
Christianity--Clement of Alexandria--St. Augustine's Attitude--The
Recognition of the Sacredness of the Body by Tertullian, Rufinus and
Athanasius--The Reformation--The Sexual Instinct regarded as Beastly--The
Human Sexual Instinct Not Animal-like--Lust and Love--The Definition of
Love--Love and Names for Love Unknown in Some Parts of the World--Romantic
Love of Late Development in the White Race--The Mystery of Sexual
Desire--Whether Love is a Delusion--The Spiritual as Well as the Physical
Structure of the World in Part Built up on Sexual Love--The Testimony of
Men of Intellect to the Supremacy of Love.


It will be seen that the preceding discussion of nakedness has a
significance beyond what it appeared to possess at the outset. The
hygienic value, physically and mentally, of familiarity with nakedness
during the early years of life, however considerable it may be, is not the
only value which such familiarity possesses. Beyond its aesthetic value,
also, there lies in it a moral value, a source of dynamic energy. And now,
taking a still further step, we may say that it has a spiritual value in
relation to our whole conception of the sexual impulse. Our attitude
towards the naked human body is the test of our attitude towards the
instinct of sex. If our own and our fellows' bodies seem to us
intrinsically shameful or disgusting, nothing will ever really ennoble or
purify our conceptions of sexual love. Love craves the flesh, and if the
flesh is shameful the lover must be shameful. "Se la cosa amata e vile,"
as Leonardo da Vinci profoundly said, "l'amante se fa vile." However
illogical it may have been, there really was a justification for the old
Christian identification of the flesh with the sexual instinct. They stand
or fall together; we cannot degrade the one and exalt the other. As our
feelings towards nakedness are, so will be our feelings towards love.

"Man is nothing else than fetid sperm, a sack of dung, the food of
worms.... You have never seen a viler dung-hill." Such was the outcome of
St. Bernard's cloistered _Meditationes Piissimae_.[45] Sometimes, indeed,
these mediaeval monks would admit that the skin possessed a certain
superficial beauty, but they only made that admission in order to
emphasize the hideousness of the body when deprived of this film of
loveliness, and strained all their perverse intellectual acumen, and their
ferocious irony, as they eagerly pointed the finger of mockery at every
detail of what seemed to them the pitiful figure of man. St. Odo of
Cluny--charming saint as he was and a pioneer in his appreciation of the
wild beauty of the Alps he had often traversed--was yet an adept in this
art of reviling the beauty of the human body. That beauty only lies in the
skin, he insists; if we could see beneath the skin women would arouse
nothing but nausea. Their adornments are but blood and mucus and bile. If
we refuse to touch dung and phlegm even with a fingertip, how can we
desire to embrace a sack of dung?[46] The mediaeval monks of the more
contemplative order, indeed, often found here a delectable field of
meditation, and the Christian world generally was content to accept their
opinions in more or less diluted versions, or at all events never made any
definite protest against them.

Even men of science accepted these conceptions and are, indeed, only now
beginning to emancipate themselves from such ancient superstitions. R. de
Graef in the Preface to his famous treatise on the generative organs of
women, _De Mulierum Organis Generatione Inservientibus_, dedicated to
Cosmo III de Medici in 1672, considered it necessary to apologize for the
subject of his work. Even a century later, Linnaeus in his great work, _The
System of Nature_, dismissed as "abominable" the exact study of the female
genitals, although he admitted the scientific interest of such
investigations. And if men of science have found it difficult to attain an
objective vision of women we cannot be surprised that medieval and still
more ancient conceptions have often been subtly mingled with the views of
philosophical and semi-philosophical writers.[47]

We may regard as a special variety of the ascetic view of sex,--for the
ascetics, as we see, freely but not quite legitimately, based their
asceticism largely on aesthetic considerations,--that insistence on the
proximity of the sexual to the excretory centres which found expression in
the early Church in Augustine's depreciatory assertion: "Inter faeces et
urinam nascimur," and still persists among many who by no means always
associate it with religious asceticism.[48] "As a result of what
ridiculous economy, and of what Mephistophilian irony," asks Tarde,[49]
"has Nature imagined that a function so lofty, so worthy of the poetic and
philosophical hymns which have celebrated it, only deserved to have its
exclusive organ shared with that of the vilest corporal functions?"

It may, however, be pointed out that this view of the matter, however
unconsciously, is itself the outcome of the ascetic depreciation of the
body. From a scientific point of view, the metabolic processes of the
body from one end to the other, whether regarded chemically or
psychologically, are all interwoven and all of equal dignity. We cannot
separate out any particular chemical or biological process and declare:
This is vile. Even what we call excrement still stores up the stuff of our
lives. Eating has to some persons seemed a disgusting process. But yet it
has been possible to say, with Thoreau, that "the gods have really
intended that men should feed divinely, as themselves, on their own nectar
and ambrosia.... I have felt that eating became a sacrament, a method of
communion, an ecstatic exercise, and a sitting at the communion table of
the world."

The sacraments of Nature are in this way everywhere woven into the texture
of men's and women's bodies. Lips good to kiss with are indeed first of
all chiefly good to eat and drink with. So accumulated and overlapped have
the centres of force become in the long course of development, that the
mucous membranes of the natural orifices, through the sensitiveness gained
in their own offices, all become agents to thrill the soul in the contact
of love; it is idle to discriminate high or low, pure or impure; all alike
are sanctified already by the extreme unction of Nature. The nose receives
the breath of life; the vagina receives the water of life. Ultimately the
worth and loveliness of life must be measured by the worth and loveliness
for us of the instruments of life. The swelling breasts are such divinely
gracious insignia of womanhood because of the potential child that hangs
at them and sucks; the large curves of the hips are so voluptuous because
of the potential child they clasp within them; there can be no division
here, we cannot cut the roots from the tree. The supreme function of
manhood--the handing on of the lamp of life to future races--is carried
on, it is true, by the same instrument that is the daily conduit of the
bladder. It has been said in scorn that we are born between urine and
excrement; it may be said, in reverence, that the passage through this
channel of birth is a sacrament of Nature's more sacred and significant
than men could ever invent.

These relationships have been sometimes perceived and their meaning
realized by a sort of mystical intuition. We catch glimpses of such an
insight now and again, first among the poets and later among the
physicians of the Renaissance. In 1664 Rolfincius, in his _Ordo et Methods
Generationi Partium etc._, at the outset of the second Part devoted to the
sexual organs of women, sets forth what ancient writers have said of the
Eleusinian and other mysteries and the devotion and purity demanded of
those who approached these sacred rites. It is so also with us, he
continues, in the rites of scientific investigation. "We also operate with
sacred things. The organs of sex are to be held among sacred things. They
who approach these altars must come with devout minds. Let the profane
stand without, and the doors be closed." In those days, even for science,
faith and intuition were alone possible. It is only of recent years that
the histologist's microscope and the physiological chemist's test-tube
have furnished them with a rational basis. It is no longer possible to cut
Nature in two and assert that here she is pure and there impure.[50]

There thus appears to be no adequate ground for agreeing with
those who consider that the proximity of the generative and
excretory centres is "a stupid bungle of Nature's." An
association which is so ancient and primitive in Nature can only
seem repulsive to those whose feelings have become morbidly
unnatural. It may further be remarked that the anus, which is the
more aesthetically unattractive of the excretory centres, is
comparatively remote from the sexual centre, and that, as R.
Hellmann remarked many years ago in discussing this question
(_Ueber Geschlechtsfreiheit_, p. 82): "In the first place,
freshly voided urine has nothing specially unpleasant about it,
and in the second place, even if it had, we might reflect that a
rosy mouth by no means loses its charm merely because it fails to
invite a kiss at the moment when its possessor is vomiting."

A clergyman writes suggesting that we may go further and find a
positive advantage in this proximity: "I am glad that you do not
agree with the man who considered that Nature had bungled by
using the genitals for urinary purposes; apart from teleological
or theological grounds I could not follow that line of reasoning.
I think there is no need for disgust concerning the urinary
organs, though I feel that the anus can never be attractive to
the normal mind; but the anus is quite separate from the
genitals. I would suggest that the proximity serves a good end in
making the organs more or less secret except at times of sexual
emotion or to those in love. The result is some degree of
repulsion at ordinary times and a strong attraction at times of
sexual activity. Hence, the ordinary guarding of the parts, from
fear of creating disgust, greatly increases their attractiveness
at other times when sexual emotion is paramount. Further, the
feeling of disgust itself is merely the result of habit and
sentiment, however useful it may be, and according to Scripture
everything is clean and good. The ascetic feeling of repulsion,
if we go back to origin, is due to other than Christian
influence. Christianity came out of Judaism which had no sense of
the impurity of marriage, for 'unclean' in the Old Testament
simply means 'sacred.' The ascetic side of the religion of
Christianity is no part of the religion of Christ as it came from
the hands of its Founder, and the modern feeling on this matter
is a lingering remnant of the heresy of the Manichaeans." I may
add, however, that, as Northcote points out (_Christianity and
Sex Problems_, p. 14), side by side in the Old Testament with the
frank recognition of sexuality, there is a circle of ideas
revealing the feeling of impurity in sex and of shame in
connection with it. Christianity inherited this mixed feeling. It
has really been a widespread and almost universal feeling among
the ancient and primitive peoples that there is something impure
and sinful in the things of sex, so that those who would lead a
religious life must avoid sexual relationships; even in India
celibacy has commanded respect (see, e.g., Westermarck,
_Marriage_, pp. 150 et seq.). As to the original foundation of
this notion--which it is unnecessary to discuss more fully
here--many theories have been put forward; St. Augustine, in his
_De Civitate Dei_, sets forth the ingenious idea that the penis,
being liable to spontaneous movements and erections that are not
under the control of the will, is a shameful organ and involves
the whole sphere of sex in its shame. Westermarck argues that
among nearly all peoples there is a feeling against sexual
relationship with members of the same family or household, and as
sex was thus banished from the sphere of domestic life a notion
of its general impurity arose; Northcote points out that from the
first it has been necessary to seek concealment for sexual
intercourse, because at that moment the couple would be a prey to
hostile attacks, and that it was by an easy transition that sex
came to be regarded as a thing that ought to be concealed, and,
therefore, a sinful thing. (Diderot, in his _Supplement au Voyage
de Bougainville_, had already referred to this motive for
seclusion as "the only natural element in modesty.") Crawley has
devoted a large part of his suggestive work, _The Mystic Rose_,
to showing that, to savage man, sex is a perilous, dangerous, and
enfeebling element in life, and, therefore, sinful.

It would, however, be a mistake to think that such men as St. Bernard and
St. Odo of Cluny, admirably as they represented the ascetic and even the
general Christian views of their own time, are to be regarded as
altogether typical exponents of the genuine and primitive Christian view.
So far as I have been able to discover, during the first thousand years of
Christianity we do not find this concentrated intellectual and emotional
ferocity of attack on the body; it only developed at the moment when, with
Pope Gregory VII, mediaeval Christianity reached the climax of its conquest
over the souls of European men, in the establishment of the celibacy of
the secular clergy, and the growth of the great cloistered communities of
monks in severely regulated and secluded orders.[51] Before that the
teachers of asceticism were more concerned to exhort to chastity and
modesty than to direct a deliberate and systematic attack on the whole
body; they concentrated their attention rather on spiritual virtues than
on physical imperfections. And if we go back to the Gospels we find little
of the mediaeval ascetic spirit in the reported sayings and doings of
Jesus, which may rather indeed be said to reveal, on the whole,
notwithstanding their underlying asceticism, a certain tenderness and
indulgence to the body, while even Paul, though not tender towards the
body, exhorts to reverence towards it as a temple of the Holy Spirit.

We cannot expect to find the Fathers of the Church sympathetic towards the
spectacle of the naked human body, for their position was based on a
revolt against paganism, and paganism had cultivated the body. Nakedness
had been more especially associated with the public bath, the gymnasium,
and the theatre; in profoundly disapproving of these pagan institutions
Christianity discouraged nakedness. The fact that familiarity with
nakedness was favorable, rather than opposed, to the chastity to which it
attached so much importance, the Church--though indeed at one moment it
accepted nakedness in the rite of baptism--was for the most part unable to
see if it was indeed a fact which the special conditions of decadent
classic life had tended to disguise. But in their decided preference for
the dressed over the naked human body the early Christians frequently
hesitated to take the further step of asserting that the body is a focus
of impurity and that the physical organs of sex are a device of the devil.
On the contrary, indeed, some of the most distinguished of the Fathers,
especially those of the Eastern Church who had felt the vivifying breath
of Greek thought, occasionally expressed themselves on the subject of
Nature, sex, and the body in a spirit which would have won the approval of
Goethe or Whitman.

Clement of Alexandria, with all the eccentricities of his over-subtle
intellect, was yet the most genuinely Greek of all the Fathers, and it is
not surprising that the dying ray of classic light reflected from his mind
shed some illumination over this question of sex. He protested, for
instance, against that prudery which, as the sun of the classic world set,
had begun to overshadow life. "We should not be ashamed to name," he
declared, "what God has not been ashamed to create."[52] It was a
memorable declaration because, while it accepted the old classic feeling
of no shame in the presence of nature, it put that feeling on a new and
religious basis harmonious to Christianity. Throughout, though not always
quite consistently, Clement defends the body and the functions of sex
against those who treated them with contempt. And as the cause of sex is
the cause of women he always strongly asserts the dignity of women, and
also proclaims the holiness of marriage, a state which he sometimes places
above that of virginity.[53]

Unfortunately, it must be said, St. Augustine--another North African, but
of Roman Carthage and not of Greek Alexandria--thought that he had a
convincing answer to the kind of argument which Clement presented, and so
great was the force of his passionate and potent genius that he was able
in the end to make his answer prevail. For Augustine sin was hereditary,
and sin had its special seat and symbol in the sexual organs; the fact of
sin has modified the original divine act of creation, and we cannot treat
sex and its organs as though there had been no inherited sin. Our sexual
organs, he declares, have become shameful because, through sin, they are
now moved by lust. At the same time Augustine by no means takes up the
mediaeval ascetic position of contemptuous hatred towards the body. Nothing
can be further from Odo of Cluny than Augustine's enthusiasm about the
body, even about the exquisite harmony of the parts beneath the skin. "I
believe it may be concluded," he even says, "that in the creation of the
human body beauty was more regarded than necessity. In truth, necessity is
a transitory thing, and the time is coming when we shall be able to enjoy
one another's beauty without any lust."[54] Even in the sphere of sex he
would be willing to admit purity and beauty, apart from the inherited
influence of Adam's sin. In Paradise, he says, had Paradise continued, the
act of generation would have been as simple and free from shame as the act
of the hand in scattering seed on to the earth. "Sexual conjugation would
have been under the control of the will without any sexual desire. The
semen would be injected into the vagina in as simple a manner as the
menstrual fluid is now ejected. There would not have been any words which
could be called obscene, but all that might be said of these members would
have been as pure as what is said of the other parts of the body."[55]
That, however, for Augustine, is what might have been in Paradise where,
as he believed, sexual desire had no existence. As things are, he held, we
are right to be ashamed, we do well to blush. And it was natural that, as
Clement of Alexandria mentions, many heretics should have gone further on
this road and believed that while God made man down to the navel, the rest
was made by another power; such heretics have their descendants among us
even to-day.

Alike in the Eastern and Western Churches, however, both before and after
Augustine, though not so often after, great Fathers and teachers have
uttered opinions which recall those of Clement rather than of Augustine.
We cannot lay very much weight on the utterance of the extravagant and
often contradictory Tertullian, but it is worth noting that, while he
declared that woman is the gate of hell, he also said that we must
approach Nature with reverence and not with blushes. "Natura veneranda
est, non erubescenda." "No Christian author," it has indeed been said,
"has so energetically spoken against the heretical contempt of the body as
Tertullian. Soul and body, according to Tertullian, are in the closest
association. The soul is the life-principle of the body, but there is no
activity of the soul which is not manifested and conditioned by the
flesh."[56] More weight attaches to Rufinus Tyrannius, the friend and
fellow-student of St. Jerome, in the fourth century, who wrote a
commentary on the Apostles' Creed, which was greatly esteemed by the early
and mediaeval Church, and is indeed still valued even to-day. Here, in
answer to those who declared that there was obscenity in the fact of
Christ's birth through the sexual organs of a woman, Rufinus replies that
God created the sexual organs, and that "it is not Nature but merely human
opinion which teaches that these parts are obscene. For the rest, all the
parts of the body are made from the same clay, whatever differences there
may be in their uses and functions."[57] He looks at the matter, we see,
piously indeed, but naturally and simply, like Clement, and not, like
Augustine, through the distorting medium of a theological system.
Athanasius, in the Eastern Church, spoke in the same sense as Rufinus in
the Western Church. A certain monk named Amun had been much grieved by the
occurrence of seminal emissions during sleep, and he wrote to Athanasius
to inquire if such emissions are a sin. In the letter he wrote in reply,
Athanasius seeks to reassure Amun. "All things," he tells him, "are pure
to the pure. For what, I ask, dear and pious friend, can there be sinful
or naturally impure in excrement? Man is the handwork of God. There is
certainly nothing in us that is impure."[58] We feel as we read these
utterances that the seeds of prudery and pruriency are already alive in
the popular mind, but yet we see also that some of the most distinguished
thinkers of the early Christian Church, in striking contrast to the more
morbid and narrow-minded mediaeval ascetics, clearly stood aside from the
popular movement. On the whole, they were submerged because Christianity,
like Buddhism, had in it from the first a germ that lent itself to ascetic
renunciation, and the sexual life is always the first impulse to be
sacrificed to the passion for renunciation. But there were other germs
also in Christianity, and Luther, who in his own plebeian way asserted the
rights of the body, although he broke with mediaeval asceticism, by no
means thereby cast himself off from the traditions of the early Christian
Church.

I have thought it worth while to bring forward this evidence, although I
am perfectly well aware that the facts of Nature gain no additional
support from the authority of the Fathers or even of the Bible. Nature and
humanity existed before the Bible and would continue to exist although the
Bible should be forgotten. But the attitude of Christianity on this point
has so often been unreservedly condemned that it seems as well to point
out that at its finest moments, when it was a young and growing power in
the world, the utterances of Christianity were often at one with those of
Nature and reason. There are many, it may be added, who find it a matter
of consolation that in following the natural and rational path in this
matter they are not thereby altogether breaking with the religious
traditions of their race.

It is scarcely necessary to remark that when we turn from
Christianity to the other great world-religions, we do not
usually meet with so ambiguous an attitude towards sex. The
Mahommedans were as emphatic in asserting the sanctity of sex as
they were in asserting physical cleanliness; they were prepared
to carry the functions of sex into the future life, and were
never worried, as Luther and so many other Christians have been,
concerning the lack of occupation in Heaven. In India, although
India is the home of the most extreme forms of religious
asceticism, sexual love has been sanctified and divinized to a
greater extent than in any other part of the world. "It seems
never to have entered into the heads of the Hindu legislators,"
said Sir William Jones long since (_Works_, vol. ii, p. 311),
"that anything natural could be offensively obscene, a
singularity which pervades all their writings, but is no proof of
the depravity of their morals." The sexual act has often had a
religious significance in India, and the minutest details of the
sexual life and its variations are discussed in Indian erotic
treatises in a spirit of gravity, while nowhere else have the
anatomical and physiological sexual characters of women been
studied with such minute and adoring reverence. "Love in India,
both as regards theory and practice," remarks Richard Schmidt
(_Beitraege zur Indischen Erotik_, p. 2) "possesses an importance
which it is impossible for us even to conceive."

In Protestant countries the influence of the Reformation, by
rehabilitating sex as natural, indirectly tended to substitute in popular
feeling towards sex the opprobrium of sinfulness by the opprobrium of
animality. Henceforth the sexual impulse must be disguised or adorned to
become respectably human. This may be illustrated by a passage in Pepys's
_Diary_ in the seventeenth century. On the morning after the wedding day
it was customary to call up new married couples by music; the absence of
this music on one occasion (in 1667) seemed to Pepys "as if they had
married like dog and bitch." We no longer insist on the music, but the
same feeling still exists in the craving for other disguises and
adornments for the sexual impulse. We do not always realize that love
brings its own sanctity with it.

Nowadays indeed, whenever the repugnance to the sexual side of life
manifests itself, the assertion nearly always made is not so much that it
is "sinful" as that it is "beastly." It is regarded as that part of man
which most closely allies him to the lower animals. It should scarcely be
necessary to point out that this is a mistake. On whichever side, indeed,
we approach it, the implication that sex in man and animals is identical
cannot be borne out. From the point of view of those who accept this
identity it would be much more correct to say that men are inferior,
rather than on a level with animals, for in animals under natural
conditions the sexual instinct is strictly subordinated to reproduction
and very little susceptible to deviation, so that from the standpoint of
those who wish to minimize sex, animals are nearer to the ideal, and such
persons must say with Woods Hutchinson: "Take it altogether, our animal
ancestors have quite as good reason to be ashamed of us as we of them."
But if we look at the matter from a wider biological standpoint of
development, our conclusion must be very different.

So far from being animal-like, the human impulses of sex are among the
least animal-like acquisitions of man. The human sphere of sex differs
from the animal sphere of sex to a singularly great extent.[59] Breathing
is an animal function and here we cannot compete with birds; locomotion is
an animal function and here we cannot equal quadrupeds; we have made no
notable advance in our circulatory, digestive, renal, or hepatic
functions. Even as regards vision and hearing, there are many animals that
are more keen-sighted than man, and many that are capable of hearing
sounds that to him are inaudible. But there are no animals in whom the
sexual instinct is so sensitive, so highly developed, so varied in its
manifestations, so constantly alert, so capable of irradiating the highest
and remotest parts of the organism. The sexual activities of man and woman
belong not to that lower part of our nature which degrades us to the level
of the "brute," but to the higher part which raises us towards all the
finest activities and ideals we are capable of. It is true that it is
chiefly in the mouths of a few ignorant and ill-bred women that we find
sex referred to as "bestial" or "the animal part of our nature."[60] But
since women are the mothers and teachers of the human race this is a piece
of ignorance and ill-breeding which cannot be too swiftly eradicated.

There are some who seem to think that they have held the balance evenly,
and finally stated the matter, if they admit that sexual love may be
either beautiful or disgusting, and that either view is equally normal and
legitimate. "Listen in turn," Tarde remarks, "to two men who, one cold,
the other ardent, one chaste, the other in love, both equally educated and
large-minded, are estimating the same thing: one judges as disgusting,
odious, revolting, and bestial what the other judges to be delicious,
exquisite, ineffable, divine. What, for one, is in Christian phraseology,
an unforgivable sin, is, for the other, the state of true grace. Acts that
for one seem a sad and occasional necessity, stains that must be carefully
effaced by long intervals of continence, are for the other the golden
nails from which all the rest of conduct and existence is suspended, the