The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

MODERN IDEAS OF GONDUCT

been labelled for ages with such words as ~ dirty” and “ filthy’ and represented as shameful. Every healthy human being has passed through stages of curiosity, peeping, and experiment. The holiest saints, the noblest of women, could confess to indelicate incidents in childhood. It would be far better if the young understood the universality of their troubles. The first flutterings of desire are no more shameful than the first flutterings of a nestling. They are clumsy, but natural, and there is no need to taint and poison them with horror and moral dismay. The avoidance of unnecessary and premature sexual stimulation does not mean concealment. But it does mean the passionless presentation of facts. Clearly and calmly imparted knowledge, not too long delayed, is the first necessity for a wholesome adolescence.

And naturally as adolescence proceeds the sexual complex gathers power. We may present the facts as passionlessly as we like; but that will not prevent the growing individual making a_ personal application of them and feeling in due time the increasing power of desire. What has modern morality to say to that ?

The rude morality of the past, preoccupied with problems of social stability, was all for prohibition and restraint except within the limits of a rigorously defined marriage. Within the marriage bond no amount of indulgence was excessive. The “new moralist,” tremendously impressed by the psycho-analysts’ revelation of an almost universal craziness in mankind due to sexual distortion and suppressions, has been throwing all his weight in favour of as free and abundant gratification as possible. He advocates the widest possible diffusion of birth-control knowledge, trial marriages, and temporary unions. The more play of sex there is, he asserts, the less we shall be bothered about it. His hostility to suppression is as great as the medieval hostility to indulgence.

The spirit of the age seems to be with him. But it is arguable that he goes as far in one direction as the old school did in another. The old teaching was that complete continence for long periods of time or for always was quite possible for human beings and on the whole better for them than indulgence. A priori this seems improbable. Many of our new liberators, however, seem to go altogether beyond established fact in the opposite direction. They seem to insist upon unrestricted sexual indulgence as a condition of bodily and mental health.

There is a sort of propaganda of indulgence and shamelessness now as mischievous as the old propaganda of disgust and repression. The fact seems to be that human beings are capable of a very wide range of behaviour in these matters. Little or none of the seasonal excitability of many lower mammals is observable. Many men and many more women practise complete abstinence from physical love-making for long periods or for a lifetime without any ascertainable mental or physical distress or injury. Many others seem under the sway of a real necessity and may be greatly troubled or disordered mentally by restraint. In women _ particularly sex may be latent for long periods and then begin to stir, often in very vague emotional forms. For normal men an occasional happy indulgence seems to secure a general tranquillity. The meaning attached to that “occasional” may vary widely for different types. If we had more exact facts to give we would give them here. But that is all we know.

Because of the tabus and repression that have hitherto prevailed and the consequent obstruction of research, we are still in the dark about the physiological facts underlying that extraordinarily variable and intricate thing, the sexual complex. Plainly it is a thing that bulks enormously in our mental life. We must admit that, even if we do not go all the road with the extreme Freudian. Its most perplexing aspect is the way in which it spreads its tentacles from the lowest to the highest strata of our minds and the rapid interaction between highest and lowest that it makes possible. If sex were a mere physical need it would present no problem of any difficulty to the moralist. Satisfy it, he would say, and take any necessary and obvious precautions that may be necessary so that it does not disorganize your population balance nor disseminate any infectious or contagious disease. So far as disease goes, prompt douchings and washings with such a substance as potassium permanganate in any case of doubt becomes a moral obligation, and any germicide that will kill the spermatozoa or any contrivance that will bar efficiently the access of the spermatozoa to the ovum, is manifestly sufficient to meet the needs of his second qualification. It is not within the purview of The Science of Life to discuss these matters in detail ; suffice it here to say that what we may call the coarse control of sex, that is to say the easy elimination of its possibilities of undesired offspring or disease-dissemination, is quite within the reach of intelligent

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