There can be no doubt that the undue discredit into which the idea of chastity began to fall from the eighteenth century onwards was largely due to the existence of that merely external and conventional physical chastity which was arbitrarily enforced so far as it could be enforced,—and is indeed in some degree still enforced, nominally or really,—upon all respectable women outside marriage. The conception of the physical virtue of virginity had degraded the conception of the spiritual virtue of chastity. A mere routine, it was felt, prescribed to a whole sex, whether they would or not, could never possess the beauty and charm of a virtue. At the same time it began to be realized that, as a matter of fact, the state of compulsory virginity is not only not a state especially favorable to the cultivation of real virtues, but that it is bound up with qualities which are no longer regarded as of high value.[79]

"How arbitrary, artificial, contrary to Nature, is the life now imposed upon women in this matter of chastity!" wrote James Hinton forty years ago. "Think of that line: 'A woman who deliberates is lost.' We make danger, making all womanhood hang upon a point like this, and surrounding it with unnatural and preternatural dangers. There is a wanton unreason embodied in the life of woman now; the present 'virtue' is a morbid unhealthy plant. Nature and God never poised the life of a woman upon such a needle's point. The whole modern idea of chastity has in it sensual exaggeration, surely, in part, remaining to us from other times, with what was good in it in great part gone."

"The whole grace of virginity," wrote another philosopher, Guyau, "is ignorance. Virginity, like certain fruits, can only be preserved by a process of desiccation."

Merimee pointed out the same desiccating influence of virginity. In a letter dated 1859 he wrote: "I think that nowadays people attach far too much importance to chastity. Not that I deny that chastity is a virtue, but there are degrees in virtues just as there are in vices. It seems to be absurd that a woman should be banished from society for having had a lover, while a woman who is miserly, double-faced and spiteful goes everywhere. The morality of this age is assuredly not that which is taught in the Gospel. In my opinion it is better to love too much than not enough. Nowadays dry hearts are stuck up on a pinnacle" (Revue des Deux Mondes, April, 1896).

Dr. H. Paul has developed an allied point. She writes: "There are girls who, even as children, have prostituted themselves by masturbation and lascivious thoughts. The purity of their souls has long been lost and nothing remains unknown to them, but—they have preserved their hymens! That is for the sake of the future husband. Let no one dare to doubt their innocence with that unimpeachable evidence! And if another girl, who has passed her childhood in complete purity, now, with awakened senses and warm impetuous womanliness, gives herself to a man in love or even only in passion, they all stand up and scream that she is 'dishonored!' And, not least, the prostituted girl with the hymen. It is she indeed who screams loudest and throws the biggest stones. Yet the 'dishonored' woman, who is sound and wholesome, need not fear to tell what she has done to the man who desires her in marriage, speaking as one human being to another. She has no need to blush, she has exercised her human rights, and no reasonable man will on that account esteem her the less" (Dr. H. Paul, "Die Ueberschaetzung der Jungfernschaft," Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd. ii, p. 14, 1907).

In a similar spirit writes F. Erhard (Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd. i, p. 408): "Virginity in one sense has its worth, but in the ordinary sense it is greatly overestimated. Apart from the fact that a girl who possesses it may yet be thoroughly perverted, this over-estimation of virginity leads to the girl who is without it being despised, and has further resulted in the development of a special industry for the preparation, by means of a prudishly cloistral education, of girls who will bring to their husbands the peculiar dainty of a bride who knows nothing about anything. Naturally, this can only be achieved at the expense of any rational education. What the undeveloped little goose may turn into, no man can foresee."

Freud (Sexual-Probleme, March, 1908) also points out the evil results of the education for marriage which is given to girls on the basis of this ideal of virginity. "Education undertakes the task of repressing the girl's sensuality until the time of betrothal. It not only forbids sexual relations and sets a high premium on innocence, but it also withdraws the ripening womanly individuality from temptation, maintaining a state of ignorance concerning the practical side of the part she is intended to play in life, and enduring no stirring of love which cannot lead to marriage. The result is that when she is suddenly permitted to 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 sexual abstinence. Thus Freud, who has carefully studied angstneurosis, the obsession of anxiety, finds that it is a result of sexual abstinence, and may indeed be considered as a vicarious form of such abstinence (Freud, Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, 1906, pp. 76 et seq.).

The whole subject of sexual abstinence has been discussed at length by Nystroem, of Stockholm, in Das Geschlechtsleben und seine Gesetze, Ch. III. He concludes that it is desirable that continence should be preserved as long as possible in order to strengthen the physical health and to develop the intelligence and character. The doctrine of permanent sexual abstinence, however, he regards as entirely false, except in the case of a small number of religious or philosophic persons. "Complete abstinence during a long period of years cannot be borne without producing serious results both on the body and the mind.... Certainly, a young man should repress his sexual impulses as long as possible and avoid everything that may artificially act as a sexual stimulant. If, however, he has done so, and still suffers from unsatisfied normal sexual desires, and if he sees no possibility of marriage within a reasonable time, no one should dare to say that he is committing a sin if, with mutual understanding, he enters into sexual relations with a woman friend, or forms temporary sexual relationships, provided, that is, that he takes the honorable precaution of begetting no children, unless his partner is entirely willing to become a mother, and he is prepared to accept all the responsibilities of fatherhood." In an article of later date ("Die Einwirkung der Sexuellen Abstinenz auf die Gesundheit," Sexual-Probleme, July, 1908) Nystroem vigorously sums up his views. He includes among the results of sexual abstinence orchitis, frequent involuntary seminal emissions, impotence, neurasthenia, depression, and a great variety of nervous disturbances of vaguer character, involving diminished power of work, limited enjoyment of life, sleeplessness, nervousness, and pre-occupation with sexual desires and imaginations. More especially there is heightened sexual irritability with erections, or even seminal emissions on the slightest occasion, as on gazing at an attractive woman or in social intercourse with her, or in the presence of works of art representing naked figures. Nystroem has had the opportunity of investigating and recording ninety cases of persons who have presented these and similar symptoms as the result, he believes, of sexual abstinence. He has published some of these cases (Zeitschrift fuer Sexualwissenschaft, Oct., 1908), but it may be added that Rohleder ("Die Abstinentia Sexualis," ib., Nov., 1908) has criticized these cases, and doubts whether any of them are conclusive. Rohleder believes that the bad results of sexual abstinence are never permanent, and also that no anatomically pathological states (such as orchitis) can be thereby produced. But he considers, nevertheless, that even incomplete and temporary sexual abstinence may produce fairly serious results, and especially neurasthenic disturbances of various kinds, such as nervous irritability, anxiety, depression, disinclination for work; also diurnal emissions, premature ejaculations, and even a state approaching satyriasis; and in women hysteria, hystero-epilepsy, and nymphomaniacal manifestations; all these symptoms may, however, he believes, be cured when the abstinence ceases.

Many advocates of sexual abstinence have attached importance to the fact that men of great genius have apparently been completely continent throughout life. This is certainly true (see ante, p. 173). But this fact can scarcely be invoked as an argument in favor of the advantages of sexual abstinence among the ordinary population. J.F. Scott selects Jesus, Newton, Beethoven, and Kant as "men of vigor and mental acumen who have lived chastely as bachelors." It cannot, however, be said that Dr. Scott has been happy in the four figures whom he has been able to select from the whole history of human genius as examples of life-long sexual abstinence. We know little with absolute certainty of Jesus, and even if we reject the diagnosis which Professor Binet-Sangle (in his Folie de Jesus) has built up from a minute study of the Gospels, there are many reasons why we should refrain from emphasizing the example of his sexual abstinence; Newton, apart from his stupendous genius in a special field, was an incomplete and unsatisfactory human being who ultimately reached a condition very like insanity; Beethoven was a thoroughly morbid and diseased man, who led an intensely unhappy existence; Kant, from first to last, was a feeble valetudinarian. It would probably be difficult to find a healthy normal man who would voluntarily accept the life led by any of these four, even as the price of their fame. J.A. Godfrey (Science of Sex, pp. 139-147) discusses at length the question whether sexual abstinence is favorable to ordinary intellectual vigor, deciding that it is not, and that we cannot argue from the occasional sexual abstinence of men of genius, who are often abnormally constituted, and physically below the average, to the normally developed man. Sexual abstinence, it may be added, is by no means always a favorable sign, even in men who stand intellectually above the average. "I have not obtained the impression," remarks Freud (Sexual-Probleme, March, 1908), "that sexual abstinence is helpful to energetic and independent men of action or original thinkers, to courageous liberators or reformers. The sexual conduct of a man is often symbolic of his whole method of reaction in the world. The man who energetically grasps the object of his sexual desire may be trusted to show a similarly relentless energy in the pursuit of other aims."

Many, though not all, who deny that prolonged sexual abstinence is harmless, include women in this statement. There are some authorities indeed who believe that, whether or not any conscious sexual desire is present, sexual abstinence is less easily tolerated by women than by men.[94]

Cabanis, in his famous and pioneering work, Rapports du Physique et du Moral, said in 1802, that women not only bear sexual excess more easily than men, but sexual privations with more difficulty, and a cautious and experienced observer of to-day, Loewenfeld (Sexualleben und Nervenleiden, 1899, p. 53), while not considering that normal women bear sexual abstinence less easily than men, adds that this is not the case with women of neuropathic disposition, who suffer much more from this cause, and either masturbate when sexual intercourse is impossible or fall into hystero-neurasthenic states. Busch stated (Das Geschlechtsleben des Weibes, 1839, vol. i, pp. 69, 71) that not only is the working of the sexual functions in the organism stronger in women than in men, but that the bad results of sexual abstinence are more marked in women. Sir Benjamin Brodie said long ago that the evils of continence to women are perhaps greater than those of incontinence, and to-day Hammer (Die Gesundheitlichen Gefahren der Geschlechtlichen Enthaltsamkeit, 1904) states that, so far as reasons of health are concerned, sexual abstinence is no more to be recommended to women than to men. Nystroem is of the same opinion, though he thinks that women bear sexual abstinence better than men, and has discussed this special question at length in a section of his Geschlechtsleben und seine Gesetze. He agrees with the experienced Erb that a large number of completely chaste women of high character, and possessing distinguished qualities of mind and heart, are more or less disordered through their sexual abstinence; this is specially often the case with women married to impotent men, though it is frequently not until they approach the age of thirty, Nystroem remarks, that women definitely realize their sexual needs.

A great many women who are healthy, chaste, and modest, feel at times such powerful sexual desire that they can scarcely resist the temptation to go into the street and solicit the first man they meet. Not a few such women, often of good breeding, do actually offer themselves to men with whom they may have perhaps only the slightest acquaintance. Routh records such cases (British Gynaecological Journal, Feb., 1887), and most men have met with them at some time. When a woman of high moral character and strong passions is subjected for a very long period to the perpetual strain of such sexual craving, especially if combined with love for a definite individual, a chain of evil results, physical and moral, may be set up, and numerous distinguished physicians have recorded such cases, which terminated at once in complete recovery as soon as the passion was gratified. Lauvergne long since described a case. A fairly typical case of this kind was reported in detail by Brachet (De l'Hypochondrie, p. 69) and embodied by Griesinger in his classic work on "Mental Pathology." It concerned a healthy married lady, twenty-six years old, having three children. A visiting acquaintance completely gained her affections, but she strenuously resisted the seducing influence, and concealed the violent passion that he had aroused in her. Various serious symptoms, physical and mental, slowly began to appear, and she developed what seemed to be signs of consumption. Six months' stay in the south of France produced no improvement, either in the bodily or mental symptoms. On returning home she became still worse. Then she again met the object of her passion, succumbed, abandoned her husband and children, and fled with him. Six months later she was scarcely recognizable; beauty, freshness and plumpness had taken the place of emaciation; while the symptoms of consumption and all other troubles had entirely disappeared. A somewhat similar case is recorded by Camill Lederer, of Vienna (Monatsschrift fuer Harnkrankheiten und Sexuelle Hygiene, 1906, Heft 3). A widow, a few months after her husband's death, began to cough, with symptoms of bronchial catarrh, but no definite signs of lung disease. Treatment and change of climate proved entirely unavailing to effect a cure. Two years later, as no signs of disease had appeared in the lungs, though the symptoms continued, she married again. Within a very few weeks all symptoms had disappeared, and she was entirely fresh and well.

Numerous distinguished gynaecologists have recorded their belief that sexual excitement is a remedy for various disorders of the sexual system in women, and that abstinence is a cause of such disorders. Matthews Duncan said that sexual excitement is the only remedy for amenorrhoea; "the only emmenagogue medicine that I know of," he wrote (Medical Times, Feb. 2, 1884), "is not to be found in the Pharmacopoeia: it is erotic excitement. Of the value of erotic excitement there is no doubt." Anstie, in his work on Neuralgia, refers to the beneficial effect of sexual intercourse on dysmenorrhoea, remarking that the necessity of the full natural exercise of the sexual function is shown by the great improvement in such cases after marriage, and especially after childbirth. (It may be remarked that not all authorities find dysmenorrhoea benefited by marriage, and some consider that the disease is often thereby aggravated; see, e.g., Wythe Cook, American Journal Obstetrics, Dec., 1893.) The distinguished gynaecologist, Tilt, at a somewhat earlier date (On Uterine and Ovarian Inflammation, 1862, p. 309), insisted on the evil results of sexual abstinence in producing ovarian irritation, and perhaps subacute ovaritis, remarking that this was specially pronounced in young widows, and in prostitutes placed in penitentiaries. Intense desire, he pointed out, determines organic movements resembling those required for the gratification of the desire. These burning desires, which can only be quenched by their legitimate satisfaction, are still further heightened by the erotic influence of thoughts, books, pictures, music, which are often even more sexually stimulating than social intercourse with men, but the excitement thus produced is not relieved by that natural collapse which should follow a state of vital turgescence. After referring to the biological facts which show the effect of psychic influences on the formative powers of the ovario-uterine organs in animals, Tilt continues: "I may fairly infer that similar incitements on the mind of females may have a stimulating effect on the organs of ovulation. I have frequently known menstruation to be irregular, profuse, or abnormal in type during courtship in women in whom nothing similar had previously occurred, and that this protracted the treatment of chronic ovaritis and of uterine inflammation." Bonnifield, of Cincinnati (Medical Standard, Dec., 1896), considers that unsatisfied sexual desire is an important cause of catarrhal endometritis. It is well known that uterine fibroids bear a definite relation to organic sexual activity, and that sexual abstinence, more especially the long-continued deprivation of pregnancy, is a very important cause of the disease. This is well shown by an analysis by A.E. Giles (Lancet, March 2, 1907) of one hundred and fifty cases. As many as fifty-six of these cases, more than a third, were unmarried women, though nearly all were over thirty years of age. Of the ninety-four married women, thirty-four had never been pregnant; of those who had been pregnant, thirty-six had not been so for at least ten years. Thus eighty-four per cent, had either not been pregnant at all, or had had no pregnancy for at least ten years. It is, therefore, evident that deprivation of sexual function, whether or not involving abstinence from sexual intercourse, is an important cause of uterine fibroid tumors. Balls-Headley, of Victoria (Evolution of the Diseases of Women, 1894, and "Etiology of Diseases of Female Genital Organs," Allbutt and Playfair, System of Gynaecology,) believes that unsatisfied sexual desire is a factor in very many disorders of the sexual organs in women. "My views," he writes in a private letter, "are founded on a really special gynaecological practice of twenty years, during which I have myself taken about seven thousand most careful records. The normal woman is sexually well-formed and her sexual feelings require satisfaction in the direction of the production of the next generation, but under the restrictive and now especially abnormal conditions of civilization some women undergo hereditary atrophy, and the uterus and sexual feelings are feeble; in others of good average local development the feeling is in restraint; in others the feelings, as well as the organs, are strong, and if normal use be withheld evils ensue. Bearing in mind these varieties of congenital development in relation to the respective condition of virginity, or sterile or parous married life, the mode of occurrence and of progress of disease grows on the physician's mind, and there is no more occasion for bewilderment than to the mathematician studying conic sections, when his knowledge has grown from the basis of the science. The problem is suggested: Has a crowd of unassociated diseases fallen as through a sieve on woman, or have these affections almost necessarily ensued from the circumstances of her unnatural environment?" It may be added that Kisch (Sexual Life of Woman), while protesting against any exaggerated estimate of the effects of sexual abstinence, considers that in women it may result, not only in numerous local disorders, but also in nervous disturbance, hysteria, and even insanity, while in neurasthenic women "regulated sexual intercourse has an actively beneficial effect which is often striking."

It is important to remark that the evil results of sexual abstinence in women, in the opinion of many of those who insist upon their importance, are by no means merely due to unsatisfied sexual desire. They may be pronounced even when the woman herself has not the slightest consciousness of sexual needs. This was clearly pointed out forty years ago by the sagacious Anstie (op. cit.) In women, especially, he remarks, "a certain restless hyperactivity of mind, and perhaps of body also, seems to be the expression of Nature's unconscious resentment of the neglect of sexual functions." Such women, he adds, have kept themselves free from masturbation "at the expense of a perpetual and almost fierce activity of mind and muscle." Anstie had found that some of the worst cases of the form of nervosity and neurasthenia which he termed "spinal irritation," often accompanied by irritable stomach and anaemia, get well on marriage. "There can be no question," he continues, "that a very large proportion of these cases in single women (who form by far the greater number of subjects of spinal irritation) are due to this conscious or unconscious irritation kept up by an unsatisfied sexual want. It is certain that very many young persons (women more especially) are tormented by the irritability of the sexual organs without having the least consciousness of sexual desire, and present the sad spectacle of a vie manquee without ever knowing the true source of the misery which incapacitates them for all the active duties of life. It is a singular fact that in occasional instances one may even see two sisters, inheriting the same kind of nervous organization, both tormented with the symptoms of spinal irritation and both probably suffering from repressed sexual functions, but of whom one shall be pure-minded and entirely unconscious of the real source of her troubles, while the other is a victim to conscious and fruitless sexual irritation." In this matter Anstie may be regarded as a forerunner of Freud, who has developed with great subtlety and analytic power the doctrine of the transformation of repressed sexual instinct in women into morbid forms. He considers that the nervosity of to-day is largely due to the injurious action on the sexual life of that repression of natural instincts on which our civilization is built up. (Perhaps the clearest brief statement of Freud's views on the matter is to be found in a very suggestive article, "Die 'Kulturelle' Sexualmoral und die Moderne Nervositaet," in Sexual-Probleme, March, 1908, reprinted in the second series of Freud's Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, 1909). We possess the aptitude, he says, of sublimating and transforming our sexual activities into other activities of a psychically related character, but non-sexual. This process cannot, however, be carried out to an unlimited extent any more than can the conversion of heat into mechanical work in our machines. A certain amount of direct sexual satisfaction is for most organizations indispensable, and the renunciation of this individually varying amount is punished by manifestations which we are compelled to regard as morbid. The process of sublimation, under the influence of civilization, leads both to sexual perversions and to psycho-neuroses. These two conditions are closely related, as Freud views the process of their development; they stand to each other as positive and negative, sexual perversions being the positive pole and psycho-neuroses the negative. It often happens, he remarks, that a brother may be sexually perverse, while his sister, with a weaker sexual temperament, is a neurotic whose symptoms are a transformation of her brother's perversion; while in many families the men are immoral, the women pure and refined but highly nervous. In the case of women who have no defect of sexual impulse there is yet the same pressure of civilized morality pushing them into neurotic states. It is a terribly serious injustice, Freud remarks, that the civilized standard of sexual life is the same for all persons, because though some, by their organization, may easily accept it, for others it involves the most difficult psychic sacrifices. The unmarried girl, who has become nervously weak, cannot be advised to seek relief in marriage, for she must be strong in order to "bear" marriage, while we urge a man on no account to marry a girl who is not strong. The married woman who has experienced the deceptions of marriage has usually no way of relief left but by abandoning her virtue. "The more strenuously she has been educated, and the more completely she has been subjected to the demands of civilization, the more she fears this way of escape, and in the conflict between her desires and her sense of duty, she also seeks refuge—in neurosis. Nothing protects her virtue so surely as disease." Taking a still wider view of the influence of the narrow "civilized" conception of sexual morality on women, Freud finds that it is not limited to the production of neurotic conditions; it affects the whole intellectual aptitude of women. Their education denies them any occupation with sexual problems, although such problems are so full of interest to them, for it inculcates the ancient prejudice that any curiosity in such matters is unwomanly and a proof of wicked inclinations. They are thus terrified from thinking, and knowledge is deprived of worth. The prohibition to think extends, automatically and inevitably, far beyond the sexual sphere. "I do not believe," Freud concludes, "that there is any opposition between intellectual work and sexual activity such as was supposed by Moebius. I am of opinion that the unquestionable fact of the intellectual inferiority of so many women is due to the inhibition of thought imposed upon them for the purpose of sexual repression."

It is only of recent years that this problem has been realized and faced, though solitary thinkers, like Hinton, have been keenly conscious of its existence; for "sorrowing virtue," as Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox puts it, "is more ashamed of its woes than unhappy sin, because the world has tears for the latter and only ridicule for the former." "It is an almost cynical trait of our age," Hellpach wrote a few years ago, "that it is constantly discussing the theme of prostitution, of police control, of the age of consent, of the 'white slavery,' and passes over the moral struggle of woman's soul without an attempt to answer her burning questions."

On the other hand we find medical writers not only asserting with much moral fervor that sexual intercourse outside marriage is always and altogether unnecessary, but declaring, moreover, the harmlessness or even the advantages of sexual abstinence.

Ribbing, the Swedish professor, in his Hygiene Sexuelle, advocates sexual abstinence outside marriage, and asserts its harmlessness. Gilles de la Tourette, Fere, and Augagneur in France agree. In Germany Fuerbringer (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. i, p. 228) asserts that continence is possible and necessary, though admitting that it may, however, mean serious mischief in exceptional cases. Eulenburg (Sexuale Neuropathie, p. 14) doubts whether anyone, who otherwise lived a reasonable life, ever became ill, or more precisely neurasthenic, through sexual abstinence. Hegar, replying to the arguments of Bebel in his well-known book on women, denies that sexual abstinence can ever produce satyriasis or nymphomania. Naecke, who has frequently discussed the problem of sexual abstinence (e.g., Archiv fuer Kriminal-Anthropologie, 1903, Heft 1, and Sexual-Probleme, June, 1908), maintains that sexual abstinence can, at most, produce rare and slight unfavorable results, and that it is no more likely to produce insanity, even in predisposed individuals, than are the opposite extremes of sexual excess and masturbation. He adds that, so far as his own observations are concerned, the patients in asylums suffer scarcely at all from their compulsory sexual abstinence.

It is in England, however, that the virtues of sexual abstinence have been most loudly and emphatically proclaimed, sometimes indeed with considerable lack of cautious qualification. Acton, in his Reproductive Organs, sets forth the traditional English view, as well as Beale in his Morality and the Moral Question. A more distinguished representative of the same view was Paget, who, in his lecture on "Sexual Hypochondriasis," coupled sexual intercourse with "theft or lying." Sir William Gowers (Syphilis and the Nervous System, 1892, p. 126) also proclaims the advantages of "unbroken chastity," more especially as a method of avoiding syphilis. He is not hopeful, however, even as regards his own remedy, for he adds: "We can trace small ground for hope that the disease will thus be materially reduced." He would still, however, preach chastity to the individual, and he does so with all the ascetic ardor of a mediaeval monk. "With all the force that any knowledge I possess, and any authority I have, can give, I assert that no man ever yet was in the slightest degree or way the worse for continence or better for incontinence. From the latter all are worse morally; a clear majority are worse physically; and in no small number the result is, and ever will be, utter physical shipwreck on one of the many rocks, sharp, jagged-edged, which beset the way, or on one of the many beds of festering slime which no care can possibly avoid." In America the same view widely prevails, and Dr. J.F. Scott, in his Sexual-Instinct (second edition, 1908, Ch. III), argues very vigorously and at great length in favor of sexual abstinence. He will not even admit that there are two sides to the question, though if that were the case, the length and the energy of his arguments would be unnecessary.

Among medical authorities who have discussed the question of sexual abstinence at length it is not, indeed, usually possible to find such unqualified opinions in its favor as those I have quoted. There can be no doubt, however, that a large proportion of physicians, not excluding prominent and distinguished authorities, when casually confronted with the question whether sexual abstinence is harmless, will at once adopt the obvious path of least resistance and reply: Yes. In only a few cases will they even make any qualification of this affirmative answer. This tendency is very well illustrated by an inquiry made by Dr. Ludwig Jacobsohn, of St. Petersburgh ("Die Sexuelle Enthaltsamkeit im Lichte der Medizin," St. Petersburger Medicinische Wochenschrift, March 17, 1907). He wrote to over two hundred distinguished Russian and German professors of physiology, neurology, psychiatry, etc., asking them if they regarded sexual abstinence as harmless. The majority returned no answer; eleven Russian and twenty-eight Germans replied, but four of them merely said that "they had no personal experience," etc.; there thus remained thirty-five. Of these E. Pflueger, of Bonn, was skeptical of the advantage of any propaganda of abstinence: "if all the authorities in the world declared the harmlessness of abstinence that would have no influence on youth. Forces are here in play that break through all obstacles." The harmlessness of abstinence was affirmed by Kraepelin, Cramer, Gaertner, Tuczek, Schottelius, Gaffky, Finkler, Selenew, Lassar, Seifert, Gruber; the last, however, added that he knew very few abstinent young men, and himself only considered abstinence good before full development, and intercourse not dangerous in moderation even before then. Brieger knew cases of abstinence without harmful results, but himself thought that no general opinion could be given. Juergensen said that abstinence in itself is not harmful, but that in some cases intercourse exerts a more beneficial influence. Hoffmann said that abstinence is harmless, adding that though it certainly leads to masturbation, that is better than gonorrhoea, to say nothing of syphilis, and is easily kept within bounds. Struempell replied that sexual abstinence is harmless, and indirectly useful as preserving from the risk of venereal disease, but that sexual intercourse, being normal, is always more desirable. Hensen said that abstinence is not to be unconditionally approved. Rumpf replied that abstinence was not harmful for most before the age of thirty, but after that age there was a tendency to mental obsessions, and marriage should take place at twenty-five. Leyden also considered abstinence harmless until towards thirty, when it leads to psychic anomalies, especially states of anxiety, and a certain affectation. Hein replied that abstinence is harmless for most, but in some leads to hysterical manifestations and indirectly to bad results from masturbation, while for the normal man abstinence cannot be directly beneficial, since intercourse is natural. Gruetzner thought that abstinence is almost never harmful. Nescheda said it is harmless in itself, but harmful in so far as it leads to unnatural modes of gratification. Neisser believes that more prolonged abstinence than is now usual would be beneficial, but admitted the sexual excitations of our civilization; he added that of course he saw no harm for healthy men in intercourse. Hoche replied that abstinence is quite harmless in normal persons, but not always so in abnormal persons. Weber thought it had a useful influence in increasing will-power. Tarnowsky said it is good in early manhood, but likely to be unfavorable after twenty-five. Orlow replied that, especially in youth, it is harmless, and a man should be as chaste as his wife. Popow said that abstinence is good at all ages and preserves the energy. Blumenau said that in adult age abstinence is neither normal nor beneficial, and generally leads to masturbation, though not generally to nervous disorders; but that even masturbation is better than syphilis. Tschiriew saw no harm in abstinence up to thirty, and thought sexual weakness more likely to follow excess than abstinence. Tschish regarded abstinence as beneficial rather than harmful up to twenty-five or twenty-eight, but thought it difficult to decide after that age when nervous alterations seem to be caused. Darkschewitcz regarded abstinence as harmless up to twenty-five. Fraenkel said it was harmless for most, but that for a considerable proportion of people intercourse is a necessity. Erb's opinion is regarded by Jacobsohn as standing alone; he placed the age below which abstinence is harmless at twenty; after that age he regarded it as injurious to health, seriously impeding work and capacity, while in neurotic persons it leads to still more serious results. Jacobsohn concludes that the general opinion of those answering the inquiry may thus be expressed: "Youth should be abstinent. Abstinence can in no way injure them; on the contrary, it is beneficial. If our young people will remain abstinent and avoid extra-conjugal intercourse they will maintain a high ideal of love and preserve themselves from venereal diseases."

The harmlessness of sexual abstinence was likewise affirmed in America in a resolution passed by the American Medical Association in 1906. The proposition thus formally accepted was thus worded: "Continence is not incompatible with health." It ought to be generally realized that abstract propositions of this kind are worthless, because they mean nothing. Every sane person, when confronted by the demand to boldly affirm or deny the proposition, "Continence is not incompatible with health," is bound to affirm it. He might firmly believe that continence is incompatible with the health of most people, and that prolonged continence is incompatible with anyone's health, and yet, if he is to be honest in the use of language, it would be impossible for him to deny the vague and abstract proposition that "Continence is not incompatible with health." Such propositions are therefore not only without value, but actually misleading.

It is obvious that the more extreme and unqualified opinions in favor of sexual abstinence are based not on medical, but on what the writers regard as moral considerations. Moreover, as the same writers are usually equally emphatic in regard to the advantages of sexual intercourse in marriage, it is clear that they have committed themselves to a contradiction. The same act, as Naecke rightly points out, cannot become good or bad according as it is performed in or out of marriage. There is no magic efficacy in a few words pronounced by a priest or a government official.

Remondino (loc. cit.) remarks that the authorities who have committed themselves to declarations in favor of the unconditional advantages of sexual abstinence tend to fall into three errors: (1) they generalize unduly, instead of considering each case individually, on its own merits; (2) they fail to realize that human nature is influenced by highly mixed and complex motives and cannot be assumed to be amenable only to motives of abstract morality; (3) they ignore the great army of masturbators and sexual perverts who make no complaint of sexual suffering, but by maintaining a rigid sexual abstinence, so far as normal relationships are concerned, gradually drift into currents whence there is no return.

Between those who unconditionally affirm or deny the harmlessness of sexual abstinence we find an intermediate party of authorities whose opinions are more qualified. Many of those who occupy this more guarded position are men whose opinions carry much weight, and it is probable that with them rather than with the more extreme advocates on either side the greater measure of reason lies. So complex a question as this cannot be adequately investigated merely in the abstract, and settled by an unqualified negative or affirmative. It is a matter in which every case requires its own special and personal consideration.

"Where there is such a marked opposition of opinion truth is not exclusively on one side," remarks Loewenfeld (Sexualleben und Nervenleiden, second edition, p. 40). Sexual abstinence is certainly often injurious to neuropathic persons. (This is now believed by a large number of authorities, and was perhaps first decisively stated by Krafft-Ebing, "Ueber Neurosen durch Abstinenz," Jahrbuch fuer Psychiatrie, 1889, p. 1). Loewenfeld finds no special proclivity to neurasthenia among the Catholic clergy, and when it does occur, there is no reason to suppose a sexual causation. "In healthy and not hereditarily neuropathic men complete abstinence is possible without injury to the nervous system." Injurious effects, he continues, when they appear, seldom occur until between twenty-four and thirty-six years of age, and even then are not usually serious enough to lead to a visit to a doctor, consisting mainly in frequency of nocturnal emissions, pain in testes or rectum, hyperaesthesia in the presence of women or of sexual ideas. If, however, conditions arise which specially stimulate the sexual emotions, neurasthenia may be produced. Loewenfeld agrees with Freud and Gattel that the neurosis of anxiety tends to occur in the abstinent, careful examination showing that the abstinence is a factor in its production in both sexes. It is common among young women married to much older men, often appearing during the first years of marriage. Under special circumstances, therefore, abstinence can be injurious, but on the whole the difficulties due to such abstinence are not severe, and they only exceptionally call forth actual disturbance in the nervous or psychic spheres. Moll takes a similar temperate and discriminating view. He regards sexual abstinence before marriage as the ideal, but points out that we must avoid any doctrinal extremes in preaching sexual abstinence, for such preaching will merely lead to hypocrisy. Intercourse with prostitutes, and the tendency to change a woman like a garment, induce loss of sensitiveness to the spiritual and personal element in woman, while the dangers of sexual abstinence must no more be exaggerated than the dangers of sexual intercourse (Moll, Libido Sexualis, 1898, vol. i, p. 848; id., Kontraere Sexualempfindung, 1899, p. 588). Bloch also (in a chapter on the question of sexual abstinence in his Sexualleben unserer Zeit, 1908) takes a similar standpoint. He advocates abstention during early life and temporary abstention in adult life, such abstention being valuable, not only for the conservation and transformation of energy, but also to emphasize the fact that life contains other matters to strive for beyond the ends of sex. Redlich (Medizinische Klinik, 1908, No. 7) also, in a careful study of the medical aspects of the question, takes an intermediate standpoint in relation to the relative advantages and disadvantages of sexual abstinence. "We may say that sexual abstinence is not a condition which must, under all circumstances and at any price, be avoided, though it is true that for the majority of healthy adult persons regular sexual intercourse is advantageous, and sometimes is even to be recommended."

It may be added that from the standpoint of Christian religious morality this same attitude, between the extremes of either party, recognizing the advantages of sexual abstinence, but not insisting that they shall be purchased at any price, has also found representation. Thus, in England, an Anglican clergyman, the Rev. H. Northcote (Christianity and Sex Problems, pp. 58, 60) deals temperately and sympathetically with the difficulties of sexual abstinence, and is by no means convinced that such abstinence is always an unmixed advantage; while in Germany a Catholic priest, Karl Jentsch (Sexualethik, Sexualjustiz, Sexualpolizei, 1900) sets himself to oppose the rigorous and unqualified assertions of Ribbing in favor of sexual abstinence. Jentsch thus expresses what he conceives ought to be the attitude of fathers, of public opinion, of the State and the Church towards the young man in this matter: "Endeavor to be abstinent until marriage. Many succeed in this. If you can succeed, it is good. But, if you cannot succeed, it is unnecessary to cast reproaches on yourself and to regard yourself as a scoundrel or a lost sinner. Provided that you do not abandon yourself to mere enjoyment or wantonness, but are content with what is necessary to restore your peace of mind, self-possession, and cheerful capacity for work, and also that you observe the precautions which physicians or experienced friends impress upon you."

When we thus analyze and investigate the the three main streams of expert opinions in regard to this question of sexual abstinence—the opinions in favor of it, the opinions in opposition to it, and the opinions which take an intermediate course—we can scarcely fail to conclude how unsatisfactory the whole discussion is. The state of "sexual abstinence" is a completely vague and indefinite state. The indefinite and even meaningless character of the expression "sexual abstinence" is shown by the frequency with which those who argue about it assume that it can, may, or even must, involve masturbation. That fact alone largely deprives it of value as morality and altogether as abstinence. At this point, indeed, we reach the most fundamental criticism to which the conception of "sexual abstinence" lies open. Rohleder, an experienced physician and a recognized authority on questions of sexual pathology, has submitted the current views on "sexual abstinence" to a searching criticism in a lengthy and important paper.[95] He denies altogether that strict sexual abstinence exists at all. "Sexual abstinence," he points out, in any strict scenes of the term, must involve abstinence not merely from sexual intercourse but from auto-erotic manifestations, from masturbation, from homosexual acts, from all sexually perverse practices. It must further involve a permanent abstention from indulgence in erotic imaginations and voluptuous reverie. When, however, it is possible thus to render the whole psychic field a tabula rasa so far as sexual activity is concerned—and if it fails to be so constantly and consistently there is no strict sexual abstinence—then, Rohleder points out, we have to consider whether we are not in presence of a case of sexual anaesthesia, of anaphrodisia sexualis. That is a question which is rarely, if ever, faced by those who discuss sexual abstinence. It is, however, an extremely pertinent question, because, as Rohleder insists, if sexual anaesthesia exists the question of sexual abstinence falls to the ground, for we can only "abstain" from actions that are in our power. Complete sexual anaesthesia is, however, so rare a state that it may be practically left out of consideration, and as the sexual impulse, if it exists, must by physiological necessity sometimes become active in some shape—even if only, according to Freud's view, by transformation into some morbid neurotic condition—we reach the conclusion that "sexual abstinence" is strictly impossible. Rohleder has met with a few cases in which there seemed to him no escape from the conclusion that sexual abstinence existed, but in all of these he subsequently found that he was mistaken, usually owing to the practice of masturbation, which he believes to be extremely common and very frequently accompanied by a persistent attempt to deceive the physician concerning its existence. The only kind of "sexual abstinence" that exists is a partial and temporary abstinence. Instead of saying, as some say, "Permanent abstinence is unnatural and cannot exist without physical and mental injury," we ought to say, Rohleder believes, "Permanent abstinence is unnatural and has never existed."