fall in love by the authority of her elders, the girl cannot
bring her psychic disposition to bear, and goes into marriage
uncertain of her own feelings. As a consequence of this
artificial retardation of the function of love she brings nothing
but deception to the husband who has set all his desires upon
her, and manifests frigidity in her physical relations with him."

Senancour (_De l'Amour_, vol. i, p. 285) even believes that, when
it is possible to leave out of consideration the question of
offspring, not only will the law of chastity become equal for the
two sexes, but there will be a tendency for the situation of the
sexes to be, to some extent, changed. "Continence becomes a
counsel rather than a precept, and it is in women that the
voluptuous inclination will be regarded with most indulgence. Man
is made for work; he only meets pleasure in passing; he must be
content that women should occupy themselves with it more than he.
It is men whom it exhausts, and men must always, in part,
restrain their desires."

As, however, we liberate ourselves from the bondage of a compulsory
physical chastity, it becomes possible to rehabilitate chastity as a
virtue. At the present day it can no longer be said that there is on the
part of thinkers and moralists any active hostility to the idea of
chastity; there is, on the contrary, a tendency to recognize the value of
chastity. But this recognition has been accompanied by a return to the
older and sounder conception of chastity. The preservation of a rigid
sexual abstinence, an empty virginity, can only be regarded as a
pseudo-chastity. The only positive virtue which Aristotle could have
recognized in this field was a temperance involving restraint of the lower
impulses, a wise exercise and not a non-exercise.[80] The best thinkers of
the Christian Church adopted the same conception; St. Basil in his
important monastic rules laid no weight on self-discipline as an end in
itself, but regarded it as an instrument for enabling the spirit to gain
power over the flesh. St. Augustine declared that continence is only
excellent when practised in the faith of the highest good,[81] and he
regarded chastity as "an orderly movement of the soul subordinating lower
things to higher things, and specially to be manifested in conjugal
relationships"; Thomas Aquinas, defining chastity in much the same way,
defined impurity as the enjoyment of sexual pleasure not according to
right reason, whether as regards the object or the conditions.[82] But for
a time the voices of the great moralists were unheard. The virtue of
chastity was swamped in the popular Christian passion for the annihilation
of the flesh, and that view was, in the sixteenth century, finally
consecrated by the Council of Trent, which formally pronounced an anathema
upon anyone who should declare that the state of virginity and celibacy
was not better than the state of matrimony. Nowadays the pseudo-chastity
that was of value on the simple ground that any kind of continence is of
higher spiritual worth than any kind of sexual relationship belongs to the
past, except for those who adhere to ancient ascetic creeds. The mystic
value of virginity has gone; it seems only to arouse in the modern man's
mind the idea of a piquancy craved by the hardened rake;[83] it is men who
have themselves long passed the age of innocence who attach so much
importance to the innocence of their brides. The conception of life-long
continence as an ideal has also gone; at the best it is regarded as a mere
matter of personal preference. And the conventional simulation of
universal chastity, at the bidding of respectability, is coming to be
regarded as a hindrance rather than a help to the cultivation of any real
chastity.[84]

The chastity that is regarded by the moralist of to-day as a virtue has
its worth by no means in its abstinence. It is not, in St. Theresa's
words, the virtue of the tortoise which withdraws its limbs under its
carapace. It is a virtue because it is a discipline in self-control,
because it helps to fortify the character and will, and because it is
directly favorable to the cultivation of the most beautiful, exalted, and
effective sexual life. So viewed, chastity may be opposed to the demands
of debased mediaeval Catholicism, but it is in harmony with the demands of
our civilized life to-day, and by no means at variance with the
requirements of Nature.

There is always an analogy between the instinct of reproduction and the
instinct of nutrition. In the matter of eating it is the influence of
science, of physiology, which has finally put aside an exaggerated
asceticism, and made eating "pure." The same process, as James Hinton well
pointed out, has been made possible in the sexual relationships; "science
has in its hands the key to purity."[85]

Many influences have, however, worked together to favor an insistence on
chastity. There has, in the first place, been an inevitable reaction
against the sexual facility which had come to be regarded as natural. Such
facility was found to have no moral value, for it tended to relaxation of
moral fibre and was unfavorable to the finest sexual satisfaction. It
could not even claim to be natural in any broad sense of the word, for, in
Nature generally, sexual gratification tends to be rare and difficult.[86]
Courtship is arduous and long, the season of love is strictly delimited,
pregnancy interrupts sexual relationships. Even among savages, so long as
they have been untainted by civilization, virility is usually maintained
by a fine asceticism; the endurance of hardship, self-control and
restraint, tempered by rare orgies, constitute a discipline which covers
the sexual as well as every other department of savage life. To preserve
the same virility in civilized life, it may well be felt, we must
deliberately cultivate a virtue which under savage conditions of life is
natural.[87]

The influence of Nietzsche, direct and indirect, has been on the side of
the virtue of chastity in its modern sense. The command: "Be hard," as
Nietzsche used it, was not so much an injunction to an unfeeling
indifference towards others as an appeal for a more strenuous attitude
towards one's self, the cultivation of a self-control able to gather up
and hold in the forces of the soul for expenditure on deliberately
accepted ends. "A relative chastity," he wrote, "a fundamental and wise
foresight in the face of erotic things, even in thought, is part of a fine
reasonableness in life, even in richly endowed and complete natures."[88]
In this matter Nietzsche is a typical representative of the modern
movement for the restoration of chastity to its proper place as a real and
beneficial virtue, and not a mere empty convention. Such a movement could
not fail to make itself felt, for all that favors facility and luxurious
softness in sexual matters is quickly felt to degrade character as well as
to diminish the finest erotic satisfaction. For erotic satisfaction, in
its highest planes, is only possible when we have secured for the sexual
impulse a high degree of what Colin Scott calls "irradiation," that is to
say a wide diffusion through the whole of the psychic organism. And that
can only be attained by placing impediments in the way of the swift and
direct gratification of sexual desire, by compelling it to increase its
force, to take long circuits, to charge the whole organism so highly that
the final climax of gratified love is not the trivial detumescence of a
petty desire but the immense consummation of a longing in which the whole
soul as well as the whole body has its part. "Only the chaste can be
really obscene," said Huysmans. And on a higher plane, only the chaste can
really love.

"Physical purity," remarks Hans Menjago ("Die Ueberschaetzung der
Physischen Reinheit," _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, vol. ii,
Part VIII) "was originally valued as a sign of greater strength
of will and firmness of character, and it marked a rise above
primitive conditions. This purity was difficult to preserve in
those unsure days; it was rare and unusual. From this rarity rose
the superstition of supernatural power residing in the virgin.
But this has no meaning as soon as such purity becomes general
and a specially conspicuous degree of firmness of character is no
longer needed to maintain it.... Physical purity can only possess
value when it is the result of individual strength of character,
and not when it is the result of compulsory rules of morality."

Konrad Hoeller, who has given special attention to the sexual
question in schools, remarks in relation to physical exercise:
"The greatest advantage of physical exercises, however, is not
the development of the active and passive strength of the body
and its skill, but the establishment and fortification of the
authority of the will over the body and its needs, so much given
up to indolence. He who has learnt to endure and overcome, for
the sake of a definite aim, hunger and thirst and fatigue, will
be the better able to withstand sexual impulses and the
temptation to gratify them, when better insight and aesthetic
feeling have made clear to him, as one used to maintain authority
over his body, that to yield would be injurious or disgraceful"
(K. Hoeller, "Die Aufgabe der Volksschule," _Sexualpaedagogik_, p.
70). Professor Schaefenacker (id., p. 102), who also emphasizes
the importance of self-control and self-restraint, thinks a youth
must bear in mind his future mission, as citizen and father of a
family.

A subtle and penetrative thinker of to-day, Jules de Gaultier,
writing on morals without reference to this specific question,
has discussed what new internal inhibitory motives we can appeal
to in replacing the old external inhibition of authority and
belief which is now decayed. He answers that the state of feeling
on which old faiths were based still persists. "May not," he
asks, "the desire for a thing that we love and wish for
beneficently replace the belief that a thing is by divine will,
or in the nature of things? Will not the presence of a bridle on
the frenzy of instinct reveal itself as a useful attitude adopted
by instinct itself for its own conservation, as a symptom of the
force and health of instinct? Is not empire over oneself, the
power of regulating one's acts, a mark of superiority and a
motive for self-esteem? Will not this joy of pride have the same
authority in preserving the instincts as was once possessed by
religious fear and the pretended imperatives of reason?" (Jules
de Gaultier, _La Dependance de la Morale et l'Independance des
Moeurs_, p. 153.)

H.G. Wells (in _A Modern Utopia_), pointing out the importance of
chastity, though rejecting celibacy, invokes, like Jules de
Gaultier, the motive of pride. "Civilization has developed far
more rapidly than man has modified. Under the unnatural
perfection of security, liberty, and abundance our civilization
has attained, the normal untrained human being is disposed to
excess in almost every direction; he tends to eat too much and
too elaborately, to drink too much, to become lazy faster than
his work can be reduced, to waste his interest upon displays, and
to make love too much and too elaborately. He gets out of
training, and concentrates upon egoistic or erotic broodings. Our
founders organized motives from all sorts of sources, but I think
the chief force to give men self-control is pride. Pride may not
be the noblest thing in the soul, but it is the best king there,
for all that. They looked to it to keep a man clean and sound and
sane. In this matter, as in all matters of natural desire, they
held no appetite must be glutted, no appetite must have
artificial whets, and also and equally that no appetite should be
starved. A man must come from the table satisfied, but not
replete. And, in the matter of love, a straight and clean desire
for a clean and straight fellow-creature was our founders' ideal.
They enjoined marriage between equals as the duty to the race,
and they framed directions of the precisest sort to prevent that
uxorious inseparableness, that connubiality, that sometimes
reduces a couple of people to something jointly less than
either."

With regard to chastity as an element of erotic satisfaction,
Edward Carpenter writes (_Love's Coming of Age_, p. 11): "There
is a kind of illusion about physical desire similar to that which
a child suffers from when, seeing a beautiful flower, it
instantly snatches the same, and destroys in a few moments the
form and fragrance which attracted it. He only gets the full
glory who holds himself back a little, and truly possesses, who
is willing, if need be, not to possess. He is indeed a master of
life who, accepting the grosser desires as they come to his body,
and not refusing them, knows how to transform them at will into
the most rare and fragrant flowers of human emotion."

Beyond its functions in building up character, in heightening and
ennobling the erotic life, and in subserving the adequate fulfilment of
family and social duties, chastity has a more special value for those who
cultivate the arts. We may not always be inclined to believe the writers
who have declared that their verse alone is wanton, but their lives
chaste. It is certainly true, however, that a relationship of this kind
tends to occur. The stuff of the sexual life, as Nietzsche says, is the
stuff of art; if it is expended in one channel it is lost for the other.
The masters of all the more intensely emotional arts have frequently
cultivated a high degree of chastity. This is notably the case as regards
music; one thinks of Mozart,[89] of Beethoven, of Schubert, and many
lesser men. In the case of poets and novelists chastity may usually seem
to be less prevalent but it is frequently well-marked, and is not seldom
disguised by the resounding reverberations which even the slightest
love-episode often exerts on the poetic organism. Goethe's life seems, at
a first glance, to be a long series of continuous love-episodes. Yet when
we remember that it was the very long life of a man whose vigor remained
until the end, that his attachments long and profoundly affected his
emotional life and his work, and that with most of the women he has
immortalized he never had actual sexual relationships at all, and when we
realize, moreover, that, throughout, he accomplished an almost
inconceivably vast amount of work, we shall probably conclude that sexual
indulgence had a very much smaller part in Goethe's life than in that of
many an average man on whom it leaves no obvious emotional or intellectual
trace whatever. Sterne, again, declared that he must always have a
Dulcinea dancing in his head, yet the amount of his intimate relations
with women appears to have been small. Balzac spent his life toiling at
his desk and carrying on during many years a love correspondence with a
woman he scarcely ever saw and at the end only spent a few months of
married life with. The like experience has befallen many artistic
creators. For, in the words of Landor, "absence is the invisible and
incorporeal mother of ideal beauty."

We do well to remember that, while the auto-erotic manifestations through
the brain are of infinite variety and importance, the brain and the
sexual organs are yet the great rivals in using up bodily energy, and that
there is an antagonism between extreme brain vigor and extreme sexual
vigor, even although they may sometimes both appear at different periods
in the same individual.[90] In this sense there is no paradox in the
saying of Ramon Correa that potency is impotence and impotence potency,
for a high degree of energy, whether in athletics or in intellect or in
sexual activity, is unfavorable to the display of energy in other
directions. Every high degree of potency has its related impotencies.

It may be added that we may find a curiously inconsistent proof
of the excessive importance attached to sexual function by a
society which systematically tries to depreciate sex, in the
disgrace which is attributed to the lack of "virile" potency.
Although civilized life offers immense scope for the activities
of sexually impotent persons, the impotent man is made to feel
that, while he need not be greatly concerned if he suffers from
nervous disturbances of digestion, if he should suffer just as
innocently from nervous disturbances of the sexual impulse, it is
almost a crime. A striking example of this was shown, a few years
ago, when it was plausibly suggested that Carlyle's relations
with his wife might best be explained by supposing that he
suffered from some trouble of sexual potency. At once admirers
rushed forward to "defend" Carlyle from this "disgraceful"
charge; they were more shocked than if it had been alleged that
he was a syphilitic. Yet impotence is, at the most, an infirmity,
whether due to some congenital anatomical defect or to a
disturbance of nervous balance in the delicate sexual mechanism,
such as is apt to occur in men of abnormally sensitive
temperament. It is no more disgraceful to suffer from it than
from dyspepsia, with which, indeed, it may be associated. Many
men of genius and high moral character have been sexually
deformed. This was the case with Cowper (though this significant
fact is suppressed by his biographers); Ruskin was divorced for a
reason of this kind; and J.S. Mill, it is said, was sexually of
little more than infantile development.

Up to this point I have been considering the quality of chastity and the
quality of asceticism in their most general sense and without any attempt
at precise differentiation.[91] But if we are to accept these as modern
virtues, valid to-day, it is necessary that we should be somewhat more
precise in defining them. It seems most convenient, and most strictly
accordant also with etymology, if we agree to mean by asceticism or
_ascesis_, the athlete quality of self-discipline, controlling, by no
means necessarily for indefinitely prolonged periods, the gratification of
the sexual impulse. By chastity, which is primarily the quality of purity,
and secondarily that of holiness, rather than of abstinence, we may best
understand a due proportion between erotic claims and the other claims of
life. "Chastity," as Ellen Key well says, "is harmony between body and
soul in relation to love." Thus comprehended, asceticism is the virtue of
control that leads up to erotic gratification, and chastity is the virtue
which exerts its harmonizing influence in the erotic life itself.

It will be seen that asceticism by no means necessarily involves perpetual
continence. Properly understood, asceticism is a discipline, a training,
which has reference to an end not itself. If it is compulsorily perpetual,
whether at the dictates of a religious dogma, or as a mere fetish, it is
no longer on a natural basis, and it is no longer moral, for the restraint
of a man who has spent his whole life in a prison is of no value for life.
If it is to be natural and to be moral asceticism must have an end outside
itself, it must subserve the ends of vital activity, which cannot be
subserved by a person who is engaged in a perpetual struggle with his own
natural instincts. A man may, indeed, as a matter of taste or preference,
live his whole life in sexual abstinence, freely and easily, but in that
case he is not an ascetic, and his abstinence is neither a subject for
applause nor for criticism.

In the same way chastity, far from involving sexual abstinence, only has
its value when it is brought within the erotic sphere. A purity that is
ignorance, when the age of childish innocence is once passed, is mere
stupidity; it is nearer to vice than to virtue. Nor is purity consonant
with effort and struggle; in that respect it differs from asceticism. "We
conquer the bondage of sex," Rosa Mayreder says, "by acceptance, not by
denials, and men can only do this with the help of women." The would-be
chastity of cold calculation is equally unbeautiful and unreal, and
without any sort of value. A true and worthy chastity can only be
supported by an ardent ideal, whether, as among the early Christians, this
is the erotic ideal of a new romance, or, as among ourselves, a more
humanly erotic ideal. "Only erotic idealism," says Ellen Key, "can arouse
enthusiasm for chastity." Chastity in a healthily developed person can
thus be beautifully exercised only in the actual erotic life; in part it
is the natural instinct of dignity and temperance; in part it is the art
of touching the things of sex with hands that remember their aptness for
all the fine ends of life. Upon the doorway of entrance to the inmost
sanctuary of love there is thus the same inscription as on the doorway to
the Epidaurian Sanctuary of Aesculapius: "None but the pure shall enter
here."

It will be seen that the definition of chastity remains somewhat
lacking in precision. That is inevitable. We cannot grasp purity
tightly, for, like snow, it will merely melt in our hands.
"Purity itself forbids too minute a system of rules for the
observance of purity," well says Sidgwick (_Methods of Ethics_,
Bk. iii, Ch. IX). Elsewhere (op. cit., Bk. iii, Ch. XI) he
attempts to answer the question: What sexual relations are
essentially impure? and concludes that no answer is possible.
"There appears to be no distinct principle, having any claim to
self-evidence, upon which the question can be answered so as to
command general assent." Even what is called "Free Love," he
adds, "in so far as it is earnestly advocated as a means to a
completer harmony of sentiment between men and women, cannot be
condemned as impure, for it seems paradoxical to distinguish
purity from impurity merely by less rapidity of transition."

Moll, from the standpoint of medical psychology, reaches the same
conclusion as Sidgwick from that of ethics. In a report on the
"Value of Chastity for Men," published as an appendix to the
third edition (1899) of his _Kontraere Sexualempfindung_, the
distinguished Berlin physician discusses the matter with much
vigorous common sense, insisting that "chaste and unchaste are
_relative ideas_." We must not, he states, as is so often done,
identify "chaste" with "sexually abstinent." He adds that we are
not justified in describing all extra-marital sexual intercourse
as unchaste, for, if we do so, we shall be compelled to regard
nearly all men, and some very estimable women, as unchaste. He
rightly insists that in this matter we must apply the same rule
to women as to men, and he points out that even when it involves
what may be technically adultery sexual intercourse is not
necessarily unchaste. He takes the case of a girl who, at
eighteen, when still mentally immature, is married to a man with
whom she finds it impossible to live and a separation
consequently occurs, although a divorce may be impossible to
obtain. If she now falls passionately in love with a man her love
may be entirely chaste, though it involves what is technically
adultery.

In thus understanding asceticism and chastity, and their beneficial
functions in life, we see that they occupy a place midway between the
artificially exaggerated position they once held and that to which they
were degraded by the inevitable reaction of total indifference or actual
hostility which followed. Asceticism and chastity are not rigid
categorical imperatives; they are useful means to desirable ends; they are
wise and beautiful arts. They demand our estimation, but not our
over-estimation. For in over-estimating them, it is too often forgotten,
we over-estimate the sexual instinct. The instinct of sex is indeed
extremely important. Yet it has not that all-embracing and supereminent
importance which some, even of those who fight against it, are accustomed
to believe. That artificially magnified conception of the sexual impulse
is fortified by the artificial emphasis placed upon asceticism. We may
learn the real place of the sexual impulse in learning how we may
reasonably and naturally view the restraints on that impulse.


FOOTNOTES:

[69] For Blake and for Shelley, as well as, it may be added, for Hinton,
chastity, as Todhunter remarks in his _Study of Shelley_, is "a type of
submission to the actual, a renunciation of the infinite, and is therefore
hated by them. The chaste man, i.e., the man of prudence and self-control,
is the man who has lost the nakedness of his primitive innocence."

[70] For evidence of the practices of savages in this matter, see Appendix
_A_ to the third volume of these _Studies_, "The Sexual Instinct in
Savages." Cf. also Chs. IV and VII of Westermarck's _History of Human
Marriage_, and also Chs. XXXVIII and XLI of the same author's _Origin and
Development of the Moral Ideas_, vol. ii; Frazer's _Golden Bough_ contains
much bearing on this subject, as also Crawley's _Mystic Rose_.

[71] See, e.g., Westermarck, _Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_,
vol. ii, pp. 412 et seq.

[72] Thus an old Maori declared, a few years ago, that the decline of his
race has been entirely due to the loss of the ancient religious faith in
the _tabu_. "For," said he (I quote from an Auckland newspaper), "in the
olden-time our _tapu_ ramified the whole social system. The head, the
hair, spots where apparitions appeared, places which the _tohungas_
proclaimed as sacred, we have forgotten and disregarded. Who nowadays
thinks of the sacredness of the head? See when the kettle boils, the young
man jumps up, whips the cap off his head, and uses it for a kettle-holder.
Who nowadays but looks on with indifference when the barber of the
village, if he be near the fire, shakes the loose hair off his cloth into
it, and the joke and the laughter goes on as if no sacred operation had
just been concluded. Food is consumed on places which, in bygone days, it
dared not even be carried over."

[73] Thus, long before Christian monks arose, the ascetic life of the
cloister on very similar lines existed in Egypt in the worship of Serapis
(Dill, _Roman Society_, p. 79).

[74] At night, in the baptistry, with lamps dimly burning, the women were
stripped even of their tunics, plunged three times in the pool, then
anointed, dressed in white, and kissed.

[75] Thus Jerome, in his letter to Eustochium, refers to those couples who
"share the same room, often even the same bed, and call us suspicious if
we draw any conclusions," while Cyprian (_Epistola_, 86) is unable to
approve of those men he hears of, one a deacon, who live in familiar
intercourse with virgins, even sleeping in the same bed with them, for, he
declares, the feminine sex is weak and youth is wanton.

[76] Perpetua (_Acta Sanctorum_, March 7) is termed by Hort and Mayor
"that fairest flower in the garden of post-Apostolic Christendom." She was
not, however, a virgin, but a young mother with a baby at her breast.

[77] The strength of early Christian asceticism lay in its spontaneous and
voluntary character. When, in the ninth century, the Carlovingians
attempted to enforce monastic and clerical celibacy, the result was a
great outburst of unchastity and crime; nunneries became brothels, nuns
were frequently guilty of infanticide, monks committed unspeakable
abominations, the regular clergy formed incestuous relations with their
nearest female relatives (Lea, _History of Sacerdotal Celibacy_, vol. i,
pp, 155 et seq.).

[78] Senancour, _De l'Amour_, vol. ii, p. 233. Islam has placed much less
stress on chastity than Christianity, but practically, it would appear,
there is often more regard for chastity under Mohammedan rule than under
Christian rule. Thus it is stated by "Viator" (_Fortnightly Review_, Dec.,
1908) that formerly, under Turkish Moslem rule, it was impossible to buy
the virtue of women in Bosnia, but that now, under the Christian rule of
Austria, it is everywhere possible to buy women near the Austrian
frontier.

[79] The basis of this feeling was strengthened when it was shown by
scholars that the physical virtue of "virginity" had been masquerading
under a false name. To remain a virgin seems to have meant at the first,
among peoples of early Aryan culture, by no means to take a vow of
chastity, but to refuse to submit to the yoke of patriarchal marriage. The
women who preferred to stand outside marriage were "virgins," even though
mothers of large families, and AEschylus speaks of the Amazons as
"virgins," while in Greek the child of an unmarried girl was always "the
virgin's son." The history of Artemis, the most primitive of Greek
deities, is instructive from this point of view. She was originally only
virginal in the sense that she rejected marriage, being the goddess of a
nomadic and matriarchal hunting people who had not yet adopted marriage,
and she was the goddess of childbirth, worshipped with orgiastic dances
and phallic emblems. It was by a late transformation that Artemis became
the goddess of chastity (Farnell, _Cults of the Greek States_, vol. ii,
pp. 442 et seq.; Sir W.M. Ramsay, _Cities of Phrygia_, vol. i, p. 96; Paul
Lafargue, "Les Mythes Historiques," _Revue des Idees_, Dec., 1904).

[80] See, e.g., Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. iii, Ch. XIII.

[81] _De Civitate Dei_, lib. xv, cap. XX. A little further on (lib. xvi,
cap. XXV) he refers to Abraham as a man able to use women as a man should,
his wife temperately, his concubine compliantly, neither immoderately.

[82] _Summa_, Migne's edition, vol. iii, qu. 154, art. I.

[83] See the Study of Modesty in the first volume of these _Studies_.

[84] The majority of chaste youths, remarks an acute critic of modern life
(Hellpach, _Nervositaet und Kultur_, p. 175), are merely actuated by
traditional principles, or by shyness, fear of venereal infections, lack
of self-confidence, want of money, very seldom by any consideration for a
future wife, and that indeed would be a tragi-comic error, for a woman
lays no importance on intact masculinity. Moreover, he adds, the chaste
man is unable to choose a wife wisely, and it is among teachers and
clergymen--the chastest class--that most unhappy marriages are made.
Milton had already made this fact an argument for facility of divorce.

[85] "In eating," said Hinton, "we have achieved the task of combining
pleasure with an absence of 'lust.' The problem for man and woman is so to
use and possess the sexual passion as to make it the minister to higher
things, with no restraint on it but that. It is essentially connected with
things of the spiritual order, and would naturally revolve round them. To
think of it as merely bodily is a mistake."

[86] See "Analysis of the Sexual Impulse," and Appendix, "The Sexual
Instinct in Savages," in vol. iii of these _Studies_.

[87] I have elsewhere discussed more at length the need in modern
civilized life of a natural and sincere asceticism (see _Affirmations_,
1898) "St. Francis and Others."

[88] _Der Wille zur Macht_, p. 392.

[89] At the age of twenty-five, when he had already produced much fine
work, Mozart wrote in his letters that he had never touched a woman,
though he longed for love and marriage. He could not afford to marry, he
would not seduce an innocent girl, a venial relation was repulsive to him.

[90] Reibmayr, _Die Entwicklungsgeschichte des Talentes und Genies._, Bd.
i, p. 437.

[91] We may exclude altogether, it is scarcely necessary to repeat, the
quality of virginity--that is to say, the possession of an intact
hymen--since this is a merely physical quality with no necessary ethical
relationships. The demand for virginity in women is, for the most part,
either the demand for a better marketable article, or for a more powerful
stimulant to masculine desire. Virginity involves no moral qualities in
its possessor. Chastity and asceticism, on the other hand, are meaningless
terms, except as demands made by the spirit on itself or on the body it
controls.




CHAPTER VI.

THE PROBLEM OF SEXUAL ABSTINENCE.

The Influence of Tradition--The Theological Conception of Lust--Tendency
of These Influences to Degrade Sexual Morality--Their Result in Creating
the Problem of Sexual Abstinence--The Protests Against Sexual
Abstinence--Sexual Abstinence and Genius--Sexual Abstinence in Women--The
Advocates of Sexual Abstinence--Intermediate Attitude--Unsatisfactory
Nature of the Whole Discussion--Criticism of the Conception of Sexual
Abstinence--Sexual Abstinence as Compared to Abstinence from Food--No
Complete Analogy--The Morality of Sexual Abstinence Entirely Negative--Is
It the Physician's Duty to Advise Extra-Conjugal Sexual
Intercourse?--Opinions of Those Who Affirm or Deny This Duty--The
Conclusion Against Such Advice--The Physician Bound by the Social and
Moral Ideas of His Age--The Physician as Reformer--Sexual Abstinence and
Sexual Hygiene--Alcohol--The Influence of Physical and Mental
Exercise--The Inadequacy of Sexual Hygiene in This Field--The Unreal
Nature of the Conception of Sexual Abstinence--The Necessity of Replacing
It by a More Positive Ideal.


When we look at the matter from a purely abstract or even purely
biological point of view, it might seem that in deciding that asceticism
and chastity are of high value for the personal life we have said all that
is necessary to say. That, however, is very far from being the case. We
soon realize here, as at every point in the practical application of
sexual psychology, that it is not sufficient to determine the abstractly
right course along biological lines. We have to harmonize our biological
demands with social demands. We are ruled not only by natural instincts
but by inherited traditions, that in the far past were solidly based on
intelligible grounds, and that even still, by the mere fact of their
existence, exert a force which we cannot and ought not to ignore.

In discussing the valuation of the sexual impulse we found that we had
good ground for making a very high estimate of love. In discussing
chastity and asceticism we found that they also are highly to be valued.
And we found that, so far from any contradiction being here involved,
love and chastity are intertwined in all their finest developments, and
that there is thus a perfect harmony in apparent opposition. But when we
come to consider the matter in detail, in its particular personal
applications, we find that a new factor asserts itself. We find that our
inherited social and religious traditions exert a pressure, all on one
side, which makes it impossible to place the relations of love and
chastity simply on the basis of biology and reason. We are confronted at
the outset by our traditions. On the one side these traditions have
weighted the word "lust"--considered as expressing all the manifestations
of the sexual impulse which are outside marriage or which fail to have
marriage as their direct and ostentatious end--with deprecatory and
sinister meanings. And on the other side these traditions have created the
problem of "sexual abstinence," which has nothing to do with either
asceticism or chastity as these have been defined in the previous chapter,
but merely with the purely negative pressure on the sexual impulse,
exerted, independently of the individual's wishes, by his religious and
social environment.

The theological conception of "lust," or "libido," as sin, followed
logically the early Christian conception of "the flesh," and became
inevitable as soon as that conception was firmly established. Not only,
indeed, had early Christian ideals a degrading influence on the estimation
of sexual desire _per se_, but they tended to depreciate generally the
dignity of the sexual relationship. If a man made sexual advances to a
woman outside marriage, and thus brought her within the despised circle of
"lust," he was injuring her because he was impairing her religious and
moral value.[92] The only way he could repair the damage done was by
paying her money or by entering into a forced and therefore probably
unfortunate marriage with her. That is to say that sexual relationships
were, by the ecclesiastical traditions, placed on a pecuniary basis, on
the same level as prostitution. By its well-meant intentions to support
the theological morality which had developed on an ascetic basis, the
Church was thus really undermining even that form of sexual relationship
which it sanctified.

Gregory the Great ordered that the seducer of a virgin shall
marry her, or, in case of refusal, be severely punished
corporally and shut up in a monastery to perform penance.
According to other ecclesiastical rules, the seducer of a virgin,
though held to no responsibility by the civil forum, was required
to marry her, or to find a husband and furnish a dowry for her.
Such rules had their good side, and were especially equitable
when seduction had been accomplished by deceit. But they largely
tended in practice to subordinate all questions of sexual
morality to a money question. The reparation to the woman, also,
largely became necessary because the ecclesiastical conception of
lust caused her value to be depreciated by contact with lust, and
the reparation might be said to constitute a part of penance.
Aquinas held that lust, in however slight a degree, is a mortal
sin, and most of the more influential theologians took a view
nearly or quite as rigid. Some, however, held that a certain
degree of delectation is possible in these matters without mortal
sin, or asserted, for instance, that to feel the touch of a soft
and warm hand is not mortal sin so long as no sexual feeling is
thereby aroused. Others, however, held that such distinctions are
impossible, and that all pleasures of this kind are sinful. Tomas
Sanchez endeavored at much length to establish rules for the
complicated problems of delectation that thus arose, but he was
constrained to admit that no rules are really possible, and that
such matters must be left to the judgment of a prudent man. At
that point casuistry dissolves and the modern point of view
emerges (see, e.g., Lea, _History of Auricular Confession_, vol.
ii, pp. 57, 115, 246, etc.).

Even to-day the influence of the old traditions of the Church still
unconsciously survives among us. That is inevitable as regards religious
teachers, but it is found also in men of science, even in Protestant
countries. The result is that quite contradictory dogmas are found side by
side, even in the same writer. On the one hand, the manifestations of the
sexual impulse are emphatically condemned as both unnecessary and evil; on
the other hand, marriage, which is fundamentally (whatever else it may
also be) a manifestation of the sexual impulse, receives equally emphatic
approval as the only proper and moral form of living.[93] There can be no
reasonable doubt whatever that it is to the surviving and pervading
influence of the ancient traditional theological conception of _libido_
that we must largely attribute the sharp difference of opinions among
physicians on the question of sexual abstinence and the otherwise
unnecessary acrimony with which these opinions have sometimes been stated.

On the one side, we find the emphatic statement that sexual intercourse is
necessary and that health cannot be maintained unless the sexual
activities are regularly exercised.

"All parts of the body which are developed for a definite use are kept in
health, and in the enjoyment of fair growth and of long youth, by the
fulfilment of that use, and by their appropriate exercise in the
employment to which they are accustomed." In that statement, which occurs
in the great Hippocratic treatise "On the Joints," we have the classic
expression of the doctrine which in ever varying forms has been taught by
all those who have protested against sexual abstinence. When we come down
to the sixteenth century outbreak of Protestantism we find that Luther's
revolt against Catholicism was in part a protest against the teaching of
sexual abstinence. "He to whom the gift of continence is not given," he
said in his _Table Talk_, "will not become chaste by fasting and vigils.
For my own part I was not excessively tormented [though elsewhere he
speaks of the great fires of lust by which he had been troubled], but all
the same the more I macerated myself the more I burnt." And three hundred
years later, Bebel, the would-be nineteenth century Luther of a different
Protestantism, took the same attitude towards sexual abstinence, while
Hinton the physician and philosopher, living in a land of rigid sexual
conventionalism and prudery, and moved by keen sympathy for the sufferings
he saw around him, would break into passionate sarcasm when confronted by
the doctrine of sexual abstinence. "There are innumerable ills--terrible
destructions, madness even, the ruin of lives--for which the embrace of
man and woman would be a remedy. No one thinks of questioning it.
Terrible evils and a remedy in a delight and joy! And man has chosen so to
muddle his life that he must say: 'There, that would be a remedy, but I
cannot use it. I _must be virtuous!_'"

If we confine ourselves to modern times and to fairly precise
medical statements, we find in Schurig's _Spermatologia_ (1720,
pp. 274 et seq.), not only a discussion of the advantages of
moderate sexual intercourse in a number of disorders, as
witnessed by famous authorities, but also a list of
results--including anorexia, insanity, impotence, epilepsy, even
death--which were believed to have been due to sexual abstinence.
This extreme view of the possible evils of sexual abstinence
seems to have been part of the Renaissance traditions of medicine
stiffened by a certain opposition between religion and science.
It was still rigorously stated by Lallemand early in the
nineteenth century. Subsequently, the medical statements of the
evil results of sexual abstinence became more temperate and
measured, though still often pronounced. Thus Gyurkovechky
believes that these results may be as serious as those of sexual
excess. Krafft-Ebing showed that sexual abstinence could produce
a state of general nervous excitement (_Jahrbuch fuer
Psychiatrie_, Bd. viii, Heft 1 and 2). Schrenck-Notzing regards
sexual abstinence as a cause of extreme sexual hyperaesthesia and
of various perversions (in a chapter on sexual abstinence in his
_Kriminalpsychologische und Psychopathologische Studien_, 1902,
pp. 174-178). He records in illustration the case of a man of
thirty-six who had masturbated in moderation as a boy, but
abandoned the practice entirely, on moral grounds, twenty years
ago, and has never had sexual intercourse, feeling proud to enter
marriage a chaste man, but now for years has suffered greatly
from extreme sexual hyperaesthesia and concentration of thought on
sexual subjects, notwithstanding a strong will and the resolve
not to masturbate or indulge in illicit intercourse. In another
case a vigorous and healthy man, not inverted, and with strong
sexual desires, who remained abstinent up to marriage, suffers
from psychic impotence, and his wife remains a virgin
notwithstanding all her affection and caresses. Ord considered
that sexual abstinence might produce many minor evils. "Most of
us," he wrote (_British Medical Journal_, Aug. 2, 1884) "have, no
doubt, been consulted by men, chaste in act, who are tormented by
sexual excitement. They tell one stories of long-continued local
excitement, followed by intense muscular weariness, or by severe
aching pain in the back and legs. In some I have had complaints
of swelling and stiffness in the legs, and of pains in the
joints, particularly in the knees;" he gives the case of a man
who suffered after prolonged chastity from inflammatory
conditions of knees and was only cured by marriage. Pearce
Gould, it may be added, finds that "excessive ungratified sexual
desire" is one of the causes of acute orchitis. Remondino ("Some
Observations on Continence as a Factor in Health and Disease,"
_Pacific Medical Journal_, Jan., 1900) records the case of a
gentleman of nearly seventy who, during the prolonged illness of
his wife, suffered from frequent and extreme priapism, causing
insomnia. He was very certain that his troubles were not due to
his continence, but all treatment failed and there were no
spontaneous emissions. At last Remondino advised him to, as he
expresses it, "imitate Solomon." He did so, and all the symptoms
at once disappeared. This case is of special interest, because
the symptoms were not accompanied by any conscious sexual desire.
It is no longer generally believed that sexual abstinence tends
to produce insanity, and the occasional cases in which prolonged
and intense sexual desire in young women is followed by insanity
will usually be found to occur on a basis of hereditary
degeneration. It is held by many authorities, however, that minor
mental troubles, of a more or less vague character, as well as
neurasthenia and hysteria, are by no means infrequently due to